By: Michael Tomasky
It was a rare confessional moment for Barack Obama. At a Miami fundraiser in mid-June, the president acknowledged that it’s “not as cool” as it was in 2008 to support him. It isn’t just a matter of fewer hip posters and viral videos. It’s a matter of votes. Rekindling the enthusiasm of African-Americans, educated white liberals, Latinos, young people, and union members–the Democratic Party’s most loyal and progressive members–will be a huge challenge. After all, you can only elect the first African-American president once, and the past two and a half years have deeply disappointed many liberals. “I know a lot of the kids who worked hard in 2008,” says Hodding Carter III, adviser to the last one-term Democratic president (Jimmy Carter) and now a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “They walk around like cattle who’ve been hit with stun guns between their eyes. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

Obama and his people have heard this sort of thing so often that they no longer bother to take umbrage. When I asked chief Obama reelection guru David Axelrod about this sense of disillusionment, he patiently ticked off a list of accomplishments: health-care reform, repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” financial regulatory reform, the drawdown from Iraq, student-loan reform. “Did we keep faith with the things that the president said he would do when he ran?” asks Axelrod. “There is a long list of things he said he’d do that we in fact did.”

It’s a solid inventory. But it’s countered by the undeniable reality that the country hasn’t noticeably moved in a more liberal direction (quite the opposite), and by the widely held perception among progressives that Obama will never wage fierce battle on behalf of liberal ideals. When I interviewed Justin Ruben, the executive director of MoveOn.org, whose 5 million members (many in swing states) must be revved up and mobilized if the president is to be reelected, he gave me four or five variants of the line “People need to feel like the president and the Democrats are really going to fight for their side.”

   President Obama arrives in Miami on June 13.

Unfortunately, making tough, partisan economic arguments has never been the president’s strong suit. “Since the beginning of his candidacy in 2007, Barack has struggled to put together a sustained, winning economic argument,” said Simon Rosenberg of NDN, a Washington-based think tank.

“With ‘Morning in America’ not really a viable option for 2012, he is going to have to draw brighter lines with the GOP, and particularly do much more to discredit their failed and reckless economic approach.”

The base vote can still emerge in large numbers, but the dominant factor this time won’t be hope and change. Instead, the factors will be fear of the other side, state and local political conditions (think of how motivated Democrats are to regain control of their politics in Wisconsin), and demographic changes that are still redounding to the Democrats’ benefit. And because we elect presidents by states, the place to assess Obama’s prospects is on the ground.

Wake County, N.C.; Arapahoe County, Colo.; Franklin County, Ohio–these are representative base Democratic counties. They are in swing states, which means the president will need a big vote in these places to offset a presumed high conservative turnout in other parts of these states. And they are counties that have only recently become solidly Democratic, because of demographic changes. “Obama’s majorities in these counties are not secure,” says Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of the 2002 book The Emerging Democratic Majority, which predicted the bluing of states like then-red Colorado. “He needs a full-bore mobilization effort in these counties to get his supporters out and develop the margins he needs to carry swing states like Ohio, Colorado, and North Carolina.”

Wake County is home to Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina. Bush won it by 7 points in 2000 and then, in a sign that demographics were changing, by just 2 points in 2004 against the Yankee John Kerry. But in 2008 Obama blew it open–a 15-point win, 57-42, and a turnout 80,000 votes higher than in ’04. Since then? Very different story. In 2009 voters installed an aggressive conservative majority on the school board, and in 2010 Republicans took a congressional seat and swept most state and county offices (the GOP won back both statehouses last year).

I don’t know a single expert who thinks Obama has a great shot at winning the Tarheel State again. But he wants it badly enough to hold the Democratic convention in Charlotte (Mecklenburg will be another county to watch). Mack Paul, the attorney who chairs the Wake County Democratic Party, believes that population growth has brought in more Democrats since 2008, and he insists, “I hear more anger directed at Democrats who don’t support the president.” His GOP counterpart, Sue Bryant, ventures that her party’s candidate might just carry Wake, but “even if we come within 5 points here, that’s the election in North Carolina.”

In Arapahoe County, outside Denver, Democrats only recently came to outnumber Republicans in voter enrollment. But the trend lines are clear: whereas Bush beat Kerry 51-47 in 2004, Obama romped McCain by 56-43 in 2008, when turnout was about 15 percent higher than four years earlier.

