(photo by votefx)

The Republican Party has engaged in a decades-long project to portray any Democratic electoral gains as fraudulent, chipping away at the legitimacy of any Democratic politician. A new poll by a Democratic firm shows that these efforts have paid off.

Public Policy Polling finds that a majority of Republicans believe that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama.

PPP’s newest national survey finds that a 52% majority of GOP voters nationally think that ACORN stole the Presidential election for Barack Obama last year, with only 27% granting that he won it legitimately. Clearly the ACORN card really is an effective one to play with the voters who will decide whether Hoffman gets to be the Republican nominee in a possible repeat bid in 2010.

Belief in the ACORN conspiracy theory is even higher among GOP partisans than the birther one, which only 42% of Republicans expressed agreement with on our national survey in September.

Overall 62% of Americans think Obama legitimately won the election to only 26% who think ACORN stole it for him, as few Democrats or independents buy into that line of thinking.

Losing Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman is resorting to this tactic in NY-23, claiming that ACORN stole his Congressional election for Democrat Bill Owens.

Though a majority of Americans believe the President legitimately won the election, the fact that so many Republicans believe in what practically every actual study has shown to be a mythical scenario of voter fraud has value for the conservative movement in delegitimizing Democratic political figures. This moves the rhetoric on the conservative side further and further to the right, as an illegitimate figure is easily demonized, and conservatives willing to believe in an fantasy “stolen election” scenario are willing to believe in all kinds of conspiracies.

This is a very dangerous scenario for the American political process.

In a special one-hour live stream, we bring back many of our guests from last year’s election day show to discuss what’s changed, what’s stayed the same, and what we still hope to see happen under Obama.

Elections around the country of course saw nowhere near the turnout of the presidential race, yet the corporate media still insists on considering races in Virginia and New Jersey referenda on Obama. What do the results really mean? And what’s going on in the Obama administration? We’ll talk to Katrina vanden Heuvel and Chris Hayes of The Nation, Jehmu Greene of the Women’s Media Center, James Rucker of Color Of Change, Danny Schechter of News Dissector, Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake, Mark Green of Air America, Esther Armah of WBAI, and special guests from the Maine Equality movement and elsewhere.

Leave comments on this post or tweet them @GRITtv and we’ll ask our guests!

Who wants change? (photo by David Katz)

I have a tiny, 750 square-foot house. But I’ve somehow made room for one of those enormous Obama “Hope” posters. You know the one – you’ve seen it a million times. This one sits framed in my kitchen – on it are the signatures of many of the volunteers I worked with on the Obama campaign last year.

Every day I am reminded of the miracle we pulled off. Every day I’m reminded how, in our congressional district alone (CA-36), 1,500 volunteers made over 600,000 phone calls to swing states all over the country, and sent hundreds of volunteers to Nevada and New Mexico to get out the vote and turn those states blue.

Every day I am reminded that change can only happen when citizens stand together and take ownership over their government, their country, their communities and themselves. Every day I am reminded our work does not end with a campaign, but rather begins with a new President, a new government, and a new day.

Tonight, as I write this, Republicans have taken the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey, yet in NY-23 Democrat Bill Owens beat out “Conservative Party” candidate Doug Hoffman, and Democrat John Garamendi easily defeated Republican David Harmer in CA-10 by running as a staunch progressive in what had previously been considered a “moderate” democratic district.

And in a heartbreaking reminder of Proposition 8 in California, another marriage equality proposition hangs in the balance vote denies homosexual Americans their rights – this time in Maine.

Every day I am reminded our work does not end with a campaign.

Our President inherited a shit sandwich from one of the most venal and incompetent administrations our country has ever known. It is all he and his administration can do keep our country from sinking into another Great Depression or stumbling into WWIII.

What’s left of the Republican party is becoming the American Taliban right before our eyes while Conservative Democrats threaten to derail health care legislation at every turn.

President Obama won the Nobel Peace prize this year, and we are poised to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan. My brother-in-law will be returning to Iraq for his third tour of duty this month, leaving a wife and three children behind. He joined the Army 15 years ago because when his wife got pregnant with their first son and they couldn’t afford health insurance. They still can’t.

Every day I am reminded our work does not end with a campaign.

I believe in my President. But I don’t expect him to “rescue” us. We entered into an implied contract when we helped get Barack Obama elected. We expected Change, we expected to be respected, empowered and included, we expected him to fight, and we expected to join him in that fight.

