Nominating America: Obama's 10 Supreme prospects

The anglers’ saying for making a decision — “fish or cut bait” — has rarely attracted so much attention as it has since Sunday, when Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens used the phrase to set the terms for deciding on a time for retiring from the court. “There are still pros and cons to be considered,’ Justice John Paul Stevens told The New York Times. “[But] I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process. The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”

Stevens’ judicial early warning means that President Obama will nominate the 112th Justice of the Supreme Court — a choice he’ll make amid a political atmosphere more charged and partisan now than it was last year, when Sonia Sotomayor was appointed after reactions from the Senate, the public and right-wing radio that went from the mildly controversial to the downright derogatory (remember Rush Limbaugh’s allusions to Sotomayor as a cleaning woman?). ...

It’s a fact that whoever President Obama nominates to the court will be required to pass a test as fraught with politics as with a command of the law. Olive branches from ranking Senate Republicans notwithstanding, GOP senators can be expected, as a matter of reflex, to oppose whoever he chooses.

And Obama’s progressive-left base isn’t a slam-dunk for support, either; liberals and progressives will call on Obama to make a selection that reflects attention to that constituency — important now, vital in 2012. The one and possibly two appointments Obama may make before long is his chance to make his philosophical imprint on the court whose laws impact Americans like no other.

Ten names that come to mind — most of them previously floated on any number of hypothetical short lists — would offer the president an embarrassment of riches: a range of intellectual and judicial heavyweights reflecting a range of personal perspectives very much like America itself. ...

Read the 10 ready for Supreme consideration at TheGrio.

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Image credit: President Obama: Pool image, March 21.

Seven days of the Democrats

“A week is a year in politics,” some political physicist once observed. By that highly compressed metric, the year between March 23 and today went as well — as perfectly, insanely great — as it ever has for the Democrats. To judge from the succession of Democratic initiatives advanced on Capitol Hill and from the White House, and the rhetorical and strategic energy that preceded them, there’s a fresh chutzpah, a swagger in the step of the Dems that’s at least momentarily got Republicans on the defensive.

It started Tuesday with President Obama signing into law what may be the landmark of his domestic agenda, a sweeping health-care bill intended to cover another 32 million Americans with health insurance — a gambit that brings the United States as close to universal health care as we’ve ever come.

On Friday the president and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a breakthrough deal on a replacement for the START agreement, a proposed landmark treaty that would update the Cold War-era pact, and cut U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles by 30 percent. Pending ratification by the Senate, Obama will sign the formal treaty on April 8 in Prague.

"I'm pleased to announce that after a year of intense negotiations, the United States and Russia have agreed to the most comprehensive arms control agreement in nearly two decades," Obama told reporters.

"With this agreement, the United States and Russia -— the two largest nuclear powers in the world — also send a clear signal that we intend to lead," the president said.

The domestic triumph of health-care reform, followed in dizzyingly short order by a sweeping proposal to reduce the world’s biggest nuclear arsenals … Is there Red Bull in the water supply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

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Magic is generally defined as the art of misdirection; on Saturday, the president proved himself to be something of a master of the art. First came the news that, one day into the spring congressional recess (lawmakers lulled into thinking a quiet March Madness weekend was in store), the White House announced it had made 15 recess appointments, vital additions to agencies and boards that Obama made without the Senate’s approval.

It’s hardly unprecedented; recess appointments are a presidential perk that’s been used routinely (President Reagan did it hundreds of times). It’s one the Obama administration has been reluctant to use, a nod to its bipartisan inclination. That was then, this is now; no doubt invigorated by the big health-care win, Team Obama’s clutch of recess appointments was the week’s last slap upside the Republicans’ heads.

It was thought that Obama issued the appointments while safely ensconced at Camp David on Saturday. The news broke a while later that, no, the commander-in-chief was on the ground in frickin’ Afghanistan! President Obama arrived that day, making a surprise visit to U.S. troops at Bagram Air Base, and calling on Afghan President Hamid Karzai for a face-to-face. After six hours or so on the ground, the multitasker-in-chief hotfooted it home, back to the White House. Next mission: a Passover Seder with family, friends and close staff members, on Monday.

