By Artur Davis, on Thu Aug 8, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET Nate Cohn’s piece in the New Republic, which relies on results from a Pew survey out this week, offers some blunt conclusions on the challenges of Republican rebranding: relatively few rank and file Republicans actually want the party to shift toward more moderate ideological positions, and those who do are generally matched by GOP voters who would just as soon shift to the right, and substantially outpaced by the numbers who prefer the status quo.
To be sure, there are methodological challenges that Cohn acknowledges but deserve more analysis: for example, a survey that assumes that voters are correctly identifying, or that they even mean the same thing, when they describe their party’s “current position”, is begging for a set of false positives. But anyone who spends time at Republican activist events can attest that the gist of the data feels about right. To the extent there is enthusiasm for redefining the party, it is more oriented around hopes for “better messaging” or a “more positive way of framing our arguments” than a wholesale desire to revisit actual substantive policies.
That’s a challenge, for a variety of reasons that I will keep addressing in these pages, but I’ll pull out one aspect of it for an extra word of elaboration: the goal of broadening the party without changing it very much explains a lot about one particular African American outreach effort that is becoming faddish on the right: capitalizing on prospective tensions inside the Democratic base between blacks v. Latinos by emphasizing the potential costs that legalizing undocumented immigrants might have on black low wage workers.
I happen to be a skeptic of the Senate immigration legislation, who would prefer Republicans counter it with an amalgamation of approaches that cross conventional lines: support of something like the DREAM Act that prioritizes immigrants who migrated as children or teenagers, combined with a more rigorous employment verification regime and tougher border enforcement, and strengthening the penalties for illegal immigration to match, say, Canada’s felony status for undocumented workers and genuinely stiff sanctions for smuggling.
 But that skepticism does not translate into an intuition that black unemployment or limited access to jobs dominated by illegal immigrants is a major economic consequence of reform. The evidence of any trends to that effect seems highly selective. Most of the case rests on an overreliance on data showing that illegal immigration diminishes low level wages even further, without accounting for the obvious: the alternative to reform is not some national dragnet that would deport most of the illegal immigrant population, and open up previously immigrant dominated jobs, but a muddling through with the status quo in which the undocumented population ratches up each year and may hit 14.5 million by 2018. Nor do the arguments that blacks are adversely affected by a pathway to citizenship grapple with another just as apparent fact: the long waiting period for actual citizenship will still mean that the current undocumented pool remains for most of the next decade what it is today: a collection of workers who have become accustomed to abysmal wages and can’t sue or comfortably complain to federal safety regulators. In other words, a more attractive labor source to certain elements of the low skill retail, construction and agri-business sectors than blacks with legal status could conceivably be.
And the heavy flaws in the effort to lure blacks with immigrant bashing don’t compare with another underlying political reality: if a politician’s sympathy for low income blacks surfaces only in the context of thwarting immigration legislation, but has no antecedents in other contemporary policy fights, like extending unemployment benefits, or preserving the recently expired FICA tax cuts, that candidate is unlikely to plausibly position himself as a champion of low wage black aspirations.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: Another Poor GOP Strategy For Pursuing Black Votes
By John Y. Brown III, on Wed Aug 7, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET  Lost in Translation?
How do you communicate with a mere gesture or casual glance to the guy in the Pontiac Sunfire tailgating you on the Watterson this morning that you are listening to and channeling Lenny Kravitz BUT that you can’t go any faster because you got a speeding ticket in this same area last week and can’t risk being late for your 7:30 client update meeting.
But you want him to know …that Mr Lenny Kravitz has no patience with tailgaters and does not want to see this happen ever again on the Watterson. Especially during an air guitar solo of Are You Gonna Go My Way.
I did the best I could to communicate this specific message with the facial expression that came to mind but am afraid parts of it–especially the Lenny Kravitz part—may have gotten lost in translation.
