When a presidential hopeful like Mitt Romney signs a Washington Post op-ed attacking the president for an arms agreement with Russia, there’s a tendency among Democrats to shrug and ignore it. Mitt, we all understand, is a former governor with no foreign policy experience who needs to burnish his credentials in this area, even if it’s only by bloviating. And Mitt, we know, is vulnerable on his right flank, partially because the GOP has decisively moved in a more conservative direction since Romney posed as the “true conservative” candidate in 2008, and partially because his sponsorship of a Massachusetts health reform initiative that’s hard to distinguish from the hated ObamaCare is going to be a constant problem for him in 2012.
So you read Mitt’s op-ed and maybe laugh at the extraordinary retro feeling of it all–you know, all the Cold War hostility to the godless Russkies–and note the many right-wing boxes he checked off, from the ancient conservative pet rock of missile defense, to the ill-repressed desire for war with North Korea and Iran, to the ritual denunciations of Obama for his alleged fecklessness in negotiating with bad people. But initially, few if any Democrats had anything to say about it.
That certainly changed today, when Sen. John Kerry took to the same WaPo pages to pen a devastating riposte to Romney for getting, well, just about all the facts wrong. After tearing Romney apart on missile defense, on MIRVs, on what the treaty would and wouldn’t let the Russians do, and on the bipartisan support for what Obama’s done, Kerry concluded with this well-placed jab:

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

As it turns out, Kerry was nicer to Romney than was foreign policy wonk Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:

In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.

Whether or not Romney’s efforts to display conservative ferocity on foreign policy work with the GOP base, he could pay a price down the road in terms of the impact on people who aren’t hard-core conservative ideologues. Talking to progressives, you generally get the sense that while they would fight Mitt Romney like sin itself if he’s the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, they basically think the man’s sane and relatively competent, and wouldn’t threaten the foundations of the Republic like some possibilities they could name. But a few more rabid op-eds on world affairs like Romney’s latest effort will definitely undermine any latent tolerance for Romney in center-left precincts, and will also provide some target practice in case the endlessly flip-flopping former governor’s act gets him to a general election.

One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and–in some cases–charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.
We’re seeing this phenomenon re-emerge with the implementation of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a competition to reward states for educational innovations including higher academic standards, more openness to public school choice, and stronger performance indicators for teachers. Unsurprisingly, many on the left dislike charter schools, pay-for-performance, and “teaching to the test.” Many of the right are hostile to the very idea of federal involvement in education, and particularly to national standards of any sort; others are lukewarm to charter schools because they are public, and instead favor private-school vouchers and/or oppose “government schools” altogether.
Liberal hostility to Race to the Top was reflected in this recent effort by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to shift emergency funds out of RTT and into teacher layoff prevention. More broadly, there’s notable tension between teachers unions (particularly the NEA) and the administration on education policy.
One of the most interesting examples of conservative infighting on education policy is in Georgia, where lame duck Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has made his state’s RTT application the centerpiece of his administration’s education program, and also a major part of its strategy to balance the state budget. But when Republican State School Superintendent Kathy Cox abruptly resigned to take a Washington think tank post, after the filing deadline for the post, the GOP was left with two candidates who opposed RTT because they oppose federal involvement in education altogether. So Perdue is backing an independent bid for the post by the career educator he appointed to replace Cox, which has made conservatives quite unhappy.
This is one major policy area where the differences within and between the two major parties are playing out at every level of government. It could be a very rocky ride just ahead for anyone longing for consistency in how our public schools are run.

The latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘ by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira flags a new poll indicating that the health care reform law passed by Democrats is winning new friends. Writing in the Center for American Progress web pages, Teixeira explains:

The June Kaiser Health Care Tracking poll found that public favorability toward the bill has risen over the last month to 48 percent favorable and 41 percent unfavorable, which is up from 41 percent favorable and 44 percent unfavorable in May. This result is consistent with trends found in a number of other public polls.

And it’s not just the law as a whole; it’s most of the specific provisions that are overwhelmingly popular with respondents:

…The poll tests 17 different provisions in the new law, and 16 of 17 received majority support. In fact, 12 of the 17 provisions were supported above the 60 percent level, with particularly high favorability ratings for health insurance exchanges (87 percent), tax credits to small businesses (82 percent), and gradually closing the Medicare “doughnut hole” (81 percent).

Teixeira concludes that “unrealistic conservatives’ fantasies of a populist uprising to repeal the law” are looking far “off the mark,” if not delusional. Americans like the reform law and its measures as an important step towards health security for all.

