Watching the effusion of U.S. commentary on the crisis in Egypt, it’s sometimes hard to tell where various pols and pundits are coming from, and that’s particularly true of conservatives, who seem conflicted, collectively and sometimes individually, on the meaning of it all.
But some conservatives have adopted the less-than-intuitive and not very popular position of defending Mubarek, or at least attacking his enemies–most notably Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei.
To sort out the sheep from the goats, check out Justin Elliot’s slide show at Salon examining Mubarak’s most prominent American defenders. They aren’t all conservatives, but the group does include two men (Mike Huckabee and John Bolton) mulling over campaigns for the Republican nomination for president, and another who is the country’s best-known conservative voice (Rush Limbaugh).
Then take a look at Matt Yglesias’ piece for The American Prospect that explains the special disdain many U.S. conservatives have for EdBaradei thanks to his position as a weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency during the buildup to the Iraq War. His team famously didn’t find evidence of nuclear weapons, because there weren’t any. As Yglesias puts it: “Many on the right can’t stand ElBaradei because he committed a cardinal sin: He was right about Iraq.”
It’s not unusual for people to bring old perceptions and grudges to the table when trying to interpret startling new developments in distant lands. But before listening to them, you should know about the ax they are about to grind.

As the 2012 Republican presidential field slowly takes shape, there’s been some very interesting discussion hither and yon about the nature of the GOP and its nominating process, and what separates a viable from a non-viable candidacy. Some of it has been stimulated by talk of various potential dark-horse candidates, from Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour to (most recently) Jon Huntsman, and I’ve been pretty outspoken in skepticism about the ability of such folk to make a serious run for it against better-known and better-prepared personalities.
But one dispute that remains wide-open involves the strange case of Mitt Romney, and whether his never-recanted sponsorship of state health reform legislation in Massachusetts that closely resembles (particularly in its use of an individual mandate for health insurance purchasing) ObamaCare will or will not doom his 2012 presidential aspirations.
Yesterday I took issue with Ben Smith’s claim that the shift in emphasis to “federalist” arguments against ObamaCare as a result of judicial challenges would save Romney’s bacon. Today let’s look at the argument of my brilliant friend Jonathan Bernstein that the elites who decide who lives or dies in GOP politics just won’t care enough about Mitt’s health care apostasy to count him out.
Here’s Jonathan:

As far as supporters, it seems to me that the groups most inclined to choose Romney are the business community and, perhaps, GOPers who are afraid of nominating a fringe factional candidate–he’s the safe port candidate. For the most part, I don’t think his health care history will prevent any of them from signing on. Will it make him clearly unacceptable to activists who might otherwise have little interest, but not actively try to veto his selection? I doubt it. As far as I can tell, health care is just one of many issues on which Romney previously supported things that are anathema to activists and some interest groups. If they’re willing to accept his abortion conversion, I can’t see why they wouldn’t accept this one (which involves not a conversion, at least so far, but a willingness to believe that his position is really way different than ACA). Sure, it could be one-too-far, but there’s no way that health care individual mandates is as big a deal to GOP activists as abortion (and there’s no organized group that really cares about it, either). And, remember, Romney will certainly shift to whatever position he needs to hold in order to get the nomination (given that anyone who cares about long-term consistency will be looking elsewhere).

