This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
The first thing you need to understand about Florida’s political climate is that its seemingly endless summer of Boom Times seems to be coming to a close. The vast migration to the state that caused its population to increase over 16 percent since the 2000 census seems to be winding down, and last year, shockingly enough, it actually lost population. The state’s economy is suffering from problems that are deeper than any business cycle: Its 2.7 percent drop in per capita personal income has pushed the state near the bottom of rankings by percent change of personal income data. State government and politics have followed suit, inaugurating a period of unhappy partisan and ideological wrangling with no clear outcome in sight.
Many of the troubles resemble the problems of Florida’s distant political cousins, Arizona and Nevada, both Sunbelt areas with significant retiree populations that have also been hit by an economic triple-whammy of rapidly declining housing values, reduced tourism, and eroded retirement savings. Not surprisingly, all three have developed volatile, toxic political climates this election cycle. (In Nevada, the only politician who is perhaps less popular than the Harry Reid is the Republican governor, Jim Gibbons. In Arizona, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, whom you’d expect to be riding high along with the GOP’s national renaissance, is scrambling to the right to survive a primary challenge by a defeated former congressman and radio talk show host, J.D. Hayworth.)
In addition, Florida has certainly suffered from the global economic slump because it is a major magnet for foreign investment. It also shares some of the structural problems of its otherwise very different Southern neighbors, particularly chronic underinvestment in public education. And when it comes to the fiscal and political consequences of a bad economy, Florida is one of just a handful of states with no personal income tax, which has made property-tax rates on steadily decreasing real estate values a red-hot issue (a billion-dollar deal that allowed the Seminole Indian tribe to expand its gambling operations was one of the only things that allowed legislators to balance the latest state budget).
So the question is, what does this mean for Charlie Crist, the erratic and heavily-tanned governor who is throwing the calculations of both major political parties into chaos? And what does it mean for Democrats, whose electoral future continues to depend, in part, on the whims of Florida’s diverse and fickle voters?
One thing is obvious: The situation certainly isn’t helping Charlie Crist win the Republican nomination. Not long ago, the all-around GOP overachiever was on John McCain’s short list for the 2008 vice presidential nomination. (Crist handed the Maverick a crucial endorsement that won him the Florida primary, which clinched the GOP nomination.) At the time, it seemed like relative moderates, such as McCain and Crist, might be the Republican Party’s entree back into the public’s good graces, post-W. Then came Palin, and the Crash, and the Tea Party movement angry about stimulus, bailouts, and (indirectly) unemployment. Crist, whose original sin was to appear with President Barack Obama in February 2009 and say very nice things about the administration’s economic stimulus proposal, looked ever more like the epitome of the Republican In Name Only. (He later claimed that he never “endorsed” the stimulus bill, which convinced just about nobody.)
Still, Crist was enough of a big deal in Republican circles that when he decided to run for Senate, the National Republican Senatorial Committee endorsed him, and few were willing to bet that conservative rival Marco Rubio had much of a chance to beat him. It’s pretty safe to say that Crist has lost ground consistently since he announced his run, as conservatives across Florida and the country have flocked to support Rubio, a Tea Party favorite who’s also something of a protégé of former Governor Jeb Bush.
Crist plotted a deep-pocketed comeback, hoping to drive up Rubio’s negatives by drawing attention to the former Florida House speaker’s involvement in a burgeoning scandal, which revolved around the state Republican Party giving its legislative poohbahs credit cards that they used for lavish non-party-related expenses. But despite hurting Rubio, nothing seemed to boost Crist himself, and rumors began to circulate that he might pull out of the primary and refile as an independent candidate in the general election (which he could still do as late as April 30).
In a deep and growing hole according to every poll of the Senate primary, Crist pretty much blew up his Republican political career by vetoing, on April 15, a bill to institute a controversial “merit pay” system for teachers. (The bill would have phased out teacher tenure and made half the value of annual teacher evaluations strictly dependent on the students’ standardized test scores, an approach that goes far beyond most “pay-for-performance” proposals in other states.) Recently, support for the bill had become something of a Republican litmus test—as well as the source of a holy war between conservatives and teachers’ unions—and the proposal was particularly close to the heart of one Jeb Bush. Crist’s campaign chairman, former Senator Connie Mack, promptly resigned.
