G.O.P. Threatens Seats Long Held by Democrats, &#169 The New York Times, April 24, 2010, by Jeff Zeleney and Adam Nougourney, excerpt quoted verbatim:

ASHLAND, Wis. — Representative David R. Obey has won 21 straight races, easily prevailing through wars and economic crises that have spanned presidencies from Nixon’s to Obama’s. Yet the discontent with Washington surging through politics is now threatening not only his seat but also Democratic control of Congress.

Mr. Obey is one of nearly a dozen well-established House Democrats who are bracing for something they rarely face: serious competition. Their predicament is the latest sign of distress for their party and underlines why Republicans are confident of making big gains in November and perhaps even winning back the House.

The fight for the midterm elections is not confined to traditional battlegrounds, where Republicans and Democrats often swap seats every few cycles. In the Senate, Democrats are struggling to hold on to, among others, seats once held by President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Democrats are preparing to lose as many as 30 House seats — including a wave of first-term members — and Republicans have expanded their sights to places where political challenges seldom develop.

“It’s not a lifetime appointment,” said Sean Duffy, a Republican district attorney here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, where he has established himself as one of the most aggressive challengers to Mr. Obey since he went to Washington in 1969. “There are changes in this country going on, and people aren’t happy.”

Mr. Obey, who leads the powerful Appropriations Committee, is one of three House Democratic chairmen who have drawn serious opposition. Representatives John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, who oversees the Budget Committee, and Ike Skelton of Missouri, who runs the Armed Services Committee, have been warned by party leaders to step up the intensity of their campaigns to help preserve the Democratic majority.

These established House Democrats find themselves in the same endangered straits as some of their newer colleagues, particularly those who were swept into office in 2008 by Mr. Obama as he scored victories in traditionally Republican states like Indiana and Virginia.

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, said he would consider anything short of taking back the House a failure. Republicans say they have not recruited strong candidates in all districts, but both parties agree that Republicans are within reach of capturing the 40 additional seats needed to win control. Republicans also are likely to eat into the Democratic majority in the Senate, though their prospects of taking control remain slim.

Democratic Congressional officials — well aware that a president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections — have long been preparing for a tough year. But that Mr. Obey here in Wisconsin and other veteran lawmakers like Representative Earl Pomeroy of North Dakota suddenly find themselves in a fight reflects an increasingly sour mood toward the Democratic Party and incumbents. ….

Read the full article, here.

Commentary by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: I just spent almost an hour on YouTube looking for mainstream media OR partisan Democratic videos about election 2010. They aren’t there. There are plenty of pro Tea Party Videos, you can find pages and pages of them in the search results for example for “election 2010″. I even went so far as to search YouTube for “election 2010 pro Democrat” (as well as “DNC election 2010″ and other partisan searches) and all of THOSE results were pro Tea Party results, including the top result listed, America Rising: An Open Letter to Democrat Politicians, which I have to admit, is a slick, well produced video…. watch it if you dare!

I’m worried…. The last figures I saw were to the effect that measurements of “party voter enthusiasm” had Democrats at 30 percent enthusiastic and Republicans at 55 percent. Traditional mid-term voter turnout has historically run about 36 to 38 percent. The last time it was as high as 38 percent was 1994, when Democrats lost Congress.

In Democrats Retain Money Advantage, ABC News, April 21, 2010, by David Chalian, it is claimed that Democrats have $57.8 million cash on hand while Republicans have just $36.3 million. I see utterly no evidence of this in the rhetoric and visibility of conservative message versus liberal message on the web or television. I have utterly no evidence that Democrats are doing anything constructive, media wise, with this money. YouTube is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tea Party in terms of the visibility of search results and their positioning. And YouTube is where America goes to find news on topics they are interested in.

In election 2010 polling done by Daily Kos/Research 2000, as of March 1-4, 2010, polling was running 45% Democrat to 42% Republican. But by April 19-23, 2010, results had swung to 46% Democrat to 47% Republican. The trend over 8 polls was a consistent erosion of Democrat support, or, rather, steady Democrat support with increasing Republican support. This means that Independents and swing voters are deciding in favor of Republican candidates. Gallop has a generic ballot for Congress as of April 15th as Democrat 43% versus Republican 46%. We are losing the war about our whole “message”. RealClearPolitics has new polling results as of April 15th which show only 36.6 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the “right direction”, while 58 percent feel we are on the “wrong track” (RCP average of five polling sources). This means that the overall opinion war is being lost.

DNC, DNCC, DSCC, DCC: you guys better wake UP! Get in there and counterpunch, unless you really do have a burning desire to go down in flames in this fall’s elections. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

*****

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Democrats in Congress have proposed a bill intended to stop the flood of corporate money into elections. This is an incredibly urgent issue since the Supreme Court legalized unlimited political spending by big corporations.

Unfortunately, this bill would require most corporations to only report how many millions they spend. History shows that transparency alone won’t stop big corporations from buying our elections.

