by Paul Goldman

Recently, one of the state’s top election gurus belittled, with his usual statistical analysis, my way-out-on-a-limb-prediction that I made last month, of a Virginia Democratic sweep this November. Such a sweep would be the first time this has happened since the Wilder-Beyer-Terry ticket of 1989. Here at 200-proof politics, we call it like we see it.

We based our  prediction on this crucial “tell”: we don’t believe the Cuccinelli strategy team regards the so-called “free media” part of a campaign as particularly relevant this year. Yes, they are sending their candidate around the state making speeches, doing debates, issuing releases on his position on the issues, yada, yada, yada. And yes, they claim to want 15 debates.

But they know, as I know, the following: No campaign that is serious about the “free media” campaign wants that many debates. Given prep time, and post-debate story time, it would eat up most of the campaign coverage. And we know what happens with campaign coverage of that type: It is reported he said/she said in BOOOORING REPETITION unless one guy makes what the press sees as a gaffe.

At the first debate, the press jumped all over something Terry said about Richmond Commonwealth Attorney Mike Herring’s report clearing the AG of any legal wrongdoing in the Star Scientific matter. Terry tried during the debate to deny Cuccinelli from claiming he had been so cleared. Unfortunately, Terry needs better legal advice: in the way the law works, Cuccinelli was cleared, and he gets to brag about it.

EXCEPT: He didn’t brag about it. Moreover, he didn’t jump all over Terry for trying to take those bragging rights away. The press was waiting to make it the headline if Cuccinelli had done what every other candidate for Governor I ever worked with would have done. Those campaigns all appreciated the value of “free media,” and such a moment was the Gold Card for such things.

But the Cuccinelli campaign seemed bothered that they had to deal with this “free media” side of things. They wanted to go back to their real strategy: TURNOUT. They are convinced they don’t need a real strategy to win. This is the same reasoning of those who disagree with my prediction. They say I have failed to consider the normative statistical turnout in a governor’s election year vs a presidential year. Not true.

Enter then: the Cook Report, which reports that a new national poll done on older voters – the key GOP demographic in a non-presidential year – says they are considerably less inclined to vote Republican right now than in 2009, when Bob McDonnell won. If this most reliable GOP demographic is not eager to vote for Cuccinelli, then he will need more than a turnout strategy to win.

Assuming the Cook Report is accurate, then I’ll make this new prediction: Cuccinelli’s starring role in opposing Obamacare, which gets right into Medicaid expansion, state funding for schools in middle class areas, and the like is going to be coming to a TV near you in the near future. Democrats think Cuccinelli’s opposition here is a slam-dunk winner for them.

200-proof disagrees. The political issue for Obamacare as regards the swing older voters and indeed middle-aged swing voters is this: these folks already have health care. For them, Obamacare’s problem is two fold. One, it isn’t seen as cutting their premiums or costs. Thus, they see it as not helping them in that regard. Second, though, they see it as requiring them to take money that should go for schools, job creation, cutting taxes,  and pay for someone else’s health care.

Terry is right that more health care does create more jobs. But not middle class jobs. High end, low end, the cost cutting is in the middle. That’s why 200-proof said from jump street that Medicaid expansion is tied to Obamacare in Virginia right now, and it is a potentially very big issue for Cuccinelli.

If the Cook Report is right, then I believe even the Cuccinelli strategy team will realize that their boy has got to start using the “free media” campaign to make this whole mix of things an issue. Democrats had best be ready: it has always seemed inevitable to me.

Washington, DC – Congressman Jim Moran, Ranking Member on the Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee, delivered the following prepared remarks at the full Appropriations Committee markup of the Fiscal Year 2014 Interior and Environment Appropriations Bill:

“Mr. Chairman, the unrealistic 302(b) allocation given to the subcommittee has put you and the subcommittee in an impossible situation. As a result of that allocation, the bill before us today is unacceptable.  How can we take seriously a document that zeros out many important programs? By our count 20 programs and agencies are zeroed out. Coming on top of the fiscal year 2013 Sequester this bill, if enacted, would do real damage to scores of programs.

