Kautzman's AP GO PO Blog

It was not all that long ago that political reporters were writing about “the Republican lock” on the White House. From 1972 to 1988, from Richard Nixon’s re-election through George H.W. Bush’s victory over Michael Dukakis, 24 states supported the GOP nominee each time.

By the end of the run, those states could deliver 219 electoral votes, leaving only 51 others to make up a majority.

But now the Republican electoral lock has been replaced and surpassed by “the blue wall.” That’s the term Ronald Brownstein, the political director of the Atlantic Media Company, applies to the Democrats’ advantage.

In an important article in a recent National Journal, Brownstein notes that there are now 18 states and the District of Columbia that have voted Democratic at least five times in a row, supporting Democrats from Bill Clinton through Barack Obama. Those states – concentrated in the Northeast, the upper Midwest and on the Pacific Coast – provide 248 electoral votes, 29 more than the old Republican lock and more than 90 percent of the Electoral College majority.

Democrats also hold at least 33 of the 36 Senate seats from those states (with the Minnesota race still undecided), 12 of the 18 governorships and the vast majority of House and legislative seats. The wall appears to be solid.

But as one who is more impressed with the volatility of American politics, especially in this age of lightly held or nonexistent party loyalties, I am skeptical of terms like “electoral lock” or “blue wall.”

Still, if real-world confirmation of Brownstein’s thesis were needed, the Republican National Committee furnished it on Jan. 30 when it elected Michael Steele, the former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as the first African-American to hold that post.

It was the clearest possible signal that the GOP realizes it must escape the shackles of its ideologically binding Southern strategy and compete in a more diverse, pragmatic and intellectually challenging environment.

I have written before about the way the election losses of 2006 and 2008 left the House and Senate Republicans even more dependent on those elected from Southern states. The attrition in the Northeast, Midwest and West has been heavy, and ever since Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich started the trend back in 1994, the national party has spoken more and more with a Southern drawl.

Brownstein noted that several of the 18 states in the blue wall had been part of the earlier Republican lock. California, Illinois, New Jersey and Vermont switched sides, in part as a reaction against a Republican Party dominated by the South and defined by its conservative positions on abortion, immigration, stem-cell research and the teaching of evolution.

The states that are part of the blue wall have distinctive characteristics. As Brownstein wrote, they “combine large numbers of well-educated, affluent and less-religious whites with substantial numbers of racial and ethnic minorities, including sizable immigrant populations.”

They rank high in the proportion of college graduates and residents who are foreign-born, and their median income tops the national average. They lag in church attendance. Every one of those traits makes them less receptive to the message being offered by most Republicans.

Maryland, where Michael Steele built his political base, and the District of Columbia, where he has practiced law, are building blocks of the blue wall. After losing a Senate race in 2006, Steele understands how great a disadvantage the party label is in places like his home. He is pro-life, as are most Republicans. But his message to his party is to broaden its appeal and to raise its sights. When Steele defeated the former Republican chairman of Lee Atwater’s and Strom Thurmond’s South Carolina, the ancestral home of the Southern strategy, in the final round of voting for the RNC chairmanship, it sent a dramatic signal of change from the old ways and the old alignments.

It will obviously take much more than that to put the GOP into a position to challenge the blue wall – and the hard fights all lie ahead, in the primaries for candidates in 2010 and 2012, and in the policy debates within the Senate and House GOP caucuses.

Clearly, Republicans have to change if they are going to climb that wall.

DAVOS, Switzerland – With its stellar cast of political and economic leaders, the World Economic Forum here provides an excellent barometer of the latest economic and political trends.

But this year’s Davos was positively scary. Its overwhelming message was that the world is changing in ways more unnerving than most of us have grasped.

The baby boom generation grew up during a period of unprecedented prosperity, with the expectation that life would be even better for their kids. The magnitude of the current economic crisis has undermined those expectations. “We are still in denial about how serious this is,” noted British historian Niall Ferguson said at the forum.

I believe he is right. At Davos, there was a strong sense of the passing of the American era. The widespread anger at the United States’ responsibility for the crisis – the reckless mortgage lending, the complex financial instruments that few understood, the lack of regulation – was tempered by one big factor: the hope that President Obama can make a difference.

Yet, despite good will toward Obama, few at Davos believed he could save the U.S. economy from more unraveling. “I’m very worried,” financier George Soros told journalists at a luncheon. “We’re still heading into the storm rather than out of it.”

Ferguson said he believes the crisis is “a turning point which signals the decline of U.S. power.” He pointed out that a combination of large debts and low growth “did Britain in” as a global leader in 1945.

Over the last eight years, the United States has run up huge deficits financed largely by borrowing from China and Arab oil states. Americans saved little and spent big, egged on by a White House that said deficits didn’t matter.

