Winning Progressive

With Rick Santorum having suspended his Presidential campaign, Mitt Romney is now the presumptive Republican candidate for President.  Over the preceding week or so, as it became clear that Romney would be the nominee, President Obama’s campaign sharpened its attacks on Romney and the rest of the GOP.  At the same time, Romney began making a predictable move towards the political center.  Many will attack this move as yet another example of Multiple Choice Mitt flip-flopping on the issues.  But Romney’s failure to stand up during the Republican primaries for the centrist values he will spend all fall pretending to support is a far more politically and substantively telling fact, as it shows that Romney would be unable as President to stand up to the rabid reactionaries who have overtaken his own party.

Romney first came onto the national scene, of course, as Governor of Massachusetts. Given that state’s progressive political leanings, Romney not surprisingly governed as a relative moderate.  He helped develop and signed the RomneyCare health care reform plan upon which ObamaCare is based.  Romney acknowledged the reality of climate change, and took relatively moderate positions on LGBT rights, immigration reform, and even choice.  Based on this record, Romney was widely perceived as a fairly moderate Republican who was not in league with the fire-breathing reactionaries who run today’s GOP.

A radically different Romney, however, appeared during the GOP Presidential primary this year.  Faced with a Republican Party that had been overtaken by rabid reactionaries, Romney decided not to fight for the centrism that he needed to pursue in Massachusetts or the reality-based conservatism that had been championed by his father George Romney in the 1960s.  Instead, Romney time and time again joined in and encouraged the level of craziness that define today’s GOP.  Examples abound, including:

* Supported Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) “marvelous” Austerity Budget, which would abolish Medicare and eviscerate social investments in order to finance $4.6 trillion in tax giveaways to the wealthy

* Sided with GOP Governor’s Scott Walker (WI) and John Kasich’s (OH) politically unpopular attacks on the rights of public employees to collectively bargain over their wages, benefits, and working conditions

* Vowed to “get rid of” funding for Planned Parenthood, and supported the Blunt Amendment, which would have allowed any employer to deny its employees health insurance coverage for contraception

* Echoed the climate deniers’ false claims that “we don’t know what is causing climate change”

* Declared Arizona’s harsh anti-immigration law to be a “model” for the nation, promised to veto the DREAM Act, and took other steps that led blogger Steve Benen to justifiably declare Romney “the the most right-wing candidate on immigration of any competitive presidential hopeful in generations.”

* Signed the 2012 pledge of the anti-LGBT National Organization for Marriage, thereby vowing to support a federal anti-marriage equality Constitutional amendment, defend the Defense of Marriage Act, and appoint so-called “originalist” federal judges.

* Promised to abolish ObamaCare on day one of any Romney Presidential Administration.

Now that he is the presumptive Republican nominee, however, Romney is making a predictable move back to the center.  For example, as Thomas Edsall pointed out at the New York Times a few days ago, Romney has already made subtle changes to his rhetoric on immigration, reproductive freedom, and economic issues that suggest a less right wing approach. And Romney is already trying to back away from his attacks on Planned Parenthood and support for the Blunt Amendment by suggesting that women will support him once they understand his “real positions.”  As Romney’s communications director Eric Fehrnstrom might say, the Etch-a-Sketching has already begun.

With Romney’s positions bouncing around like a ping pong ball, how should Democrats react?  Remembering the attacks that were successfully leveled at John Kerry in 2004, many will eagerly brand Romney a flip-flopper who lacks the values and principles needed to be President.  And that is certainly true.  But to the extent such a focus requires pointing out that Romney is taking more moderate positions during the general election, that approach could also backfire as it could help Romney falsely convince voters that he truly is a centrist.  As Paul Krugman recently pointed out, the chattering classes in DC, in their desperation to find moderate Republicans who don’t really exist anymore, continue to try to portray Paul Ryan as a reasonable and fiscally responsible politician, despite his budget proposal that would increase the deficit, end Medicare, and slash the safety net in order to finance $4.6 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthy.  If the chattering classes are doing that for Paul Ryan, imagine how eager they will be to accept Romney’s effort to convince voters that he really is a moderate.