By Krystal Ball, on Wed Aug 7, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET  President Obama just gave another economic speech, this time in Phoenix, aimed at helping middle class families attain the American dream of home ownership. In truth, however, owning a home is only one part of the American dream. The real core of the American Dream was illustrated well recently by Robert Putnam, a social scientist whose work on community and inequality has influenced the president. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times Putnam talks about the way his hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio, has crumbled. He warns that the American dream is in danger of crumbling right along with it as manufacturing jobs leave and Port Clinton residents become locked in a cycle of poverty, hopelessness and despair.
I just spent the summer with my family and my new baby in my own crumbling rust belt town and I can attest to the fact that seeing that sort of regional despair up close has a way of clarifying your thinking. My little town of East Liverpool, Ohio, used to be the pottery capital of the world. Now China is the pottery capital of the world. The next town over, Midland, PA., used to be home to one of the largest steel mills in the country, offering thousands of good, union, middle class jobs. Now the mill is all but defunct. What will replace these jobs? That’s the real economic question we need to focus on, the real heart of preserving the American dream. After all you need a job and money to buy a house.
We tend to romanticize our era of manufacturing dominance and there is something wonderful about making things. Perhaps with new technology and new economic incentives we can restore some of our manufacturing prowess but there’s no time machine to take us back to the good old days. But listen to Richard Florida, senior editor at the Atlantic. He suggests the job boom we really need is staring us right in the face. Jobs that can’t be outsourced, in a sector that is already growing rapidly. The service sector. Jobs like retail clerks, home health care providers, childcare workers.
As manufacturing jobs have declined in this country, service sector jobs have increased. Perhaps rather than trying to bring back a bygone manufacturing era, we need to find a way to make service jobs the sort of good jobs that you can support a family on, buy a car with, take vacations on.
I don’t know exactly how we do it. But I know the activism among fast food workers and WalMart employees is a good start. I know that companies like Costco and Zappos and Amazon are leading the way by showing that a respected worker is a productive worker. And I also know that turning service jobs into middle class jobs will likely require a willingness among all of us to pay a bit more for the services we use. But keep in mind, manufacturing jobs were not always so great. They started out dirty, low paid, and dangerous. Perhaps service sector jobs can evolve just as manufacturing jobs did in those good old days.
Home ownership is fine. Bridges and roads are great. Education is absolutely critical. But what we really need to preserve the American Dream is a realistic path for all to the middle class through a fundamental shift in the way we view and treat our service workers. Oh, and it might help to have a Congress that was actually interested in tackling these problems, or might even be in session now and then.
Originally posted at MSNBC.com.
By Greg Harris, on Wed Aug 7, 2013 at 8:30 AM ET
By RP Staff, on Tue Aug 6, 2013 at 1:30 PM ET The Missouri Times collected a list of more than 100 people in the world of politics and political media that you need to know if you don’t already. The list doesn’t include legislators, but rather their staff and the governmental relations personnel and consultants that affect the outcomes of the legislator’s actions. Follow them on Twitter, familiarize yourself with their work and keep an eye out, because these people are not going anywhere.
Recovering Politician and former Missouri State Representative Jason Grill made the cut:
Jason Grill
Principal, JGrill Media & Consulting
Twitter: @jasongrill
This former member of the House has a leading media and governmental relations firm in Kansas City while also continuing to practice law. He seems to never sleep with all of the hats he wears, including hosting a radio show.
By John Y. Brown III, on Tue Aug 6, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET How to know if you have reached middle age?
When someone asks you “If you could live your life over again what things would you do differently?” and you give them an exasperasted look that has an undercurrent of disgust and reply,
“What are you talking about? Are you even serious? People don’t get to live their lives over. At this point I’m not even sure I have the energy to finish the life I am living now much less think about a do over.”
If your response sounds like this you are probably middle-aged.
By Artur Davis, on Tue Aug 6, 2013 at 10:00 AM ET
Having written favorably about Chris Christie in the past, and having taken to task Rand Paul on other occasions, it won’t be surprising that I lean toward the governor and not the senator in the much discussed back and forth between the two over national security and electronic surveillance. I am also in the camp that views an internal dust-up between presidential level Republicans as a good thing that promises that the party is headed toward a 2016 field that is decidedly less one-note than the one in 2012.
