With the obvious, yawning gap between the deficit-reduction and corporate-lobby impulses of the GOP, it’s equally obvious that progressives benefit from promoting deficit-reducing measures that are progressive but that threaten corporate interests.
It appears that the soon-to-expire batch of subsidies for the ethanol industry could meet those criteria handily.
The immediate impetus for this opportunity is actually coming from two right-wing Republican senators, Tom Coburn of OK and Jim DeMint of SC, who are arguing for letting the subsidies (mainly provided through a tax credit aimed at a few Big Dog suppliers) expire on deficit-reduction and market-neutrality grounds. The reason this idea has traction, of course, is that environmentalists have long disliked ethanol subsidies, creating the rare possibility of a left-right coalition.
The money we are talking about–$5 billion, or about a third of the amount involved in the appropriations earmarks that conservatives have been obsessing about for the last couple of years, if you take seriously the dubious idea that banning earmarks will reduce appropriations–is serious enough to make this of interest to Tea Party folk.
But the ethanol lobby spends some pretty serious money of its own backing Republican candidates. And its defenders include the likely incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, Dave Camp (Coburn’s OK colleague) and the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley of IA.
Steve Benen was right to identify this issue earlier in the month as a potentially big deal:

If Dems play this right, the subsidies could be a carefully-applied wedge, driving divisions between the party’s activists and the party’s corporate benefactors.

Moreover, I’d add, ethanol is a particularly excrutiating issue for Republicans who want to run for president in 2012 and beyond, given the iconic status of the subsidy in First-in-the-Nation-Caucus-State Iowa.
It’s no accident that George W. Bush’s first policy statement upon officially running for president in 2000 was to pledge his support of ethanol subsidies. And it’s no accident that John McCain, an unrepetetant ethanol subsidy detractor, skipped Iowa in 2000 and skirted it in 2008.
In pushing the issue now, progressives not only help expose some internal rifts in the GOP in the lame duck session of Congress, while showing that good environmental policies can be appealing to Tea Party Folk. They also create some very uncomfortable moments for Republicans who are facing the prospect of spending many months barnstorming amongst the corn stalks in Iowa.

Three conservative memes are unraveling in the wake of the midterms – the notion that the public supports their rigid positions on the deficit, Bush’s tax cuts and DADT. As Ruy Teixeira explains in his November 22 ‘Public Opinion Snapshot‘:

On the deficit, conservatives are promoting the idea that immediate drastic action must be taken to shrink government spending and reduce the deficit despite the current economic situation. They are aided and abetted by a chorus from the mainstream media and professional budget scolds. Indeed, to listen to the rising tide of deficit mania you’d think nothing was more important than rapid action on this front.
But that’s not how the public sees it. Fifty-six percent of respondents in a recent CBS News poll said they wanted the new Congress to concentrate first on jobs and the economy. Fourteen percent said health care, and a whopping 4 percent said the budget deficit or the national debt.

On W’s tax cuts:

On the Bush tax cuts, conservatives claim that preserving the tax cuts for the rich is a matter of grave national importance that must not be separated from preserving the middle-class tax cuts. Once again, the public’s view is far from that of conservatives. Sixty-four percent of respondents in a recent CNN poll either want to keep only the tax cuts that apply to families earning under $250,000 a year (49 percent) or think all the tax cuts should be eliminated. Just 35 percent endorse the idea that all the tax cuts should continue regardless of how wealthy families are.

Regarding “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:”

Finally, conservatives are putting up a last-ditch effort to stop the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, which currently prevents gays from serving openly in the armed forces. They may be worried about this change, but the public isn’t. In the same CNN poll just referenced an overwhelming 72 percent favored permitting gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military compared to only 23 percent who were opposed.

So much for the GOP’s midterm mandate regarding three major issues of 2010. Less than a month after the Republicans’ midterm victory, their triumphalist masquerade looks a lot like a farce. As Teixeira puts it to the conservatives: “…You say you want to represent the will of the American people with your newly won power in Congress. Why don’t you start by actually listening to them?”