As such, it will be far more important to portray Romney not simply as a flip flopper, but rather as a candidate so lacking in values, principles, and spine that, when the cards were down, he was entirely unable to stand up to the right wing and, instead, joined in the attacks on reproductive freedom, immigrants, LGBT Americans, working people, the poor, etc.  Given this performance, imagine how Romney would act as President, when he would be under extreme pressure from the Koch Brothers, right wing activists, and the Fox “News”-led conservative media echo chamber to carry out their right wing agenda.  When Romney is deciding who to appoint to the federal judiciary and to his cabinet, would he stand up to the right wing?  When Romney is deciding what Executive Orders to issue, would he stand up to the right wing?  When Romney is deciding whether to veto reactionary legislation passed by a Republican Congress, would he stand up to the right wing?  Romney’s performance during the GOP Presidential primaries demonstrates that the answer to each of those questions is almost certainly no.

In short, no matter how much Romney tries to moderate his positions over the next seven months, we need to remind voters that on issue after issue, Romney was more than happy to take on rabidly reactionary positions as his own throughout the GOP primary.  Romney may try to Etch-A-Sketch his way out of those positions now, but an Etch-A-Sketch is not going to stand up to the right wing reactionaries that have taken over the GOP and that would be running the show during a Romney Administration.

The primary goals of the Winning Progressive blog are to inform our readers on the issues of the day from a progressive perspective and to encourage our readers to make their progressive voices heard. We progressives are faced with a well-organized, well-funded conservative messaging machine, and a national media that consists primarily of conservative talking points, meaningless he-said she-said reporting, and mindless drivel about famous people and fake scandals. In order to counteract the vapidness of our media and the conservative megaphone that we face, it is up to all of us progressives to take the progressive message to the American people, the media, the White House, members of the House and Senate, and the letters to the editor pages of our local newspapers, so that voters and elected officials constantly hear a positive message about what progressive policies can do to improve our country.

The need for we progressives to make our own messaging machine is perfectly illustrated by a study of media coverage of the 2012 President Election released last fall by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Titled “The Media Primary,” the study quantified the percentage of positive, neutral, and negative media coverage President Obama and each of the GOP candidates for President received from May 2 to October 9. The results were shocking only if you somehow still believed the myth of the “liberal media”:

One man running for president has suffered the most unrelentingly negative treatment of all, the study found: Barack Obama. Though covered largely as president rather than a candidate, negative assessments of Obama have outweighed positive by a ratio of almost 4-1. Those assessments of the president have also been substantially more negative than positive every one of the 23 weeks studied. And in no week during these five months was more than 10% of the coverage about the president positive in tone.
[...]
As for Barack Obama, 9% of the news coverage about him over the last five months has registered as positive while 34% has been negative and 57% has been neutral or largely straight news accounting of events. In each of the 23 weeks studied, his negative coverage exceeded his positive coverage by more than 20 percentage points. And in none of those weeks did his negative coverage fall below 30%. The tone of Obama’s coverage on blogs, while still overwhelmingly negative, was slightly better—14% positive and 36% negative.
[...]
Even the week of May 2-8, immediately after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Obama’s coverage was overwhelmingly negative.

The results of the Pew study were even more stark when you compare the coverage of President Obama to that of every GOP Presidential candidate. Even though most of those GOP candidates were hardly qualified to be dog catchers, much less President, coverage of all of them was far more favorable than was coverage of our President:

Faced with this type of blatant media bias it is up to us to take the progressive message to the American people. A second reason we must all get involved in doing so is that you can count on the fact that our opponents are going to make their voices heard, so we better do the same if we want to win political battles.

A perfect example of this can be seen when the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) sent out an e-mail petition supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. Apparently the banksters on Wall Street had their feelings hurt by the DCCC petition and they let the Democratic leaders know it:

After the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent a recent email urging supporters to sign a petition backing the wave of Occupy Wall Street protests, phones at the party committee started ringing.

Banking executives personally called the offices of DCCC Chairman Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) and DCCC Finance Chairman Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.) last week demanding answers, three financial services lobbyists told POLITICO.