That tide of red ink is turning into a tsunami, as more government funds are poured into bailouts and stimulus packages. This bad balance sheet is not sustainable, especially if – as Ferguson believes – the U.S. economy will grow only 1 percent a year for the next decade.

Ferguson predicts the American debtosaurus will succumb to the same double whammy that did in British global dominance: large indebtedness and low growth rates.

Some economists at the forum thought Ferguson’s growth predictions too pessimistic. But the U.S. economic model – once the object of emulation at Davos – was the whipping boy this year.

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao castigated the “unsustainable model of development” of some unnamed countries, characterized “by prolonged low savings and high consumption,” and he attacked the “blind pursuit of profit.” In previous years, Davos-goers might have scoffed at that language, but this year, Wen drew rapt attention.

No longer is Davos the bastion of the Washington consensus that championed wholly free markets; this year, the forum was consumed by talk of the need for state intervention to save industries and banks.

But what really conveyed the sense of an era passing was the palpable loss of confidence in America’s economic savvy. Over and over, attendees asked how investment bankers could have been so stupid.

Others had the same question about U.S. regulators, the rating agencies, the borrowers, the investors and the politicians who thought more home ownership could be created out of thin air. Ditto for the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan.

One also had the sense that Americans had lost faith in themselves. There was little agreement on how to overcome the crisis or coordinate a global response to it – or on how to forestall a worldwide wave of protectionism that could severely restrict trade.

The only upbeat American I heard at Davos was Al Gore, who insisted that the United States retains the capacity to lead the world by synchronizing a stimulus package with a push for alternative sources of energy. It was a relief to hear someone who hadn’t succumbed to the palpable feeling of fear in the air.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls it “Armageddon.”

Home Depot’s CEO called it “the demise of a civilization,” and said his fellow corporate executives who didn’t contribute big bucks to defeat it “should be shot, should be thrown out of their (expletive) jobs.”

What has Corporate America so apoplectic with fear and anger? A fatal epidemic? A terrorist nuclear threat? A new Michael Moore movie?

It’s legislation before Congress called the Employee Free Choice Act. It would increase fines and penalties against employers that refuse to negotiate union contracts or that illegally threaten or fire workers who support forming unions.

But the provision that strikes fear in the heart of Corporate America is allowing the workers to decide for themselves whether they want to form a union through the traditional government-supervised ballot election or by signing authorization cards.

It doesn’t eliminate “secret ballot elections,” as you’ve been told. It lets the workers decide if they want one, instead of letting the boss decide, as he now does.

Here is the sad truth. If you support forming a union in America, your employer can – and often will – harass, demote or fire you. It doesn’t matter that it’s illegal. Federal labor laws are so weak, and so weakly enforced, that it could take years of litigation just to prove you were unlawfully fired. Even then, the fines are minuscule.

We, as Americans, should be ashamed. This country, which prides itself for protecting the freedom of association, is listed by Human Rights Watch alongside Third-World dictatorships as a violator of basic human rights on this issue.

Today, the illegal suppression of unions is a simple cost of doing business. It’s seen as cheaper than granting your employees a union contract with higher wages, better benefits and a voice on the job.

Workers who belong to unions earn 30 percent more than non-union workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. They are 59 percent more likely to have employer- provided health coverage and 72 percent more likely to have pensions.

Corporations know this. They don’t want their employees to unionize. And right now, they have the system rigged.

That’s why they so aggressively oppose attempts to reform labor laws to make it easier to form unions. And that’s why, as you read this, they are spending millions to convince you the EFCA will take away your sacred right to “secret ballot” election and lead to intimidation by union thugs like me.

They are lying to you. The EFCA doesn’t eliminate the secret ballot, it lets workers choose if they want one.

As for union thugs on your doorstep, union-authorization cards have always been a part of the election process established by the National Labor Relations Act. In the 70 years that labor organizers have been seeking card signatures, there have been fewer than 50 cases of union misconduct or coercion documented by the National Labor Relations Board. That’s less than one case per year.

Compare that to 29,559 cases in 2007 alone of workers receiving back pay in cases where employers were charged with violating workers’ rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

We have example after example of companies right here in Eastern Washington where workers have reached out to union organizations asking for representation. The results have been intimidation and threats by the employers; fear mongering from the employers to the point of retreat from employees. This doesn’t sound like the America or the community that I know and love.

Notoriously anti-union companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot want you to believe you need their protection from the Employee Free Choice Act and from jack-booted union thugs that will come crashing through your front window to take your money.

When are we going to stand up for our rights, and stop listening to this disingenuous, self-serving propaganda from multinational corporations?