Seven-term Representative Leonard Boswell is only the 64th most vulnerable Democrat in the House of Representatives, according to Crisitunity's "vulnerability index," but Iowa Republicans still like their chances against him. Five candidates have already entered the GOP primary, and two others I've never heard of were reportedly collecting signatures on nominating petitions at the off-year caucuses on January 23. The field may expand before the filing deadline in March.
A few recent developments in the Republican primary race are after the jump.
One of the popular lines that the Republicans come out with every time they campaign against Democrats is the old "they are going to raise your taxes" schtick. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't. Quite frankly, it's getting old. Lately, it hardly ever works (as evidenced by their losses in 2006 and 2008).
So when they claimed in a recent ad targeting NY-23 Democratic candidate Bill Owens that he was for raising taxes, it caught FactCheck.org's attention.
The announcer misleads, however, when he says: "Now, Bill Owens wants to help Nancy Pelosi raise your income taxes."
As support, the NRCC cites Owens' Web site, where he says that he supports "allowing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy to expire." The NRCC also cites a brief from the National Center for Policy Analysis, a group whose stated goal "is to develop and promote private alternatives to government regulation and control." The paper describes the effect on small businesses if they faced three simultaneous tax hikes.
We know of no one who has called for enacting all three of the proposals laid out in the paper, but we needn't venture further into that tangle. Suffice to say that the only tax increase Owens has said he supports is the one above, allowing the expiration of the tax cuts for the "wealthy," which is scheduled to happen in 2010. (Under Bush, the top marginal tax rate was cut from 39.6 percent to 35 percent.)
What's "wealthy"? Owens' Web site doesn't specify. During his presidential campaign, though, Barack Obama used a threshold of individuals making $200,000 or more, and households making at least $250,000. Under those limits, how many constituents of the NY-23 would be affected by Owens' proposal?
Not a whole lot. According to the most recent Census data, 2,728 households in the district had a total income of more than $200,000 in 2007. That's just 1.1 percent of all the district's households. Average household income was $52,801.
We're not minimizing the fact that those relatively few households might be unhappy about the prospect of seeing their income taxes go up. We're just saying it would affect, well, relatively few. Which is a lot less than the ad would have you believe.
Amazing what lengths the Republicans will go just to make this claim.
I happen to be reading around on the blog when I find a response written by Ta-Nehisi Coates to Matt Yglesias's response to an article written by Pat Buchanan concerning whether or not the best bet for the Republican Party is to give up any pretext of doing well among the non-white vote. Here's the basic point behind Buchanan's argument:
In 2008, Hispanics, according to the latest figures, were 7.4 percent of the total vote. White folks were 74 percent, 10 times as large. Adding just 1 percent to the white vote is thus the same as adding 10 percent to the candidate's Hispanic vote.
If John McCain, instead of getting 55 percent of the white vote, got the 58 percent George W. Bush got in 2004, that would have had the same impact as lifting his share of the Hispanic vote from 32 percent to 62 percent.
But even Ronald Reagan never got over 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. Yet, he and Richard Nixon both got around 65 percent of the white vote.
When Republican identification is down to 20 percent, but 40 percent of Americans identify themselves as conservatives, do Republicans need a GPS to tell them which way to go?
Why did McCain fail to win the white conservative Democrats Hillary Clinton swept in the primaries? He never addressed or cared about their issues.
These are the folks whose jobs have been outsourced to China and Asia, who pay the price of affirmative action when their sons and daughters are pushed aside to make room for the Sonia Sotomayors. These are the folks who want the borders secured and the illegals sent back.
Had McCain been willing to drape Jeremiah Wright around the neck of Barack Obama, as Lee Atwater draped Willie Horton around the neck of Michael Dukakis, the mainstream media might have howled.
And McCain might be president.
Basically, Buchanan is arguing that the Republicans are engaging in a vain effort to make nice with Latinos (and Blacks, for that matter) when they should be playing hardball on these types of issues (particuarly concerning Judge Sotomayor, President Obama's pick to the Supreme Court).
Matt Yglesias seems to agree with Buchanan's reasoning (even if he thinks the reasoning is scuzzy):
At any rate, while Buchanan is being repugnant, I do think this is something conservatives are going to want to think about. Consider the case of Jeff Sessions (R-AL). We're talking about a guy who's too racist to get confirmed as a judge, but just racist enough to win a Senate seat in Alabama. And it's not because Alabama is a lilly white state. With 65 percent of its electorate white, and 29 percent of its electorate African-American, Alabama is much more demographically favorable to the Democrats than is the country at large. But while McCain pulled 55 percent of the white vote nationwide he scored 88 percent of white vote in Alabama. And this is what you tend to see in the Deep South, white Americans exhibiting the kind of high levels of racial solidarity in voting behavior that you normally associate with African-Americans in the US political context.
