Interesting Monday morning for a change. Here’s some breakfast leftovers:

* Just saw Suze Orman emphatically endorse Obama on The View. Could be one of the more influential endorsements we’ll see for a while.

* So does Newsweek’s “gaylo” adorning the image of “the first gay president” trumps Time’s cover image of woman breastfeeding her very large three-year-old? Hard to say, but pretty sure Washington Monthly won’t be entering this particular sweepstakes.

* Kruman suggests JP Morgan fiasco illustrates basic need for bank regulation. Shame he has to make the case.

* Steve King complains “left wing of the Republican Party” pushing for bipartisanship in Congress. Didn’t know conservatives took hallucinogenic drugs.

* Dan Gilgoff examines DC’s “Mormon Mafia” of highly-placed LDS members.

And in non-political news:

* Legendary session musician Donald “Duck” Dunn dies at 70.

Back very shortly.

When Winning Our Future, Newt Gingrich’s Super-PAC, ran a savage video series (a 30-minute film called “When Mitt Romney Came To Town,” and better-known short excerpts run as TV ads) under the rubric “King of Bain,” just prior to the South Carolina presidential primary (which he subsequently won), it was often said that we’d be seeing and hearing similar themes during the general election.

Well, now we are:

The ad begins running today in Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia today. As Jonathan Chait notes, it will be denounced as “demagogic” by conservatives, but it actually hits Romney squarely for the very experience he claims as his credential to become a Mr. Fix-it for the U.S. economy. At Bain Romney actually was a cutting-edge capitalist who found ways to maximize profits by eroding if not demolishing the old social contract between corporations and workers—and more implicitly, with the communities in which they were located—in the name of superior efficiency. And it’s superior efficiency that, when you boil it all down, Romney and the GOP are touting as the object of all its plans to cut taxes and eliminate regulations as an unnecessary burden on “job-creators.”

The Obama ad, says Chait accurately, is pretty even-natured compared to the WOF video:

[I]t’s interesting to contrast the measured tone of Obama’s ads against the over-the-top style of the same material in the hands of Romney’s GOP rivals. Obama’s ad merely presents interviews and clippings from news articles. “King of Bain,” an anti-Romney documentary disseminated by supporters of Newt Gingrich earlier this year, is hilariously propagandistic, with grainy images of cigar-smoking men and fulminations against greed.

The panic Gingrich’s campaign inspired among Republican officials, not just those working for Romney, gives away the fact that this is a true political vulnerability for the Republican nominee. The transformation of American business is deeply unpopular. It has made working life less secure and has failed to deliver broad-based prosperity even while it has bestowed enormous riches on the most fortunate. The locus of public opinion on it in many crucial ways sits well to the left of what either party proposes. Many Americans want to go back to the days when corporations offered secure employment and generous benefits.

So the Obama campaign doesn’t really need to exaggerate Romney’s record at Bain to get persuadable voters thinking not only about Mitt’s experience, but about a more fundamental view of how the economy should function at both the micro and macro levels that is almost impossible for the GOP candidate to deny. You don’t have to believe Romney collects the tears of the children of laid-off workers to fill his swimming pool to understand he considers most people in this country as dispensable and interchangable units of production whose immediate interests must be subordinated to the great Golden Calf of efficiency. So a King of Bain-style attack that’s light on the Daddy Warbucks trappings and heavier on the central message makes sense.

In a discussion of the Romney campaign’s outreach to the wingnutosphere earlier this month, I mentioned in passing the apparent preoccupation of these new partners in crime with Twitter wars, and particularly the belief that Hilaryrosengate represented some sort of historic triumph for The Cause.

This preoccupation seems to be growing, viz. this gloating post today from John Hinderaker at PowerLine:

We are in the early stages of the 2012 campaign season, with a lot of battlespace preparation going on. In the skirmishing so far, one perhaps surprising media advantage has become clear: the right is clobbering the left on Twitter.

Maybe it’s because Twitter puts a premium on brevity and cleverness. I don’t know. But for some reason, it seems to be a natural medium for conservatives. We saw it when the Hilary Rosen interview (“Ann Romney never worked a day in her life”) prompted a Twitterstorm. We saw it again when #ObamaEatsDogs exploded, and when #Julia blew up in the White House’s face like an exploding cigar. Currently, the White House is promoting #AskMichelle, where loyal Democrats can go to ask the First Lady a question. Only nearly all of the questions have come from conservatives.