The real key to Jonathan’s argument is that any conservative activists who have already swallowed Mitt’s flip-flops on gay rights, gun control, or (especially) abortion are probably going to be able to stomach his position on health reform. But here’s the thing: Romney did in fact flip-flop on the earlier issues. He hasn’t abandoned his support for RomneyCare, with its individual mandate and health insurance purchasing exchanges, at all; he’s just tried to claim, without much success, that they are fundamentally different from the same provisions of ObamaCare. As for the idea that Romney will eventually flip-flop on his own health care plan, I just don’t buy it: he’s been defending it for years as his signature contribution to health care policy. It’s just too late for him to suddenly decide it was a bad idea all along.
I agree with Jonathan that the whole subject is less viscerally important to conservative activists than abortion, but I’m not sure that will be true after this year’s (and possibly next year’s) daily demonization of ObamaCare in general and the individual mandate in particular.
More importantly, even if Romney is not “vetoed” by activists or party leaders for his health care problem, it’s hardly going to help him nail down their support, either, which is a real concern for a candidate who does not inspire much excitement anywhere in the party. And as Jonathan notes, other candidates’ attacks on Romney for his health care record can and will matter to that other vital constituency in the Republican nominating process, actual voters in the caucuses and primaries.
Now Jonathan has a much lower estimate of the power of actual voters in the GOP nominating process than I do. Yes, the elites that run the “invisible primary” can and often do make or break candidates. But they are not invincible. Consider 2000, when George W. Bush amassed the most impressive array of elite support going into an open presidential year that anyone’s ever seen. He had the money guys. He had the right-to-lifers and other cultural conservatives. He had the foreign policy mavens. He had the Wall Street Journal/business crowd. He had anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist. He had it all, and nearly lost the nomination to John McCain–whom the elites heartily disliked–by getting drubbed in New Hampshire. I was living in Washington at the time and knew some pretty influential conservatives, and they were in a state of complete panic the week after that primary. And as we remember, it took a scorched-earth, Total War effort against McCain in South Carolina to derail him and put Bush back on track.
And that was with the elites totally behind a candidate. This will not be the case in 2012; it’s more likely to resemble the untidy process of 2008, when a handful of activists in Iowa and a relatively small number of voters in New Hampsire, South Carolina and Florida decided the contest in favor of the elites’ least favorite candidate.
Even if the elites do unite behind someone, it almost certainly will not be Mitt Romney. He will have to sell himself in the early primaries, and I’d be shocked if his health care record doesn’t come up every single day on the campaign trail. It won’t be the only concern raised by Romney, but it could very well be the first and last and the most crucial.
Sure, we won’t know until it all comes down. But the bottom line is that the people who control the Republican nominating process–both the elites and actual voters–are not particularly in the mood to be tolerant about ideological heresies, or give candidates a pass based on electibility (after 2010, they believe all their candidates, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, are electable) or general good behavior. Without his health care problem, Mitt Romney would have a tough time in Iowa and perhaps elsewhere in the early going, but would probably be the front-runner. With his health care problem, he’s a very bad bet to be on the podium in Tampa to raise hands with Marc Rubio as leader of the GOP ticket.

Democrats who grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s often feel a certain subtle disquiet when talking to politically active Dems who came of age during or after the 1980’s. The latter generally accept the modern world of prepared “talking points”, “sound bites” and “message discipline” as the “new normal” of political activity. To them, the hyper-partisan ideological clash of dueling frames and completely incompatible alternate realities simply “is” what American politics is about.
But taking all this for granted inescapably entails accepting a profoundly cynical and manipulative view of how politics should be conducted – a view that rejects any attempt to try to be “fair” or “accurate” or “objective.” It is a world where politicians and media figures will publically unite behind statements they know to be patently dishonest in order to drive a few simple propositions through the media blizzard and implant them in the minds of the voters.
From the point of view of Democrats, the last two years have provided example after example of this profound cynicism and manipulation on the part of the Republican Party and Fox News.

• Repeated assertions that Obama is “socialist” when he was in fact proposing policies originally developed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and endorsed at the time by leading Republicans.
• Repeated assertions that “tax cuts do not increase deficits” in utter and proud defiance of the laws of addition and subtraction.
• The near-maniacal repetition of the words “job-destroying” in front of any policy or action to be discredited as if robotic repetition was the same as the presentation of evidence.
• The presentation of over 100 individual TV segments on Fox News repeating the same 20 second videotape of two individuals at one polling place in 2008 as the “proof” that widespread voter intimidation actually occurs.
• The constant use of manipulative background visuals (heavy on American flags and bald eagles for positions that were favored) on Fox’s “news” programs, combined with talking points taken verbatim from Republican press releases flashed at the bottom of the TV screen.