In the last decade, the Latino population of Arapahoe County has more than doubled, to 105,249. If the Democratic Party can register and mobilize this key Obama constituency–Latinos gave him 67 percent of their votes nationally last time–the president would likely carry Arapahoe by a far larger margin than he did in ’08. But Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the nonpartisan Colorado Latino Forum, says the community’s temperature about Obama is awfully lukewarm. “This is very anecdotal,” Mendoza ventures, “but overall, in my experience? General dissatisfaction.”

Todd Mata, the county Democratic chairman, acknowledges that “a lot of people are a little disillusioned, rightly or wrongly,” with Obama, but he says that on the ground, the party structure is working much more closely than last time with Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama get-out-the-vote vehicle. Obama might benefit here from a local GOP that “doesn’t have it together,” according to Scott Adler, political-science professor at the University of Colorado. When I spoke with Joy Hoffman, the county Republican chairwoman, she did acknowledge she’s herding cats, between the more traditional Republicans and no fewer than “15 or 16 distinct Tea Party groupings in the county.” But, she insisted, the state GOP is picking up the pieces from its 2010 debacle, when its gubernatorial candidate got just 11 percent of the vote.

And then there’s Ohio. Big numbers in Franklin County–home to the state capital of Columbus, Ohio’s largest city–are crucial to Democratic hopes. Again, the trend is evident: Al Gore won the county 49-48 in 2000, when 414,000 votes were cast. Kerry won it 53-45, with 517,000 total votes. Obama: a 59-40 blowout on the strength of 575,000 total votes.

It’s pretty difficult to imagine another nearly 20-point win. But Greg Schultz, the county’s Democratic chairman and the state director for OFA, says an on-the-ground network exists today in a way it didn’t even in 2008. “There’s a structure that remains in place today that is self-organizing,” he boasts, even in Republican-leaning parts of the county like Westerville.

Another factor that might motivate Democrats in Franklin, and across Ohio: the unpopular Republican governor, John Kasich. He won a narrow victory over Democratic incumbent Ted Strickland in 2010, when base Republican voters turned out and their Democratic counterparts did not. Now Kasich and his public-employee-union-bashing bill (S.B. 5) are targets of rage. “If the Democrats are smart,” says Herb Asher of the Ohio State University, “here and in Wisconsin they’ll have a very simple theme: Elections have consequences. Look at what happened in your states.”

That’ll be about the strongest argument Obama can make to base voters: it could, and will, be a lot worse if you don’t vote for me. That’s true, and fear is usually a pretty good motivator in politics. But it still isn’t what people were hoping for, and it seems inevitable that some percentage of the most loyal Democrats will stay home. In these three counties and others like them, that percentage will be the difference between reelection and retirement.

Playlist: Road To 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections [ 194 Clips ]

Playlist: Road To 2012 — Barack Obama Re-Election Campaign [ 43 Clips ]

Jon Stewart lists dozens of false statements made by the network. Lies about Obama’s healthcare plan and his connection to ACORN, fear mongering about “death panels” and the war on Christmas and talk of a “government takeover” — are just but a sliver of the numerous lies and falsehoods Fox has been diarrhea-ring for years.

Jon Stewart To Chris Wallace: A “Designed Ideological Agenda” Is “The Soup You Swim In”

We have been documenting Fox’s syphilitic, racist and malicious lying on this website since late 2006. Our “book” is thick with right-wing venom and terrorism.

Since 2004, Media Matters For America has compiled a “Library of Congress” size treasure trove of videographic evidence of conservative crooks, racists and bigots lying, race-baiting and issuing terroristic threats directed at blacks, latinos, Mexicans, immigrants, gays, abortion providers, everybody else they don’t like ….and veiled death threats to President Barack Obama.

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References:
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1. Fox News Sunday Edits Out Jon Stewart’s Criticism Of Fox Exec — [ READ MORE ]

2. Fox Lies About Polling To Claim It Is “Most Trusted” TV News Source — Fox News has been touting an outdated survey in order to falsely claim that a national polling firm says that Fox “is the most trusted television news source in the country.”

2. Jon Stewart Gets It Right About Fox News: Fox News has attacked Daily Show host Jon Stewart for claiming that Fox News viewers are “the most consistently misinformed viewers” of cable news. However, Stewart was correct — Fox News consistently misinforms its viewers, and its viewers are found among the most likely to hold misinformed beliefs about current events.

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   By: Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez
In Arizona, we fight because we are spirit. Yet, in recent travels, I’ve gotten the distinct impression that many people think that human beings are made simply of flesh and blood and that only things material have consequence.

