Weekly Voting Rights News Update

By Erin Ferns

In the aftermath of the presidential primaries, stories of unprecedented voter registration and turnout are drifting to the back burner. But with an exceedingly imbalanced electorate, the fight to create access to the voting rolls and enforce the voting rights of all Americans continues. With historic voter registration drives underway and a preview of the types of problems that could occur in November, the focus of the media is beginning to shift towards the less sexy, but crucial elements that work to maximize voter participation while ensuring eligible voters can cast their ballots and have them counted. In Project Vote's view, this is a welcome development since many of the potential issues require more time to sort out than is available if problems are noted only weeks in advance of the election. This week, election officials, advocates and a presidential candidate worked to assist in or restore voting rights for hospitalized veterans in Connecticut, minority citizens in Georgia, and former felons in Tennessee.

I wasn't surprised by the results of the Kos poll.  It only confirms what I've known for some time.  Joe Lieberman sold voters in CT a bill of goods, and buyer's remorse has set in.  But the race is long over.  You might be asking yourself what the value of knowing is?  The answer is political capital, namely how little of it Lieberman has left.  

Lieberman used up nearly all of his political capital in last year's Senate race.  I don't believe he could win another election here, even with being a well known, well funded incumbent.  More important is how little weight his endorsement will carry, and how Democrats can use that to our advantage.  

What does that mean for 2008?  Here in Connecticut it's good news for Jim Himes.  Lieberman will almost certainly endorse Shays and campaign for him in the 4th CD.  Who better to illustrate Shays' ever changing position on Iraq than Joe No one wants the troops home more than I do Lieberman?  I can't wait for them to hit the campaign trail together.  

Nationally, Lieberman's lack of political capital can be utilized for any race he chooses to get involved in.  We've already seen Senate Challenger Tom Allen invoke Lieberman's support of incumbent Susan Collins with great results.  Joe Lieberman could easily become one of the best weapons in the progressive Dem infrastructure's arsenal. Who will Joe help next?

 Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.Com has a story today that includes figures on the turnout rate by age groups. In the 2006 elections younger voters turned out at a rate far below older voters. Only 25.5% of voters 18 - 29 actually voted compared to 63.1% of voters over 60.

So basically this is what's going down.  Larry Flint (I think) owns Hustler magazine.  In 1998 he had an ad in the paper saying "1,000,000 dollars if you can give any information on a congressperson, senator, or other high ranking official involved in a sex scandal with some sort of documentary proof."  

In 1998 this forced Speaker-Elect Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) to resign.  At the time it was used as a tool to weed out hypocrisy.  They were on the hunt for Clinton, meanwhile similar things were going on behind closed doors.

What this ammounts to is trying to draw out reporters who know the good stuff but don't report it for whatever reasons.  

However, it is happening again.  The ad is back, with the incentive of 1,000,000 dollars.  Rather enticing.  Larry said on MSNBC's Hardball today that they have recieved 200 e-mails and are looking into them.  Usually around 2% will actually pan out into something he added.  (That seemed more like an on the spot guess to me though).  

I didn't see a diary on it, so I thought I'd throw it out there to keep our eyes on in case if something good comes out of it.

Campaigns and Elections has an online issue this month about the successes and failures of various 2006 campaigns.  While it's somewhat marred by letting GOP/Lieberman partisans write some of the articles, the piece on Nancy Boyda's campaign is pretty good.  Click on the link, then click forward to page 58.  In a nutshell, she didn't let the party tell her what stands to take, or how to get her message across, and she won as a Democrat in Kansas.  You knew that already, but the story adds a lot of depth and detail.

In 2004, Boyda let the DCCC tell her how to run a campaign, and lost by 15%.  In 2006, they ignored the DCCC and its consultants, and ran a ground-up campaign that started with yard signs and billboards, advanced to 12- and 16-page inserts in a whole bunch of local papers across the district (cost for district-wide coverage for each insert: $25,000), and finally, locally-produced, non-cookie-cutter TV ads.  In one such ad, a cat walks across the table in front of Boyda.  Not exactly your scripted ad (try to script a cat!), but the different feel of her ads helped get people to notice them.

And Boyda addressed the issues aggressively, in particular taking a strong position against the Iraq war. As she said during the campaign, "the American people have to understand there aren't any good solutions.  When you drive over a cliff, your options are very limited."  It's hardly what a Rahm Emmanuel-picked candidate would have said, and that's probably why it worked.

Here's what Chris Cillizza of the WaPo had to say yesterday about that ridiculous idea of expanding the playing field in Congressional elections.  Guess 2006 reversed the CW on that topic!  (More at the link.)

Democrats believe they have convinced the outgoing mayor of Kansas City, Mo., Kay Barnes, to challenge [Rep. Sam] Graves [R-MO] in 2008, in one of a handful of early recruiting successes that, national party strategists argue, will allow them to greatly expand the playing field of competitive races that November.