“They were livid,” said one Democratic lobbyist with banking clients.

The execs asked the lawmakers: “What are you doing? Do you even understand some of the things that they’ve called for?” said another lobbyist with financial services clients who is a former Democratic Senate aide.

It is, of course, no surprise that our opponents make their voices heard when they are upset about something politically. It is critical, however, that we do the same both when we are upset about something our elected officials are doing and also when we are supportive of something they are doing. Because if every time our elected officials do something we like they only hear anger from our opponents, that official is less likely to take a progressive stand the next time. And if every time our elected officials do something we do not like they only hear from conservatives and do not hear our objections, our elected officials will come to believe that they can get away with selling out the progressive position at little to no political cost.

We urge our readers to not cede this ground to conservatives and, instead, to be proactive in contacting your elected officials whenever he or she does the right or wrong thing, and in spreading the progressive message to the media and our family, friends, and colleagues. In order to help you do so, we have collected links for sending letters to your local newspaper editor, and contact information for your elected officials and Democratic Party organizations. We’ve also started a list of political races and campaigns we encourage our readers to get involved in. Because, in the end, it is up to us to do what we can to ensure that our political system responds to all of us rather than to just the conservative noise machine.

While Mitt “Etch-a-Sketch” Romney continues to struggle to defeat Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum in the GOP Presidential primaries, President Obama has spent the last couple of weeks making clear that Romney will face a far tougher opponent in the general election if he becomes the GOP nominee.  This effort by the Obama campaign has involved reminding voters of the success that the Obama Administration has achieved, aggressively attacking the dangerous conservative economic vision for our country, and challenging GOP attacks on him.

First, at the end of March, President Obama gave a stirring speech listing some of the substantial progressive victories that we have achieved over the past three years.  This speech helps remind progressives and other voters that while the past three years have certainly held their fair share of disappointments and setbacks, we have also seen major progress on numerous issues.  As President Obama said:

And here’s what I want to report — that in three years, because of what so many of you did in 2008, we’ve begun to see what change looks like.  (Applause.)  We’ve begun to see what change looks like.

Change is the first bill I signed into law — a law that says women deserve an equal day’s pay for an equal day’s work, because I want our daughters treated just like our sons.  (Applause.)

Change is the decision we made to rescue an auto industry that was on the verge of collapse, even when some said let Detroit go bankrupt.  One million jobs were at stake, so we weren’t going to let that happen.  And today, GM is back on top as the world’s number one automaker, reported the highest profits in 100 years — (applause) — 200,000 new jobs over the last two and a half years.  The American auto industry is back and it’s making cars that are more fuel-efficient.  So that’s helping the environment, even as we’re putting people to work.  (Applause.)

Change is the decision we made to stop waiting for Congress to do something about our oil addiction.  That’s why we finally raised our fuel-efficiency standards.  By the middle of the next decade, we will be driving American-made cars that get almost 55 miles to a gallon — (applause) — saves the typical family more than $8,000 at the pump.  That’s what change is.

Change is the fight we won to stop handing $60 billion in taxpayer giveaways to the banks who were processing student loans.  We decided let’s give those student loans directly to students — (applause) — which meant we could make college more affordable to young people who need it.  That’s what change is.  That happened because of you.

And, yes, change is the health care reform that we passed after over a century of trying.  (Applause.)  Reform that will finally ensure that in the United States of America, no one will go broke just because they get sick.  Already — already 2.5 million young people now have health insurance who didn’t have it before because this law lets them stay on their parent’s plan.  (Applause.)  Already millions of seniors are paying less for their prescription drugs because of this law.  Already, Americans can’t be denied or dropped by their insurance company when they need care the most.  Already, they’re getting preventive care that they didn’t have before.  That’s happening right now.  (Applause.)

Change is the fact that for the first time in history, you don’t have to hide who you love in order to serve the country you love, because we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell.”  (Applause.)