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This sense of the wind at the back of the Democrats is contagious. We’ve seen it on the Hill in recent weeks and months, as Rep. Alan Grayson of Florida and Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York spoke truth to power on the House floor during the vituperative health-care debate, with rhetorical flourishes that had more to do with the street than with Roberts’ Rules of Order.

Sen. Al Franken got the badass bug over the weekend. Frankel (who I saw occasionally back in the day at the New York Sports Club on 80th and Broadway in Manhattan, not far enough from Zabar’s, the gourmet-food emporium) was the subject of a media ambush orchestrated by Jason Mattera, a conservative mediaite and wannabe hit-man reporter in the mold of the producers from Fox News.

Nico Pitney of The Huffington Post writes:

“A conservative media activist named Jason Mattera confronted Sen. Al Franken last weekend and has posted video of the incident on YouTube.

“In the video, Mattera introduces himself warmly to Franken and then asks him, "Which portions of the health care bill lower costs? Is it the provision giving $7 billion to fund jungle gyms or the provision mandating that employers provide time off for breastfeeding?"

“Franken asks him to show him the portion of the legislation that gives "$7 billion to fund jungle gyms." Mattera points to a section of the bill he was carrying with him, but when Franken begins to respond, Mattera interjects: "Why is that the job of the federal government...to create an army of monkey bars? Go ahead, answer it."

“At this point, Franken seems to have had enough. "You have to shut up right now and listen to me instead of interrupting me." Mattera says, "I'm sorry, go ahead." The two continue their back-and-forth as Franken heads up a flight of stairs. …

Franken, of course, has been no freshman shrinking violet on Capitol Hill. From the beginning the prickly Minnesota senator has left no ideologue unchallenged, in recent months happily bitch-slapping Sens. Joe Lieberman and John Thune, and getting in the face of Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. Ambush-boy Mattera would be no exception.



Franken isn’t just an odd case. What’s striking is the way in which the Democrats, collectively buoyed by one success, have used its momentum to bolster their own self-confidence. And there’s no success quite like a Historic one.

William Galston, a former Clinton White House aide and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told the Associated Press on Sunday that the Obama White House "had a political near-death experience over health care the past few months. It turned out OK in the end, but it was a close call. So I think they have to ask themselves: Do they think Democratic elected officials and the electorate have the stomach for a lot more controversy?"

That misses the point of the White House’s recent assertiveness. It’s never really been about deliberately courting controversy; it’s been a matter of getting things done. Of intending to lead. And over the last seven days, that’s exactly what’s happened: a series of achievements, crowded with ceremony and substance.

All in all, it seems, a helluva good time to be a Democrat in Washington. For as long as it lasts.

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Image credits: Obama top: Pool. Red Bull: Red Bull GmBH. Obama in Afghanistan: Pete Souza/The White House.

The GOP and its malcontents

Sometime on Tuesday night, some idiot cut the propane line on the gas grill at the Virginia home of the brother of Rep. Thomas Perriello, a Democratic congressman who voted for the health care bill that was just signed into law. An organizer for the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party, posted on his blog what he believed to be the congressman’s address, in case “any of his friends and neighbors want to drop by and express their thanks regarding his vote for health care.”

It goes without saying that a lit match anywhere near that line could have meant a disaster for Bo Perriello, his wife or their four, small, children. Happily, that didn’t happen. But that little incident reflects how the Republican Party in particular and the nation in general are dealing with something even more combustible.

With the passage of the health-care reform bill into law, the Republicans have started the ritual blame game, deciding who in the conservative ranks was at fault for the most stunning legislative rebuke the GOP has sustained in years.

They can start with their philosophical brethren, the good folks in the Tea Party movement.

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The behavior of Tea Party activists in the weeks and days and even hours before Sunday’s pivotal House vote — when TP protesters stained the parliamentary process with hateful posters and old-fashioned racist invective — probably made it easy for Democratic fence-sitters to throw their weight behind the Obama legislation that passed.

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But the inflammatory rhetoric of the Tea Party crowd isn’t isolated to the Tea Party. After the vote came down on Sunday, GOP Rep. Steve King of Iowa spoke to a crowd of TP activists.