Human beings also have spirits. In Arizona, bigot forces are not content with simply getting rid of as many brown bodies as possible, but also ensuring that those that remain become assimilated into intolerant copies of themselves.

The world appears to be knowledgeable about the effort — via SB 1070 — to legalize hate, fear and racial profiling in Arizona. What most seem to be unaware of is that there is also an effort by state schools superintendant, Tom Horne, to brainwash the state’s school children via HB 2281 — the anti-Ethnic/Raza Studies law that unless stopped — will go into effect on Jan 1, 2011.

There is a third law in the works; the effort by state rep. Russell Pierce, chief sponsor of the state’s apartheid laws, to nullify the 14th Amendment in Arizona [guarantees U.S. birthright citizenship].

Tolteka, a renowned Los Angeles hip hop artist — inspired by a recent column — From Manifest Destiny to Manifest Insanity — has penned a rhyme called: The Trilogy of Terror. It breaks down these so-called laws that are intended to destroy our minds and spirits.

Those of us here in Arizona do not recognize these apartheid schemes as laws. At least not as moral or legitimate laws. Even the courts have already struck down the most odious parts of SB 1070.

But back to HB 2281. This is the one people are paying least attention to. While denouncing SB 1070 in May, five UN Special Rapporteurs also denounced HB 2281. They said: “Such law and attitude are at odds with the State’s responsibility to respect the right of everyone to have access to his or her own cultural and linguistic heritage and to participate in cultural life… Everyone has the right to seek and develop cultural knowledge and to know and understand his or her own culture and that of others through education and information.”

They further pointed out that controlling immigration and adhering to fundamental principles of non-discrimination are not mutually exclusive. “States are obligated to not only eradicate racial discrimination, but also to promote a social and political environment conducive to respect for ethnic and cultural diversity.”

Their report is self-evident, yet, we should pay close attention to the illogic of the bigoted forces; they claim they are not against immigration: only illegal immigration. So what does anti-bilingualism and Ethnic Studies have to do with illegal immigration?

There is an equal danger to both SB 1070 and HB 2281; one attacks our bodies, the other our minds and spirits. HB 2281 targets Tucson’s highly successful Raza Studies program. But as written, it applies to the entire state, and it can become copycat legislation — state by state — not simply targeting k-12 education, but universities as well. The authors erroneously claim Ethnic Studies result in hate, segregation, anti-americanism and advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

What’s at stake with HB 2281 is not simply an attack on a program (Raza Studies), but on the right to teach/learn and the right of students to succeed as a result. As signed, HB 2281 creates a mechanism by which books and curriculums will be subject to approval by the state. The premise is that only Greco-Roman culture (“Western Civilization”) is acceptable for Arizona curriculums. Knowledge from other cultures is henceforth deemed to be “un-American.” Books such as Occupied America (Acuña) and Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire) have already been singled out.

In Arizona, the state superintendant of schools has appointed himself not simply education czar (opposing local control), but also, royal cosmographer — determining that not only is maiz-based or Maya-Nahua culture and knowledge — the philosophical foundation for Raza Studies — outside of Western Civilization, but also outside of humanity. In effect, he also fancies himself head of the BIA — determining who/what is Indigenous.

While singling out people of color, these Inquisition-era “laws” in reality, are an attack against all people. The legalization of racial profiling and cultural mind-control belongs in the Dark Ages and the battle against the sanctioning of hate, censorship and forbidden curriculums is being fought right here in Arizona (This is the subject of a forthcoming conference in December at the University of Arizona). Within weeks, this battle will step into the courtroom via a lawsuit against the state. We are confident we will easily win against the forces of fear, hate and ignorance.

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   [ By: Greg Grandin ]
For decades, progressives and Democrats have searched in vain for a wedge issue to call their own, something that could match the success Republicans have had in using race, abortion and homosexuality to split the electorate.

Yet unable even to leverage environmental catastrophe, drastic economic inequality and near global financial collapse to their advantage, Democrats have instead mastered trimming and triangulating, accepting much of the conservative agenda while promising to implement it more effectively.

