Justin's Political Corner

The Democratic National Committee voted Tuesday to re-elect Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida as the DNC chair. President Obama had requested that the congresswoman remain in the position, according to CNN. 

h/t: TPM LiveWire

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama wants Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz to stay on as his party’s chairwoman.

Wasserman Schultz has overseen the Democratic National Committee since early 2011. Party officials credit her in part with helping the president carry her home state of Florida, as well as leading the party to an expanded majority in the Senate and more seats in the House.

Democratic officials said Obama asked DNC members to back Wasserman Schultz when they meet in January, just after the president’s inauguration.

A mother of three and a breast cancer survivor, Wasserman Schultz, 46, has represented a reliably Democratic Fort Lauderdale-area district since 2005. Along the way she has earned a reputation as a workhorse and as an outspoken liberal happy to duke it out on television with her Republican counterparts.

h/t: Yahoo! News

The Democratic National Committee on Wednesday fired a Texas staffer who appeared to offer to help someone figure out how to vote simultaneously in two states in undercover video released by conservative activist James O’Keefe.

Shot in September in the Houston office of Organizing for America, President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the video appears to show regional field director Stephanie Caballero helping someone who claims to want to vote in both Florida and Texas. The video was posted online on Wednesday morning by O’Keefe, who is known for undercover stunts, the results of which are sometimes heavily edited.

DNC spokeswoman Melanie Roussell told TPM this video, however, was clear enough to fire the staffer.

“There is obviously a history here of making selective use of taped material, and we will certainly not vouch for the completeness of what was released,” Roussell said. “However, what we saw was enough for us to take the action that we did.”

Caballero did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.

O’Keefe has released a number of videos this year intended to demonstrate how easy it is to commit in-person voter fraud. One video showed an O’Keefe ally being offered Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot at his D.C. polling place.

When TPM pointed out that voter ID laws wouldn’t have stopped the type of absentee ballot voter fraud that the undercover videographer claimed to want to pull off, O’Keefe said he has never endorsed any specific legislative solution.

h/t: Sahil Kapur at TPM

ST. LOUIS • The city’s chances of hosting the 2016 Democratic National Convention may hinge on Missouri’s transforming itself back into a contentious political battleground.

In her race, McCaskill is running as a moderate Democrat against U.S. Rep. Todd Akin, a Republican and a strong conservative who has been told by his own party’s establishment to quit the race after controversial comments on rape and abortion.

In the last two election cycles, Democrats have focused on states that have morphed into battlegrounds because of demographic shifts.

Until 2008, North Carolina hadn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1976, when the state sided with Jimmy Carter. Through the decades, North Carolina transformed itself from a largely rural state into one dominated by banking and research professionals. In 1980, it had 13 electoral votes. Today it has 15.

By contrast, Missouri has lost influence and electoral sway, thus hurting its convention chances. St. Louis has hosted four Democratic conventions, the last in 1916 when Woodrow Wilson was nominated for president. Missouri had 18 electoral votes that year. Today it has 10.

With its standard bearer being the nation’s first black president, the Democratic Party has tried to showcase a minority-friendly image.

Missouri is about 83 percent white. North Carolina is 66 percent white and 21 percent black. Colorado, which hosted the Democrats in 2008, is 19 percent Hispanic. Missouri’s Hispanic population is just 3 percent.

Ken Warren, a political science professor at St. Louis University, said Missouri’s lack of diversity will hurt St. Louis’ chances.

“North Carolina, for example, has become more yuppified,” Warren said. “These metro people tend to be a lot more liberal. Missouri is an old, traditional state. The demographics aren’t that appealing to Democrats.”

Obama barely lost Missouri in 2008, but the state has slipped further from his reach in the following years, according to polling data. Still, some Democrats hold a sliver of hope that it could reverse course for Obama.

h/t: STLtoday.com

The annual Values Voter Summit in Washington is always pulsating with worry that God and Christianity are being pulled from the national fabric at a frightful pace. That concern was more elevated than ever this year at the social conservative confab hosted by the Family Research Council, thanks to an ordeal that took place during the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte earlier this month.