If you are at all interested in journalism, you should check out this New York magazine profile of New York Times columnist David Brooks, and then Jonathan Chait’s comment on the subject.
I couldn’t agree more with Chait’s observation that Brooks is now operating in a format, the op-ed column, that just isn’t suited for him:

Brooks used to be known mainly for his long-form journalism. I doubt anybody read his work and thought, “This man should be writing an op-ed column.” But what happened is that the New York Times needed a conservative who liberals would find amenable, and there were few candidates other than Brooks. The role of New York Times columnist is very prestigious and lucrative, so Brooks obviously felt he couldn’t turn it down. From the perspective of the Times, he’s quite valuable, even though he’s in a role that misuses his considerable talents.

Some of Brooks’ long-form pieces at The Weekly Standard were not only insightful, but very entertaining (my favorite, a piece entitled “How to Become Henry Kissinger,” a hilarious send-up of Washington chattering class culture, has unfortunately vanished from the internet). But that approach is very difficult to pull off in 800-word bursts, much less the television punditry that Brooks engages in. So he’s kind of like a great athlete playing out of position; his mistakes and misperceptions (and I’ve gone after them more than a few times) are all the more maddening because you know he could do better.

As the elections draw closer, it becomes increasingly obvious that – within the general “enthusiasm gap” that is so widely discussed – there is one specific  kind of intensity and passion that is painfully missing in the Democratic community.

 Over the Fourth of July weekend, for me that missing ingredient came dramatically into focus. The celebrations brought back memories of family gatherings many years ago, listening to the stories told by veterans of WWII, most of whom had fought in the Italian theater of operations.

They were tough, no-nonsense men, hardened by both a lifetime of hard work and the experience of war and who spoke with deep cynicism about aspect after aspect of their wartime experience.

The equipment -“The first thing we did when we hit the beach was bury most of it. It was too God-damn heavy and it got you killed. You buried it the minute you hit the beach, and then dug it up for inspection”.

The officers – “They were all a bunch of rich boys who had never worked a day on an assembly line or climbed on high steel. They were as tough as rubber nails and a dumb as a newborn baby”

The Bazooka – “a real piece of s**T.  If you got real close to a panzer tank, the best you could do was give the German tanker an earache when the shell bounced off the hull”.

The U.S. Sherman Tank – “The armor was so thin, if you had to sneeze you could pull off one of the f***ing armor plates and blow your nose in it”

The strategy – “The Brass did everything by the book. The trouble was that the Germans had all read exactly the same god-damn f*** ing book and were ready for us every time.”

The campaign – “If the country had been any narrower we would’ve had to walk sideways.  The Germans didn’t even have to aim their God-damn guns, they could just point anywhere south and fire.”

And so it went for hours at a time. Surprisingly, they had little hatred for the ordinary Italian and German soldiers that they had fought. The enemy soldiers were just “dupes” who had been “suckered” by the “big lie” propaganda. Far more time was devoted to criticizing every single aspect of the how the “Brass” had conducted the war.

 But at the end of every one of these sessions, they would always suddenly pause and say with a sharp, chilling intensity to the young people who were listening – “but, don’t ever get me wrong. It was worth it and I’d do it all over again In a minute–  because those bastards had to be stopped” 

That’s the spirit that’s painfully missing In the Democratic discussion today. That crystal clear, hard, fierce and ferocious sense of determination. That cold burning anger. That elemental sense of total commitment and passion. What’s missing today is a clear understanding that – whatever opinion one may have of Obama, or his strategy,  or the candidates,  or the campaigns, or the issues, or the way things have gone,  or how they could have gone better, or why things were done wrong or a thousand other matters – there remains one transcendent, overarching reality.

What the Republicans have done in the last year and a half goes beyond politics and beyond partisanship. They have embraced a politics of extremism that goes far beyond anything in the Republican tradition -including not only the era of Ronald Reagan but even of the Buckley and Goldwater right. They have chosen a cynical submission to an extremist ideology that is not only wrong but dangerous, venomous and vile.

Democrats can complain and second guess and criticize as much as they want this year but the hard reality is that we do not have the luxury of indifference or discouragement.

For Democrats, there is no choice.

This Republican assault cannot be ignored, minimized or accommodated.

They have to be stopped.