But if Democrats could overcome their shortsightedness and embrace immigrants’ rights — as passionately as Republicans mobilize around tax cuts, fetuses and war — they may find the holy grail they’ve been looking for, one with the power to transform domestic and foreign policy. Here are nine reasons immigration reform, especially legislation that will grant citizenship to the millions of undocumented Latinos, is a progressive game changer:

1.   Immigration reform ends the Southern strategy. For more than four decades, the conservative movement’s base has been the segregationist South, subsidized by an archaic Electoral College system that grants disproportionate power to majority white voters in Southern states. The enfranchisement of millions of undocumented Latino workers, combined with the votes of Latino citizens, would change that, turning red states purple and purple states blue. Almost 10 million Latinos voted in 2008, 7.4 percent of the total, and a large majority voted for Barack Obama. Analysts believe Latinos were responsible for giving the president larger than expected victories in key swing states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. They helped him squeak out a win in North Carolina and forced John McCain to defend Republican strongholds like Georgia. Then there are Texas’s thirty-four electoral votes, without which the GOP’s chances of winning national office collapse. Latinos make up more than 20 percent of registered voters there, with their turnout increasing 30 percent between 2000 and 2008. Even direr for Republicans, in ten years Latinos are expected to be the state’s largest ethnic group, surpassing whites. By 2040 they will be an absolute majority.

Every election cycle, the number of registered Latinos, as well as actual voters, increases. They are trending Democratic — 67 percent voted for Obama, up from 59 percent for Kerry in 2004. Democratic support for reform would ensure that this trend continues. Seventy-eight percent of Latino voters identified immigration as important to them and their families; 62 percent say they know someone who is undocumented. Forget futile efforts to abolish the Electoral College; the best way to wrench the dead hand of the Confederacy off the throat of the political system is to enfranchise Latinos.

2.   It wins back the Catholic Church to social justice. Catholics, mostly white ethnic working-class migrants, were stalwarts of the New Deal coalition. But they began to peel away in 1980, with the backlash to Roe v. Wade. In 2004 the future pope Benedict XVI, then the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, helped Karl Rove execute his “Catholic strategy,” urging priests to deny communion to politicians who support abortion (i.e., Kerry). The combined Catholic vote roughly split that year, with white Catholics breaking for Bush and Latinos for Kerry.

But immigration reform now has the potential to trump abortion as a wedge issue. Latinos, who make up one-third of its membership, are the best shot the US Catholic Church has of remaining viable. And though the church has become increasingly conservative over the past two decades, when it comes to immigration its social justice ethos is still intact. Priests and congregations have been vocal in opposing Arizona’s SB 1070, and central in providing safe havens and basic services to migrants. Even the Vatican’s recently appointed conservative archbishop of Los Angeles, Mexican-born José Gómez, a member of Opus Dei, has stated that in “Catholic teaching, the right to migrate is among the most basic human rights. It’s very close to the right to life. Why? Because God has created the good things of this world to be shared by all men and women — not just a privileged few.”

3.   It slows the inclusion of Latino evangelicals into the religious right. “Woe to the legislators of infamous laws, to those who issue tyrannical decrees, who refuse justice to the unfortunate and cheat the poor among my people of their rights…. What will you do on the day of punishment, when, from afar off, destruction comes? To whom will you run for help?” This bit of fire and brimstone from the Book of Isaiah was recently cited by the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the nation’s largest Hispanic Christian organization, to condemn SB 1070.

The religious right is actively courting Latinos, who make up a small but growing percentage of evangelicals. But the poor, precarious situation of many congregations limits their inclusion in conservative politics. Like their Catholic counterparts, Protestant pastors spend much of their frontline ministry helping undocumented workers. After a recent meeting with Obama, Pentecostal pastor Samuel Rodriguez, who has been wooed by 2012 Republican hopefuls, said that the president’s position is “99.9 percent” in line with evangelical doctrine. Likewise, Latino Mormons are demanding that leaders of the Mormon church take a stand against the Arizona law, even while many conservative white Mormons — like State Senator Russell Pearce, who sponsored SB 1070, and Utah Representative Stephen Sandstrom, who hopes to implement a similar law in Utah — are on the other side of the issue, insisting that church law demands enforcing immigration laws.

4.   It is lose-lose for Republicans. Put immigration reform on the docket before the midterm elections and watch Republicans squirm. If they support it, they enrage their Tea Party base. If they oppose it, they keep the Tea Party and might win, even big, in November, but will so anger the more electorally important Latinos that not even Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush, with help from his Mexican-born wife, will be able to win them back. As Ruy Teixeira notes, the “GOP dilemma” is that the Tea Party might help Republicans win in November but that short-term gain will be a long-term loss, a death embrace with a rump political movement that “concentrates in one place the most extreme and reactionary views.” By pushing immigration reform before the midterm elections, the Democrats would magnify this dilemma. Let South Carolina’s GOP gubernatorial candidate Nikki Haley explain to Latino voters why she calls for stepped-up deportation, opposes amnesty and applauds SB 1070 in the name of “states’ rights.” Immigration reform could also short-circuit any attempt to restore the Bush dynasty through Jeb, who has spoken out against the Arizona law and in favor of reform.