Change is the fact that for the first time in nine years, there are no Americans fighting in Iraq.  (Applause.)  We refocused our efforts on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11.  And thanks to the brave men and women in uniform, al Qaeda is weaker than it has ever been.  Osama bin Laden is no more.  (Applause.)  We’ve begun to transition in Afghanistan to put them in the lead, and start bringing our troops home from Afghanistan.  That’s what change is.  (Applause.)

For additional progressive victories under the Obama Administration, see our list covering 2009 and 2010, or this list of the top 50 things accomplished by President Obama.

Second, President Obama gave a speech last week describing just how regressive the recent budget proposal from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is.  Ryan’s budget, which Romney has described as “marvelous,” would abolish Medicare and replace it with inadequate vouchers, cut 14 to 27 million Americans off of Medicaid, and eviscerate most other government programs, while increasing military spending and giving millionaires an average additional tax cut of $256,000 per year over what the W. Bush Administration already gave away to the rich.  The Ryan budget would also increase the deficit, especially given that it relies on $4.6 trillion in tax loophole closures to offset the tax giveaways for the wealthy but does not identify a single loophole that would purportedly be closed.

In a great speech worth reading or watching in its entirety, President Obama took on the Ryan budget head-on, framing the issue as not just one about how to restore fiscal balance, but instead as:

a Trojan Horse.  Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country.  It is thinly veiled social Darwinism.  It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class.  And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last  — education and training, research and development, our infrastructure — it is a prescription for decline.

President Obama then proceeded to outlines the contrast between the two parties on two key issues, health care and taxes, explaining that:

Instead of saving money by shifting costs to seniors, like the congressional Republican plan proposes, our approach would lower the cost of health care throughout the entire system.  It goes after excessive subsidies to prescription drug companies.  It gets more efficiency out of Medicaid without gutting the program.  It asks the very wealthiest seniors to pay a little bit more.  It changes the way we pay for health care — not by procedure or the number of days spent in a hospital, but with new incentives for doctors and hospitals to improve their results.

And it slows the growth of Medicare costs by strengthening an independent commission — a commission not made up of bureaucrats from government or insurance companies, but doctors and nurses and medical experts and consumers, who will look at all the evidence and recommend the best way to reduce unnecessary health care spending while protecting access to the care that the seniors need.

We also have a much different approach when it comes to taxes — an approach that says if we’re serious about paying down our debt, we can’t afford to spend trillions more on tax cuts for folks like me, for wealthy Americans who don’t need them and weren’t even asking for them, and that the country cannot afford. At a time when the share of national income flowing to the top 1 percent of people in this country has climbed to levels last seen in the 1920s, those same folks are paying taxes at one of the lowest rates in 50 years.  As both I and Warren Buffett have pointed out many times now, he’s paying a lower tax rate than his secretary.  That is not fair.  It is not right.

And the choice is really very simple.  If you want to keep these tax rates and deductions in place — or give even more tax breaks to the wealthy, as the Republicans in Congress propose — then one of two things happen:  Either it means higher deficits, or it means more sacrifice from the middle class.  Seniors will have to pay more for Medicare.  College students will lose some of their financial aid.  Working families who are scraping by will have to do more because the richest Americans are doing less.  I repeat what I’ve said before:  That is not class warfare, that is not class envy, that is math.

Finally, the Obama campaign has directly taken on the issue of rising gas prices, which Republicans have baselessly argued President Obama is responsible for.   In its latest advertisement (which we have embedded at the end of this post, the Obama campaign has detailed how his Administration has worked to break our addiction to oil while accurately identifying Romney as the “Candidate of Big Oil.”

While President Obama has an early lead over Romney of 49-45% overall, and 51-42% in swing states, we cannot become complacent if we want to win.  Seven months until election day is an eternity in politics, the media will of course be cheerleading for the GOP and do little to call Romney out when he tries to Etch-a-Sketch his way back to the center, and 8%+ unemployment is not a good starting point for any re-election campaign.  So it is critical that we all take the fight to the GOP over the next seven months.  It is nice to see that President Obama is already doing so.

(By NCrissie B)

Some in the media and many Republicans would like it if disillusioned young voters gave up and didn’t vote in 2012. An October 2011 Pew Research Poll showed 62% of young voters favoring President Obama over Mitt Romney. That is only a tiny slip from the 66% of millennials who voted for President Obama in 2008.