There are no major surprises in a new study of the midterm elections by Project Vote. Much of the analysis published elsewhere is confirmed in the study, but some interesting trends are highlighted in comparison to the 2006 midterms. Among the findings, which are based on exit poll data and estimates from the U.S. Elections Project and reported here by Steven Thomma and William Douglas of McClatchey News Service:

Senior citizens turned out in force — their turnout was 16 percent higher than in the last midterm election of 2006, and 59 percent of them voted Republican, up 10 percentage points from 2006. While voters 65 and older are 13 percent of the U.S. population, they made up 21 percent of this year’s electorate.[compared to 19 percent in the 2006 midterms] The wealthy voted heavily too. Total ballots cast by people making $200,000 a year or more expanded by 68 percent over 2006, the study found. Those making from $100,000 to $200,000 cast 11 percent more ballots than they did in 2006.

Dems also lost their edge with women voters in 2010, according to the study:

Women voters’ turnout surged significantly over 2006 as well — and the traditional gender gap vanished. In 2006, women voted Democratic by 55 percent to 43 percent for Republicans. This year, women voted 49 percent for Republicans and 48 percent for Democrats.

On a more positive note, the study also confirmed the influence of Latino vote in Democratic victories: “…One striking development helped Democrats in a few races: Hispanic voting surged in several states, helping Democrats win hotly contested Senate races in California, Colorado and Nevada.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
How will the Republican primary election of 2012 unfold? It’s impossible to predict the exact result, but now that the midterms are over, we are in a position to make some educated guesses. Below is a state-by-state analysis of the early Republican primary contests, and a look at how Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and the whole presidential field will fare in a landscape altered by the Tea Party wars and the Democratic Shellacking of 2010.
Nobody ‘Won’ the Midterms
One determining feature of the 2012 field is that no potential candidate so distinguished him or herself on the midterm campaign trail as to vault–as Richard Nixon famously did back in 1966–into a front-running position. And despite talk about the midterms producing a fresh new batch of presidential timber, the reality is that no one first gets elected to major office and then runs for president the very next minute. (Barack Obama had four years to make the switch, and was already a national celebrity before he was elected to the Senate.) The unquestioned new GOP superstar, Marco Rubio, is already being fitted for the vice presidential nomination in 2012, but no one thinks he’s moving to Des Moines or Manchester to campaign a few days after he’s sworn in.
Tea Party State of Mind
The key effect of the midterm campaign was psychological. The conservative base of the Republican Party, which now calls itself the Tea Party movement, is fully convinced that the conventional wisdom holding that trans-partisan appeal and “moderation” are the keys to electability is a total crock. After all, the Republican Party just moved aggressively to the right after two straight defeats, and proceeded to rack up a historic victory. This is precisely the formula conservative activists have been touting for over four decades. Now that they’ve been vindicated, it’s most unlikely they’ll want anything less than a fire-eating conservative as their presidential nominee in 2012. In particular, those polls showing that a candidate like Sarah Palin is a sure loser in a general election will be dismissed as elitist BS designed to keep the RINO establishment in the driver’s seat.
For the same reason, the GOP establishment has almost surely lost its alleged power to dictate a presidential nominee. The idea that Republicans are sheep-like “hierarchical” voters who will always go for the presidential candidate that is “next in line,” or favored by national party bosses, isn’t terribly compelling in a climate where members of the establishment are visibly struggling to keep up with their followers’ demands. Indeed, according to a much-discussed Politico piece that appeared just before the midterm elections, party insiders are pretty much focused on the more limited task of keeping St. Joan of the Tundra from the nomination.
They have their work cut out for them. No politician in recent memory–or maybe ever–has her ability to channel the deepest resentments, and most vengeful hopes, of her fans. And that makes her remarkably immune to criticism, and even to self-inflicted political damage. Who else could have survived a fiasco like her baffling resignation as governor of Alaska? And why would anyone who has experienced her rapid rise from obscurity to almost limitless celebrity–she’s even capable of making her teenage daughter a major global entertainment figure by mere association–exhibit modesty or “wait her turn”?
So Much Depends Upon the Iowa Caucus
But the story doesn’t end there. At first glance, the Iowa Caucus appears to be friendly territory for a candidate like Palin. Republican caucuses are dominated by conservative activists, and Iowa is especially partial to social conservatives, including Palin’s old comrades in the Right-to-Life movement. Yet the way endorsements shook out during the 2010 election, a different candidate may have the advantage: Mike Huckabee.
Huckabee is the unquestioned organizational kingpin of Republican Iowa. He humiliated Mitt Romney there in 2008, and his Iowa chairman that year, Bob Vander Plaats, has maintained his status as the most important right-wing figure in the state. During the 2010 election, when Vander Plaats was running for governor, both Romney and Palin endorsed his opponent Terry Branstad (a bit of a RINO), who ended up eking out a win by a surprisingly narrow margin. Yet Vander Plaats then rebounded by heading up a successful ballot effort to deny “retention” in office to three members of the Iowa Supreme Court who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
These dynamics may seriously affect the way the campaign unfolds. Even though Vander Plaats lost his bid for statewide office, he walks tall in the activist-controlled Iowa Caucuses. So, if Huckabee decides to run, he’ll probably control the strongest organization against a divided field of opponents, and he would have to be considered the Iowa frontrunner. If he doesn’t run, his base of support could be up for grabs.
For his part, Mitt Romney will face a painful choice about whether to compete in Iowa. Like Hillary Clinton in 2008, he may think it necessary to go all-out in the state because he is the frontrunner; and like Clinton, that could be a choice he comes to regret. Other candidates will see Iowa as do-or-die: Nobody will take Tim Pawlenty seriously if he doesn’t run, and run well, in the state next door to his own Minnesota. And potential “dark horse” candidates like Hoosiers Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, who have no obvious early-primary base, are in a similar situation.