Christian leaders have been warning for years that modern elections boil down to a fight between those who would have God as part of the United States and those who would not. But the DNC episode — in which Democrats added the word “God” and support for Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, to a chorus of boos from some of the audience — was all the evidence social conservatives needed to prove they’ve been right all along.

Though most Americans who watched the Democratic convention didn’t catch the brief and chaotic fight over the amendments, which came early on the second night of festivities, Values Voter Summit attendees were intimately acquainted with the episode. And just about all the speakers on stage at the conference were clear on its ramifications.

“Let us not mistake: The fight for religious freedom starts here at home, because we are one nation under God,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said Friday. “This is despite what that other party has put in their platform.”

Cantor wasn’t the only speaker to make an issue out of the Democratic platform fight. It was mentioned in countless other addresses, and was on the lips of attendees throughout the conference. Mainstream Republicans have attempted to leverage the Democratic platform changes — which were reportedly pushed by President Obama — to attack the president’s campaign, to limited effect. Mitt Romney was widely criticized after he seemed to suggest Obama would remove the phrase “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency.

For “values voters,” the three votes required in Charlotte to get the platform amended are just the kind of thing its base needs to get fired up before the election. Democrats, social conservatives say, are now unabashed in their support for the removal of God from the national conversation.

H/T: Evan McMorris-Santoro at TPM

Tart-tongued Democratic Rep. Barney Frank mocked Mitt Romney’s claims that his private-sector success makes him the better candidate to revive the economy, deriding the Republican candidate as “Myth Romney” in a speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.

CHARLOTTE — Democrats finished a strong convention with President Obama’s speech on Thursday, but his address was the culmination of a variety of powerful themes set up by the previous night’s speakers and reinforced throughout.

Taken together, these fronts will define the final stage of the election, providing a guiding light for campaign ads, speeches and surrogates’ talking points in the weeks to come. Each is designed in its own way to appeal to different demographics — from the young and socially liberal to the old and the blue collar — to play up Obama’s strengths, and to exploit Romney’s softest spots — or reveal new ones.

• Obama Cares About You, Romney Cares About Balance Sheets

Perhaps even more than policy, what stood out in many of the biggest speeches was the idea that Obama cares — beyond just the term the GOP has used (and Democrats have sought to re-claim) to describe the Affordable Care Act.

Mitt Romney’s awkward, private and sometimes prickly personality has been one of his biggest vulnerabilities since his earliest days in politics. Democrats picked at this scab at every opportunity, portraying him as cold, calculating and at his core incapable of feeling for others because of his wealthy upbringing and wealthier career in business. For contrast, they played up Obama’s own empathy, connecting many of his policies directly to his humble roots.

A Ted Kennedy tribute film showed Romney running as a pro-choice candidate in 1994. It resonated not because it made Romney appear like a closet moderate, but because it made him appear soulless and unprincipled.

• Economic Patriotism

Every convention needs some red meat, and this was it for the Democrats. The convention featured a number of populist barnburners, each portraying Romney as out of touch with average Americans and actively disdainful of the nation’s values.

Not surprisingly, Romney’s foreign assets advanced the theme. Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland zeroed in on the issue for one of the biggest applause lines of the week.

“Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport,” Strickland said Wednesday. “In Matthew, Chapter 6, Verse 21, the scriptures teach us that where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. My friends, any man who aspires to be our president should keep both his treasure and his heart in the United States of America.”

• Romney’s Untested Foreign Policy

Foreign policy hasn’t figured big in this election — Romney didn’t even feel compelled to mention Afghanistan in his convention address. But Democrats brought it back in a major way at their own gathering, opening a new front attacking Romney and Paul Ryan as dangerously inexperienced.

This angle figured most prominently in the convention’s final night. Sen. John Kerry set the table with a speech that figuratively and literally echoed the attacks lobbed at him at the 2004 Republican convention, accusing Romney of flip-flopping over Afghanistan and Libya.

“Mr. Romney — here’s a little advice,” Kerry said. “Before you debate Barack Obama on foreign policy, you better finish the debate with yourself!”

Biden retold the decision to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, and depicted Romney as weak and vacillating.

Finally, Obama pushed Romney on foreign policy as forcefully as anyone.