Now maybe I’m just an old goat who doesn’t understand why Twitterwars will determine the configuration of forces in the 2012 campaign. I’m a reasonably active Twitter user, but mainly use it to (a) draw attention to blog posts, columns, and other longer content I’ve written, (b) follow other people’s longer content, and (c) occasionally track breaking news—real news that hasn’t been written up yet, not contrived crap like Hilaryrosengate. Sure, I may toss out a snarkly one-liner now and then, and have now and then used Twitter for live-blogging of events like candidate debates. I also realize that campaigns and other political organizations effectively use Twitter to organize communications or events. But truth be told, I can’t imagine that purely Twitter-centric snarkfests have any particular impact on media coverage of politics, much less actual public opinion.

For the moment, I’m actually kind of pleased that conservative gabbers seem determined to spend so much of their time firing leaden witticisms at the hated foe or high-fiving each other in 140-character bursts. Like Hinderaker, but for different reasons, I tend to agree there may be something about the contemporary conservative perspective that lends itself to this limited medium where frat-boy insults can pass for epigrams. But unless more evidence emerges that quantitative domination of Twitter has some larger effect, I’m happy to use Twitter mainly as a flag for more extensive utterances, and let these boys enjoy their sandbox supremacy. To quote the old saying about academic politics, it’s violently exciting because the stakes are so low.

I said on Friday that I’d be paying close attention to Mitt Romney’s commencement address at Liberty University, and deciphering as many “dog whistles” as possible. And I have to say I’m impressed at how understated and subtle his pitch to the culture-warriors of Falwell’s university turned out to be. I suspect his rapidly improving political position among white conservative evangelicals, solidified by the president’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, made him less anxious in this particular fever swamp than one might have expected a couple of months ago.

But make no mistake, the effort to seek a new level of identity with the Christian Right was present in the speech, and not just because of his extended paen to Falwell, described as a kind, avuncular family friend with a fine sense of humor—not the sort of image the late founder of the Moral Majority left when you get much beyond the city limits of Lynchburg.

Many observers noted the one vague allusion Romney made to his own LDS faith, but may not have understood the kicker:

People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview. The best case for this is always the example of Christian men and women working and witnessing to carry God’s love into every life - people like the late Chuck Colson.

The front end of this paragraph is intended to restate the basic Christian Right case that conservative evangelicals and Mormons (and for that matter, Catholics) should suspend their many historical and theological differences—you know, all those quibbles about the structure of the universe, the purpose of human life, and the nature of true faith—to pursue “shared moral convictions” (i.e., opposition to LGBT and reproductive rights) that “stem from a common worldview (a heavily freighted term meaning a commitment to divinely blessed cultural conservatism in self-conscious opposition to interlocking “secularist” ideologies from Marxism to feminism to “relativism”).” But it’s the reference to Colson that is truly clever, since the recently deceased Watergate felon and prison ministry chieftain was for many years the chief advocate among conservative evangelicals of a “united front” with other conservative Christians (notably Catholic “traditionalists”) to pursue an aggressive cultural agenda wrapped in claims that those enemies of the “Christian worldview” were threatening religious liberty, which happens to have become the battle-cry of Christian Right opposition to Barack Obama.

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A perenially important political challenge that’s been associated with the Washington Monthly for years (and that also happens to be one of my own favorite crusades) is an effort to convince progressives not to concede important segments of the U.S. population to the opposition on grounds that they represent some sort of inherent “enemy turf.” Yes, certain demographic categories may be “lost” to conservatives if you insist on a winner-takes-all definition, and no, aggressively pursuing support among such voters isn’t worth it if it involves abandoning key principles or essentially adopting the opposition’s point of view. But reducing the margin of defeat on “hostile ground” is often achievable simply by paying attention and not wilfully repelling voters, and in the end a vote is a vote whether it comes from a segment of the electorate that progressives are “winning” or “losing.”

There are growing signs that progressives in general, and the Obama campaign in particular, are “getting it.”

Back in 2003, the Monthly published a much-discussed article by Amy Sullivan entitled “Do Democrats Have a Prayer?” that argued the Donkey Party was unnecessarily sacrificing moderate-to-liberal religious voters—and even some nonreligious voters impressed by the moral clarity of faith-grounded statements of principle—by refusing to engage with conservatives claiming a monopoly on the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Over this last weekend the self-same Sullivan penned an op-ed in the Washington Post noting how aggressively Barack Obama is challenging the assumptions of conservatives and secular MSM observers alike that the only religious perspective on same-sex marriage is one of horror and hostility:

Obama cited several reasons for his support for gay marriage, including conversations with U.S. troops, his family and his staff. But his assertion that his views on same-sex marriage come from — not despite — his Christian faith marks a shift in U.S. politics. Democratic politicians now unabashedly cite religion when making their case, and GOP leaders sometimes find themselves in the unusual position of justifying — rather than merely stating — their religious claims.