When confronted with examples like these Republicans and conservatives have a simple reply: “both sides do it and Dems are even worse than we are.” Many conservatives quite genuinely and sincerely believe that the three major TV networks are just as biased and partisan as Fox News, that The New York Times is no more objective than The National Review and that Paul Krugman’s opinion on economic matters is not the slightest bit more informed and authoritative than Glen Beck’s.
In itself this is not surprising. People almost universally tend to perceive their own groups’ views as objective and the views of others as biased. Even in psychological lab experiments where groups are randomly divided into teams of “red” and “blue” and shown propositions where there is absolutely no objective “right” or “wrong” at all – simply two propositions or stimuli that are identical mirror-images of each other – a clear and powerful “my teams’ perspective is right, yours is biased” psychological effect quickly emerges. This is unfortunate, to be sure, but it is also certainly nothing new.
What is indeed new and profoundly disturbing, on the other hand, is that the traditional American ideals of honest debate and sincere discussion have themselves been substantially discarded. The goal of letting citizens hear a fair, unvarnished debate between advocates of competing ideas now only exists in a handful of debates between candidates during election years and has ceased to be an objective to be sought anywhere else in political life. Instead, in modern politics debate and discussion has increasingly come to resemble a clash between two cynical trial lawyers, each seeking to bully the witnesses, distort or suppress the evidence and bamboozle the jury.
Yet the abandonment of fair and genuine debate between equal advocates of opposing ideas is now asserted by Fox News to actually represent a new kind of “balance” or “fairness.” Despite Bill O’Reilly’s bullying of his guests and Glen Beck’s demonstrably false conspiracy narratives as well as the presentation of “experts” without credentials or “Democrats” whose last connection with the party is four or five decades old, Roger Ailes and other Fox News executives nonetheless quite seriously argue that their style of programming actually provides the audience with “the truth” because it acts as counterweight to the “liberal” media.
For Americans who entered politics during or after the Reagan era, this view that political “truth” can only be found by embracing one side or another of diametrically opposed partisan dichotomies seems inevitable and leads to the frequent view that Democrats have no choice but to “fight fire with fire.” For people who grew up in the 1950’s and early 60’s, on the other hand, this view is profoundly troubling.
Americans who went to school in the in 50s and 1960’s were taught that there were two fundamentally distinct modes of political life – Soviet “totalitarianism” and the “American way.” “Propaganda”, “brainwashing” and “thought-control” were three central pillars of totalitarian societies and the exact opposite of how things were done in America.

Read more…

I’m in wholehearted agreement with Ed Kilgore’s point, made in his post on Romney’s stake in Judge Robert Vinson’s ruling on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA), that, “conservative commitment to federalist principles is almost certainly being overrated on this issue as on many others over the years. …federalism is primarily a mean to a desired end, and is disposable otherwise.”
Ed cites conservative support for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion and the high court’s decision in “Bush v Gore” as the leading examples of conservatives’ extravagant flexibility on federalist arguments. I would also cite the latter as cause for concern that the Supreme Court’s partisan conservatives may set a new standard for activist interpretation when it comes time to rule on the ACA.
As Ed noted, conservatives will use the full range of legal challenges to invalidate the Act. The only question is whether the conservative high court justices are politicized to the point where they will do the Tea Party’s bidding.
Legal commentator Jonathan Turley thinks the Act is weakened by the omission of a “severability clause,” expressly allowing courts to remove provisions of the law as unconstitutional, while allowing the rest of the law to stand. A severability clause was removed from an earlier draft of the bill. However, provisions have been severed in previous rulings on other laws, even when there was no severability clause.
Senator Dick Durbin makes a strong case that the Act is on solid legal grounds. His remarks in a recent television interview provide excellent boilerplate for Dems seeking a succinct rebuttal to the conservative meme that the law is somehow unconstitutional. Here’s the text, followed by a video of the interview with Senator Durbin, one of the Dems’ better soundbite craftsmen:

This law has been challenged in 16 diffferent federal courts. Twelve judges have dismissed the challenges. Four have considered it. Two ruled that it was constitutional, two unconstitutional. So it isn’t exactly a wave of sentiment against the law.

