July 1, 2012

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Iowahawk has the spirit.

The last time Democrats gloated this hard after a health care victory, they lost 60 House seats.

 

Andrew Malcolm’s take on the decision.

The Supreme Court’s shocking decision to uphold most of ObamaCare Thursday elated its proponents, disheartened its enemies and may have finally taught media legal observers to never again draw conclusions from justices’ questions in oral arguments.

But one other thing it did for sure is thrust Obama’s whole idea of inserting government deeper and deeper into the most intimate parts of Americans’ daily lives and deaths smack dab back into the political arena. There, in the next 130 days, the nation will hear a different set of oral arguments — on the stump – until voters issue their collective final opinion on Nov. 6.

The 5-4 court decision ruled the idea was constitutional. Now, voters will decide if it’s acceptable. And affordable. Within hours, the decision had driven more than a million new dollars into the Romney war-chest. … 

… We were disappointed with a sharp sense of betrayal as the professed conservative chief justice, unsolicited, crafted a successful legal foundation to hand a grand victory to this arrogant Chicago bully like an undeserved, unexpected gift.

It may well have been accidental or coincidental, but Roberts’ ‘political choices’ image is apt and perfectly-timed for summer of a presidential election year. Remember back during the ObamaCare debate when Nancy Pelosi said we’d have to pass the mammoth thing to find out what was in it? Only in Washington could someone utter those lordly words in public, as if they made any sense whatsoever. And not be laughed off the rostrum. …

 

And Peter Wehner.

Having already written about the majority opinion by Chief Justice Roberts, what about the politics of the decision?

I have argued before that while overturning the Affordable Care Act (ACA) would be a debilitating blow to the president, upholding it would create problems of its own. And that’s certainly the case.

For one thing, as others at ”Contentions” have pointed out, the president is now saddled with a huge middle class tax increase. Anchoring the Affordable Care Act in the Tax Clause is the only way it passed constitutional muster—and Republicans will do everything in their power to tether Obama to his tax increase. It doesn’t help the president that the argument that saved ObamaCare contradicted what Obama himself repeatedly said, which is (a) the individual mandate is “absolutely not a tax increase” and (b) he would never in a thousand years raise taxes on the middle class.

It was, and he has.

In addition, the decision by the Court to uphold the Affordable Care Act has once again thrust to center stage a historically unpopular law (one that is particularly unpopular in swing states).

The Supreme Court, then, has succeeded in once again inflaming the passions of the GOP base while reminding independents why they despise the ACA. The 2012 election may now take on a 2010 feel. And for those who might have forgotten, Democrats—thanks in large part to Obama’s health care law—sustained an epic defeat in that mid-term election.

As it was, so may it be.

 

Mort Zuckerman on Obama’s middle class vulnerability.  

The American public has had lots of experience living through recessions. We have endured 11 over the past 60 years, but none since the end of World War II has been as deep or as long as this one. It has severely tested the optimism, confidence, and animal spirits that typify the temper of America.

People see that the administration has invested $5 trillion to reverse the recession and achieve growth again, and the Federal Reserve has pushed interest rates down to record lows. But it’s like strenuously inflating a tire with a leaky valve. Whatever we do, it is soon soft again and now the air still seems to be hissing out, so we fear we will soon be riding on the rim. The only certain result is that we will be paying interest on this $5 trillion for decades to come.

American families are hurting. Just this month, the Federal Reserve reported that between 2007 and 2010 there was a massive decline of 39 percent in real median household net worth, dropping from $126,400 to $77,300, the lowest level since 1992. Two decades of cumulative prosperity for the average American family have been wiped out. The housing market hasn’t reached anywhere near bottom, further threatening Americans’ largest asset, their home equity. Banks still own 450,000 foreclosed properties on top of another 2 million units in the foreclosure process, and an additional 1.7 million homes are in some form of delinquency. Add to this the near record 3.6 million vacant units being held off the market for “unspecified reasons,” and you have a huge excess supply that will be a dead weight on housing values for months to come.