Sullivan cites the recent difficulties encountered by Paul Ryan in reconciling his supposedly Catholic worldview with his admiration for Ayn Rand and his disdain for any concept of “social justice.” He wouldn’t have had to bother squaring these circles if he was not being challenged by religiously-inspired progressives critics, who are in turn keeping pressure on the Catholic bishops to object to Ryan’s more outrageous claims that you exhibit love for the poor by denying them food stamps.

After years of pretending that the culture wars were a matter of religious views lined up against secular beliefs, politicians are recognizing what average Americans knew all along. A majority of Americans now believe that there is more than one way to get to heaven, pollsters report. Our political discussions finally reflect that there’s also more than one answer to the question: “What would Jesus do?”

Pretty simple, but it’s taken a good while for that two-front challenge to the conservative monopoly on religious expression to emerge.

On a different front, in 2007 the Monthly published a colloquoy in 2007 of advice from recent military veterans on how Democrats could improve their performance among “military voters”—another constituency often conceded to the GOP as “enemy turf.”

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Even as attention was drawn to the struggle to put together a Greek government and the possibility of that country’s exit from the eurozone, the forces of the status quo took a more direct hit from the major losses suffered by Angela Merkel’s party in another German state election, this time in the country’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, per this report from Reuters’ Stephen Brown:

The election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), a western German state with a bigger population than the Netherlands and an economy the size of Turkey, was held 18 months before a national election in which Merkel is expected to fight for a third term….

According to first projections, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) won 38.8 percent of the vote and will have enough to form a stable majority with the Greens, who scored 12.2 percent.

The two left-leaning parties had run a fragile minority government for the past two years under popular SPD leader Hannelore Kraft, whose decisive victory on Sunday could propel her to national prominence.

Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) saw their support plunge to just 25.8 percent, down from nearly 35 percent in 2010, and the worst result in the state since World War Two.

The CDU in this particular state was strongly identified with pro-austerity policies. Beyond that, the defeat couldn’t have come at a worse time for Merkel:

NRW, a diverse state with struggling cities in the rust-belt Ruhr region and home to one third of Germany’s blue-chip companies, has a history of influencing national politics.

Seven years ago, a humiliating loss for then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s SPD in the state prompted him to call early elections, which he subsequently lost to Merkel.

I found myself thinking this weekend about a period of time when I had to commute exactly 100 miles to work every Monday morning. The only thing that kept me awake and sane was EXTREMELY LOUD music. So I’m posting this life performance of “And Justice For All,” from Seattle in 1989, in honor of those “Metallica Mondays.”

It’s a slow news day, so I decided to write about something that I’ve meaning to get to for a while: the best new blogs and websites that I’ve discovered over the past year.

I’ll start with the two of the new kids on the block that is the left blogosophere: Charlie Pierce, who blogs at Esquire’s Politics Blog and Corey Robin, who writes at his own eponymous site. These two bloggers each, in different ways, bring some pretty cool things to the table. Robin, an academic and most recently the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, brings a wealth of scholarly knowledge, particularly about the right, as well as his real-world experience in the labor movement (he was organizer for Yale’s grad student union). He’s written about subjects ranging from the roots of conservative radicalism to the history of the bathroom break to Ron Paul. I appreciate the deep historical context Corey brings to discussions of contemporary conservatism — he helps you see continuities that are profound and yet by no means obvious. He’s also an astute observer of workplace tyrannies of all sort, which he connects to the conservative desire to assert dominance in the private sphere. Corey’s site has become, to me, one of the essential go-to blogs.