Read more…

Political Animal Steve Benen has a strong post up at The Washington Monthly — the most persuasive case yet made that the good of the country is not even on the radar screen of Republican leadership priorities, compared to their quest to defeat President Obama. Yes, it’s been said before, but not this well:

NONE DARE CALL IT SABOTAGE…. Consider a thought experiment. Imagine you actively disliked the United States, and wanted to deliberately undermine its economy. What kind of positions would you take to do the most damage?
You might start with rejecting the advice of economists and oppose any kind of stimulus investments. You’d also want to cut spending and take money out of the economy, while blocking funds to states and municipalities, forcing them to lay off more workers. You’d no doubt want to cut off stimulative unemployment benefits, and identify the single most effective jobs program of the last two years (the TANF Emergency Fund) so you could kill it.
You might then take steps to stop the Federal Reserve from trying to lower the unemployment rate. You’d also no doubt want to create massive economic uncertainty by vowing to gut the national health care system, promising to re-write the rules overseeing the financial industry, vowing re-write business regulations in general, considering a government shutdown, and even weighing the possibly of sending the United States into default….

Benen quotes Matthew Yglesias to underscore the point:

McConnell has clarified that his key goal in the Senate is to cause Barack Obama to lose in 2012 which if McConnell understands the situation correctly means doing everything in his power to reduce economic growth. Boehner has distanced himself from this theory, but many members of his caucus may agree with McConnell.
Which is just to say that specifically the White House needs to be prepared not just for rough political tactics from the opposition (what else is new?) but for a true worst case scenario of deliberate economic sabotage.

Democrats have been reluctant to impugn the patriotism of those with different political beliefs as unseemly. But given the Republican leadership’s open admissions that defeat of a Democratic President is the priority that trumps all others, then they are raising the question, not Dems. Benen continues:

We’re talking about a major political party, which will control much of Congress next year, possibly undermining the strength of the country — on purpose, in public, without apology or shame — for no other reason than to give themselves a campaign advantage in 2012.
Maybe now would be a good time to pause and ask a straightforward question: are Americans O.K. with this?

A good question. I doubt that there are any polls that frame the question in such a way as to get a definitive answer. But my guess is that few Americans would endorse McConnell’s stated priorities. And it’s getting worse, as Benen explains:

For months in 2009, conservatives debated amongst themselves about whether it’s acceptable to actively root against President Obama as he dealt with a variety of pressing emergencies. Led by Rush Limbaugh and others, the right generally seemed to agree that there was nothing wrong with rooting against our leaders’ success, even in a time of crisis.
But we’re talking about a significantly different dynamic now. This general approach has shifted from hoping conditions don’t improve to taking steps to ensure conditions don’t improve. We’ve gone from Republicans rooting for failure to Republicans trying to guarantee failure.