In fact, it’s worth hoping that the conversation between the two current Republican front-runners (as subject to change as Cory Booker’s claim that he won’t run for president in 2016) rapidly expands to encompass the domestic side of the equation. To date, it hasn’t, and the vague, far from congruent, alignments of center-right conservatives and libertarians around various economic and social issues has made this week’s tensions seem artificially stark. In fairness, the non-congruent, hazy nature of these domestic divisions has prevented any coalescing into the kind of binary lines that might lead to more clarity.
So, rather than a coherent libertarian v. center-right debate, the 60 percent of Republicans who endorse some revamp of the party have splintered into social moderates who prioritize expanding the party’s appeal to suburban professional women and 18 to 29 year olds; right leaning populists who want to recast the party as a skeptic of crony capitalism and oversized banks, and who reject amnesty for illegal immigrants as a threat to downscale workers; establishment types who want to revive the Bush vision of “compassionate conservatism” and pro-immigration reform; social conservatives who also see merits in amnesty and more emphasis on poverty and education; to libertarians who want to reconcile a move to the center on gay marriage (although generally not abortion) with a hard right turn on entitlements and domestic spending. And the soft borders between these camps mean that in some respects, a Paul has as much of a claim to a reformer mantle as a Jeb Bush.
It is not altogether clear where Christie falls on that grid. And to be sure, for the same pragmatic reasons that Republicans are transitioning swiftly from “Hillary never would have made Obama’s mistakes” to criticisms of Benghazi and the old Clintonian penchant for influence peddling, liberals can be counted on to temper their praise of Christie as a “responsible adult” with jabs at his resistance to gay marriage and his “demonization” of teachers. For equally clear tactical reasons related to nomination politics, Christie would be foolish to wear the label as the moderate trying to upend the conservative grip on the party. (In fact, one assumes that Christie appreciates that his long standing toughness on anti-terror tactics also shores up his conservative credentials in a party where to most, Edward Snowden resembles a subversive more than a patriot).
But there are reasons to think, and to wish, that Christie offers a potential of shaping at least some of the disparate elements of reform into the kind of conservative vision I have praised: one that takes middle class economic anxiety seriously, that is not allergic to market based strategies to address the chronically poor and the uninsured, and that treats a more cohesive, less fractured society as a valid goal of the political right. Some of that promise is rooted in a gubernatorial record that has been impressively attentive to education reform, and that whether he ends up being wrong or right on Medicaid expansion, at least acknowledges the moral dilemma of a low wage poor population that lack health care through no fault of their own. And some of the case for Christie as the best prospective champion of reform is admittedly derived from atmospherics, like his penchant for rebuking some of the less becoming traits on the right, i.e., a NRA web attack ad that featured Barack Obama’s daughters.
Read the rest of…
Artur Davis: What The Next Christie/Paul Fight Should Look Like
By Rod Jetton, on Mon Aug 5, 2013 at 3:00 PM ET Rod Jetton appeared on KSMU Radio to discuss The Recovering Politican’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis.
Click here to listen to the interview.
Here’s the summary:
 Click here to purchase Two former Missouri politicians who were once mired in scandal have now written a book together. As KSMU’s Jennifer Davidson reports, the book is garnering some national attention.
Rod Jetton, former speaker of the Missouri House, and Jeff Smith, a former state senator, co-authored “The Recovering Politician’s Twelve Step Program to Survive Crisis.” Several other former politicians contributed chapters as well.
Jetton pleaded guilty two years ago to a misdemeanor assault, admitting he struck a woman in the face and choked her during rough sex. Smith spent a year in prison after pleading guilty to lying about a campaign violation.
Jetton says he was approached by the book’s editor, Jonathan Miller, about taking part.
“And he said, ‘You know, I think you really ought to tell your story. And we could put a nice little book together that could really help some folks who may be going, or going to go through some kind of crisis or scandal. [They could] have some concrete plans and techniques on how to handle it, and also learn that, no matter how their situation turns out, they can overcome it and still lead a happy, successful life,’” Jetton said.