The quote kicks in about a quarter of the way into the interview:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Smooth.

Because, I suppose, every well-aired political argument eventually stimulates second thoughts, the idea that the similarity between Mitt Romney’s and Barack Obama’s health care policies could doom the former’s odds of getting to face the latter in 2012 is now arousing some significant pushback.
At Politico, Ben Smith suggests that the shift in the conservative fight against health reform to the courts, and more specifically, to a “federalist” argument against the constitutionality of last year’s legislation, may save Mitt’s bacon, since he, too, has argued that mechanisms (like an individual health insurance purchasing mandate) perfectly appropriate for state-level policymaking are illegitimate if pursued at the federal level. Here’s Ben’s conclusion:

One of Romney’s weak arguments was that the Massachusetts plan was fundamentally different, as a matter of policy, because it had been enacted on a state rather than federal level. The argument got little traction and Romney, after an effort in the Spring of 2010 to explain his record, simply fell silent.
Romney’s argument is now much stronger. Because the main objection to ObamaCare, as its critics call it, is no longer a matter of policy nuance. Now critics primarily make the case that it’s an unconstitutional expansion of specifically federal power. And on that turf, the similar structure of the plans doesn’t matter. Romney enacted his at a state level, and states have — conservatives argue — more power to regulate the insurance industry, as they do with car insurance.

I think this counter-argument is off for two reasons. First of all, the current conservative enthusiasm for a second federal district court decision invalidating some or all of “ObamaCare” does not mean the judiciary is now the sole front against this legislation. Yes, conservatives will echo the “federalist” arguments of their judicial heroes, but they won’t stop attacking ObamaCare on other grounds–cost, coercion, redistribution, alleged threats to Medicare, etc., etc.– in other venues, including Congress and state governments.
Second of all, conservative commitment to federalist principles is almost certainly being overrated on this issue as on many others over the years. If conservatives oppose a particular federal policy that is unpopular in many states, they will of course support the right of those states to go their own way. But when the shoe is on the other foot, federalism goes out the window quickly. This is most obvious on cultural issues like abortion, where conservative activists simultaneously rail at the preemption of state policymaking wrought by Roe v. Wade, and favor a federal constitutional amendment protecting the fetus regardless of what individual states want. But it’s also evident in the vast array of issues involving business regulation, where conservatives regularly support the right of states to enact less stringent environmental or labor regs, and just as regularly support (where they can get it) federal preemption of more stringent state regulations. Conservative adulation for the supremely anti-federalist decision in Bush v. Gore is the capper, in my opinion: federalism is primarily a mean to a desired end, and is disposable otherwise.
In any event, the attack on the individual mandate as a dangerous extension of federal power is inextricable from the idea that the individual mandate is itself dangerous to individual liberty. Consider this key line from Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling this week:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Aside from the gratuitious and revealing shout out to the Tea Party Movement in this line, Vinson is excoriating the tyrannical nature of a mandate against “inactivity” by government, any government. And Mitt Romney has done nothing to defend himself against that conviction, which will endure among conservatives no matter what happens to the constitutional challenge to health reform.

In his current ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira discusses data from a DCorps focus group indicating that President Barack Obama’s State of the Union or SOTU address was popular with swing voters, ands even Republicans, as well as Democrats. Teixeira explaoins the DCorps exercise:

…They gathered 50 swing voters together in Denver, Colorado to watch and react to the speech. These swing voters were decidedly not partisans of the president’s party or Obama backers in general–48 percent were Republican and just 18 percent were Democratic, while they split their 2008 ballots evenly between McCain and Obama.
Among this skeptical audience, Obama’s speech played very well indeed. Comparing pre-speech to post-speech assessments, his job approval went up 26 points. The proportion believing he has realistic solutions to the country’s problems increased by 34 points, and the proportion believing he has a good plan for the economy went up 36 points. The total confident he could create new jobs went up by 28 points, the percent confident in his energy plans went up 22 points, and the proportion confident in his handing of the budget increased by 36 points. In addition, the proportion seeing him as a tax-and-spend liberal went down by 36 points.