Benen cites Jon Chait’s concern about using terms like “deliberate sabotage” when describing Republican motives, which is a valid consideration. However, as Benen notes,

…Jon’s benefit-of-the-doubt approach would be more persuasive if (a) the same Republicans weren’t rejecting ideas they used to support; and (b) GOP leaders weren’t boasting publicly about prioritizing Obama’s destruction above all else, including the health of the country.
Indeed, we can even go a little further with this and note that apparent sabotage isn’t limited to economic policy. Why would Republican senators, without reason or explanation, oppose a nuclear arms treaty that advances U.S. national security interests? When the treaty enjoys support from the GOP elder statesmen and the Pentagon, and is only opposed by Iran, North Korea, and Senate Republicans, it leads to questions about the party’s intentions that give one pause.

All political parties want control of the political process. But it’s difficult to see how democracy is served when one political party refuses bipartisanship on any significant piece of legislation as a matter of openly-stated principle. When the raw pursuit of political power is defined as the end goal of a political party, that is cause for concern about the motives of its leadership. As Benen concludes,

If a major, powerful political party is making a conscious decision about sabotage, the political world should probably take the time to consider whether this is acceptable, whether it meets the bare minimum standards for patriotism, and whether it’s a healthy development in our system of government.

Benen’s concern is well-echoed in this excerpt from Paul Krugman’s New York Times column today:

…Our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize. …The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing… The G.O.P. isn’t interested in helping the economy as long as a Democrat is in the White House. Indeed, far from being willing to help Mr. Bernanke’s efforts, Republicans are trying to bully the Fed itself into giving up completely on trying to reduce unemployment.

Or, as one of the readers of Benen’s post put it in the comments, “During the Clinton presidency, Rush Limbaugh began every show with the words “America held hostage day …Unfortunately, it looks like that’s exactly what is happening now. Republicans are holding the economy and security of the U.S. hostage in order to win the White House..”

Those sensitive pachyderms are beginning to twitch, hem and haw over a growing chorus of accusations that they are being hypocritical in calling for repeal of federally-subsidized health insurance for working people while accepting it for themselves (see my backgrounder on the topic here). Well, not absolutely all of them…yet.
Into the fray rides Bill Johnson, incoming freshman Republican from northeastern Ohio, who maybe, just maybe might be the one exception, who practices what he preaches regarding the Affordable Care Act, as Jonathan Riskind reports following an interview he conducted with Johnson for the Columbus Dispatch:

“I have not made a final decision, but I am leaning toward not taking it,” Johnson told The Dispatch last week on Capitol Hill as he and other incoming members of Congress went through orientation classes and voted for party leaders.
But Johnson, who as a retired Air Force officer also has veterans health insurance available to him, seems to be in a minority among the new GOP House majority in drawing a comparison between criticizing the health-care reform law and participating in a congressional health plan.

“Leaning toward” — wowsers, what a masterful example of principle and integrity. We await his “final decision” with baited breath.
Riskind reports that other Republicans are trotting out the old “apples and oranges” cliche to deny their hypocrisy on the topic. Happily, by the time they are finished explaining the nuanced distinctions between their acceptance of government-subsidized insurance and that provided to everyday working people under the ACA, they sound like Irwin Corey on speed.

Fun to watch the Republicans stumble and trip all over themselves in search of a non-existent justification for their unbridled hypocrisy on the topic of health care reform. It appears Dems have a potent attack weapon here, and they should not hesitate to wield it with all of the ferocity at their command.