Charlie Pierce comes from the world of journalism — for many years he was, among other things, a sportswriter. He has a fine sense of the absurd, and he brings an old-school, hard-bitten reporterly skepticism to his coverage of politics. Clearly Pierce knows this tawdry, fallen world all too well, and has met more than a few public personages who, to paraphrase Woody Allen, would be unlikely to inspire the confidence of your average bail bondsman. And did I mention that Pierce writes like a dream? He truly does, and it’s a pleasure to read him. He is also freaking hilarious and deploys a vocabulary so inventively filthy that even I, no slouch in the foul-mouthed department myself, stand in awe. He’s used obscene expressions that are new to me, and that takes some doing — I thought I’d heard them all. He’s also come up with some awesomely rude (and profoundly well-deserved) nicknames for various loathsome public figures — for instance, “zombie-eyed granny starver” for Paul Ryan. Here are a few of the Pierce posts I’ve greatly enjoyed, on Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, and last but far from least, Charlie’s favorite whipping boy, David Brooks (about whom Pierce’s writing is so dead-on, entertainingly vicious that I almost feel sorry for him. But not really).

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This past week, the U.S. Depart of Commerce published an interesting report about the importance of the manufacturing sector for the U.S. economy. Manufacturing, says the report:

is a cornerstone of innovation in our economy: manufacturing firms fund most domestic corporate research and development (R&D;), and the resulting innovations and productivity growth improve our standard of living.

Also very important is the fact that manufacturing jobs tend to provide higher pay and better benefits than their nonmanufacturing counterparts:

After controlling for demographic, geographic, and job characteristics, manufacturing jobs experienced a significant 7 percent manufacturing wage premium. In other words, all else being equal, workers in manufacturing tend to earn 7 percent more per hour than their counterparts in other private industries.

[Snip]

Manufacturing workers are more likely than other workers to have significant, highly-valued employer-provided benefits, including medical insurance and retirement benefits. Taking these into account increases the manufacturing compensation premium to 15 percent.

The report minds me of an intriguing argument Thomas Geoghegan makes in Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, his book about European social democracy. Geoghegan makes several arguments for why the U.S. should develop an economic policy that encourages the creation of more high-skill manufacturing jobs and a stronger industrial base. But his most interesting pro-industrial argument is that, as he says, “without an industrial base, a democracy dies”:

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I’ve made it a habit to keep track of the New York Times’ “Most E-Mailed” articles list, because the list provides a fascinating window into the dreams, obsessions, and (especially) the anxieties of middle-class Americans. Currently, the most-emailed article is this piece, about how the ever-escalating cost of college combined with steep cuts in student aid and public support for higher education has left an entire generation drowning in debt. The article contains many scary statistics; here is one of them:

From 2001 to 2011, state and local financing per student declined by 24 percent nationally. Over the same period, tuition and fees at state schools increased 72 percent, compared with 29 percent for nonprofit private institutions, according to the College Board.

One major problem is that, not unlike the subprime lenders of the mortgage crisis, many colleges provide misleading information to naive prospective students about the true cost:

College marketing firms encourage school officials to focus on the value of the education rather than the cost. For example, an article on the cover of Enrollment Management, a newsletter aimed at college admissions officials, urged writers of admissions materials to “avoid bad words like ‘cost,’ ‘pay’ (try ‘and you get all this for…’), ‘contract’ and ‘buy’ in your piece and avoid the conflicting feelings they generate.”

[Snip]

The financial aid award letters to newly admitted students can also be a minefield for students and parents sorting through the true costs of a school. Some are written in a manner that suggests the student is getting a great deal, by blurring the line between grants and loans or not making clear how much the student may have to pay or borrow.

This is an extremely screwed up situation and there are a number of things we as a society need to do to address the problem of skyrocketing student debt. Here are two of the most important ones:

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In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m going to post one of my all-time favorite “mama” songs, Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors.” Dolly wrote this song, btw. She’s penned some real beauties in her time, but this one is surely one of the most moving. And I just adore Dolly — who doesn’t?

Happy Mother’s Day to one and all, and don’t forget to call your mom!

The must-read op-ed in today’s morning papers is this piece in the New York Times, on “The Human Disaster of Unemployment.” Interestingly, it’s co-authored by two economists who normally do not agree on very much: Dean Baker, from the left-wing Center for Economic and Policy Research, and Kevin Hassett, from the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. They call attention to the growing problem of long-term unemployment, which they characterize as “nothing short of a national emergency,” and they usefully summarize some of the grim consequences of unemployment, such as dramatically higher mortality rates for the unemployed; higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and psychiatric illnesses; higher divorce rates; and lower earnings for the children of unemployed workers.

They advocate for a variety of government interventions to deal with the unemployment program, but the one that intrigues me the most is the idea of job-sharing:

The recent bill that extended the payroll tax cut included a provision that covered the cost of work-sharing programs in the 23 states that already had them as part of their unemployment insurance systems, and it helped other states start such programs. This should slow job destruction in those states, which will improve chances for all workers seeking employment. From now on, the first line of defense during a recession should be to expand work sharing rather than simply extend unemployment benefits.