Crist probably took the popular position on “merit pay,” which had provoked protests and marches by teachers, students, and parents all over the state. And, as it happened, a new Quinnipiac poll came out the very day of the veto showing Crist running first in a hypothetical three-way race against Rubio and Democrat Kendrick Meek. So, even as Crist left Floridians hanging right up until the very end on his intentions toward the “merit pay” bill, he may now keep them guessing until April 30 about his current party affiliation.

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This item, the second in the TDS/Demos forum on “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom,” is by Demos Senior Fellow Lew Daly, the co-editor of this forum. It is intended to raise questions of immediate interest to progressives about the “Ideal of Freedom” as it affects practical politics.
The national elections of 2006 and 2008 suggested a powerful political realignment and raised hopes for a revival of progressive ideas about government and society. War-weary, disengaging from the culture wars, and reeling from economic collapse, the American electorate voted decisively against the failed conservative policies and incompetent governance of the George W. Bush years. Yet today, an explosive combination of media and activist engagement on the right has defined the terms of key national debates in ways that have made it difficult if not impossible to advance progressive policies in Washington. There may be rosier edges to this scenario in the distance, given deeper voting trends driven by demography and cultural change, but the political process for achieving strong progressive policy goals seems very much in disarray.
Among several key reasons for this, from the faltering economic recovery, to ever-more blatant lobbying influence, to Senate voting rules, far too little attention is being paid to thematic and ideological dynamics and how these dynamics shape political identification and public opinion on issues and policies. Today more than ever, with so many major challenges confronting us, we should be paying closer attention to the thematic and ideological dynamics that are shaping our politics and indeed distorting our politics in dangerous ways.
It has always been the case, and it remains so today: the central theme in the ideological dynamics of American politics is freedom. Yet the political struggle for freedom is completely one-sided today: Conservatives—and especially free-market conservatives—own the term, and their definition of the idea is dominant. They deploy it tirelessly and in unison with political leaders; and they are all working in concert on a polarization strategy that hinges on branding progressive policies and those who support them as enemies of freedom.
Yet, the truth is that progressives, not conservatives, stand closer, much closer, to the vision of freedom held by America’s founders and developed by the two greatest presidents who followed them, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Progressives, not conservatives, understand and seek to advance American freedom, as traditionally understood.
Even though the meaning of American freedom is being hijacked by the right, little is being done to expose their distortion of values or to revive the truth about freedom and what it requires. We have developed this online forum to help progressive thought- leaders, strategists, and activists address this problem and change the political environment into one in which progressives once again own this most powerful thematic and ideological ground.
We hope that participants can help address several questions of immediate importance to progressives:
1. How does the progressive “freedom” theme fit in with other progressive themes such as “a common national purpose,” “equality,” and “fairness”?
2. Is this progressive concept of freedom resonant with the public’s understanding of freedom?
3. (A) Is a progressive “freedom” agenda particularly appealing to constituencies and to major voting blocs (such as the white working class) that are particularly up for grabs? (B) Is the progressive “freedom” theme consistent or inconsistent with a progressive “populist” message? (C) Can the “freedom” agenda effectively challenge the current conservative populist backlash?
4. What are two or three banner areas of domestic policy in which progressives can most emphatically identify themselves with the defense of freedom?
5. What concept of the proper role of government is most consistent with a systematic progressive concept of freedom? What are the most effective ways of communicating that concept of government to the public?
We hope to have a lively discussion on these and other topics.

On this 40th Earth Day, as President Obama prepares to nominate a new Supreme Court justice, environmentalists are perusing the records of prospective nominees.
Retiring Justice Stevens replaced the most ardent champion of the environment in the High Court’s history, Justice William O. Douglas, so environmentalists can’t be blamed for thinking of this seat as one that ought to be filled by someone who won’t allow corporate profits to trump environmental concerns. The records of all of the prospective nominees don’t reveal a lot about their environmental concerns per se — no one on the latest ‘short lists’ jumps out as a great champion of the environment. But perhaps the next best indicator is their decision-making with respect to the exercise of corporate power over the public interest.
Justice Douglas’s commitment to the environment would be impossible to match for any nominee. As the longest-serving justice in the history of the High Court, Justice Douglas ruled in favor of the environment at every opportunity. Nominated by FDR, he was also the youngest justice ever to be sworn in — at the age of forty. He reportedly hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. In his dissenting opinion in the landmark environmental law case, Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U.S. 727 (1972), he argued that “inanimate objects,” including trees have legal standing in lawsuits. An excerpt:

Inanimate objects are sometimes parties in litigation. A ship has a legal personality, a fiction found useful for maritime purposes. The corporation sole — a creature of ecclesiastical law — is an acceptable adversary and large fortunes ride on its cases…. So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes — fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.