Yet the Tennessean chose to focus on a different number today in their article headlined Young voters cool to Obama: College students go from devoted to disenchanted. The article cites another statistic from the same October 2011 Pew Research Poll:

According to the Pew Center, just 13 percent of Americans under 30 have given a lot of thought to the 2012 candidates, down from 28 percent four years ago. That compares with a 42 percent interest level among voters age 66-83.

The reporter interviewed a handful of Tennessee college students, starting with one who admits he’s disillusioned with President Obama and two others who say they’ve ignored the presidential campaign so far. The article then quotes the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party and the president of the Middle Tennessee State College Republicans. Only in the final third of the article does the reporter note that President Obama’s approval among young voters remains over 50%, with quotes from some supporters and campus organizers.

Have President Obama and Democrats lost young voters?

Most young voters “very excited” about 2012

A January Public Policy Polling survey found that 55% of young voters were “very excited” about voting in 2012. Young voters tied with self-identified conservatives in excitement. The only groups more excited were African Americans and the Tea Party, tied at 62%. Self-identified liberals and Republicans tied at 54%. While men (52%) were more excited than women (48%), the poll was taken was before Republicans erupted in outrage over an Obama administration rule requiring health insurance to cover contraceptive care. The GOP’s outrage, and their outrageous rhetoric, have since awakened a sleeping giant. A mid-February AP/GfK poll showed a 10-point jump in President Obama’s approval rating among women since the start of 2012.

But back to those young voters. How can Public Policy Polling find that 55% of young voters “very excited” about the 2012 election, when Pew Research found that only 13% of those young voters had paid attention to the 2012 candidates?

The obvious answer lies in the data themselves. By a nearly 2-to-1 margin, the Pew Research poll found, young voters favor President Obama and Democrats. In 2008, both major parties had contested primaries and supporters of both parties had ample reason to pay close attention to the candidates. But in 2012, with President Obama the incumbent and certain Democratic Party nominee, Democratic voters have less reason to follow the primary process. A Gallup poll this week showing a slight enthusiasm edge for Republicans included this caveat:

The current data provide a snapshot of voting enthusiasm at a time when political attention is devoted mostly to a fractured Republican field. Where these enthusiasm figures stand after the GOP nomination is decided – and certainly in the fall after the dust settles from both parties’ conventions and news coverage of the two parties has evened out – will be more telling, and could, in fact, be determinant of who wins.

In short, mostly-Democratic young voters are largely ignoring the Republican primary. But Republicans don’t simply wish those mostly-Democratic young voters would stay home in 2012.

Blocking the vote

Republicans are passing ever more stringent voter registration and ID laws to build legal walls between mostly-Democratic voters and the voting booth. They’re even prosecuting a Florida teacher for registering her students:

As Stephen Colbert aptly satirizes, Republicans have given up on claims of existing voter fraud. That’s hardly surprising, as almost every recent case of voter fraud involves Republicans trying to demonstrate that it might happen. As the Brennan Center reports, less than 0.0001% of votes cast are fraudulent. As for the ACLU spokesman’s claim about shark attacks being more common than voter fraud in Florida, PolitiFact Florida rated that “mostly true,” with the usual caveats about not all voter fraud cases being reported and not all of the reported cases being proved.

As the Tampa Bay Times reports, a federal judge heard testimony on Thursday in a lawsuit to overturn Florida’s new voter registration law:

The League of Women Voters, Rock the Vote and the Florida Public Interest Research Group Education Fund went to court late last year to ask the judge to throw out the parts of the law putting new requirements on third-party voter-registration organizations.

Lawyers for the groups argued that the new rules – which include submitting the names of those who work for the organization, having volunteers sign forms agreeing not to break the law and turning in registrations within 48 hours instead of the early state deadline of 10 days – were so hard to comply with that the organizations were largely forced to shut down their registration drives.

Florida Democrats are also pushing the legislature to overturn changes to the state’s early voting rules:

A coalition of African-American legislators is pushing to allow early voting on the Sunday before Election Day, saying a yearslong tradition was eliminated by elections changes approved last year.