Consequently states with small white populations like Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi can be solid GOP territory. Under the circumstances, it's not entirely crazy for Republicans to believe that the right way to respond to shifting American demographics is by just trying to amp-up the level of racial anxiety in the shrinking white majority. An analogy might be to religion. When the country was overwhelmingly Christian, Christianity didn't play much of a role in our politics. But as the Christian majority shrank it became more and more viable to explicitly mobilize Christian identity for political purposes.
Yglesias seems to buy into Buchanan's argument, that it might be a politically smart move to attempt to shore up the white vote against the non-white vote (basically Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Indians, etc.). I disagree with Yglesias's reasoning for a few reasons. Ta-Nehisi Coates pretty much sums up part of my disagreement with Yglesias:
The second problem is that it likely turns a significant portion of white people also. The GOP's problem isn't that it needs to shore up Alabama--at least not yet. It's problem is, well, basically everywhere else that isn't Alabama. I don't know how bashing Sotomayor makes you more competitive in, say, Colorado or Oregon. I'd assume the opposite.
Coates points out that the White vote, like the Latino vote, is simply not a homogenous group in the same way the Black vote is (although the GOP's racist rhetoric regarding Latinos could turn the Latino vote into a more strongly Democratic vote than it is now). Though I do think that there are states where this could possibly pay dividends for the GOP outside of the Deep South, there are also plenty of states where this sort of tactic won't work, and in some cases can backfire. Think about this for a second, take away the states of North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania from Obama and give them to McCain (67 electoral votes), Obama would win the electoral college with nearly 300 electoral votes (298 votes, 297 if you take away NE-02 from Obama's column). That's assuming that you'd make net gains among the White vote in those states, when there is plenty of reason to think otherwise. Looking at Ohio, the quintessential bastion of the White Working Class that Pat Buchanan is so obsessed with, Obama won the state by only marginally improving among the less educated group and improving greatly among the more educated compared to Kerry's performance in 2004. Something which Buchanan and his ilk have failed to understand is that one of the reasons that the GOP has been collapsing has little to do with their strength among blue-collar Whites, rather it's been because the Republicans have been doing worse and worse with better educated White voters and with minorities in general, and one thing that these two groups have in common is that they're more likely to turn on groups who use the type of polarized voting that Buchanan advocates.
The second problem with Buchanan's (and Yglesias's) logic is that even if this strategy would help them out in the short term (a view which I strongly disagree with) in the long term, it would probably spell the end of the Republican Party. Think about this for a moment, Barack Obama only lost the state of Georgia by 5 points, compared to John Kerry's embarrasing 18 point loss to George Bush, yet Obama did this despite doing as well with white voters as John Kerry did. This is the main problem with the Republican gambit, many states which form the core of the Republican Party's base in the electoral college (Texas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Arizona) have populations which are becoming more and more non-white (Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi will probably be majority-minority states in the next decade or two). If McCain had lost the four states which I mentioned before (without taking back any of the other states I mentioned before) then he would've only had 108 electoral votes. The Republican Party may very well succumb to the demographic tide which is moving against it, but Buchanan's advice would speed up the schedule very quickly.
Angry social conservatives are speculating that Senator Chuck Grassley could face a primary challenge in 2010. The religious right has been dissatisfied with Grassley for a long time (see here and here).
After the Iowa Supreme Court struck down the state's Defense of Marriage Act, Grassley issued a statement saying he supported "traditional marriage" and had backed federal legislation and a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But when hundreds of marriage equality opponents rallied at the state capitol last Thursday, and Republicans tried to bring a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the Iowa House floor, Grassley refused to say whether he supported their efforts to change Iowa's constitution:
"You better ask me in a month, after I've had a chance to think," Grassley, the state's senior Republican official, said after a health care forum in Mason City.
Wingnut Bill Salier, who almost won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate in 2002, says conservatives are becoming "more and more incensed [the] more they start to pay attention to how far [Grassley] has drifted."
The State Central Committee of the Republican Party of Iowa picked a new party chairman yesterday. The winner was Matt Strawn, a former Congressional staffer best known as part of the group that owns the Iowa Barnstormers arena football team.
I do most of my writing at the Iowa progressive community blog Bleeding Heartland.
Last year at this time I was scrambling to make as many phone calls and knock on as many doors as I could before the Iowa caucuses on January 3.
This week I had a little more time to reflect on the year that just ended.
After the jump I've linked to Bleeding Heartland highlights in 2008. Most of the links relate to Iowa politics, but some also covered issues or strategy of national importance.
I only linked to a few posts about the presidential race. I'll do a review of Bleeding Heartland's 2008 presidential election coverage later this month.
Skip this diary if you think it's too early to start talking about the 2012 presidential campaign just because Barack Obama hasn't been inaugurated yet.
