Loranne Ausley: The Southern Project

In the past few weeks we have heard a lot of discussion about the demographic shifts that played so prominently in this election.  While it has prompted some discussion (The New Republic), Sunday’s article in the New York Times may have said it best:
“If the Democrats are going to be a true majority party, they will need to build a coalition in all 50 states. So rather than see the South as a lost cause (pun intended), the Democratic Party and liberals north and west of us should put a lid on their regional biases and encourage the change that is possible here.”
We all know that change is possible here which is why we have joined together to create The Southern Project.

Many of you joined our official launch in Charlotte, or have had the opportunity to participate in subsequent conversations in Washington, DC or in Boca Raton before the final presidential debate.    We are working on a state by state plan which will include significant post election analysis  to  help drive pre-legislative session agenda research in key southern states, starting in Virginia, and continuing our work in Florida and North Carolina.    We will be in touch with you as this research and analysis becomes available, and as we look for ways to make sure this research is actionable across the south.

I’m truly honored by the group of people who have joined us in building this project and look forward to our work together. 

The Seattle Times Endorses No Labels — Refers to The RP’s Appearance on The Daily Show

The Seattle Times was watching The RP on The Daily Show last week.  Indeed, they mention the appearance as an illustration of the problem of hyper-partisanship and polarization in our system:

Some will glance at the list and liken No Labels’ mission to a bunch of kumbaya ho-hum, but something’s gotta give. If the two main parties in this country can’t work together, we need an independent force to shake things up. I’m not saying we should do away with the Democrats and the Republicans; I’m saying citizens should encourage them to use No Labels as a basis for building consensus and compromise.

On last Thursday’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, correspondent Al Madrigal “reported” on gridlock in America and interviewed a No Labels co-founder about the group’s 12-point plan. The fake newsman challenged the virtues of those ideas by taking us to “a magical land of no gridlock.” He goes to Arizona, where Republicans have a super majority in both chambers of the Legislature and have passed a series of controversial bills.

Watch. It’s really silly, but the underlying message is serious.

In Madrigal’s faux news world, we’re presented with two extremes: gridlock —  government inaction that’s symptomatic of parties seeking to tip the balance of power — or one-party domination.

We’re better-served by having something in the middle.

Since the make-up of the U.S. Congress is relatively balanced between Republicans and Democrats right now, I can’t think of a better time for lawmakers to set aside party labels and take tentative steps to re-gain the public’s trust.

Read the full editorial here.

Artur Davis: The Real Reason Democrats Held Their Base

There are no ties weaker than the ones that bind politicians. So, no major surprise that surrogates who were just trumpeting Mitt Romney’s election as essential to the country’s future and celebrating his record as ideally suited to cracking open the partisan gridlock are doing their share of distancing from the defeated candidate. They have a lot to distance from: ranging from internal polling that was so off base it wasted the ticket’s precious time with last-minute campaigning in states they did not come close to winning, to Romney’s characterization of the Democratic base as tools whose affection was bought off by “gifts”.

But a cautionary note: Romney’s frustrations are the musing of a candidate legitimately perplexed by the Democrats’ ability to hold together a base that should have been frayed by the economic deterioration of the last four years. And if Republicans are being brutal but right about the politics of dismissing Romney, they are wrong if they ignore the question he was stabbing at: exactly how does a political majority keep intact when so many of its underlying policies aren’t exactly working in the interests of the coalition inside that majority? And if a flailing economy was not enough to weaken that base, what does that mean for the future given the unmistakable shifts in the national demographic?

Case in point: the African American solidarity behind Barack Obama in the face of severe black unemployment and poverty, and at the same time that Obama has aligned himself with a gay rights movement that is disdained by a consistent 30 to 40 percent of the black voter community. Another example is the 70 plus percent support Obama amassed from a Latino community that barely yielded him 50 percent approval ratings for much of 2011 and that was openly critical of his failure to push, much less pull off, comprehensive immigration reform. And for good measure throw in Obama’s sixty percent with voters 18-29 and more improbably, his ability to sustain their participation at 2008 levels despite months of polling evidence that the poor job market for young adults would diminish their enthusiasm.