It was the leadership of Justice Douglas that saved the Buffalo River in Arkansas and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. He also swayed the High Court to preserve the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky, which is Holy Ground to folks from that part of the country. A trail in the Gorge is named in his honor, as is The William O. Douglas Wilderness, adjoining Mount Rainier National Park in Washington state, along with Douglas Falls in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. There is a lot more that can be said about the visionary leadership of Douglas on behalf of the environment, but environmentalists would be happy with a justice with half his phenomenal commitment to mother earth.
Here’s hoping the President will keep William O. Douglas in mind when he nominates his choice to fill the seat once occupied by the justice who did more than any other to protect America’s natural heritage.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been wondering if California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s mammoth and apparently endless ad campaign would eventually backfire on her among voters tired of seeing her every time they turn on the tube. Now there’s some evidence the backlash could be developing very early in the 2010 cycle.
Rasmussen released a new California poll today, and most of the attention will be paid to the topline finding that has Jerry Brown reopening a 6-point lead over eMeg; the last two Rasmussen polls had them tied.
But what I find more interesting is that Whitman’s negatives seem to be spiking pretty fast. A Rasmussen poll in February had her favorable/unfavorable ratio at 56/28. A mid-March Rasmussen poll placed the ratio at 51/34. Now it’s at 47/43. And that’s during a period when she’s pretty much had the airwaves to herself, with the exception of a recent Steve Poizner ad blitz that rarely even mentions Whitman (and then just calls her a “liberal”).
Meanwhile, Whitman’s general election opponent, that ultimate known quantity, Jerry Brown, has a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 51/42. It’s pretty interesting that Brown built up his negatives over a period of forty years. With Whitman, it’s more like forty days. At this rate, she’s going to be one of the more unpopular people in California by the time she faces primary voters in June, and assuming she wins that one, it’s a long time til November.

This item on the British election campaign, by TDS Co-Editor William Galston, is crossposted from The New Republic.
Seldom has a single debate had such an impact on a political campaign. A week ago, jaded observers were wondering whether David Cameron’s Conservatives could hold on to the lead over Gordon Brown’s Labour Party that they had enjoyed for more than two years, and the Liberal Democrats seemed doomed to their traditional also-ran status. In the wake of Liberal Democratic leader Nick Clegg’s strong performance in the first of three face-to-face encounters, though, the Liberal Democrats have surged into contention, vaulting ahead of Labour in several surveys and ahead of the Conservatives in at least one.
Underlying this development are deep reservations about the two major parties. While Gordon Brown gets grudging credit for a kind of stolid persistence, the fact remains that he was chancellor of the exchequer for a decade before succeeding Tony Blair as prime minister, so he can hardly evade responsibility for Britain’s acute fiscal crisis. As for the Tories, the electorate wonders whether David Cameron’s effort to reinvent his party as greener and more compassionate goes more than skin-deep. The Liberal Democrats’ gains reflect a desire—especially among younger voters—for something new and different … even if the third party’s platform offers an inadequate response to the structural problems Britain faces.
Whatever its cause, the Liberal Democrats’ surge does not mean that they have a serious chance of emerging with the most seats—let alone a majority—in the next parliament. Largely because of the way their votes are distributed among the electoral districts, the Liberal Democrats are almost certain to receive a much smaller percentage of seats than their share of the popular vote—which helps explain why they favor dramatic changes in the voting system. All other things equal, they could receive 30 percent of the popular vote and end up with fewer than 100 seats—less than 15 percent of the 650 seat total.
The oddities of this election do not end there. Labour’s votes are distributed far more efficiently than are those of the Conservatives. In 2005, Labour’s 35.2 percent of the vote brought them 356 seats, versus 198 seats for the Conservatives (32.4 percent) and only 62 for the Liberal Democrats (22.1 percent). Based on an algorithm found at ukpollingreport.co.uk, I was able to calculate that while Labour could retain a narrow majority this year with about only 34.5 percent of the popular vote, the Conservatives would need about 39.5 to win an outright majority, and the Liberal Democrats would need an implausible 41.3 percent. Otherwise put, Conservatives need to increase their share of the popular vote by about 7 percent points over last time to take over—not out of the question, but well above their showing in recent surveys.