That contract, in many ways, has only been partially fulfilled.

As way of example, I take Obama at his word when he says he believes the public option is the best way to reform our health care system. But here’s what I’ve never heard him say:

While the public option may be the best way to bring reform to our health care system, it’s not the easiest or surest road to passing health care reform through congress – in fact it may be the most difficult. I understand this risk and willing to take it, because together I believe we can make this dream a reality.

Instead, I believe the President and his advisers have chosen a different path, one they hoped was less risky, one that would more likely give them a victory that’s eluded every President since Roosevelt. They chose triggers. They chose Olympia Snowe. They have, all along the way, chose to manage expectations for the public option instead of drawing a line in the sand and fighting for it. Not because they’re corrupt, or deceitful or because they don’t believe in efficacy of the public option, but because they don’t believe the system would allow it to happen.

They say politics is the art of the possible.

This is what they believe is possible.

I believe they’ve created a self-fulfilling prophecy, and by doing so, have made the possible finite.

Every day I am reminded our work does not end with a campaign.

If the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn’t want to go.

So it’s up to us – all of us – to hold our President accountable. To support him when he needs it, but also to hold his feet to the fire when he chooses the merely possible over the audacity of hope.

We have to make sure the path against the public option, against withdrawal from Afghanistan and Iraq, against the climate change bill, against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, and against federal marriage equality is more difficult than the path for it.

This is our end of the contract. We have to understand what the issues are, and understand that merely “supporting the President’s agenda” may not be enough.

Every day, when I walk by my kitchen wall and see that poster and see my volunteer’s names scrawled across its face, I am reminded our work does not end with a campaign.

We did not ask permission then and we do not need permission now.

We will be the change we seek and we will move our country towards the possibilities of the infinite.

[Welcome Michael Huttner (ProgressNow) and Jason Salzman, and Host Toby Wollin.   Please stay on topic - bev]

50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America

Alright…everyone comfy? Once upon a time, the DH and I wanted to get pregnant. Now, for many young couples this is, shall we say, a simple affair; and actually, if you asked them, they would say, “We want to have a baby,” not “we’re trying to get pregnant.”

To say that ‘getting pregnant’ for the DH and your Aunt Toby was a ‘group project’ is putting it mildly and I will NOT go into details about what and who it involved. Suffice it to say that the only person who did not have a hand in it was probably the local mayor. And it took some solid work and science and faith and a bunch of other stuff over a period of several years.

When we found out I was pregnant, it was actually a huge surprise because I thought I was ill again, only this time the answer was something out of one of those cheesy 1950s films. And that’s when the trouble started. Because the project had become ‘getting pregnant’ – not ‘having a baby,’  the DH and I struggled for about two weeks wrestling with changing the mind set from “All we want is to get pregnant” to “We’ve got to prepare to become a family.”

Totally different deal, requiring totally different thinking, totally different activities — planning, putting things into action, working through all the ‘what if’, etc. etc.

Electing Barack Obama has actually been sort of the same thing. For a lot of people, just getting Obama elected president was IT. They’d been fighting (or hiding under the bed, whichever the choice) for so long that this was the be-all and end-all. And then he got elected (with the help of a lot of people who actually went and stood in the voting booth and made their choice) and everyone held their breaths and waited for some disaster to hit before the inaugural. And then Aretha Franklin stood up and sang and the Chief Justice screwed up the oath and they did it again. And there’s been all this noise trying to delegitimize the entire thing.

Over and over and over again.

And now the GOP seems to have also taken the position that their job is to stop ANYTHING from happening; hoping that with the economy, and the war, and everything else, they can wave the ‘see, they didn’t do anything’ flag.

It’s become a constant struggle with ‘we want to get pregnant’ rather than what we need to do as a country, which is ‘we have to move things along to the future.”

For those of us who need check lists, spreadsheets, phone numbers, web sites, suggestions, contacts and ideas, Michael Huttner and Jason Salzman have provided an accessible, interesting, enlightening, and ORGANIZED book to help us all get off ‘the short game’ and get into the real business of why we elected Barack Obama in the first place: to change America. This book, 50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America, is a simple way for anyone to become more involved at any level, get more involved in more ways, and keep things moving forward. It’s filed with ideas, solid data and information, and practical ways to put things into action. This is a terrific handbook for anyone looking to ‘be the change they wish to see.” Please welcome Michael and Jason.