Arguably, (and amusingly given the backlash from inside the party) Romney’s observations were only a clumsily put version of what numerous Republican commentators have said in a more sanitized way—that Democrats have nursed an entitlement culture that promises an engaged, assertive government to a variety of groups who are facing the imperfections of the free market. (Conservatives who argue that a softening of the GOP’s hard-line on immigration will be outweighed by Democratic pledges of more government benefits for Hispanics are channeling Romney). There is something to this assessment in its most reductionist form: between a health care law that has, for all its other imperfections, insured more young adults and low income minorities, to an executive order that eases off on the deportation of young undocumented immigrants, to a student loan reform that has cut the borrowing obligations of recent college undergraduates, the Obama administration has built a portfolio that delivered results for elements of its base that might have drifted.

Dismissing that record as a bounty of gifts was both impolitic and naive. There is nothing untoward or unpredictable in electoral groups siding with a party that has pursued initiatives friendly to their interests. But even the glossier version of Romney’ remarks, the pundit classes’ abstracting of initiatives that are base-friendly as an entitlement culture, is off-key because it underestimates exactly what else Democrats have managed to do.  The more accurate assessment is that Democrats have stitched together a coalition that is linked less by dependency on government than by a shared perception of Republican and conservative insularity.

Republicans who marvel at the loyalty of the 08 Obama coalition fail to appreciate that the coalition was and remains socially aspirational rather than economic. Its foundation is a yearning for a culture that is stripped of its ethnic and social boundaries and hierarchies, an embrace of diversity as a strength rather than a source of disarray, and a suspicion that conservative individualism is both un-cool and at odds with the wired, interconnected reality of the 21st century. It should have been no surprise that the black/Latino/youth base responded so powerfully to Democratic insinuations that Obama’s defeat would mean a retreat from a modernist notion of American identity, and that consolidating that identity proved more compelling than jobless numbers (especially when Obama’s argument that Republican intransigence was more at fault than his own policies took hold).

To be sure, the Obama campaign did not trust its appeal entirely to inspiration. There was a healthy dose of fear-mongering: witness the demonization of voter ID laws, which Democratic operatives relentlessly painted as a scheme to suppress minority and youth turnout, as well as the allegations from Obama allies that ordinary Republican partisanship was deep seated revanchism and white backlash.

That Republicans minimized this demonization while it was in progress meant that it was rarely answered.  GOP strategists comforted themselves with assumptions that liberals were practicing an identity politics that would backfire, or that cold economic realities would thwart the Democrats’ tactics, or at least constrain their turnout. Instead, the best evidence is that Democrats pulled off the feat of turning Republican orthodoxy into a cultural identity in its own right, one that was white, traditional and unattractively reactionary. The result was a galvanized Obama base that shattered Republican voter models.

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Artur Davis: The Real Reason Democrats Held Their Base

Tom Perez Has a Great Idea Concerning Voter Registration

My good friend, Thomas Perez — formerly the Montgomery County (MD) Council President, and currently the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice — has a great idea on how to help solve the continuing problem of our ineffective national voter registration system.

Writes Pete Yost of the Associated Press:

One of the top enforcers of the nation’s civil rights laws said Friday government should be responsible for automatically registering citizens to vote by using existing databases to compile lists of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.

The proposal by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, follows an election with breakdowns that forced voters in many states to wait in line for hours.

In remarks at George Washington University law school, Perez said census data shows that of 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the 2008 presidential election, 60 million were not registered and therefore ineligible to cast a ballot.

Perez says one of the biggest barriers to voting in this country is an antiquated registration system.

President Barack Obama has said the problem must be dealt with and “we in the Justice Department … have already begun discussing ways to address long lines and other election administration problems, whether through proposed legislation, executive action and other policy measures,” Perez said in prepared remarks. He welcomed his audience to contribute suggestions.

“For too many people in our democracy, the act of voting has become an endurance contest,” said Perez. “I used to run marathons; you should not feel like you have endured a marathon when you vote.”

Perez said the current registration system is needlessly complex and forces state and local officials to manually process a crush of new registrations, most handwritten, every election season. This leaves “the system riddled with errors, too often, creating chaos at the polls,” Perez said. “That’s exactly what we saw at a number of polling places on Election Day last week.”

“Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century,” Perez said. “It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights.” He did not say which level of government should be responsible for implementing such changes.

Perez said the nation also must address the problem that 1 in 9 Americans moves every year, but voter registration often does not move with people who move.

Election officials should work together to establish a program of “permanent, portable registration so that voters who move can vote at their new polling place on Election Day,” Perez said. In the meantime, he said states should implement fail-safe procedures to correct voter-roll errors and omissions by allowing every voter to cast a regular, nonprovisional ballot on Election Day.

Perez supported allowing voters to register and cast their ballots on the same day. He called same-day registration “a reform we should be considering seriously” because it would promote voter participation.

He said that in the 2008 presidential election, five of the six states with the highest turnout in the country were states with same-day registration. Preliminary turnout estimates for the 2012 election, he said, show that this pattern will likely continue.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Saul Kaplan: The Hardest Question Any Leader Can Ask

Is it worth daring to be great? No buzzwords, no ambiguity, just a simple question that couldn’t matter more.  Business model innovation starts by realizing you are contributing to a movement that is bigger than you. It’s global, self-organizing, and transformative. Lead by letting go. The first and most important step in the business model innovation process requires a change in perspective for both you and your organization. Looking through the lens of your current business model will most likely result in incremental changes at best. Business model innovation requires a different perspective. It requires a different set of lenses to examine new opportunities. It starts by realizing transformational opportunities are bigger than you and your organization. Business model innovation must be treated like an epoch journey with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a young child exploring new territory for the first time.

Saul Kaplan

Business model innovation must be a strategic objective or it won’t happen. One of my biggest pet peeves is setting strategy one tactic at a time. It drives me crazy to be surrounded by people and organizations that think if they just work hard enough and do more things that a strategic direction and destination will emerge. It seems that most of the world works this way. It is terribly inefficient. How many people and organizations do you know that pedal the bicycle like crazy but never seem to arrive anywhere. They just keep pedaling harder hoping that something will eventually stick. It is exhausting watching them. Why not establish business model innovation as a strategic objective, a specific destination, and work hard on those things that help you get there. It seems so simple. Setting a strategic direction provides a way to know which tactics are aligned and contribute to reaching the destination. The destination may change along the way requiring different tactics, and that is OK, but not having a destination at all is a ticket to nowhere.

When John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to go to the moon” in 1961, Americans rallied around the destination. We believed it was possible and the goal of setting foot on the moon rallied a country to advance its global science and technology leadership. It was cool to study math and science and clear that innovation was the economic engine that would drive American prosperity. When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon eight years later and said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”, we celebrated his achievement as if it was our own and knew at that moment that anything was possible. We have been trying to get that feeling back ever since. Today, we have no clear destination, in space or on earth.

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Saul Kaplan: The Hardest Question Any Leader Can Ask

Congressman-elect Ami Bera Rides Support for “No Budget, No Pay Act” to Victory in CA-7

From the crew at No Labels:

With his victory over longtime Rep. Dan Lungren now official, Ami Bera is heading to Washington as the newly-elected congressman for the 7th District of California.  While Bera’s triumph is a testimony to his political skills and personal appeal, his victory also demonstrates the public’s hunger for a new breed of political leadership, based around problem-solving and underscored by Bera’s championing of the No Labels-endorsed “No Budget, No Pay Act.”

This common sense legislation says that if Congress doesn’t do their job and pass a responsible budget, they don’t get paid. As Bera said on the campaign trail, “Most Americans work hard and play by the rules. We pay the bills, we make tough choices, and we hold up our end of the deal. It may be hard sometimes, but it’s what we always do. It’s time for Congress to play by the same rules as everyone else. We need leaders who will put the people first to break through the gridlock and move forward.”

According to Mark McKinnon, No Labels Co-Founder “Ami Bera’s victory in the congressional race in CA-7 is also a victory for problem-solving leadership in Washington.  As indicated by his embrace of ‘No Budget, No Pay,” Bera is the type of leader Americans need and want in Washington. No Labels is proud to congratulate Ami Bera on his victory and to stand behind him and other Members of both parties dedicated to problem solving not point scoring.”

