This Article Should Not Only Be A Part Of Our History BUT Should Also Be A Wake Up Call To All Democrats And Independence Who Value Their Freedom!

It's quite obvious that the Democrats have not been paying attention, have no fight in them or they are still trying to teach President Obama a lesson after last nights win in NY but if they don't become fighters, learn what loyalty to a party is or have the ability to learn a lesson from mid-terms then we all lose!  I am not ready to give up what freedoms I have left because I was too lazy or ignorant to keep the tea party republicans out of the WH and out of Congress!  We are left with one simple fact; because of many on the left and indies it IS going to take a village to get rid of the idiots!-Mem

Now THIS, the Obama campaign should worry about
September 14, 2011
 

What could stop the Obama re-elect cold? New rules.

There’s a new adage, you might say, in Republican politics. If the rules don’t ensure victory for your side, change the rules.

That’s one way to sum up the veritable stew of voter ID laws, redistricting gamesmanship and other restrictive measures being thrown up to flummox young voters, minority voters and anybody else who might have a troubling proclivity to vote Democratic. (Can laws requiring women to bring their husbands with them to the polls in order to be eligible be next?)

But the latest “genius plan” to pull a 2000 in 2012 just might work. And Democrats need to sit up and take notice.

From Mother Jones:

The problem for Obama, and the opportunity for Republicans, is the electoral college. Every political junkie knows that the presidential election isn’t a truly national contest; it’s a state-by-state fight, and each state is worth a number of electoral votes equal to the size of the state’s congressional delegation. (The District of Columbia also gets three votes.) There are 538 electoral votes up for grabs; win 270, and you’re the president.

Here’s the rub, though: Each state gets to determine how its electoral votes are allocated. Currently, 48 states and DC use a winner-take-all system in which the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state gets all of its electoral votes. Under the Republican plan—which has been endorsed by top GOPers in both houses of the state Legislature, as well as the governor, Tom Corbett—Pennsylvania would change from this system to one where each congressional district gets its own electoral vote. (Two electoral votes—one for each of the state’s two senators—would go to the statewide winner.)

This could cost Obama dearly. The GOP controls both houses of the state Legislature plus the governor’s mansion—the so-called “redistricting trifecta”—in Pennsylvania. Congressional district maps are adjusted after every census, and the last one just finished up. That means Pennsylvania Republicans get to draw the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts without any input from Democrats. Some of the early maps have leaked to the press, and Democrats expect that the Pennsylvania congressional map for the 2012 elections will have 12 safe GOP seats compared to just 6 safe Democratic seats.

Under the Republican plan, if the GOP presidential nominee carries the GOP-leaning districts but Obama carries the state, the GOP nominee would get 12 electoral votes out of Pennsylvania, but Obama would only get eight—six for winning the blue districts, and two (representing the state’s two senators) for winning the state. Since Obama would lose 12 electoral votes relative to the winner-take-all baseline, this would have an effect equivalent to flipping a medium-size winner-take-all state—say, Washington, which has 12 electoral votes—from blue to red.* And Republicans wouldn’t even have to do any extra campaigning or spend any extra advertising dollars to do it.

Nebraska and Maine already have this system, but their small electoral vote size makes it mathematically impossible, apparently, to pull such a switcheroo off there. But Pennsylvania is a big, major, important state.

And by standing down and allowing Republicans to also overrun crucial blue-trending swings states: Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin, Democrats (including union voters, a third of whom switched their votes to GOP in the midterms, and all the disgruntled or complacent Dems who stayed home) may have made 2010 the father of 2012, almost no matter what the president and his campaign do.
A bit more from Mother:

Implementing a Pennsylvania-style system in those three places—in Ohio, for example, Democrats anticipate controlling just 4 or 5 of the state’s 16 congressional districts—could offset Obama wins in states where he has expanded the electoral map, like Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, or Virginia. “If all these Rust Belt folks get together and make this happen, that could be really dramatic,” says Carolyn Fiddler, a spokeswoman for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), which coordinates state political races for the Dems.

Democrats would not be able to retaliate. The only states that John McCain won where Dems control both houses of the state legislature are Arkansas and West Virginia.* West Virginia is too small for splitting the electoral votes to have much effect. That leaves Arkansas, another small state—and one where McCain won every district handily in 2008.

Nor is there anything obviously illegal or unconstitutional about the GOP plan. “The Constitution is pretty silent on how the electors are chosen in each state,” says Karl Manheim, a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles. The GOP plan “would certainly increase the political advantage of politically gerrymandering your districts,” he adds.

Says Fiddler, the DLCC spokeswoman: “This would effectively extend the effect of gerrymandering beyond Congress and to the Electoral College. State legislatures could gerrymander the Electoral College.”

Call it the cost of not voting in midterms.

I’m not as doom and gloom on the president’s re-election prospects as my friend Beth Reinhardt and her colleagues at the National Journal are, nor am I ready to call the race for whatever Republican happens to be standing nearby, like Charlie Cook is (well, he’s like that every election…) but I do agree with Burton that Democrats lack a sense of urgency in the re-election fight, because they think of the various and sundry oddballs running for the GOP nomination as easy pickings. The tea party on the other hand, never lacks a sense of urgency. They simply don’t quit, and won’t, til they’ve got the entire federal government in hand. That’s serious business, and Democrats ought to take it seriously.

The Reid Report