I don’t think much of anybody in the Democratic Party is more dedicated to the principles of open and civil intraparty debate than us folks at TDS. We go out of our way to avoid favoring factions (if the facts allow it!) and actively want a big-tent party where dissent is welcome as much as common values are cherished.
But sometimes there are self-identified Democrats who clearly are anything but that, and use this identity to gain money and fame eagerly participating in every right-wing attack on the Donkey Party. Two who have taken this masquerade beyond the point of self-parody are Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen.
These two characters, regulars on Fox News who also enjoy some peculiar access to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, do nothing, so far as I can tell, other than degrade Democrats. They have no policy ideas, no fresh takes on public opinion, no strategic insights, and indeed, no advice for Democrats other than “surrender.” That was particularly the message of their last WaPo piece, which in a tone of more sadness than anger, called on President Obama to end his political career and invite Republicans into his administration to help run the country. They didn’t ask the president and vice president to resign right away; presumably that advice will be held in reserve until Speaker Boehner is in place to accept the transfer of power.
Dave Weigel, who is no Democrat, reacted this way to the Caddell-Schoen “One and Done” column:

On Friday, the Washington Post published the worst column of the year. It’s been a long year, and a stupid year, so this is no light accusation. And pollster-pundits Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell write a lot of bad columns–they are good ways to spend the slow hours between Fox and Friends and Hannity, more productive than knitting or Sudoku. Still, the hackwork in their call for President Obama to retire after one term was something special.

As an update, Weigel pointed out that Caddell and Schoen are going to be strutting their stuff at David Horowitz’ right-wing “Restoration Weekend” bacchanalia at the swank Breakers resort in Palm Beach that kicks off today:

Sure, we all appear at conference[s] where [we] don’t agree with the content, but what a place to be token liberals-who-hate-liberals! Horowitz, of course, is a former Communist who’s spent the last 20 years trying to prove that modern liberals are as bad as he was. Caddell has definitely appeared before, and is in heated competition with Horowitz to see how long you can use your experience working with Democrats as a chit for bashing liberals. Other speakers: Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, Fred Thompson, Geert Wilders, Phyllis Schlafly, Andrew Klavan, George Gilder, Jonah Goldberg, Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Steve Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Bruce Bawer, Congressmen Ed Royce and Thaddeus McCotter, General Paul Vallely, Liz Cheney and Jim DeMint.

In the end, Shoen and Caddell may be doing some good for the Democratic Party by deluding their conservative buddies into thinking they actually represent anyone other than themselves. But they don’t, and while anyone is free to change his or her mind and change political allegiances, they shouldn’t have the privilege to perpetually pose as something they clearly are not. Caddell and Schoen should join another former consultant to a Democratic president, Dick Morris, in letting their Republican freak flag fly.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On Thursday, the House Democratic caucus selected Nancy Pelosi as the minority leader. A few hours earlier, Quinnipiac University released its latest survey, which sheds some interesting light on that decision.
Included in the survey was a standard question that Quinnipiac has asked for several years: Is your opinion of Nancy Pelosi favorable, unfavorable, or haven’t you heard enough about her?
Two points stand out:
1.The share of people who hadn’t heard enough about Pelosi to form an opinion declined by 25 points from February of 2007 until November 2010. During that period, the share with a favorable opinion remained constant at 25 percent, while those with an unfavorable opinion rose by 24 points, from 31 to 55 percent. In short, virtually everyone who received additional information about Pelosi over the past three and a half years reached a negative conclusion.
2.This is a long-term development and not principally the result of the advertising campaign waged against her during the peak of the midterm election. By the time of Obama’s election, her unfavorable rating had already risen by ten points; by March of this year–eight months ago, it had risen another Ten points. Between March and November, it rose by only four more points. The inescapable fact is that whatever her strengths as an inside player, Pelosi’s public presence has proved monumentally unappealing to all except a small core of supporters.
This is especially significant because, other than President Obama, Nancy Pelosi is the best-known and most visible public face of the Democratic Party. The Quinnipiac survey showed that after nearly four years as Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid is no better known today than Pelosi was in early 2007: Fully 42 percent of respondents said that they hadn’t yet learned enough about Reid to form an opinion.
In the face of all this, Jonathan Allen and John Harris have just produced a dispiriting analysis titled “Why Dems don’t dump Pelosi.” They offer five explanations:
1.Standing up to Obama, whom many House Democrats see as the principal architect of their defeat.
2.The loyalty of key blocs, including the California delegation, women, and the Progressive Caucus.
3.The fear factor–the Speaker’s demonstrated willingness to use rewards and punishments to keep people in line.
4.Her skill in raising money, rallying the base, and devising legislative strategy.
5.Pride: Many House Democrats believe that humiliating her would discredit what they have done during the past two years.
If Allen and Harris’s reporting is correct, the Democrats have convinced themselves that their agenda during the past two years is the moral equivalent of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which may have cost their party dearly at the polls but was the right thing to do and was of such transcendent, transformational significance as to justify any degree of unpopularity.
Maybe that’s the verdict history will render (for the record, I doubt it). But in the here and now, the people who crafted and drove the 2009-2010 legislative agenda–including the cap-and-trade bill, reportedly one of Pelosi’s top personal priorities–are not the ones who paid the political price for it. What’s the logic of patiently rebuilding a Democratic majority–for which Pelosi deserves a considerable share of the credit–only to embark on a strategy seemingly calculated to destroy it? And why should the kinds of Democrats without whom no Democratic majority is possible expect anything better in the future?
This decision was the victory of inside baseball over common sense, and no amount of spin can change that.
Allen and Harris finish their piece with a section that begins, “There’s no one else.” Yes there was, and his decision not to challenge Pelosi is hardly a disqualification for party leadership. Why on earth should Steny Hoyer have mounted a kamikaze attack against colleagues who would rather be the majority in a minority party than do what’s necessary to regain the only majority that matters?