As the Fresno Bee noted, Bera made “No Budget, No Pay” a “central theme of his campaign.” In the campaign’s home stretch, Bera’s campaign released an ad titled, “No Pay,” which highlighted the absurdity of Members of Congress getting paid despite their failure to pass a budget each year.  In an Elk Grove Citizen op-ed published in early October, Bera touted his endorsement of “No Budget, No Pay,” saying: “Congress must be held accountable for doing the jobs the people elect them to do. That’s why I pledge to sponsor ‘No Budget, No Pay,’ which would ensure that if members of Congress don’t do their job and pass a responsible budget, they don’t get paid.  And that’s why I will work relentlessly with anyone, regardless of party, who is serious about creating jobs and rebuilding an economy that works for the middle class.”

In contrast to Bera, Rep. Lungren denied the legislation even a hearing in the relevant committee he chairs in Congress.  As the Fresno Bee reported in a fact check of relevant campaign issues, “A congressional committee chaired by Lungren has not granted requests from other members to hold a hearing on the legislation, which calls for withholding pay for members of Congress if a federal budget resolution is not approved by the deadline.  Bera has made his pledge to support the legislation a central theme of his campaign”

Said McKinnon, “Democracy works, after all. Ami Bera clearly understood the power of the public’s desire for action on common-sense measures like ‘No Budget, No Pay’ and recognized that embrace of the issue would also touch upon voters’ desire for something other than the status quo in Washington.  Voters in CA-7 and across the nation want their elected representatives to stop fighting and start fixing.”

In addition to “No Budget, No Pay,” No Labels supports a range of common-sense proposals designed to reinvigorate problem-solving in Washington.  On January 14, 2013 at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, New York, NY, No Labels will host a meeting titled, “Meeting to Make America Work,” to discuss how we can move forward on problem solving in Washington.  At the meeting, No Labels will unveil two national leaders – one Republican, one Democrat – who will help guide the movement in 2013 and the organization will introduce a group of congressional Members who have signed on as members of the “Problem Solvers Bloc” in Congress. Learn more about No Labels and the meeting at http://meetforamerica.com/.

Krystal Ball: Some Friendly Advice for the GOP

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Artur Davis: The Worst Republican Solutions

The Republican self-assessments, and the hardly disinterested kibbitzing from liberal pundits, are as scattered as would be expected in the wake of last week’s defeat. Some of the ideas have the virtue that they at least were not implicated in a 2012 strategy that failed. But in world where all rationalizations are not created equally, it’s worth dwelling on some of the more problematic pieces of advice floating around the atmosphere.

Hold firm on immigration.

Laura Ingraham, Ross Douthat and others have sounded the alarm that a Republican embrace of immigration reform, which they label presumptively as amnesty, will fail because Democrats will simply raise the bidding by promising Hispanics ever more government benefits and largess. They are right that immigration is no panacea. For one thing, any immigration reform remotely palatable to conservatives will not treat all undocumented immigrants alike, and the GOP’s likely preference for privileging families and long time residents will be challenged by Democrats who favor a dusted off version of the abandoned 2006 McCain Kennedy bill, which drew no such distinctions. An Obama Administration that clung to the position that virtually any state based immigration standards were illegal is extremely unlikely to accommodate the inevitable conservative preference for an approach more respectful of federalism. In other words, Republicans entering the immigration fight will not be greeted with an olive branch.

But a softening of the Republican hard-line on immigration is frankly not about co-opting the left. It is, instead, recalibrating the GOP line so it is not so easily cast as a reflexive backlash at a surge in the Hispanic population. The orthodoxy in the Republican primaries and in the Fox universe was even in its best light, contradictory of conservative impulses: for example, an avowedly pro-family party was averse to making the consolidation of families a linchpin of immigration policy and a party that is determined to tie welfare benefits to responsible behavior seemed uninterested in a Dream Act aimed at promoting college attendance and enrollment in the military. An immigration view that seemed suspiciously adrift from the usual conservative values couldn’t help but be seen as a code for a much worse instinct.