“My opponent and his running mate … are new to foreign policy,” he said. “But from all that we’ve seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost America so dearly.”

In another sharp line, Obama brought up Romney’s much-criticized trip abroad last month, in which he drew condemnations from British leaders for disparaging their Olympic preparation.

“You might not be ready for diplomacy with Beijing if you can’t visit the Olympics without insulting our closest ally,” Obama said.

H/T: Benjy Sarlin at TPM

Last night during Sandra Fluke’s speech at the DNC, radical right-wing moron Dana Loesch took to her twitter account to attack Fluke, as expected. She also attacked former Texas Governor Ann Richards’s daughter, Cecile, simply because she is the President of Planned Parenthood. Not surprising given Loesch’s repeated and vehement anti-choice rhetoric.

Woman abuser/accused rapist Clinton speaks after Fluke talks of rape & they deify Ted Kennedy the woman murderer. #DNC2012 #Hypocrisy
— Chris Loesch (@ChrisLoesch) September 6, 2012

Don’t lecture conservative women about empowerment while demanding that we pay for what goes on in your bedroom #DNC2012
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 6, 2012

Then why isn’t birth control for men free? #DNC2012
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 6, 2012

Fluke “shut out and silenced” conservative females from honest discussion on women’s issues at RNC. thedc.com/QZyjiE #DNC2012
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 6, 2012

Oh thank heavens. I was worried we wouldn’t hear about free birth control for five minutes straight.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) September 6, 2012

(Cross-posted from DanaBusted.blogspot.com)

Eight years ago in Boston, I introduced you to a state senator from Illinois with a name that was hard to pronounce. Four years ago in Denver, I asked you to give him our party’s nomination for president. Tonight in Charlotte, I ask you to join me in giving President Barack Obama four more years to finish the job he started.

I was there that cold January afternoon when Barack Obama lifted his hand from Abraham Lincoln’s Bible and looked out on an America facing an economic collapse. These last four years have been hard. Too many families are still hurting. But today, our economy is beginning to recover, jobs are returning, businesses are expanding and America is coming back.

Our friends in the other party have a theory about America. They tell us we’re all in this alone. They say builders never need a helping hand. Democrats know better. America knows better. History and this president have shown us we are stronger when we are all in this together.

Come to Belvidere, Illinois and meet 5,000 proud Chrysler UAW workers. Some said let GM and Chrysler go bankrupt. President Obama said let those workers go back to work. Meet the working families all across our nation who will finally have a chance for affordable health care and college loans. And I am proud of our president’s fight for justice for women in the workplace and ending the discrimination of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in our military. Eleven years ago, I authored the DREAM Act. It took President Obama to finally bring these kids out of the shadows and into the America they have always called home.

One hundred and fifty years ago, another president from Illinois brought justice to his day with the Emancipation Proclamation. His critics told him he had gone too far and he should undo what he had done. But Lincoln said, “I hope to stand firm enough not to go backwards.” We cannot build a better, stronger, fairer America by walking backwards. We must walk forward, together. With President Obama in the White House, we will. President Obama: Your values, your vision, your commitment to a just America are still worth fighting for.

h/t: HuffPo

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There were no fireworks on Thursday night — at least not of the literal variety. There were no Greek columns or open-air stadiums surrounded by majestic mountains. There were no calls for a new type of politics or for a turning of the page on the George W. Bush administration.

There was some glitz, some Hollywood stars and immaculate stagecraft. But the idea that a presidential candidate could himself become the embodiment of change was replaced with something less lofty but, perhaps, just as politically poignant. When President Barack Obama addressed the Democratic National Convention here at 10:25 p.m., both he and the crowd were animated by protectiveness for what’s been accomplished so far in his presidency and hope to build on those achievements.

It was reflected not just in the tone of the week — from a rousing and unexpected defense of the president’s health care law on Tuesday night, to an invocation of the GOP-maligned clean energy subsidies, to a repeated reference to Vice President Joe Biden’s favorite line “bin-Laden is dead and General Motors is alive” — but in the arc of Obama’s speech as well.

“I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention,” Obama said. “The times have changed –- and so have I. I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.