“You are the awesome American people,” King said. “If I could start a country with a bunch of people, they’d be the folks who were standing with us the last few days. Let’s hope we don’t have to do that! Let’s beat that other side to a pulp! Let’s chase them down. There’s going to be a reckoning!”

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On Saturday, Missouri congressman Emanuel Cleaver was spat upon by a protestor. Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and icon of the civil rights movement, was called a “nigger.” And Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank was labeled a “faggot” by protestors who shouted at him as he made his way to work.



South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, the House Majority Whip and like Lewis a veteran of the civil rights era, told The Huffington Post that he “heard people saying things [over the weekend] that I have not heard since March 15, 1960, when I was marching to try and get off the back of the bus.”

And then there was that little outburst on Sunday by Rep. Randy Neugebauer of Texas, the conservative who shouted “baby killer” at Democratic Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan on the floor of the House of Representatives, while Stupak was defending his support of the bill.

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Want some more? On the day Obama signed health-care bill into law, Carl Paladino, a Buffalo millionaire and Republican candidate for governor, equated the impact of the new federal health care law to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“The day that bill was passed will be remembered just as 9/11 was remembered in history,” Paladino told Curtis Sliwa during a morning drive-time interview on AM-970. “It was an attempt by these people in Washington to defy the Constitution.”

In the days since the signing, there have been at least 10 attacks or threats against Stupak and other Democratic lawmakers in upstate New York, Kansas, Ohio and Arizona.

And, oh yeah, that severed gas line at Bo Perriello’s home.

You can’t say President Obama’s inauguration 14 months ago didn’t put people to work. It effectively created a full employment act for Tea Party activist sign painters, graphic artists and Web designers all over the country. In their angry Photoshop-capable hands, the 44th president of the United States has been transformed into a witch doctor, a lab-coated mad scientist, Batman’s nemesis the Joker, a surrogate for Osama bin Laden, a Russian general and a darker, leaner version of Adolf Hitler.

The Internet is of course a great conduit for artistic outrage. Recently, for example, the SarahPAC Web site, run by former Alaska governor and political personality Sarah Palin, displayed a map of the United States featuring 20 crosshair designs scattered over various states — 20 crosshairs meant to symbolize the 20 House Democrats thought to be politically vulnerable in November.

And if that ballistic metaphor isn’t enough, check her Twitter page. That’s where, in the wake of conservative defeat last weekend, Palin wrote: “Commonsense Conservatives & Lovers of America: Don’t Retreat, Instead – RELOAD!”

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But there’s another element to all this. Clyburn’s sense of the pervasiveness of this attitude — “This stuff is not all that isolated,” he told MSNBC. “It's pretty widespread. I hope it's not too deep" — anticipates the reality documented in a March 2 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC report, the cover story of its quarterly Intelligence Report publication, documents “an astonishing 244 percent increase in the number of antigovernment Patriot groups in 2009.”

This is when change begins

It’s no panacea. The process of redirecting the oceanliner of our bureaucracy vis-à-vis health care will take time; the sausage-making process common to American legislation has not been repealed; the full effects won’t trickle down to everyday bedrock for another four years. But today at the White House, President Obama did what at least eight presidents in the modern era before him could not:

With his signing of the 2,409-page Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the biggest shift in health insurance coverage for American citizens since Medicare in 1966, about 32 million uninsured Americans are poised to reap the benefits of the closest thing to universal health insurance in the nation’s history.

A change in the social contract between government and governed has been laid upon the table, signed, sealed and delivered.

“Today, health insurance becomes law in the United States of America,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House.

“The bill I’m signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see,” said the president. “Today we are affirming that essential truth, a truth every generation is called to rediscover for itself, that we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.”

Up to now, much of the talking on the issue has been about politics and policy. With health-care reform now health-care law, you make the pivot to perception — of the president and his party. Obama’s too polite to throw it out there, but he’s entitled to ask: How ya like me now?

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People forget it was in his special joint session address to Congress, on Sept. 9, 2009, when he made his daring gauntlet throw-down on health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause but I am determined to be the last.”

Six months and change later, it’s reality. That’s a potent message to put before the voters between now and November, an actualization of his campaign slogan: not Yes He Can but Yes He Did. It’s the kind of big win Obama needed to buttress the Democratic base of supporters tired of congressional gridlock, hungry for the kind of transformational event that Obama’s election showed them was possible in the first place.