Given the huge psychic and economic traumas caused by unemployment; given the fact that the unemployed worker’s skills tend to erode dramatically during periods of unemployment, especially long-term unemployment; and given the fact that the longer a worker is unemployed, the more remote are the chances that she will ever find a job again, it makes a lot of sense that we as a society do all we can to help workers stay on the job. During economic downturns, job sharing shows much promise as a way to do this. Anything the government can do to promote job sharing and eliminate barriers to implementing job sharing on a mass scale should be strongly encouraged.

Job sharing also makes a lot of sense for another reason. As Alternet’s Sara Robinson recently pointed out in this excellent piece, a strong body of research suggests that “shorter work hours actually raise productivity and profits — and overtime destroys them.” Job-sharing would entail shorter work weeks which, as Robinson demonstrates, would likely be more economically efficient. Job sharing could be a powerful tool not only for dealing with our severe long-term unemployment problem, but also for reforming dysfunctional workplace cultures that demand long hours from employees, even when those long hours have few if any demonstrated benefits.

Here are some of the more interesting articles I’ve come across on the intertubes lately:

— Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell writes about the virtues, and also the limits, of one of my favorite magazines, Tom Frank’s splendid Baffler, which, following a 2-year absence, has made a most welcome return.

— The case for the pervasively corrosive effects of inequality becomes more damning every day. Paul Krugman reports on new research that suggest that inequality and lack of economic mobility are associated with high rates of teen pregnancy. (Speaking of Krugman, if for some reason you crave yet more evidence of what gigantic horse’s asses conservatives can be, check out this recent example of Krugman Derangement Syndrome).

— The wonderful Rebecca Traister argues that the war on women has helped feminists rediscover our joy.

— In the New York Review of Books, Garry Wills reviews the latest volume of Robert Caro’s monumental LBJ bio, focusing on the epic, astonishingly vitriolic political feud between LBJ and RFK. Sample quote: “I doubt that Caro, when he began his huge project, thought he would end up composing a moral disquisition on the nature of hatred. But that is what, in effect, he has given us. Hate breeds hate in an endless spiral.”

— Also in the current NYRB, Darryl Pinckney has written an extraordinary essay about, among other things, Trayvon Martin, Barack Obama, black identity, and the war between “the black revolutionary imperative” and “the materialism of American society.” It’s a must-read.

— And finally, I’m a bit late in getting to this, but I can’t recommend this recent, and remarkable, London Review of Books essay about Marilyn Monroe by British academic Jacqueline Rose highly enough. Even if you think you’ve been Marilyn’d to death and that there’s nothing more about the woman that could possibly interest you, trust me, Rose will surprise you. Most crucially, Rose reclaims Marilyn as an icon of American liberalism, and reveals Monroe as political activist, as a serious reader, as a tireless seeker and self-analyst: “To read Monroe’s fragments, letters, journals and poems is to realise that, however tormented, she had another life. It is to be struck by the unrelenting mental energy with which she confronted herself.” Once again it is deeply poignant to be reminded that Monroe did not live to see the rise of the second wave of the women’s movement. It’s fascinating to contemplate how she would have reacted to that world historic development.

Nancy Keegan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, has announced her resignation. Keegan claims that

she is leaving out of concern for the future of the pro-choice movement — and thinks she could be holding it back… [Snip] … If the pro-choice movement is to successfully defend abortion rights, Keenan contends, it needs more young people in leadership roles, including hers.

“There’s an opportunity for a new and younger leader,” Keenan said during a Wednesday interview in her downtown Washington office. “Roe v. Wade is 40 in January. It’s time for a new leader to come in and, basically, be the person for for the next 40 years of protecting reproductive choice.”

It’s unclear what other factors may have played a role in Keenan’s decision to step down. And while I don’t believe that younger leaders would necessarily bring in fresh ideas conducive to better outcomes, I do believe that the beleaguered pro-choice movement needs to seriously rethink its approach. For decades now, it’s been a terrible political climate for reproductive rights, and a woman’s right to an abortion is being slowly chipped away. I don’t blame the pro-choice establishment for this sorry state of affairs, but it must be said that their responses to it have not been particularly inspiring. Nor have they been particularly successful in stemming the anti-choice tide.

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