“I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn’t return. I’ve shared the pain of families who’ve lost their homes, and the frustration of workers who’ve lost their jobs. If the critics are right that I’ve made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them. And while I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’” 

“America,” Obama offered at the conclusion of his speech, “I never said this journey would be easy, and I won’t promise that now. Yes, our path is harder — but it leads to a better place. Yes our road is longer — but we travel it together. We don’t turn back.”

“Day after day, night after night, I sat beside him, as he made one gutsy decision after another — to stop the slide and reverse it,” said Vice President Joe Biden, in remarks that set the stage for the president’s address. “I watched him stand up to intense pressure and stare down choices of enormous consequence. Most of all, I saw what drove him: His profound concern for the American people.”

In one of the most rousing one-liners of the night, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) reminded Americans of the president’s top national security accomplishment while deftly skewering a top Republican talking point.

“Ask Osama bin Laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago,” said the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee.

Obama himself didn’t mention the economic stimulus he pushed early in office. But former President Bill Clinton made that defense the night before. On Thursday, meanwhile, veterans, auto workers, college students and gay rights advocates all appeared on stage to thank the president for what he’s done. Former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm credited Obama with making the “tough calls” that saved the American auto industry. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) was brought on stage to talk, in part, about the dangers of repealing financial regulatory reform, but he meandered hopelessly off-script and ended up lampooning Mitt Romney’s record in Massachusetts instead.

“After all that we’ve been through, I don’t believe that rolling back regulations on Wall Street will help the small businesswoman expand, or the laid-off construction worker keep his home. We have been there, we’ve tried that, and we’re not going back,” said Obama. “We are moving forward.”

The comments concluded a three-day convention that was equal parts proudly unapologetic about the president’s record and hostile to Mitt Romney’s. There were mishaps: one self-inflicted (platform language over Jerusalem’s status as the capital of Israel), the other a force of nature (concerns over thunderstorms forced the campaign to move the final night into the much more confined Time Warner Cable Arena). But by the count of most observers, including some Republicans, it was a bigger hit than the GOP conventions that preceded it.

“If you turn away now — if you buy into the cynicism that the change we fought for isn’t possible — well, change will not happen,” said Obama. “If you give up on the idea that your voice can make a difference, then other voices will fill the void: lobbyists and special interests; the people with the $10 million checks who are trying to buy this election and those who are making it harder for you to vote; Washington politicians who want to decide who you can marry, or control health care choices that women should be making for themselves.

“Only you can make sure that doesn’t happen,” he urged. “Only you have the power to move us forward.” 

h/t: Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel at HuffPo 

CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Vice President Joe Biden has famously distilled President Barack Obama’s argument for re-election to a simple phrase: “Osama Bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” On Thursday evening, the scrappy former senator delighted Democrats gathered at their national convention in Charlotte with a long-form version of that slogan.

Speaking from his “ringside seat” to Obama’s struggles since January 2009, Biden praised the president he has watched at work and told Americans worried about the still-sputtering economy that “America has turned the corner.”

“Yes, the work of recovery is not yet complete, but we are on our way,” said Biden. “The journey of hope is not yet finished, but we are on our way. The cause of change is not fully accomplished, but we are on our way. So I say to you tonight, with absolute confidence, America’s best days are ahead of us, and, yes, we are on our way.”

he vice president roughed up Mitt Romney, suggesting that the former Massachusetts governor would have failed both the GM and the bin Laden tests (though it’s worth noting that Biden himself has said he opposed the bin Laden raid).

He cited Romney’s comment that it was not worth “moving heaven and earth” to get the elusive al-Qaida mastermind. And he savaged the Republican standard-bearer for opposing the auto bailout.

After noting that Romney’s father, George Romney, had led American Motors, Biden said that Romney opposed the rescue because “he saw it the Bain way,” a reference to Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney founded and built into an investment powerhouse.

“I mean this sincerely, I think he saw it in balance sheets. And write-offs,” said Biden. “Folks, the Bain way may bring your firm the highest profits. But it’s not the way to lead your country from its highest office.”

“President Obama and Governor Romney they’re both loving husbands they’re both devoted fathers. But let’s be straight. they bring a vastly different vision and a vastly different values set to the job,” the vice president said.

h/t: Yahoo! News