“I recognize Mr. Chairman the difficulties you faced in crafting this bill but what we are seeing today is the bitter fruit of the Ryan Republican budget. The nearly 19 percent overall cut to the bill has turned it into the Sequester on steroids, with the deep cuts made in part to pay for the spending in the Defense, Homeland Security and Military Construction bills now passed by the House.

“The list of cuts in this bill is long and deep. The Fish and Wildlife Service alone would be cut $400 million below this year, an astonishing 27% reduction. No dollar amounts are listed for numerous programs, leaving it to the agency, rather than the subcommittee, to make the painful choices. These cuts would do real damage to a host of fish and wildlife programs that are vital to the survival of numerous plant and animal species.

“The Land and Water Conservation Fund would be zeroed out, a first for the program.

“The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would each be cut by $71 million, a 50% cut. The Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, and the Kennedy Center all face 20% cuts. Far from being a drain on the Treasury, these entities deliver programs that enhance our quality of life and provide an economic boost here in Washington DC and in communities across the country.

“The late inclusion of an emergency designation for wildfire suppression has staved off even deeper cuts in the bill but even this designation is not without controversy.

“In years past Mr. Chairman, you have protected Native American programs from cuts. Unfortunately, that is not the case this year. That is why it is surprising to me that even as these cuts are made, increases are provided for oil and gas programs. Instead of rejecting the Administration’s proposed onshore oil and gas inspection fee, couldn’t we have asked this industry, which is so highly profitable, to share in the sacrifices necessitated by the bill that provides the public lands from which they get much of their revenue?

“And then there is EPA.  I wish I could say that I am surprised by what has been included but I am not.  The agency is cut by over one-third (- 34%).  This is on top of the 20% the agency has been reduced since fiscal year 2010. Brownfields projects are eliminated. Alaska Native Villages water infrastructure assistance is eliminated.  US Mexico Border water infrastructure is eliminated. The Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water programs may as well be eliminated given the comparatively small amounts they received in this bill.  As if going after the agency’s programs were not enough, the bill takes a jab at the brand new EPA Administrator and cuts her immediate office by 30%.  

“One area there seems to be no shortage of in the bill is the special interest riders and funding limitations. The polluters, grazers, and snowmobilers are taken care of. These sorts of provisions have become the new earmarks. By our count there are 31 such special interest provisions in the bill, with 13 of them being new this year, and all of them harmful to our environment.

“I regret that the subcommittee’s woefully inadequate 302(b) allocation has led to this bill. The only consolation I can take is that with its funding, this bill will never become law.

“Mr. Chairman, I appreciate our working relationship but this is a bad bill. Thank you.”

To read a fact sheet highlighting cuts included in the bill, please visit: http://moran.house.gov/sites/m…

For a list of the 20 programs and agencies eliminated in the bill, please visit: http://moran.house.gov/sites/m…

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So sayeth Krazy Ken:

Certainly one thing about the Attorney General’s office is it is a very reactive office…the Attorney General doesn’t get to put bills in. And in fact, you know, the biggest things that we’ve been known for during my tenure have been reactions to the federal government. There’s no greenhouse gas endangerment finding, there’s no lawsuit. If there’s no health care bill that violates the constitution, there’s no lawsuit. If the EPA doesn’t try to make up new rules and burden Fairfax County with them there’s not lawsuit. So, you know, it’s us reacting over and over and over again in the AG’s office…

Wow, the guy’s learned absolutely nothing from his multiple witch hunts and failed lawsuits. He also apparently didn’t catch the Supreme Court ruling that the Affordable Care Act IS constitutional. As for the greenhouse gas endangerment finding, of course the reality is that greenhouse gases DO pose a grave threat to human health and well being, even if Ken Kookinelli continues to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence (and consensus of 97% of scientists).  Finally, as the Democratic Party of Virginia notes, Cuccinelli’s “reactions” don’t “excuse his pattern of using his office to…put his extreme ideological agenda ahead of what’s best for Virginia families,” such as using his office “to bully the State Board of Health into passing backdoor abortion ban regulations…to try and force state universities to stop protecting gay and lesbian students and staff from discrimination and…to wage a witch hunt against the University of Virginia over his anti-science agenda.” #FAIL

P.S. Does “reacting” over and over and over again make you…uh, a “reactionary” perhaps? Hmmm.