What does all this mean? Well, there’s a good chance that the 2010 election will result in a “hung” parliament, in which neither Labour nor the Conservatives enjoys an outright majority. This would leave the Liberal Democrats as the kingmaker, and their price for entering a coalition government would include a major modification of the first-past-the-post system that has disadvantaged them for decades. This would change the dynamic of U.K. politics in ways that are hard to calculate but sure to be consequential.
Here’s one. For decades, the Liberal Democrats and their predecessors have struggled against the traditional disability of third parties in a first-past-the-post system: a vote for them might not only be “wasted,” but could actually work to the advantage of the voter’s least preferred outcome. If a vote for the Liberal Democrats in a new electoral system were a vote for them, full stop, they would have a better chance of attracting support from a new generation of voters who find themselves unimpressed by the major parties. If that happened, the Liberal Democrats would have to get more serious about a governing agenda than they have been up to now. But that’s a story for another day.

This item by John E. Schwarz is the opening and framing essay in an online forum cosponsored by Demos and TDS entitled: “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom.” Responses to this essay, and other thoughts on the subject of progressivism and freedom, will be featured here over the next two weeks. John Schwarz is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Arizona, and the author, most recently, of Freedom Reclaimed: Rediscovering the American Vision.
Standing on the steps of the capitol, just before the House voted on its health-care reform bill last November, House Republican leader John A. Boehner proclaimed: “This bill is the greatest threat to freedom I’ve seen in the 19 years I’ve been here.” He used the very same terms four months earlier when he declared war on the Obama cap and trade bill: “The fight we have between the two (political parties),” he said, “boils down to one word—freedom: the freedom to allow the American people to live their lives without all these extra taxes and all this bureaucracy. I say to my colleagues… let’s trust the American people, let’s allow America to flourish, and, most importantly, let’s allow freedom to flourish.”
That is the core of the conservative message, and it has strong legs. Consider what happened to the single-payer plan in the health-care reform debate. President Obama and most progressives believed a comprehensive single-payer system provided the most effective foundation for reform, and they often said so. However, they also knew it was politically out of the question. So they settled for a “robust” but optional public plan instead. That already represented a substantial compromise for them, more than half a loaf. Yet, what they got in the House was far weaker still, a public option so eviscerated that a mere 2-3 percent of Americans would be eligible, most of them with such poor health conditions that insurance companies didn’t want to cover them anyway. They ended up with nothing in the Senate. An opposition asserting the cause of freedom and raising the specter of big government, as much as anything else, brought that result about. The cap and trade bill that Boehner attacked as an assault of coercive government on freedom is currently experiencing a similar fate.
Polls show that individual freedom is a highly potent value for Americans across the ideological spectrum, among strong partisans of both sides and independent swing voters as well. (Center for Policy Alternatives, “Findings From a Nationwide Survey,” Lake Research Partners, November 2006; p.31-32; Center for American Progress, “The State of American Political Ideology, 2009: A Study of Political Values and Beliefs,” p. 40 ) We see our country as the land of the free. We identify ourselves as the free and the brave. Freedom has been the battle cry behind the adamant reaction that has grown against raising taxes. It has been the clarion call in town halls and tea parties everywhere across the country. By rallying around the contrast between individual freedom and government oppression, the Republicans are advancing an emotional appeal with deep and powerful resonance.
The same message has worked with profound effects many times before. For decades, conservatives hit liberals over the head as uncaring about individual freedom and personal responsibility, given their repeated advocacy of big governmental programs and regulatory planning. The attacks succeeded with such thoroughness that not only were liberals put into a perpetually defensive position, but the word “liberal” itself actually became an unmentionable political pejorative—the “L” word. Unless President Obama and the Democrats learn how to counter the opposition’s call for freedom effectively, it will continue to delimit them and the country in advancing the nation’s agenda over the years to come no differently than it proved able to demonize liberalism, emasculate the public option in the health-care reform bill, and make increasing taxes to finance government practically prohibitive.
What is supremely ironic here is that President Obama and the Democratic majority actually are the real defenders of American freedom. It is they, not the Republicans, who represent the true ideal of American freedom. They need to make that case strongly, for all to see, both for their own success and for the nation’s ability to build the stronger foundation required to move forward effectively. They must defeat the opposition on what it has come to presume is its own home turf.