I have no idea what is going on here…

Fred Barnes, who is the emergency back-up always-wrong person in case Bill Kristol is unable to fulfill his duties, points out that President Blacker Than A 1000 Midnights should never attempt anything that might turn out badly like, say, getting involved in a land war in Asia. Barnes then challenges all of the DC media types to totally call Obama out for being a big fucking failure who, if he had a shred of decency, would resign because he can’t win anything of importance, besides that Leader of the Free World thing:

…Obama’s aides assured reporters the president wouldn’t be put in a position where he could be embarrassed. But that’s exactly what happened. The White House gang thought the IOC was poised to ratify the president’s bid for a Chicago Olympics. Hardly anyone else shared that view, including the Japanese, who figured Tokyo wouldn’t be picked but Rio would be and Chicago would finish last.

And even Fred Barnes (Fred Barnes!) knows that only fools bet on long shots because they have failed to weigh all of the available evidence and tend to think not with their heads but with their —

Sorry. What? Oh…

Standard editor Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

Well yeah, but what about that time when the Huffington Post asked 27 Very Smart People (including Karl Rove, George Will, Ed Rollins, and Morton Kondrake) on 11/2/2008 who was going to win the election and all 27 of them picked Barack Obama—

What? Oh, one person didn’t:

Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard editor
Winner: McCain
Electoral College: Obama 252 McCain 286
Senate Seats: 55 Democrats 43 Republicans
House Seats: 255 Democrats 180 Republicans

How bad was that? Even Mark Halperin (Mark Halperin!) got it right, and I’m pretty sure that he’s brain damaged.

h/t Barack Obama flickr page

It was only a year ago, when Democrats approved the party’s platform in Denver. In the space of 57 pages, the platform addressed all manner of issues before the country: energy, science, national security, education, etc. The platform laid out for the voters a clear statement of what the Democratic party stands for, and called on voters to make a choice between the GOP vision for the country and the Democratic vision for the country — a choice digby described yesterday as being between "the fear and resentment tribe and the inspiration and progress tribe."

In the platform of the inspiration and progress tribe, after the introductory comments, the very first issue that is raised is health care: 

If one thing came through in the platform hearings, it was that Democrats are united around a commitment that every American man, woman, and child be guaranteed affordable, comprehensive healthcare. In meeting after meeting, people expressed moral outrage with a health care crisis that leaves millions of Americans–including nine million children–without health insurance and millions more struggling to pay rising costs for poor quality care. Half of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills. We spend more on health care than any other country, but we’re ranked 47th in life expectancy and 43rd in child mortality. 

The whole health care section of the Democratic platform is well worth reviewing, as Democrats prepare for the battles in the coming weeks. The opening vision of inspiration and progress it lays out for health care is particularly impressive (emphasis added):

Our vision of a strengthened and improved health care system for all Americans stands in stark contrast to the Republican Party’s and includes:

Covering All Americans and Providing Real Choices of Affordable Health Insurance Options. Families and individuals should have the option of keeping the coverage they have or choosing from a wide array of health insurance plans, including many private health insurance options and a public plan.

Max Baucus: did you catch the last four words there? ". . . and a public plan." 

Health care is the very first issue the platform deals with at length, and the very first specific policy prescription in that section is for health care choices that include a public plan.

The polling shows that the country wants to have the choice of a public plan for their health insurance, and the platform adopted by the Democratic party last August says that the Democrats want to provide people with that choice.

Why do Rahm Emanuel, Max Baucus, and the Blue Dogs not want to do what the country yearns for and what the party pledged itself to do? After all, if voters wanted a GOP health care plan that is driven by fear and resentment, they would have elected more than 40 of them to the US Senate.

The choice of a public plan: that’s what Democrats promised, and that’s what the country wants. 

It’s time to step up, Mr. President, and help the Democrats on the Hill to do what was promised.

My colleague Dana Bash and I have learned from a source, each one of us, that this White House right now is very quietly in serious conversations with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe, a key moderate.

She is basically the last Republican out of those gang of six senators who have been negotiating, really the last Republican that has an open line to this White House right now.

What we’re hearing that she’s talking about with White House staff is sort of a scaled-back bill that would focus on insurance reforms that both sides could agree to, but would not have a full public option, instead, would have a so-called trigger. What that means in layman’s terms is basically that the insurance companies would have a couple of years to make some dramatic changes.