That strategy paid major dividends for Democrats in 2006 as they upset previously safe incumbents in Kansas, California and Arizona, and came mighty close in the GOP strongholds of Idaho and Wyoming. Democrats hope to repeat that game plan in 2008, aided by the continued dismal national political environment for Republicans.

This article says it all:

EARLIER THIS week Hillary Clinton changed her schedule to include a visit to a church in Selma, Alabama this weekend. There were plenty of reasons for the last-minute adjustment. Selma is marking the 42nd anniversary of an historic civil-rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a march that was broken up by club-wielding state troopers. Leading Democrats, including Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, will be attending the event too. Still, it is hard to believe that Mrs Clinton was not influenced by the fact that Barack Obama is scheduled to make a speech at a black church in Selma. On March 4th the two senators will now give simultaneous speeches in churches that are no more than 300 yards apart.

Even though HRC supporters want you to believe otherwise, she wasn't planning to go to Selma, let alone bring Bill.

This set-piece battle for the black soul could hardly be for higher stakes. The black vote is vital in the Democratic primaries--blacks make up more than half the electorate in the key early primary state of South Carolina, and dominate among party workers there.

Does anyone believe that blacks will not support Obama in huge numbers?

Mr Obama is now leading Mrs Clinton among blacks by 44% to 33%. Fully 70% of blacks now have a favourable impression of Mr Obama. He is clearly succeeding in wooing this constituency--and Mrs Clinton is discovering that she cannot rely on her husband's memory to keep black America on her side.

And its not just blacks who like what they see.

Mr Obama is making inroads into a political base that the Clinton dynasty has spent more than a decade cultivating. And he poses a threat on other fronts: Mrs Clinton has always had problems with anti-war leftists, who are furious about her vote to authorise the Iraq war and disappointed that she has refused to renounce it. Mr Obama, by contrast, has an impeccable anti-war record.

The perception of inevitability is fading fast.

there are few more important advantages in the primary race than a sense of "inevitability". If you are the inevitable candidate, operatives clamour to be on your team, fund-raisers stuff your coffers with gold and waverers swallow their doubts. Lose that aura, and it all goes into reverse. Hard-knuckled Clinton operatives are still trying to prevent people from wavering or hedging their bets by hinting that "You are either with us or against us." But these threats are growing hollow.

Its not over by any means.

Mrs Clinton remains a formidable candidate--an experienced and intelligent politician, backed by a state-of-the-art political machine. Still Mrs Clinton's once-solid lead in the opinion polls is shrinking: the two Washington Post polls show her lead over Mr Obama halving from 24 points to 12 points in little more than a month. Her "unfavourable" ratings are worryingly high: the same poll gives her a favourability/unfavourability rating of 49/48 compared with 50/30 for Mr Obama. And some Clinton campaign people are beginning to fret that they may have backed the wrong candidate, and to talk of jumping ship. The days when Mrs Clinton could walk her way to the Democratic nomination have gone.

This is going to be quite a year.

In the wake of Al Gore's victory (okay, technically it was Davis Guggenheim's victory, but you get the idea) at the Oscars, I anticipated a wave of positive press about Gore's efforts to raise awareness of global warming.  What I didn't anticipate were the numerous comments from the press . . . about Gore's appearance, specifically, his weight.

The conventional wisdom seems to be that Gore cannot run for national office until he drops some pounds, as he did in 2000.  In addition to being shocked that this topic would even come up in the wake of the seriousness of An Inconvenient Truth, I was also struck by how those critics (and Democratic consultants, including, not surprisingly, Donna Brazile,) don't have a clue as to how people respond to image in politics.
Let's assume Gore jumps into the race (as I certainly hope he will.) If I were advising him (not that he needs to get into the habit of listening to advisers, as that's a big part of what did him in in '00,) I would tell him not to lose too much weight. Right now, Gore looks avuncular. And, for a Democratic presidential candidate, avuncular is a GOOD THING!!!! Remember how the Rove smear machine was able to portray Kerry and Edwards as effeminate sissies (all those stupid jokes about them being gay because they hugged so much) partially because of their physical presentations? Kerry was slim, overly well-groomed, and was caught on film windsurfing. (The fact that he was from the state that had just legalized gay marriage, and that the Democratic National Convention was held there, to boot, certainly didn't help matters as far as this image was concerned.) The meme of Edwards-the-prettyboy is still alive and well today-- major political web sites and news programs have made reference to the very popular YouTube video that shows Edwards scrutinizing over his hair before going on TV (and whoever posted it on YouTube accompanied it with the theme music "I Feel Pretty.") An overly-attractive, too-well-groomed candidate reinforces the right wing smear machine's portrayal of Democrats as weak, effeminate sissies.