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Certainly, some of the disillusioned independent voters who drifted away from the Democrats in the past year will come back into the fold, galvanized by a refreshingly new Democratic focus on getting things done, and the Dems’ apparent willingness to leave the circular-firing-squad behavior to the Republicans.

And that perception of Democrats as winners will resonate further on the president’s behalf. With passage of a health-care law he pledged the American people, Barack Obama already steps into the ranks of the most socially transformational presidents of the last 100 years.

And we’re not even halfway through his first term.

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This is when change begins. But let's give credit where it’s overdue. If we want a shorter, less cumbersome name for the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, we might try calling it what it really is: the Dingle-Kennedy Act.

Their legislative contributions form the DNA of the new health-care law. No two members of Congress worked harder for what Obama signed into law than Democratic Rep. John Dingle, the congressional champion of health-care reform going back more than 50 years, and Edward Moore Kennedy, the late Democratic senator from Massachusetts who for 40 years made health-care reform not just his job in the Senate but his mission, his calling, to the day he died last year.

Dingle and Kennedy’s work for the healthcare reform that President Obama signed into law was, among other things, an attempt to level the playing field between haves and have-nots.

The New York Times’ David Leonhard gets that. Writing in the Times today about the economic impact of the Obama health care law, he notes how the law begins to change, or at least challenge, the economic disparities of American life — disparities that had their origins in the Reagan administration.

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“The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago,” Leonhard wrote.

“Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

"Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. … Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan.”

And Leonhard, recounting a story told to him by White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, reported Tuesday on how Summers, helping his daughter prepare for a college exam, “realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare — and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.

“Now there is.”

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Image credits: Health-care bill signing: Pete Souza/The White House. Signature: President Obama. Ted Kennedy: via The Huffington Post.

‘This is what change looks like’

“I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

President Obama

Yesterday’s date rendered strictly in numerical form — 3.21.10 — looks a lot like what the day turned out to be: a countdown clock on ruinous past practices, the arrival of time’s-up on a national legacy that’s been a national embarrassment before the world. It might have been just another official first full day of spring if not for the fact that lawmakers on Capitol Hill were busy changing the arc of the national future.

With the initiative and energy of President Obama and the negotiating skill of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership, a courageous Democratic Congress voted last night to enact the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the most panoramic change in health insurance coverage for American citizens since Medicare in 1966.



In two dramatic votes last night the Democratic led House passed the Senate bill 219-212, passed the reconciliation bill 220-211. The Senate bill, passed last Christmas Eve, now goes to President Obama to be signed into law in a ceremony on Tuesday morning. The reconciliation bill makes corrections to the Senate bill; it goes to the Senate for a final vote. A motion to recommit was also defeated by the Democrats.

The vote last night and the president’s expected signature in the morning usher in the most sweeping realignment of the terms of the social contract between the federal government and the American people in generations, and the closest thing to universal health care this nation has ever seen.

MSNBC’s Ed Schultz got the gravity of the occasion: “This is a defining moment in our history when it comes to what our priorities are. We have chosen people over profit.”

Talk-radio velociraptor and former recreational pharmaceutical enthusiast Rush Limbaugh might want to have his Costa Rican real estate agent on speed-dial right about now.

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“Tonight, after nearly 100 years of talk and frustration, after decades of trying, and a year of sustained effort and debate, the United States Congress finally declared that America’s workers and America's families and America's small businesses deserve the security of knowing that here, in this country, neither illness nor accident should endanger the dreams they’ve worked a lifetime to achieve,” Obama said in the East Room of the White House last night, after the deal went down.

“Tonight, at a time when the pundits said it was no longer possible, we rose above the weight of our politics. We pushed back on the undue influence of special interests. We didn't give in to mistrust or to cynicism or to fear. Instead, we proved that we are still a people capable of doing big things and tackling our biggest challenges. We proved that this government -- a government of the people and by the people -- still works for the people. ...

“This isn’t radical reform. But it is major reform. This legislation will not fix everything that ails our health care system. But it moves us decisively in the right direction. This is what change looks like.”