Who has suffered the largest percentage of losses in both wealth and income? The middle class of America. …

 

National Journal piece on Hillsborough County outside of Tampa.

TAMPA, Fla.—Welcome to the molten core of the political universe, the hottest battleground in the biggest battleground state. Since 1960, Hillsborough County has called every single presidential election except for one—and there’s no reason to think that voters here won’t do it again.

Look around this county of 1.2 million and you’ll find a mash-up of past and future: a solidly Democratic city bracketed by Republican-leaning suburbs; strawberry fields, ranch-style homes, and gentrified urban neighborhoods; Puerto Ricans, Cuban-Americans, African-Americans, Midwestern retirees, college kids, active military, and young families; the brick and wrought iron of historic Ybor City, and the stucco and terra-cotta of the Sun City Center senior community.

The county boasts the nation’s seventh-largest seaport, the fourth-largest zoo, three major-league sports teams, and an annual festival honoring pirate invasions of the 18th and 19th centuries. It sits at the intersection of Interstate 75, which traverses the United States from north to south, and I-4, which bisects Florida from east to west. This is holy ground for pollsters and advertisers scouting a cross section of America.

“To me, it’s the linchpin,” said Peter Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster who has overseen dozens of focus groups in the county, including one last month that analyzed Republicans’ views of presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney. “If you want to understand the swings in the electorate, you are likely to find them in Hillsborough County. It tends to be a good mirror.”

Hillsborough was a Democratic bastion back in the 1970s, but, like other parts of Florida and the South, it has been trending Republican for years—even though the Democratic Party has a 50,000-vote edge in the county. The last time Hillsborough voted for a Democratic presidential nominee was for Bill Clinton in 1996. Before that it was Jimmy Carter in 1976. Five out of the seven county commissioners are Republicans; so are the property appraiser, the tax collector, the state attorney, the elections supervisor, and the sheriff.

In 2008, Hillsborough became the only Florida county that had backed Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 to flip to Barack Obama. A surge of minority voters, young people, and independents helped Obama wring 68,000 more votes out of Hillsborough than John Kerry had, propelling him to a 7-point victory over Republican nominee John McCain in the county.

Was it a fluke? Or was it the start of something big?

Democrats are banking on the latter, pointing to demographic trends here and throughout the country that are pumping up the share of the electorate that isn’t white and that leans their way. Republicans prefer to think of 2008 as an anomaly and Obama as a one-hit wonder, a history-making candidate at a time when the stars and planets over Hillsborough were aligned just right. …

… Can Romney ultimately match Obama in organizational power here? There’s no reason to think he can’t. The race is a dead heat, and Obama was even less organized in Florida than Romney at this time four years ago.

“We’re not going to be outworked,” said Martinez, the Romney spokesman and a veteran of Rubio’s successful U.S. Senate campaign in 2010. “You’re going to see an aggressive effort in the state of Florida comparable to the successful Republican efforts you’ve seen in the state before.”

Few, however, are underestimating the difficulty of dislodging a president in a place so evenly divided. Over a mug of coffee in his cottage-like office, Republican strategist Goodman proudly pointed to framed signs from recent winning state campaigns: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater, incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford. But this one is different.

“Anyone who thinks that Florida, which tends to be reliably Republican, will be anything less than a firefight in November is ignoring history,” Goodman said. “All hands will be on deck.”

Goodman called the GOP’s selection of Hillsborough to host the national convention “huge” and said that the publicity surrounding the four-day event could easily boost Romney’s popularity enough to make a difference in November. But there is little evidence that the location of a convention translates into a win; in fact, the last four Republican nominees all lost the states that hosted the national conventions: California in 1996, Pennsylvania in 2000, New York in 2004, and Minnesota in 2008. Eric Ostermeier, a research associate at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, noted on the school’s website that over the past half-century, there was only one instance in which a state hosting the Republican convention flipped after voting for the Democratic nominee four years earlier.

That was in 1968, when Richard Nixon won Florida.

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