Jetton’s chapter is about how to apologize for the mistakes you made. He says his troubles started when he spent all of his time working, and put his family on the back burner, which led him to make poor choices. Today, Jetton lives in Poplar Bluff and works for a surveying and engineering company that specializes in rural communities. He says his faith and family are his top priorities now.
By John Y. Brown III, on Mon Aug 5, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET My big little idea. And the importance of mentoring–a dying art.
Several years ago Leadership Louisville and the Courier-Journal spearheaded a project to identify the 128 “Connectors” in our community. These are the people who are descri…bed as often the unsung heroes but also the glue in a community to help bring people and groups together and help get things done. They are energetic, trusted and enthusiastic and play an integral leadership role but aren’t necessarily in the most visible leadership position. And they exist in a variety of fields— profit and non-profits, commercial and public sector.
I was honored to be selected as one of these 128 “Connectors” (the concept came from Malcolm Gladwell’s breakthrough book Tipping Point).
The most important byproduct of this program was that it highlighted the idea of so-called connectors in our community as a role that is important and worth doing. I think in some small but important ways it “upped our city’s game” in this department. It inspired those identified connectors —and those who could or should have been on that list— to embrace this role that they play and to try to do it even better. It gave a name to this vague art and identified it as important and worthy of development.
The downside of this exercise is the “Now what?” conundrum. What do we do with this group now that they’ve been identified to improve the community. So that it doesn’t end up appearing to be little more than a high school senior superlative exercise. There was a study done and suggested, among other things, that connectors don’t necessarily work at their best with a group of other connectors. And so it was difficult to galvanize the group in some formal way…but it was a worthy project that was more than just a self-congratulatory yet probably didn’t leave as deep or as broad a legacy benefiting our community as its sponsors had originally hoped.
Which brings me to my big little idea.
Does Louisville have another group of individuals who are integral to our community’s growth and future but too often fly under the public radar and aren’t encouraged or thanked enough for the important role they play? And–here’s the pivotal question– if a similar project to the “Connectors” was established for them could leave a significant and lasting legacy?
I think the answer is yes! And I propose we have a project identifying and celebrating “Mentors” in our community. Those who take the time to show their younger eager counterparts the ropes and serve as role models and sounding boards and touchstones and are relied on for the sound sober guidance so critical when the stakes are high and emotions running higher.
By identifying and cultivating our city’s mentors everyone wins. We don’t value our wiser and more experienced elders enough in our world today–and it is to our detriment. And these mentor-types derive great personal satisfaction in giving back and helping facilitate new and better leaders for the future. But there is no formal mechanism to identify and encourage this practice. At least right now.
Louisville has a lot of great natural resources and is blessed with a central location and rich history. But perhaps our greatest resources is the fund of experiences so many accomplished people in our community have —and have in a host of different fields and professions. And our other great resource is we have some highly energetic, dynamic and ambitious young people who have more confidence than experience and more smarts than judgment. Their shortcomings begin where the untapped expertise of the mentors in our community begins.
Think of the underutilized mentors in our community as an internal brain drain we can’t blame on our sister states bleeding from us. We can only blame ourselves.
Wouldn’t it be great if we found a way to connect these two powerful but currently fragmented forces? I think so.
By John Y. Brown III, on Fri Aug 2, 2013 at 12:00 PM ET Fight Club. Did it inspire you…but seem just a tad too much?
Now there may be a new option.
Pinch Club.
That’s right. Sort of like Fight Club but from the Ladies Tees.
I was fascinated by the movie Fight Club which I saw for the first time about 2 years ago. No doubt many males can fall into a consumer-culture corporatized and commoditized ennui that leaves them needing something deeper and… more primitive to bring meaning to their lives.
Fighting–the punching with fists kind– would seem the natural dramatic first choice. But what it yours is a milder case? Or you are less disposed to physical violence? The option of a Pinch Club seems to accomplish the same end without all the messy and needlessly painful excesses.
Men meet late at night at an agreed upon place.
And pinch each other.
Incessantly.
Until they feel like men again.
And khaki pants are allowed.
|
|