In response to the challenges of the 2000 general election, the Legislature greatly expanded early voting in 2002. Black churches began to encourage congregants to vote immediately after Sunday services the weekend prior to any election day, an effort known as “Souls to the Polls,” Sen. Chris Smith, D-Ft. Lauderdale, said. The event sometimes accounted for 20 or 30 percent of all African-American turnout, he said.

But the elections changes approved last year limited early voting hours and restricted early voting within 3 days of an election, which effectively ended “Souls to the Polls.”

“Last year’s elections law took us back,” Smith said.

Seeding a media narrative

When you read a news story like the one in the Tennessean, remember that Republicans have launched an all-out legislative campaign to suppress mostly-Democratic voters. Their voter suppression campaign won’t show up in public opinion polls, as pollsters don’t ask if voters have jumped through the new legislative hoops. Republicans are establishing a media narrative of young voters, women, and persons of color “disillusioned” with President Obama … in case their voter suppression campaign works.

We Democrats must both push back against that media narrative and – more important – work to ensure that young voters, women, and persons of color are ready to vote. Don’t let Republicans turn their “disillusioned voters” myth into suppressed voters reality. Contact your local or state Democratic Party, the Obama/Biden Campaign, Protecting the Vote, or Election Protection and ask how you can help.

(Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com))

On Monday, February 27, early voting started for Illinois’ March 20 primary elections.  As we’ve reported previously, we have a great opportunity to elect a strongly progressive Democrat to Congress from Illinois’ 10th Congressional District, where Ilya Sheyman is running to be the Democrat nominee to replace freshman Tea Party Rep. Robert Dold.

Unfortunately, another candidate in the Democratic primary, Brad Schneider, is pretending to be the progressive in the race.  Winning Progressive has no doubt that Schneider would be far better than Rep. Dold, and we will certainly support Schneider if he were to win the nomination.  But it is quite a stretch to call Schneider a progressive, especially when a true progressive like Sheyman is in the race.

First, Schneider has the problem that he, on a number of occasions, made campaign contributions to Republicans.  For example, in the 2010 and 2008 election cycles, Schneider donated a combined $1,800 to Mark Kirk (R-IL), $250 to Robert Bennett (R-UT), and $250 to Mike Johanns (R-KS).  Between 1999 and 2006, Schneider made four more contributions totaling $1,500 to Mark Kirk, $1,000 to Mike Rogers (R-MI), and $1,000 to Mark Kennedy (R-MN).  While Schneider also made numerous donations to a range of moderate to progressive Democrats, $5,800 of donations to Republicans is not the record of a true-blue progressive.

Second, Schneider’s Facebook page notes that he is “very proud to announce the endorsement of the New Democrat Coalition.”  As Roll Call recently described, the endorsement was part of the Coalition’s effort to “become the go-to group for moderates next year.”  Such endorsements go to “moderate, pro-business” Democrats, and are accompanied by a $10,000 donation from the Coalition’s PAC, which is chaired by conservative Democrat Jason Altmire (D-PA).  Schneider’s other political endorsements include moderate Steny Hoyer (D-MD), various local Illinois officials, and a handful of unions.   By contrast, Sheyman’s supporters include the Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chairs Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN), Democracy for America, Americans for Democratic Action, MoveOn.Org, former Illinois State Senator and dean of progressive politics in the state Miguel Del Valle, Howard Dean, AFSCME Local 31, the Lake County Federation of Teachers, and Sheet Metal Workers Local 73.

On the issues, Schneider mostly states support for progressive positions.  One key area where Schneider and Sheyman differ, however, is that only Sheyman supports gradually developing a Medicare-for-all, single payer type health insurance system because quality, affordable health care should be the “birthright of every single American.”  By contrast, Schneider specifically stated in his response to a candidate questionnaire from the Independent Voters of Illinois – Independent Precinct Organization (IVI-IPO) that he does not support single payer or extending Medicare and would prefer to focus on insurance market reforms and reducing costs.