If they do not make those changes, then a public option would be triggered. So, it would be used down the road. They would hope that this would appease liberals by saying it’s not completely off the table. And the big hope is that this could bring along another moderate Republican, like maybe Susan Collins of Maine, some conservative Democrats, like Ben Nelson and Mary Landrieu in the Senate, who don’t want a public option, but would sort of potentially be open to a trigger like this.

That is just great. In 2008, we put a Democrat in the White House, delivered a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate and a 79 seat majority in the House, just so. . . a Republican could write the health care bill.

The Republican Noise Machine

Things that many Americans, thanks in large part to well-financed conservative myth machines, think are true but which aren’t:

– "The ‘Wild West’ Didn’t Have Gun Control." Oh yes it did:

Pioneer publications show Old West leaders repeatedly arguing in favor of gun control. City leaders in the old cattle towns knew from experience what some Americans today don’t want to believe: a town that allows easy access to guns invites trouble.

What these cow-town leaders saw intimately in their day-to-day association with guns is that more guns in more places created not greater security but greater danger in an already dangerous wilderness. By the 1880s many in the West were fed up with gun violence. Gun control, they contended, was absolutely essential, and the remedy advocated usually was usually no less than a total ban on pistol-packing.

The prevalence of gun control in the West is part of what kept it from being anywhere near as wild as the dime-store novelists, writing for Eastern and European audiences, depicted — depictions that NRA-worshipping conservatives cherish so much that they screamed bloody murder at Clint Eastwood when he dared to show 19th-century Western gun control in his film Unforgiven.

– "FDR’s Dropping the Gold Standard was a Horrible Mistake."  On the contrary — as economist Brad DeLong shows here and here, dropping the gold standard was what allowed Roosevelt to save the country in the 1930s.    The less time a nation spent on the gold standard, the better off it was.

– "Americans Get the Best Health in the World from Private Industry."  How wrong is this?   Markfromireland cites the Journal of the American Medical Association’s own study eviscerating this myth-lie — and shows that even the richest Americans are no healthier on average, and get no better care on average, than the poorest and sickest Brits.  Why?  Because the UK’s National Health Service, terribly underfunded though it is, still outperforms the US’ private-medical industry.  In fact, the best health care in America is not provided by private industry, but by the Federal government through the Veterans Administration.

– "Obama’s and the Democrats’ Ratings are Dropping ‘Cuz Americans Reject Traditional Democratic Policies."  Actually, as the crosstabs of this Daily Kos poll show, the biggest drop in Obama’s and other elected Democrats’ numbers are occurring because the people who voted for them want to see a lot more Democratic behavior than is currently being exhibited.  In other words, we didn’t vote for "bipartisanship", we voted for change.   Obama, the Blue Dogs, and the rest of the Capitol Hill Democrats forget this at their peril.  (That includes you, Max Baucus –as Montanans, especially Democratic ones, aren’t too happy with you right now for rejecting the public option.)

But maybe there are some lessons that can be drawn from the most recent parallel — the avalanche of lies, feigned outrages, and scurrilous rumors that John McCain’s campaign unleashed on Obama in last fall’s presidential race.

You remember that, right? "Lipstick on a pig"? TV ads insinuating that Obama wanted to teach sex education to kindergarten students? In the end, it didn’t work, and Obama overcame an early September deficit to win the election.

Of course, some factors that helped then aren’t around now. It’s unlikely that a major, unexpected event like the sudden economic collapse of late September will boost Obama’s political prospects now. And he doesn’t have the advantage of running as an either-or choice against the increasingly implausible duo of John McCain and Sarah Palin. (Whatever you may think of Obama’s first seven months, can you imagine having those two in the White House?)

But really, the main element that helped Obama survive last fall’s mudslinging was his ability to dominate the airwaves, thanks to his campaign’s enormous fundraising advantage. Then, as now, you had random, stray fact-checks in the media that debunked the lies. But the crucial multiplier was Team Obama’s ability to leverage those into hard-hitting ads that defined McCain far more vividly than the GOP’s smears did Obama… even as the Democratic campaign was protecting its own image with an equally heavy onslaught of positive commercials.

Is the famed "bully pulpit" of the Presidency going to be enough to replace that? Obama’s campaign advertising enabled him to play good cop and bad cop at the same time. We know he can still do the former; Obama has an almost limitless ability to present himself as reasonable and above the fray. But how is his soft-spoken calm going to drown out the noise machine — and define and discredit them the way his campaign was able to do last fall?