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For days now, the Democrats on the Hill have quietly betrayed a growing sense of optimism about passage of the bill, even as they engaged in a variation of Lyndon Johnson-style arm-twisting. And deal-making wioth one noted holdout: Rep. Bart Stupak of Michigan, a conservative Democrat who'd opposed the bill since November because of what he said were loopholes through which elective abortion could be paid for with public funds.

Stupak insisted on and yesterday received a way to make clear his objection to public funds used for abortion: A pending executive order announced by President Obama, meant to shore up his already-stated commitment to maintaining the Hyde Amendment's policy and language restricting federal funds for abortion in the current health-care legislation. Executive Order 13535 was signed after an agreement with Stupak, who’d threatened a no vote against the bill unless such an agreement were obtained.

“We’ve all stood on principle,” Stupak said at a news conference announcing the deal. “We expect the current Hyde language to apply throughout this health-care bill. “[The president] said there will be no federal dollars for abortion. The president has put his commitment in writing. This is a very extensive order, he does not plan on rescinding it.” ...

“We've always said ... that we were for health-care reform, but there was a principle that meant more to us than anything, and that was the sanctity of life.”

There’s some illogic in Stupak’s argument, though: How do you uphold the sanctity of life as an absolute and oppose health-care reform when opposing it likely means dismissing the sanctity of the lives of millions of Americans here already?

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The great thing about the Stupak-brokered agreement — besides the fact that its very existence validates the best deliberative possibilities of American government — is something that burnishes the president’s negotiating bona fides: the agreement that led to Obama’s executive order reflects no compromise of Obama’s own principles on the matter of elective abortion. He’s been on the record as saying that under his health plan, no federal funds would be used or siphoned off, directly or indirectly, to fund non-medically necessary abortions.

Health-care reform: Navigating the tunnel's end

The health-care debate that’s on the verge of becoming American history has hundreds of thousands of personal stories that distill the nation’s perilous situation on health care for its citizens into something accessible. The lofty, procedural, partisan rhetoric of the issue comes down to everyday scenarios. Like the one for Natoma Canfield, a small-businesswoman recently diagnosed with leukemia, a woman whose story typifies the bureaucratic farrago facing those millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.

Or Michael Brooks’ story. The 12-year-old Omaha boy, faced with a myofibroblastic tumor, a rare form of cancer that was unresponsive to chemotherapy, found that his family’s insurance wouldn’t cover an experimental procedure, according to KETV of Omaha. He faced a grim future until his community — from neighbors, friends and classmates to strangers wandering in off the street — rallied to gather the money for the experimental procedure. Health care by crowdsourcing: a sad sign of the times if there ever was.

It’s that kind of heart-wrenching financial improvisation that may be near an end in the United States. Sometime this week, maybe next at the very latest, President Obama expects to sign into law the most sweeping health-care legislation since Medicare, more than two generations ago, and the realization of an objective that has eluded this nation since Theodore Roosevelt first proposed it in 1912.

The caged death match Republicans have now with House Democrats hinges on so-called deeming resolutions, a procedure under which the yearlong saga of the health-care reform may finally be just about over. The resolution, shorthanded as “deem and pass,” was suggested by Rep. Louise Slaughter, chair of the House Rules Committee, and has been adopted and championed as a strategy by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.



It's the latest skirmish in the health-care warfare between the House and the Senate, the bruising and confusing legislative choreography that all these months has looked like gridlock to the American people.

The intricacies of this entirely parliamentary procedure will provoke a headache you don’t need, but Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post, breaks it down nicely:

The House is stuck having to basically pass the Senate health care bill, because the bill cannot be reconciled in conference committee. Why? Because it will be filibustered. However, House members are averse to doing anything that looks like they approve of the various side-deals that were made in the Senate -- like the so-called "Cornhusker Kickback." The House intends to remove those unpopular features in budget reconciliation, but if they pursue budget reconciliation on a standard legislative timeline -- where they pass the Senate bill outright first and then go back to pass a reconciliation package of fixes -- they'd still appear to be endorsing the sketchy side deals, and then the GOP would jump up and down on their heads.

Enter deem and pass. Under this process, the House will simply skip to approving the reconciliation fixes, and "deem" the Senate bill to be passed. By doing it this way, the Democrats get the Senate bill passed while simultaneously coming out against the unpopular features of the same.

