Visual source: Newseum
Carl Leubsdorf at The Record looks at the advantage Democrats have in the tax debate:
As Americans scramble to file their tax returns before Tuesday’s deadline, President Obama and his allies are pressing a multilevel campaign to bolster what seems to be an unusual Democratic advantage on a traditional Republican strong point — taxes. [...]
Until 2008, when Republican nominee John McCain bore the brunt of voter concern over a sagging economy, Republicans traditionally held an advantage on taxes because of their consistent support for lowering them.
The Democrats have erased that margin. They benefit from the fact that polls consistently show the public favors increased taxes on the wealthy and that economists say the Bush cuts had only a modest impact on creating jobs.
Democrats truly have a unique opportunity here. Between the context of the 99% movement and being handed a super-wealthy, out-of-touch Republican presidential nominee on a platter, Democrats been handed a gift of circumstances. All that's required of them now is to take full advantage of that climate, rather than shrink away from it. The Buffet Rule is but one marketing measure of a much larger tax debate that favors Democrats. The Bush tax cuts are the main issue. The question is, will Democrats step up to the challenge or will they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory on this issue?
As David Lightman at McClatchy suggests, if groups like the Third Way had their way, Democrats would wave the white flag at the outset:
The Democratic strategy, though, may not be a winning one.
While taxing the rich is popular, "it just isn't the first priority" of the swing voters who likely will decide the 2012 presidential and congressional elections, said Lanae Erickson, deputy director of social policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic group that recently studied independent voters.
It found that key swing voters were more interested in a candidate, and a government, that creates opportunity. Fairness trailed as a priority. [...]
Still, Democrats insist they have found a magic political bullet. [...] Democrats love this issue for a lot of reasons. They can paint themselves as champions of fairness in the tax code. And, as Ciruli put it, "it emphasizes what they need to emphasize," that Mitt Romney, the expected Republican nominee, is an out-of-touch rich guy.
Hopefully, Democrats will go with common sense rather than Third Way fetishization with centrism and "swing independents." The Bush tax cuts are a golden opportunity for Democrats to pound the table on defending the middle class while popping the Republican ballon of deficit reduction.
President Obama's rhetoric on the tax cut issue is spot-on this weekend:
President Barack Obama says the nation can't afford to keep giving tax cuts to the wealthiest, "who don't need them and didn't even ask for them."
Let's hope Democrats in the House and Senate match his words with real action.
Meanwhile, on to another advantage Democrats have...the support of women during an era of anti-women legislation from the right. Brent Larkin at The Cleveland Plain Dealer explains:
The gender gap is now a chasm. And Republicans are in panic mode, fearing it might swallow up Mitt Romney.
The 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920. But in the last two presidential elections, GOP leaders have acted as if the most important thing that happened that year was the Red Sox selling a young pitcher named Babe Ruth to the Yankees.
Now they're being punished for that mentality. Women are abandoning them in droves.
Even conservative
Juan Williams over at FOX "News" sees damage done:
Historians are certainly going to ask how a Republican Party that won big in the 2010 mid-term elections became so self-destructive? How could the party’s nominee start out running behind a very vulnerable incumbent? How could it be that in March a clear majority of registered voters, 52 percent, told Fox News they now have an unfavorable opinion of the GOP. [...]
In the 2012 primaries none of the candidates for the GOP nomination called themselves “Bush Republicans.” Lots of them attached Ronald Reagan to their candidacy. But not one of them claimed to stand for the Bush administration’s policies -- with the exception of the “Bush Tax Cut.” And just this week the former president said he wished the tax cuts he championed were not named for him because with another name they might have a better chance to survive. [...]
Meanwhile, the candidates have taken far-right positions on everything from contraception to immigration. That pandering to Tea Party positions has alienated independent women and Hispanic voters, both critical to the party’s future.
Shorter Juan Williams: Republicans are having an identity crisis between embracing the "compassionate conservative" marketing campaign of the early Bush years or hugging the Tea Party tighter. It's a lose-lose situation either way.
Speaking of the Tea Party, Pauline Arrillaga at The Associated Press looks at the state of that conservative movement:
[S]o-called "umbrella" organizations such as the Tea Party Express, the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks and others haven't, to date, put their names behind any one candidate. And only in recent weeks have tea party darlings such as U.S. senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of Utah finally weighed in — endorsing likely nominee Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whom some see as un-tea-party-like as one could be, in part because of his state's own health care reform law.
Some local tea party groups (in Massachusetts, for example) have divided over divergent priorities — whether to make conservative economic principles or conservative social issues paramount. Others, such as the Tennessee Tea Party, have disbanded altogether.
In researching her recent book, "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism," Harvard professor Theda Skocpol found that about 1,000 local tea party groups formed in 2009-2010. Today, she estimates there are about 600. A declining number, yes, but still what Skocpol, an expert on civic engagement, calls "a very good survival rate."
I'd love to see the membership numbers of those 600 groups. I suspect most of them have less than a couple dozen members.
Back to Mitt Romney, Maeve Reston at The Los Angeles Times explains that Democrats are looking to two key California races as a template:
As Democrats launch their general election assault on Mitt Romney, their approach has sounded familiar to those who followed the meteoric rise and fall of Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman, corporate chieftains who lost their Republican bids for senator and governor in California two years ago.
Much as Fiorina and Whitman emphasized their business experience, Romney's presidential campaign has presented him to voters as the man to tackle the nation's economic problems because of his grasp, as he likes to say, of "why jobs come and why they go." [...]
At a recent breakfast in Washington, Obama pollster Joel Benenson mentioned the Whitman and Fiorina races when asked whether the Obama team viewed any 2010 contests as models for this year's campaign. In California, Benenson said, "You had two people who ran on their business experience, spent a boatload of money … and lost — in a state that has elected Republicans."
Jeremy Roebuck at
The Philadelphia Inquirer answers the question "what happens to funds in defunct super PACs?":
what happens to the millions collected by such groups on behalf of the Rick Santorums, Rick Perrys and Jon M. Huntsman Jrs. of this world when these would-be presidents wind down their campaigns?
In short, campaign finance experts said, super PAC managers can spend the money on whatever they like.
"Theoretically, they could buy a yacht and sail off into the sunset, drinking margaritas if they wanted to," said Paul S. Ryan, a campaign finance expert at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. "In a nutshell, there are no restrictions." Well, except for two. The rules still prohibit such committees from donating directly to specific candidates and political parties or coordinating their spending with either.