Of all of the left’s cultural bogeymen this past cycle—voter  ID laws, Republican resistance to gay rights, and the anti-immigrant mantra—none affected a larger swath of swing voters than the immigrant bashing charge.  A Hispanic electorate that barely gave Barack Obama 50 percent approval ratings for much of 2011 crested at 70 plus percent support for the president on Election Day. The size of the Hispanic deficit doomed Romney in Nevada and Colorado, and Democrats are right that a repeat in 2016 could arguably put Arizona and Texas in jeopardy.

Join Obama’s grand compromise.

There is much truth to the notion that Obama effectively framed this election as a choice between a middle class champion and a millionaire coddling plutocrat. To be sure, the Republican Party needs to shed its royalist economic image. While that likely does not mean embracing a breakup of big banks or the decentralization of the capital markets structure (Craig Shirley’s ideas in the Washington Post) it would make ample sense for Republicans to adopt the kind of smart, market oriented ideas Douthat and Reihan Salam have extolled for awhile, and as Governor Bobby Jindal proffered this week, to make that kind of conservative innovation a leading edge of the party’s rhetoric.

But morphing into a more middle-class friendly party does not inevitably mean yielding on the cornerstones of the current economic debate, by acquiescing on Obama’s proposed tax hikes on the wealthy or retreating from a spending cut focused approach to downsizing the deficit. In fact, the compromise that a rising number of top rank CEOs are urging, letting go the Bush tax rates for earners above $500,000 in exchange for a phased in reduction of the corporate rate, is a classic example of a pragmatic seeming position that is actually quite deferential to the Republican donor base. The party’s donors and lobbyists would invariably trade a marginal rate boost that their accountants could trim away to holding the status quo on reams of corporate deductions.

Hence, the weakness of cosmetic positions that are badly flawed in practice, but accomplish some strategic repositioning.  It is actually to Mitt Romney’s credit that he rejected a quick-fix middle income tax cut during the primaries, and unlikely that a Romney embrace of the Simpson Bowles Commission would have done anything other than saddle him with rolling back the popular mortgage deduction. The impact of the Ryan Plan remains debatable, but given that seniors gave Obama a negligible edge on Medicare, one smaller than the Democratic edge on the subject in the last two presidential cycles, it is also a stretch to say that the shrewdest future course is silence on entitlements.

Count on an increase in the GOP’s African American vote.

Perhaps in the interest of holding ground on immigration and ceding an outsized Hispanic vote in perpetuity, there is an emerging school of thought that the easier route might be to target a notably higher African American vote than Romney’s 7 percent, which itself was an over-performance from summer polls showing virtually no black votes for Romney( not to pick on Douthat again, but there are strong traces of this analysis in his last column and it is an emerging favorite of African American Republican bloggers).

The math seems unassailable. Running up the black vote to low double digits would do wonders to Republican numerical calculations for future races (or perhaps it would compensate for the unwisely understated assumptions this cycle about black turnout). The challenge for Republicans is that no nominee has reached those levels of blacks support since 1972 and only George W. Bush in 2000 has crossed the ten percent line, and then only barely.

There are usually two dubious assumptions at the base of an African American strategy for Republicans. The first, that the near monolithic black vote is a function of a superior outreach machinery by Democrats, and that Republicans could lessen the gap with a more assertive deployment of advertising or social media. Second, the idea that there is a suppressed black conservative vote that could be activated by more artful use of themes like opposition to same sex marriage.

Both theories downplay the extent to which the black advantage for Democrats is a reflection of one community’s entrenched skepticism of the Republican label as well as its considered judgment that active Democratic style government intervention is in its best interest. That mindset is only hardened by the near universal belief in black circles that Obama has faced uniquely vigorous opposition from Republicans for racially tinged reasons.

A Republican candidate who came to verbal blows with the Tea Party and the GOP’s southern wing and who was an avowed moderate would have a head start on gaining ground with blacks; so for that matter would a socially conservative Democrat who criticized, say, gay influence in the Democratic Party have a running start at securing more white Southern evangelical support. Neither variant has a remote shot of emerging in the current left-right duopoly of American politics. Absent the wildly improbable, or the inclusion on a Republican  ticket of Condi Rice, there is no empirical reason to think that in the short term, Republican percentages in the black electorate would rise more than a point or so to average post Nixon levels. (In fact, a smaller black turnout post Obama would wipe out the gain from returning to Bush 2000 support levels).