We put together this chart make the point. If enough people understand why a “transparency-only” plan won’t work, we can convince Congress to push for a stronger bill, like the Fair Elections Now Act. Click the buttons below to share this chart with your friends via email, Facebook, or Twitter.

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Sources:

• Summary of Van Hollen-Schumer proposal: “BREAKING: Congress’s response to Citizens United,” Fix Congress First, February 11, 2010
  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=87102
• Data on total federal campaign spending: “The Money Behind the Elections,” Center for Reponsive Politics, accessed March 19, 2010
  http://www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/index.php
• Projected 2010 spending: “Midterm Elections Will Cost at Least $3.7 Billion, Center for Responsive Politics Estimates,” Center for Responsive Politics, February 23, 2010
  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=87103
• Open Secrets begins tracking political money online, 1996: “About the Site,” Open Secrets, accessed March 19, 2010
  http://www.opensecrets.org/about/tour.php
• Reporting required for “soft” money, June 2000: “Clinton signs bill requiring groups to list donors,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 2, 2000
  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=87107
• “I approve these message” ads appear, 2004: “‘Tagline’ could alter tone of ads,” USA Today, March 10, 2004
  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=87108
• New reporting for lobbying and earmarks, September 2007: “Bush Signs Reform Bill Pushed By Dems,” Politico, September 14, 2007
  http://www.moveon.org/r?r=87109

Cross-posted at Eclectablog.com.

Far be it from me to give Republicans political advice but this clamor to “Repeal It!” while Barack Obama is still in office and would have to sign any bill repealing the freshly signed health insurance reform seems a little … uhhh … dumb?

But hey, guys, knock yourselves out, right?

And that’s just what the GOPosaurs in my district of MI-01 are doing. Both super-conservative Tim Walberg and super-duper conservative Brian Rooney have both signed the “Repeal It!” pledge sponsored by the Club for Growth.

But yesterday, this political grandstanding met the bitter, harsh reality of our nation’s health insurance crisis, a crisis the new law hopes to alleviate in part, on the pages of the Jackson Citizen Patriot‘s website. On the page reporting Walberg’s and Rooney’s signing of the silly, toothless pledge is a link to a related story. The story is of a 19-year old young man, one of nine kids in his family, who has cancer. His family has no health insurance.

Here’s a blurb from the first article:

Two Republican candidates who want to unseat U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer have pledged to work to repeal the health care reform bill President Obama signed today.

The conservative group Club for Growth has created a Web site…where lawmakers, candidates and citizens can join the campaign to get rid of the law they find too expensive and intrusive…As of this morning, more than 50 lawmakers and close to 200 candidates have signed the pledge, as well as more than 13,000 citizens.

The candidate pledge reads: “I hereby pledge to the people of my district/state upon my election to the U.S. House of Representatives/U.S. Senate, to sponsor and support legislation to repeal any federal health care takeover passed in 2010, and replace it with real reforms that lower health care costs without growing government.”

And here’s a bit from the story of the pancake breakfast held to benefit the 19-year old man from Michigan Center:

[Jake Fagan] first began experiencing pain in the fall of 2009 but did not notify his parents until months later. Both his mother and stepfather are facing financial difficulties and do not have insurance.

By the time doctors examined the him, they discovered a large tumor had already spread into Fagan’s abdomen. Had he notified his parents earlier, the cancer might not have advanced so quickly.

[...]

Moose Davis said his stepson has not let the cancer dampen his spirits.

“He didn’t want to be treated any differently,” Davis said. “I still joke around and give him a hard time sometimes.”

Fagan is more than happy to have the jokes directed toward him.

“It helps me keep my mind off (the disease),” he said.

As of Saturday’s event, more than $4,000 had been raised.

“I was hoping and praying we’d get to two grand,” Hitt said. “I’m just ecstatic that we hit this.”

It’s going to take a lot of pancake breakfasts for Jake and his family to pay for his medical care. Under the current system, he’ll never get health insurance now, not with cancer.

So when Rooney and Walberg and all the other Republicans happily sign a pledge to “Repeal It!”, that’s what they are signing on to:

• Restoring the ability of health insurers to reject customers with preexisting conditions
• Taking away the high-risk pool that would help families like Jake’s in the future
• Taking away Jake’s ability to stay on his parent’s insurance (if they manage to get some) until he is 26
• Restoring health insurance companies’ ability to cut people off when they get sick or when they have reached some payment ceiling.

The list goes on and on. So go ahead and stake your claim to that bit of hateful land, Tim and Brian. When Representative Mark Schauer is running his campaign to retain his seat as the Democratic Congressman from MI-07, he’ll be able to proudly point to his vote to start the process of fixing the system that makes families hold pancake breakfasts and bake sales just so they can receive health care.

Let me know how that works out for you.

I’m just sayin’…

Poll: Tea Partiers Are Largely White,
Republican, and Worried About America:

On Politico, “Ken Vogel writes up the results of a Quinnipiac Poll on the Tea Party movement, which reveals them to be — no surprise — largely white (88 percent), massively worried about the direction of the country (92 percent), and by and large, supporters of the Republican Party (74 percent).”