They do not have to look very far to find the alternative theme and narrative they need. It is already spread throughout the speeches and writings of the incumbent President. Though not yet fully employed, it is contained in hundreds of President Obama’s statements that align closely with his actions. Together they cohere into a remarkable vision, a paradigm. We might call it “the Obama Doctrine.” Its single overriding aim is the very goal that the opposition claims as its own: to enlarge and expand the freedom of Americans here at home.
In seeking that goal, however, the Obama Doctrine calls us back to an ideal of freedom that is more faithful to the Founders’ beliefs, and to Abraham Lincoln’s, than is the conservative way of thinking about freedom that currently prevails in our politics. Here is the crucial difference. Obama shares with the Founders and Lincoln an ideal of freedom that, building upon personal accountability, also embraces certain mutual responsibilities toward one another and shared sacrifice for others and the common good as crucial obligations of freedom. By contrast, except for the realm of national security and defense, such mutual obligations and shared sacrifice have had a far lesser place in the highly individualistic conservative notion of freedom that is politically supreme today.
Similarly, what distinguishes the Obama Doctrine from conservatism is its positive recognition of the need for governmental activism to effectuate the obligations we have toward one another that are imbedded in the Founders’ and Lincoln’s ideal of freedom. Because they are obligations of freedom, and not options, government is the proper arena to address them and assure that they are carried out. At the same time, in doing so, government must maintain discipline and carefully control itself so that it not exceed its own legitimate bounds. A government that fails this test will not retain public support.
In the eyes of the Founders and Lincoln, the prevailing conservative view of freedom is mistaken at its core. Nonetheless, it has dominated both our politics and public policy for much of the past three decades, with severely damaging results that the Founders might well have predicted. The grave economic consequences that a great majority of American families have experienced, and the urgent need for an alternative capable of reversing them, will become clearer in the pages to come. Ultimately, the Obama Doctrine not only advances the most fundamental political value that has inspired Americans through the ages, including its connection to shared sacrifice for others and the common good. It not only builds upon basic principles that Americans intuitively understand and accept. At the same time, it promotes the most deep-felt economic interests of everyday Americans—crucial to both Democratic and independent swing voters alike, and many Republicans too— that the flawed individualistic conception of freedom has so egregiously abused for nearly two generations now. It is an exceptional political combination.

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On Monday I reported on an exchange I had with RealClearPolitics’ Jay Cost on my contention that the political landscape is likely to get a lot rockier for Republicans in 2012, no matter how well they do this November.
I don’t want to keep this exchange going perpetually, but Jay’s last update raises two issues that I want to mention before turning the page. First, he quite rightly argues that the governing record of the Obama administration, and the policy and message response of the GOP, could have at least as large an impact on 2012 as the demographic factors I stressed in my original piece. No question that is true, and that’s the sort of thing I write about here nearly every day. But I don’t get the sense that Republicans are paying much attention to the changes in landscape that are going to occur semi-automatically as we move from a midterm to a presidential cycle–changes that will complicate every step they take. And that was the main point of my Salon article, which was by no means some sort of definitive personal manifesto on everything related to the 2012 elections.
But Cost makes an argument on another question where I am much less inclined to agree with him: How likely it is that a “dark horse” will emerge in 2012 to revolutionize the Republican presidential field? Sure, again, anything’s possible, particularly this far from Election Day 2012. But as I observed in my original piece, presidential campaigns these days almost have to develop long in advance, particularly for “dark horses” who have to establish name ID, raise a lot of money, and then perform the ritual of semi-residence in early primary and caucus states. (I suspect there may be some understandable confusion on Jay’s part based on the assumption that I was arguing that various “dark horse” candidates would be poor general election candidates, but my main contention was that Republicans had a weak field of leading candidates, and that none of the dark horses had the chops to get the nomination).
Jay thinks my lukewarm assessment of lesser-known potential Republican presidential candidates like John Thune, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence and Tim Pawlenty is just a matter of partisan bias. He even makes the (to me) astonishing statement that Thune’s appeal is no more superficial than Barack Obama’s in 2008 (which I’d say reflects more than a little partisan bias). So let’s think about what makes a “dark horse” candidate formidable, at a time when there are no kingmakers to pluck a Warren Harding out of obscurity and lift him to the nomination. I’d say the minimum qualifications are one if not more than one of the following qualities: exceptional public renown; special identification with a major cause or new ideology; a particular appeal to important and previously underrepresented constituencies; a remarkable public personality; or a novel approach to presidential candidacy. To some extent, dark horses these days, unless they just get lucky, need a candidacy that is in some respect historic. Giant fountains of money also help, though none of the people being “mentioned” as dark horses in 2012 are named Michael Bloomberg. Geography can matter, too, but that’s usually not dispositive unless a candidate’s geographical origins are somehow “historic” or unique.