Brian Beutler reports at Talking Points Memo on four Democratic House members’ creative expose of Republican hypocrisy on health care reform:

Four members — Joe Crowley (NY), Linda Sanchez (CA), Donna Edwards (MD), and Tim Ryan (OH) — are rounding up signatures for a letter to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Speaker-to-be John Boehner, encouraging them to press their members to refuse their federal health benefits based on the same principles underlying their opposition to health care reform.
“It is amazing that your members would complain about not having health care coverage for a few weeks, even after campaigning to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which will help provide coverage to millions of Americans who find themselves without health insurance for months or even years,” the letter reads. “It begs the question: how many members of the Republican conference will be forgoing the employer-subsidized FEHBP coverage and experiencing what so many Americans find themselves forced to face? If your conference wants to deny millions of Americans affordable health care, your members should walk that walk.”

A fair question, not that the Republicans will answer the Dems’ letter with anything resembling candor. But it is a question that decent political reporters should keep asking Republicans who have been calling for repeal of the Affordable Care Act until they get some answers. The letter continues:

…You cannot enroll in the very kind of coverage that you want for yourselves, and then turn around and deny it to Americans who don’t happen to be Members of Congress. It is worth noting that in 2011, the Federal government will pay $10,503.48 of the premiums for each member of Congress with a family policy under the commonly-selected Blue Cross standard plan.
It is important for the American people to know whether the members of Congress and members-elect who have called for the repeal of health insurance reform are going to stand by their opposition by opting out of the care available to them at the expense of hard-working taxpayers. We look forward to your response in the coming days about exactly how many of the members in the Republican conference will be declining their taxpayer-supported health benefits.

The controversy about Republican opponents of HCR who accept government-subsidized health insurance was re-ignited when GOP incoming House freshman Andy Harris complained that his health insurance wouldn’t kick in until a month after he began working.
In addition to the hypocrisy Republicans are displaying in calling for repeal of the Affordable Care Act while accepting government-subsidized health insurance for themselves, many GOP outspoken opponents of earmarks are also on very shaky ground when you look at their track records. For example, according to Andy Birkey at the Minnesota Independent:

Just days after saying she had requested zero earmarks for her district, Rep. Michele Bachmann admitted to Fox News’ Brian Wilson that she had indeed requested millions in earmarks in 2008. But, she says, it’s not a big deal because her earmarks were less than the average earmarks for the rest of Minnesota’s congressional delegation.
…Bachmann secured $3,767,600 for her district in 2008. As Think Progress has pointed out, the average earmark for Minnesota’s delegation is $2.1 million…

When Republican House members talk about their positions on HCR repeal or banning earmarks, apparently what they say depends on which face you are hearing from.