( – promoted by lowkell)

I’m developing this series* on the important ways in which our present political crisis can be seen as a replay of the run-up to the Civil War with two purposes in mind: 1) To help us perceive more clearly the nature of the force we’re up against in these dangerous times; and 2) To help illuminate some important – and perhaps hitherto unrecognized – ways that the human world works.

In order to validate the general thesis of this series — that the spirit that’s damaging America today is a re-incarnation of the spirit that drove the nation into Civil War — it’s important to perceive accurately the spirit at work in each of the two eras, a task made more difficult by the false picture presented in each case.

Let’s begin with a proposition concerning the nature of the conflict in the era of the Civil War.  This proposition is controversial in America but should not be, because the evidence is clear: The root of the conflict was not states’ rights but slavery.

Here’s a relevant passage from an article in the April 12, 2001 issue of the New York Review of Books, written by one of the foremost historians of the Civil War, James McPherson, professor emeritus at Princeton:

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, at the end of four years of civil war, few people in either the North or the South would have dissented from his statement that slavery “was, somehow, the cause of the war.”

The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was ‘the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution’ of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast,

is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Unlike Lincoln, Davis and Stephens survived the war to write their memoirs. By then, slavery was gone with the wind. To salvage as much honor and respectability as they could from their lost cause, they set to work to purge it of any association with the now dead and discredited institution of human bondage. In their postwar views, both Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states had seceded not to protect slavery, but to vindicate state sovereignty. This theme became the virgin birth theory of secession: the Confederacy was conceived not by any worldly cause, but by divine principle.

Lying about its motivations, as McPherson describes here, is an integral part of the modus operandi of this spirit-then and now. (More on the pattern of dishonesty later in this series.)

Even though there is a sense in which the war was fought over “states’ rights,” that’s not true in any way that detracts from the basic truth that conflict was about slavery.

The spark for the war was disagreement over the right of the states to secede: The Confederacy claimed that right, and attempted to exercise it; the Union, under Lincoln, denied that right and fought to preserve the Union.

But the whole reason the issue of secession arose — the dispute behind all the political battles that had worked over the course of more than a decade to split the nation into two parts ready to fight one another — was slavery.

What does it say about a spirit if it drives people to kill or die for the right of some people to treat other people as property?

It was a war, incidentally, not over whether slavery would be abolished. Lincoln, who thought slavery a moral wrong, said that he believed the Constitution required him to protect slavery where it already was, and he repeatedly promised that as president he would do so.

No, the political conflict throughout the 1850s and leading into the Civil War, was over whether slavery would expand its dominion into the new territories that would become states in the future, and then, with the reasoning of the Dred Scot decision, perhaps even into states that were and wanted to remain free.

The war, then, was over an issue on which the South was on the offensive, not the defensive. As this suggests, it was the South — far more than the North — that determined that the long-difficult issue of slavery would be settled through strife, not — as it had been in earlier times — by compromise.

That tendency — to choose conflict over compromise or cooperation – will be the subject of future entries in this series. But first, let’s follow how the spirit that inflamed people to fight for slavery has manifested itself in the century and a half since slavery was abolished, all the way up to America’s current political battles.

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* This article is the fourth in the series.  The first three have been The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: Introduction, The Spirit that Drove Us to Civil War is Back: The Wolves’ Version of Liberty , and The Spirit That Drove Us to Civil War Is Back: Looking Closer at that National Nightmare.

Andy Schmookler, recently the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia’s 6th District, is an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher.  His books include The Parable of the Tribes:  The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.   His website is at www.nonesoblind.org/index.php .