These aren’t disastrous ideas—don’t over-assume the benefits of a turnabout on immigration; lose the image of being the party of No; and rediscover the tradition of Lincoln—but they miss in different ways what, in the context of race, conservatism has done to itself and in the context of economics, the nature of the cards we are dealt. This road back is a long one.

(Cross-posted, with permission of the author, from OfficialArturDavis.org)

Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column

 

 

 

Q: I’m a first-time candidate. After guiding me to victory in my primary, one of my chief strategists asked me to hire his ne’er-do-well son. The son was a campaign volunteer and got along well with everyone, but I turned down the request. I didn’t want to start out my career like that. Did I make the right call, or did I make an enemy for life?
A Political Neophyte, Kansas City, Mo.

Both.

Q: Does direct mail still work? Is it a good use of money relative to other forms of communication, like TV, radio or knocking doors?
Initials withheld, New York City

Increasingly, no. There are some places it still works, though. Rural Missouri and St. Louis’ southern suburbs, for instance, are home to large concentrations of seniors, some of whom rarely leave the house, aren’t online except to use email, and for whom snail mail is a highlight of the day. Parts of the outer boroughs in particular also have high concentrations of elderly residents.

Of course, in rural Missouri, television buys are cheap. And moving images (TV ads) are generally more effective/persuasive than mail. So TV is preferable to mail there. But in a legislative race in the outer boroughs, New York City media market TV buys aren’t feasible, so mail is a decent option.

Radio is often a good option for negative ads, since listeners tend to forget the source of the attack and thus don’t hold the attacks against the candidates making them to the same degree they would with a television spot, for instance. But again, this is prohibitively expensive for legislative and City Council candidates in the New York City market. Upstate, it is much more feasible.

Of course, having someone actually talk to voters is always preferable to mail, radio or TV. But some areas are remote and/or difficult to canvass because of the distance between homes. And even in areas that can be canvassed effectively, some campaigns lack volunteers. They may employ paid canvassers as a substitute, but that can be dicey: Those jobs typically pay approximately $10 an hour or even less, and sometimes paid canvassers have more legs than teeth.

My chief opponent in a congressional primary used an oxymoronically named D.C. firm called Grassroots Solutions that hires paid canvassers. They were so stupid that they picked the only day of the entire election cycle when you know who is actually going to vote—Election Day—and spent the morning waving signs outside my office instead of at poll sites talking to voters. So be cautious about hiring anyone who claims they’ll help create “organic” grassroots support.

In sum, yours is a question with which every campaign must grapple. Except in anomalous areas like senior-heavy sections of the outer boroughs, money that once went toward mail will largely be steered toward online advertising in the future. In addition to the Internet’s status as a place where people spend more time than the 15 seconds it takes them to go from the mailbox to the trash can, the Web provides ad buyers information about the number of people who actually see and click on an ad, which mail is unable to do. In a metrics-obsessed Moneyball world, tools that enable campaigns to gather information while assessing the effectiveness of their messaging are increasingly essential.

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Jeff Smith: Do As I Say — A Political Advice Column

VIDEO: My Moment of Zen on “The Daily Show”

Last night, I had the incredible opportunity of playing straight man to The Daily Show‘s hilarious Al Madrigal in a segment of the Comedy Channel’s most popular franchise — and one of my all-time favorite shows.

As Madrigal exposed, No Labels — the national grassroots movement I co-founded, that involves 600,000 Democrats, Republican, and Independents in efforts to promote problem-solving to replace hyper-partisanship — is really a front group for immigrant harassment, forced Chick-fil-a feeding, and spinning in circles.

Or something like that.

When the show was first run, I tweeted my commentary simultaneously.  You can read my wacky insights by clicking here.

So if you missed it last night; now, here’s my moment of zen:

Having trouble accessing the video? Click here to watch on The Daily Show Web site.

The Recovering Politician Bookstore

     

The RP on The Daily Show