It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal asked 109 Republican “insiders” to rank possible nominees in terms of likelihood, Daniels finished fifth, tied with Sarah Palin and well ahead of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And at the same time, 111 Democratic “insiders” ranked Daniels fourth when asked about the most formidable prospective GOP candidate. And that was all before a slow but steady drumbeat of interest in the Hoosier, culminating in one of those long, hagiographical magazine profiles that often serve as the informal launching pad of presidential runs, this one by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard.
You can see the logic behind the Daniels-for-president enthusiasm. Virtually unknown among voters outside Indiana, Daniels has none of the baggage accompanying retreads like Gingrich, Huckabee and Mitt Romney, or even fellow-insider-favorite Haley Barbour, much less the lightning-rod Palin. He’s a state official who has never had to cast a controversial vote in Congress, but also has DC street cred from his work in the Reagan White House and his stint as George W. Bush’s first OMB director (where he exited before the inevitable gusher of red ink really exploded). He’s very popular in a state carried by Barack Obama in 2008, and his state’s positive fiscal record stands out sharply against a national landscape of state fiscal disaster. Moreover, as Ferguson’s profile illustrates, Daniels has a moderately quirky but folksy personality that seems a lot more appealing than those of other, dark horses like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or John Thune of South Dakota.
Given the newly rediscovered monomania for deficit hawkery among Republicans, buttressed by Tea Party demands for smaller government now, Daniels looks like someone who can credibly wear a green eyeshade at a time when that’s the sexiest look around.
But in the self-same Ferguson profile that exemplified the emergence of Daniels ’12 buzz, the putative candidate himself (who has mastered a stance of disinterested availability for a White House run) tossed a little hand grenade into his own camp:

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.

Predictably, Mike Huckabee pounced on the “truce” idea (or gaffe, or whatever it was):

“Apparently, a 2012 Republican presidential prospect in an interview with a reporter has made the suggestion that the next president should call for a ‘truce’ on social issues like abortion and traditional marriage to focus on fiscal problems,” Huckabee said. “In other words, stop fighting to end abortion and don’t make protecting traditional marriage a priority.”
“For those of us who have labored long and hard in the fight to educate the Democrats, voters, the media and even some Republicans on the importance of strong families, traditional marriage and life to our society, this is absolutely heartbreaking. And that one of our Republican ‘leaders’ would suggest this truce, even more so,” said Huckabee, a social conservative who is weighing another presidential run.

Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins chipped in with his own more harshly worded condemnation of Daniels for talk of a culture-war truce:

We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the Establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.

Other, more sympathetic social conservatives, like National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, wondered if Daniels had simply misspoken or overstated his focus on fiscal issues, but also warned him not to get carried away with fiscal-first rhetoric:

A lot of people will cheer [Daniels’] statement: Truces are usually popular, and most people see the economic issues as more important than the social ones at this moment. But I’m not sure how a truce would work. If Justice Kennedy retired on President Daniels’s watch, for example, he would have to pick someone as a replacement. End of truce.
I also can’t help but think of Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. Like Daniels, Gramm was an enthusiastic budget-cutter. Concern about big government was running strong in the years just prior to that election. Gramm had a solid social-conservative record, but consciously chose not to campaign on it; he famously flew out to Colorado Springs to tell James Dobson, “I’m not a preacher.” That approach helped to doom Gramm’s campaign.

Finally, the Washington Post’s resident religious conservative Mike Gerson gave Daniels a chance to backtrack, and the Hoosier allowed as how cultural issues with a fiscal dimension, like the Mexico City rules (and presumably abortion funding generally), would not fall under any “truce.”
Crisis averted? Perhaps; certainly many Republicans will be privately counseling Daniels not to make the same mistake twice, and he’d be smart to take advantage of the Kagan confirmation issue by blowing the dog whistle of determination to appoint “strict constructionist” judges. Meanwhile, he’ll get some credit from the shrinking band of social moderates in the GOP, not to mention libertarians, along with secular MSM types whose skepticism of the Tea Party movement has always been tempered by their obvious relief at the sight of conservatives thumping not Bibles but the Constitution.
But it’s worth noting that Huckabee’s not the only 2012 possibility who is taking a different tack than Daniels on the culture wars. And indeed, the other candidate with a bullet next to his name of late, and in public polls rather than insider buzz (viz. a recent PPP survey of Texas Republicans, which placed him at the top of the 2012 list with or without home-state Gov. Rick Perry), is none other than Newt Gingrich, who seems determined to escalate the culture wars into a full-scale Clash of Civilizations.

Read more…

John McCain has gotten a blast of richly-deserved negative coverage recently about his flip-flop on immigration policy, which put him squarely in the camp of the bashers of undocumented workers. But McCain will have a ways to go to top KY Senatorial candidate Rand Paul, who has just accomplished a rare double flip-flop on an important immigration issue.
Sam Stein’s Huffpo post, “Rand Paul’s Border Fence: Candidate Does Full 180, Now Supports Physical Fence” explains it thusly:

Rand Paul’s Senate campaign has clarified yet again the Kentucky Republican’s position on how to stem illegal immigration, this time fully embracing a proposal he once criticized: the construction of a physical fence along the border.
In an email statement to the Huffington Post, Paul’s chief spokesman also insisted that Paul does not, as he has stated previously and on his own campaign website, support building an underground electrical fence along the border…Several weeks ago, the Huffington Post reported that Paul had been championing an underground electrical fence as a way to detect border crossings (law enforcement officials stationed with helicopters at nearby stations would then detain those coming into the country illegally). Senate Republicans copped to having never heard of such an idea. Libertarian immigration experts openly criticized the cost and draconian nature of the proposal.
Since then, Paul’s camp has insisted that the underground electrical fence was simply an erroneous item on the campaign website, not something that the Tea Party backed candidate actually supports. But there is clear video evidence of Paul advocating the proposal on the campaign trail. In fact, in the same video in which Paul touts building a fence underground, he also talks disparagingly about the symbolism of building an above-ground structure dividing the United States and Mexico — the very proposal his campaign is now embracing.