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The conservatives won’t roll over. In recent days, the National Republican Congressional Committee took out a new sky-is-falling ad, a countdown clock in ominous blacks, whites and red counting down the time before the expected vote.

And the conservative press is up in arms. The Wall Street Journal, mouthpiece of media buccaneer Rupert Murdoch, condemned “deem and pass” as an “amazing procedural ruse,” a “two-votes-in-one gambit” and “a brazen affront” to the Constitution. The Journal mentions in passing that the procedure has been used in the past, only going back to 1998 to put it in a shallow historical context.

Exhuming McCarthy 2.0

The Republican Party has been in an ethical wilderness for so long now, has so aggressively assisted in its own spiritual demise, it’s hard to remember when this deathwatch really began. Bereft of any vision for the nation, emotionally attuned to the punitive instinct, ready to oppose President Obama on any initiative out of reflex rather than principle, the GOP has been on intellectual and credibility life support for a long time.

Liz Cheney, Jim Bunning and the Republican National Committee just pulled the plug.

With three events that happened in such lockstep it makes you think it was intentional, the conservatives in Congress and outside have been badly served by some of their number who showed, by accident and on purpose, just how desperate and mean-spirited they’re willing to be in order to advance their agenda.

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The Republicans’ lock on their old strong suit, national security, isn’t what it used to be; two wars and responsibility for the worst attack on American soil won’t enhance its bona fides on that front over the long haul. And so, the former vice president Dick Cheney has, in speeches and op-ed pieces and a forthcoming book, been working furiously to rewrite history as it relates to the panoramically criminal actions of the Bush administration.

Daughter Liz has happily entered the family business. On March 1, Liz Cheney’s right-wing advocacy group, Keep America Safe, released a breathtakingly ridiculous Web video that suggests that lawyers at the Justice Department responsible for defending the military prisoners collectively misidentified as “detainees” share the ideological viewpoints of the al-Qaida network.



It was a revisitation of the same innuendo and character assassination perfected by Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and unleashed on the country for three harrowing years during the McCarthy hearings in the 1950's. And like her apparent ideological mentor, Liz Cheney had her Joseph Welch moment. In fact, she had more than one.

Cheney’s DoJ broadside got a lot of pushback from a broad range of conservatives, some from previous Republican administrations, who indicated that the video was off base in its ad hominem attacks of Justice attorneys. The Conservative Power Line blog called the video “vicious” and “unfounded.”

Reginald Brown, former Bush associate White House counsel said “the video is truly offensive … It’s beyond a cheap shot to suggest that a lawyer is an al-Qaida sympathizer because he advocates a detainee’s position in the Supreme Court ...”



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Cheney’s YouTube mal mot surfaced two days before a story in Politico, a piece highlighting GOP fundraising documents apparently lost or forgotten at a Republican National Committee leadership retreat for top donors and fundraisers, held Feb. 18 at the Gasparilla Inn & Club in Boca Grande, Fla.

The presentation was delivered by RNC Finance Director Rob Bickhart, Politico reported on March 3. The 72-page document was provided to Politico by a Democrat who was apparently at the hotel.

The docs, assembled as a PowerPoint presentation, shows one graphic that highlights desired motivational triggers for getting donations from conservative supporters. At the top of the column for “Visceral Giving” (read: spot donors) is the word “Fear.” In another column headed “Calculated Giving” (code for deep-pocketed donors), motivations the document said are ripe for exploitation include giving that’s “Ego-Driven” or powered by a desire for “Access” or “Personal” reasons.

Another slide in the deck reads: “What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!”

From the Politico story: “In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives.”

It was all too clear for former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean. “The Republicans simply don’t respect American voters,” he told MSNBC on Thursday. “What this shows is that they don’t even respect their own donors among their own voters.”

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As you’d expect, the damage-control machine went off loudly at RNC headquarters.

“This was an internal matter,” RNC Chairman and apologist-in-chief Michael Steele told Fox News. “Clearly it’s not something I would tolerate … We’re dealing with it administratively within the RNC.”

“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, an attorney and organizer of the recent National Tea Party Convention, told the Daily Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.” Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.” “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting?”