Again, none of this is to disparage Schneider or to suggest that moderate to conservative Democrats such as himself should not have a place in the party. But Illinois’ 10th is the type of Congressional District that a truly progressive Democrat can and should win, and Ilya Sheyman is the progressive candidate to do so.

If you’d like to help make sure that we have a truly progressive Democratic candidate in Illinois’ 10th, please:

* make sure you vote early by March 15th, or on election day (March 20th), if you live in the District

* Sign up to help turn out the vote by signing up to volunteer or by RSVPing to the weekday phonebanking or weekend canvassing occurring now through election day

* Contribute to the campaign to help finance the grassroots efforts and air the following commercial for Sheyman’s campaign:

Suppose you are a Democratic President of the United States.  The voters sent you to the White House with a large electoral college victory and large Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.  Two years later, the voters rebuked your party in mid-term Congressional elections, creating a divided government in which Republicans control at least one house of Congress.  As President, you are now gearing up for your re-election campaign and are preparing to offer your State of the Union speech that is perhaps the best opportunity to frame the debate in re-election battle.   What would you do – triangulate or offer a progressive vision?

If you were President Clinton, the answer was to triangulate between the conservative Republicans and more progressive Democrats in Congress by offering a State of the Union speech filled with mostly conservative themes and small bore ideas.  President Clinton offered a few progressive proposals, such as raising the minimum wage, ratifying the START II anti-nuclear proliferation treaty, and protecting Medicare and Medicaid.  But the overarching theme of the speech was that “the era of big government is over,” which Clinton said three times during the speech.  The three biggest proposals in the speech were balancing the budget, welfare reform, and cracking down on illegal immigration.  And the rest of the speech was filled with minor ideas like requiring V-chips in TV sets, school uniforms, and voucherizing job training programs.

President Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union speech was not horrible. But at a time of strong economic growth and low deficits, President Clinton had the opportunity to set forth a strongly progressive vision for reducing poverty, making health care more affordable, rebuilding our cities, improving the environment, and shoring up Medicare and Medicaid.  Instead, he decided to tack to the center, criticize government, and offer small bore proposals like V-chips and school uniforms. Some of the individual ideas may have been worthwhile, but President Clinton certainly did not offer the type of strong defense of progressive governance that we should expect by a Democratic President.

By contrast, President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union speech offered a far more progressive vision to launch his re-election campaign.  Sounding some of the same themes that were in his December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama focused largely on economic fairness and how it can be achieved, starting by posing the following choice:

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by.  Or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

After outlining how financial shenanigans and deregulation caused the economic collapse of 2008, President Obama noted that he would not go back to those failed policies:

But I intend to fight obstruction with action, and I will oppose any effort to return to the very same policies that brought on this economic crisis in the first place.  No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits.

Next, President Obama proposed to help stop jobs and tax revenues from going overseas by, among other things, proposing a basic minimum tax for multinational corporations:

First, if you’re a business that wants to outsource jobs, you shouldn’t get a tax deduction for doing it.  That money should be used to cover moving expenses for companies like Master Lock that decide to bring jobs home. Second, no American company should be able to avoid paying its fair share of taxes by moving jobs and profits overseas.  From now on, every multinational company should have to pay a basic minimum tax.  And every penny should go towards lowering taxes for companies that choose to stay here and hire here.

Our President also reiterated his call for the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform that helps law-abiding immigrants get on a path to citizenship:

Let’s also remember that hundreds of thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another challenge:  The fact that they aren’t yet American citizens.  Many were brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet they live every day with the threat of deportation.  Others came more recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and create new jobs somewhere else.

That doesn’t make sense.. . . . We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now.   But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country.  Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship.  I will sign it right away.

Pushing back on the largely baseless conservative attacks about government loans for the Solyndra solar company, Obama next offered a defense of renewable energy investments and called for paying them by eliminating tax breaks for the oil industry:

I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or Germany because we refuse to make the same commitment here.  We have subsidized oil companies for a century.  That’s long enough.  It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.   Pass clean energy tax credits and create these jobs.