Here is what Paul actually said in May 2009 (video here):

“I don’t like the symbolism of a 15-foot fence going the whole border. It’s extraordinarily expensive, and it reminds me of the Berlin Wall which was built to keep people in and from fleeing to the West,” Paul said. “I think you could actually put in an electronic fence under the whole border for probably $10 or $15 million, which sounds like a lot to us but that’s peanuts. And you could probably have helicopter stations in maybe five different locations, and I think you could have any breach of the border could be stopped at any point and we send them back.”

You see, he was against the above-ground electrified fence he now supports. But he was for the underground electrified fence he now opposes. Is that clear?
Apparently Kentuckians are starting to get it, and perhaps understand why even the dean of conservative columnists, George Will has described Paul as a “frivolous” candidate. For Dems, the latest poll is encouraging. As TPM’s Eric Kleefield reports:

The new survey of the Kentucky Senate race by Public Policy Polling (D) shows a tied race in this red state, where Republican nominee Rand Paul and Democratic state Attorney General Jack Conway are competing for the seat of retiring GOP Sen. Jim Bunning. Furthermore, it’s quite possible that the negative coverage of Paul’s past opposition to the Civil Rights Act may have done him some damage.
The poll has Paul and Conway tied up at 43%-43%…The poll finds Paul with a favorable rating of only 34%, with 42% unfavorable, compared to Conway’s rating at 31%-29%.

Sure, Kentucky is a red state. But Attorney General Jack Conway, the Democratic nominee, is playing a strong hand, while Paul, who also stood up for BP, is rapidly positioning himself to be the GOP’s poster boy for ‘Saturday Night Live’ ridicule in this cycle. This Senate seat is looking increasingly like the Dems’ best shot at a pick-up.

As someone with a particular interest in the power of the immigration issue in the South, where Hispanics are newly visible but don’t vote in large numbers, I’ve been closely watching the impact of Arizona’s round-em-up law on competitive GOP primaries in Dixie. And it was particularly striking to see Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, an accidental governor who was something of a joke in her own state until quite recently, intervene in Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial primary on behalf of former Secretary of State Karen Handel.
Handel’s reaction to the endorsement was almost as excited as it might have been if she had really hit the conservative jackpot and gotten the nod from Sarah Palin. And right on cue, conservative political scientist John Tures, writing in Southern Political Report, called Brewer “the next Sarah Palin,” and credited her intervention for a reported rise in the polls by Handel.
We’ll see in a couple of weeks how this works out for Handel, who has positioned herself in the large Georgia gubernatorial field very much like SC’s Nikki Haley did before sexual allegations and attacks on her ethnicity took over the contest and lifted her to a relatively easy win in the Palmetto State’s GOP primary. But strange as it would have seemed not so very long ago, Brewer has morphed from a doomed and much-mocked candidate for re-election in her own state to a factor in campaigns thousands of miles away.

In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican United States Senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.
In a long and interesting profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, it was vouchsafed that the senior senator had described the Tea Party Movement as a marginal, passing fad that “will die out.”
Asked about this comment on Fox News yesterday, the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who has been intervening in state after state to support Tea Party-approved candidates against alleged RINOs, had this to say:

“Lindsey’s a great friend, but he’s wrong on this.”
“The tea party is just the tip of the iceberg of an American awakening of people that want to take back their government,” said DeMint, a vocal leader of the tea party movement. “Americans are going to show in November that they aren’t going anywhere.”

Insofar as DeMint appears to think the Tea Party Movement is coextensive with “Americans,” it might be inferred that doesn’t think his “great friend” Lindsey Graham is actually an American, much less right on this subject.
As for Graham’s intentions, the Times profile can be read in two very different ways. Perhaps he’s already decided to pack it in when his current term ends, and thus doesn’t care what he says. On the other hand, given his obvious pride in mastery of public opinion polls, perhaps he thinks he can flip-flop just enough to stay ahead of the conservative mobs back home who are itching for his destruction, and get re-elected anyway. He’s certainly off to a good start with his abandonment of bipartisan negotiations on several key topics, but he might be advised to be a little more circumspect about the political calculations that guide his conduct.