5.   It splits the conservative coalition in other ways. A fight over immigrants’ rights drives a wedge between business Republicans and the GOP’s “no-amnesty,” know-nothing wing. Last year, the powerful National Association of Evangelicals issued a statement calling for comprehensive, dignified reform, which was strongly criticized by the conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy. And the “purity” of Ron and Rand Paul’s libertarianism — as the mainstream media never cease to describe what is largely a rebranding of paleoconservatism — seems a lot less pure when they get started talking about “electronic fences,” “helicopter stations” and “making English the official language of all documents and contracts.” So much for the right to engage in economic transactions as one wishes.

6.   It revitalizes the union movement. Latino immigrants have already helped turn Los Angeles, Las Vegas and other cities into union towns. They’ve often done so against great odds and with impressive courage, since many undocumented union workers are not fully covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Imagine what they could do if they were protected by labor law. Despite all the Republican talk about Latinos being natural conservatives, committed to family, religion and hard work, most reject the extreme economic individualism that is the bedrock of the GOP. They come from countries where democracy means social democracy, including workers’ rights, welfare and economic justice.

7.   It dilutes the power of Florida Cubans. Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Cuban exiles have had a toxic effect on US domestic and foreign policy. They have repeatedly helped deliver Florida’s large number of electoral votes to Republicans and in 2000 served as the shock troops for the infamous “Brooks Brothers Riot,” which shut down Dade County’s recount of its disputed presidential ballot, a critical event that helped hand the election to Bush. Beyond forcing Washington to keep up its pointless embargo of Cuba — which handicaps US diplomacy in the rest of Latin America — they have backed a hardline foreign policy, supporting Ronald Reagan’s patronage of death squads in Central America and last year’s coup in Honduras. Their power is on the wane; in 2008 other Florida Latinos helped deliver the state to Obama, overriding the Miami Cuban-American vote, which went for McCain. But candidate Obama still felt compelled to genuflect before them, traveling to Miami to criticize Bush from the right for losing Latin America to leftist “demagogues.” Legislating a way to citizenship for Latino immigrants would dampen Florida Cubans’ ability to influence foreign policy, as well as change the terms of the debate: even Cuban-Americans are in favor of immigration reform.

8.   It helps America’s cities. I lived in Durham, North Carolina, for a few years, and for all the romance of Southern porch culture, it was mostly Latinos, nearly all of them undocumented laborers from Mexico and Central America, who were outside, facing the street, talking, listening to music, raising families. The city’s more settled residents were inside with their air-conditioners and TVs. Throughout the United States, Latinos are re-energizing neighborhoods and populating downtowns, opening stores and pumping money into established small businesses. Not too long ago cities were rearguards of a progressive ethos in retreat. Today, with the help of Latinos, one of the fastest growing urban demographics, they are again vital hubs of social democracy. Google the words “Latinos,” “cities” and “revitalize” and you will be led to any number of stories about how stressed city centers in Detroit, Dallas, Memphis, Newark and the Hudson Valley are being rescued by Latinos. No wonder the right hates them.

9.   It is the morally right thing to do. And as a result, it is strategically smart. Progressives need not just wedge issues but driving righteousness, and the heart-rending plight of more than 10 million vulnerable residents who are denied basic human rights and hunted by random raids, their families split apart, is as morally urgent an issue as the civil rights movement was in its heyday. Considering the role Latinos would play in burying, once and for all, the Southern strategy, the issue needs to be understood as essential in finally achieving the promise of the original civil rights movement. With one eye on November’s midterm elections and another on polls showing support for Arizona’s SB 1070, many Democrats are reverting to hedging. It’s a “toxic subject,” says Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. For all the reasons above — plus the fact that many Latinos might just wash their hands of the Democrats if betrayed — that temerity itself is toxic. And considering Democrats’ perpetual minority status in Tennessee, if I were a Democrat there, I’d want as liberalized an immigration policy as possible.

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Points To Note: Courtesy, Aaron Belkin, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Palm Center at University of California, Santa Barbara

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

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LOSER-LIAR John ‘Spineless’ McCain Obsessed With Obama and Immigration

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