Noting the significant amount of spending we are avoiding by ending the war in Iraq and gradually winding down the war in Afghanistan, the President proposed to use half of that money to invest in infrastructure here in the US:

Take the money we’re no longer spending at war, use half of it to pay down our debt, and use the rest to do some nation-building right here at home.

President Obama then offered a lengthy defense of smart federal regulations and calling for an increased enforcement effort against abusive financial practices:

We’ve all paid the price for lenders who sold mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and buyers who knew they couldn’t afford them.  That’s why we need smart regulations to prevent irresponsible behavior.  Rules to prevent financial fraud, or toxic dumping, or faulty medical devices, don’t destroy the free market.  They make the free market work better.

There is no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly.  In fact, I’ve approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his.  I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense.  We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.  We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil.  With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.

I’m confident a farmer can contain a milk spill without a federal agency looking over his shoulder.  But I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago.  I will not back down from protecting our kids from mercury pollution, or making sure that our food is safe and our water is clean.  I will not go back to the days when health insurance companies had unchecked power to cancel your policy, deny you coverage, or charge women differently from men.

And I will not go back to the days when Wall Street was allowed to play by its own set of rules.  The new rules we passed restore what should be any financial system’s core purpose:  Getting funding to entrepreneurs with the best ideas, and getting loans to responsible families who want to buy a home, start a business, or send a kid to college.

So if you’re a big bank or financial institution, you are no longer allowed to make risky bets with your customers’ deposits.  You’re required to write out a “living will” that details exactly how you’ll pay the bills if you fail – because the rest of us aren’t bailing you out ever again.  And if you’re a mortgage lender or a payday lender or a credit card company, the days of signing people up for products they can’t afford with confusing forms and deceptive practices are over.  Today, American consumers finally have a watchdog in Richard Cordray with one job: To look out for them.

We will also establish a Financial Crimes Unit of highly trained investigators to crack down on large-scale fraud and protect people’s investments.  Some financial firms violate major anti-fraud laws because there’s no real penalty for being a repeat offender.  That’s bad for consumers, and it’s bad for the vast majority of bankers and financial service professionals who do the right thing.  So pass legislation that makes the penalties for fraud count.

And tonight, I am asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.

Finally, President Obama called for the wealthy to begin paying their fair share again by ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and instituting a Buffett Rule that ensures that millionaires pay a tax rate of at least 30%.  While Obama’s accompanying proposal to rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid could create some peril, it is important to keep in mind that we can and should rein in such costs by rationalizing health care spending rather than by cutting benefits:

I’m prepared to make more reforms that rein in the long term costs of Medicare and Medicaid, and strengthen Social Security, so long as those programs remain a guarantee of security for seniors.

But in return, we need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes.  Tax reform should follow the Buffett rule:  If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.  And my Republican friend Tom Coburn is right:  Washington should stop subsidizing millionaires.  In fact, if you’re earning a million dollars a year, you shouldn’t get special tax subsidies or deductions.  On the other hand, if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up.  You’re the ones struggling with rising costs and stagnant wages.  You’re the ones who need relief.

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want.  But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes?  Most Americans would call that common sense.

President Obama’s speech did include a few conservative ideas that we aren’t excited by such as opening up more than 75% of our potential offshore oil and gas areas to drilling.  But the clear focus of President Obama’s speech was an aggressive presentation of a progressive vision of economic fairness, smart regulations, the wealthy paying their fair share, clean energy development, immigration, and infrastructure investment.  The contrast with President Clinton’s 1996 triangulation could hardly be clearer.

While President Obama’s speech provides us progressives with an opportunity, it also presents a risk.  Clinton’s triangulation was harmful to the progressive cause as a matter of policy, but it succeeded in what it was intended to do – get President Clinton re-elected. With President Obama taking a far more progressive approach in a fairly similar political situation, we progressives must do what we can to make sure that Obama is re-elected with a Democratic Congress (and then hold their feet to the fire in 2013) so that we can show that the progressive vision is a better approach not only as a matter of policy but also as a matter of politics.

To do your part, write a letter to your local newspaper editor in support of the proposed Buffett Rule and sign up to volunteer for Obama’s re-election campaign.