So let’s look at Cost’s list of potentially formidable 2012 dark horses with those criteria in mind. John Thune is a minor legend in Republican insider circles because he narrowly won a GOTV-driven slugfest in the heavily Republican state of South Dakota in 2004, thus beating Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. This was a testament to Thune’s personal attractivenss, durability, and willingness to toe the party line, but these are not typically the qualities that vault someone from obscurity to a presidential nomination. So far as I can tell, he is not particularly known for any policy positions, issues, or personification of any underrepresented constituency group or geographical grouping. Yes, he is broadly acceptable to every major element of the GOP, but “acceptability” is a quality that matters only when one is no longer a dark horse, and in any event, who isn’t “acceptable” in these days of monochromatic conservative uniformity in the GOP? That is also the problem of Indiana Rep. Mike Pence, were he to run for president. He’s a guy beloved of movement conservative types for representing the movement conservative point-of-view in the House GOP Caucus. But are self-conscious “movement conservatives” really a voting faction in the GOP nominating process, and are they so aggrieved by the rest of the field that they will coalesece around Pence? There’s no particular reason to think so.
Mitch Daniels is another insider heart-throb, in no small part because he was a major Washington figure as OMB Director under Bush 43, and then successfully took his act mainstream by being elected and then re-elected governor of a usually Republican state where Republican statewide candidates have often struggled. I can see the argument that Daniels’ resume equips him to become the symbol of the suddenly preeminent conservative issue of fiscal discipline (though oppo researchers would have great sport with his responsibility for Bush budget deficits). But again: is that a quality that so separates him from the field that he can make it his own? And does he have other personal or representational characteristics that could give him the rock-star aura to come out of national obscurity, and, say, win the Iowa Caucuses? Maybe, but the evidence of that isn’t obvious.
And then there’s Tim Paw, and it is true that he coined a very interesting and serviceable slogan in talking about “Sam’s Club Republicans.” It is also true, as Jay notes, that Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat turned that slogan into a pretty unorthodox agenda for the GOP–so unorthodox, in fact, that it was generally rejected or ignored by conservatives, aside from its very orthodox endorsement of tax subsidies for marriage and child-bearing. But that has little or nothing to do with Pawlenty, who has been conventionally conservative in his proto-presidential campaign, and whose Big Idea seems to be the ancient and completely symbolic chesnut of a balanced budget constitutional amendment.
Is there anything about these putative “dark horses” that makes any of them particularly stand out, other than as “acceptable” alternatives to the front-runners if one of them happens to get a one-on-one contest? I don’t see it. And there’s certainly nothing about any of them that is comparable to the Democratic “dark horses” that Jay Cost cites in his own piece: John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Kennedy was the first serious Catholic candidate for president since Al Smith; Carter was the first serious Deep South candidate since the Civil War; Clinton ran aggressively against the pieties of his own party; and Obama became a huge national celebrity as a state senator and went on to beat a legendary Democrat in virtually all-white Iowa.
Until someone emerges on the fringes of the Republican presidential field who can truly separate him- or herself from the field, anyone is entitled to some serious skepticism about the faith of many Republicans that they’ll wind up with a presidential candidate who doesn’t share the handicaps of the established field.
As for the weakness of that established field, check out Nate Silver’s 538.com post that comments on my exchange with Jay Cost and offers some objective evidence that the elephants running in 2012 don’t quite match the donkeys who ran in 2008.

Few subjects create as much controversy as that of race, and that’s particularly true of any discussion of race and the 44th President of the United States. So it’s of considerable interest that the ever-estimable David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, has penned a new biography of Barack Obama, entitled The Bridge, that is focused primarily on Obama’s role as a major figure in the history of American race relations.
For those interested in this topic, I’ve written a pretty lengthy review of Remnick’s book for the Washington Monthly. I conclude that the racial conflicts raised and addressed by Obama’s rise to the White House remain, unfortunately, relevant to his presidency. I’m sure my review will eventually be added to the long list of material that conservatives object to as raising what they call “the race card.” Too bad.