Teixeira explains that “Obama connected the need for increased public investment (infrastructure, education, science) and safeguarding key social programs to budget challenges in a way that resonated with the public as a whole.: He adds,

…A recent CNN poll asked the public about a series of federal programs in the context of reducing the budget deficit. The specific query was whether they thought it was more important to cut spending in that program to reduce the deficit or more important to prevent that program from being significantly cut.
By 85-14, the public did not want to see veterans’ benefits cut and voiced similar sentiments about Medicare (81-18), Social Security (78-21), education (75-25), Medicaid (70-29), assistance to the unemployed (61-38), and programs to build and maintain bridges, roads, and mass transit (61-39).

So much for the notion that Americans are persuaded by budget-cutting deficit hawks. As Teixeira concludes, “…The public has very strong priorities in the area of public spending and these are far closer to Obama’s views than theirs. In fact, as shocking as it may seem, conservatives might want to consider working with the president rather than against him.”

There’s a surprising amount of buzz going around about the significance of Democrats choosing Charlotte as the site of the 2012 National Convention. Does it mean Obama’s brain trust has decided to make North Carolina–which Democrats improbably won in 2008–a major target in ’12? Does it represent an “invasion” of a southern region where anti-Obama sentiments have been powerfully on the rise?
Probably not. The consensus of political science research is that convention locations have little or no impact on general election voting patterns. Choosing a convention city has more to do with local “buy-in”–facility, fundraising and volunteer commitments, hotel space, airline access, etc.–than with any strategic considerations. Democrats met in “blue states” in every convention between 1976 (New York) and 2004 (Boston), other than in 1988 (Atlanta). I don’t know anyone who thinks Obama won Colorado in 2008 because the convention was in Denver. Indeed, you can make the argument that conventions distract local partisans and disrupt general election planning as much as they contribute anything to the cause, though the Obama folk did do a good job of mobilizing convention attendees in Denver to conduct some door-to-door campaigning while in town.
Democrats do have a bit of a problem in Charlotte because there are no union hotels there (there was only one in Denver). Presumably some accomodation will be made to satisfy the labor movement that its concerns are being met.
The more interesting question (particular to me, as one of the floating tribe of volunteers who help staff Democratic conventions every four years, or at least since 1988) is whether either party will decisively break the mold and make the convention something other than a long series of podium speeches pitched to an ever-declining television audience. In 2008, Republicans killed off most of the afternoon sessions that gave non-celebrity pols a chance to say they had spoken to a national convention. But the basic construction of suits-at-a-podium remained in place. As with the nominating process that leads up to the convention, changing the system is difficult without knowing whom it might favor or discomfit; conventions are invariably run from top to bottom by the nominee and his or her staff. But since Democrats already know the identity of their 2012 nominee, they are theoretically in a position to think outside the box in staging a convention. We’ll see if Democrats rise to the occasion.

Yesterday J.P. Green and I both wrote about the uncertain progressive response to events in Egypt. But it’s worth noting that conservatives are struggling with the issue even more.
Politico reports today that congressional Republicans are keeping quiet and generally being supportive of the administration’s line on Egypt. Let’s give them some credit and assume this is in part attributable to the impulse to support the president in a foreign policy crisis. But it’s also pretty clear conservatives have no defined point of view for this sort of situation, and that they are torn between the democracy-promotion fad of the Bush administration and more durable fears of democracy becoming the gateway to jihadi domination of the Middle East.
In the conservative commentariat and blogsphere, however, negative views of what’s happening in Egypt are a lot more common. Fox News coverage has dwelled on possible “radical Islamic” motives behind the Egyptian demonstrations. A Media Matters report suggests that conservative gabbers are itching to blame Obama for fears raised by the Egyptian uprising, but can’t agree whether Obama is to be attacked for abandoning Mubarak or failing to abandon him.
Some conservatives seem to be looking to Israel for clues on how to react. Mike Huckabee, who happens to be on a trip to Israel at the moment, issued a statement referring to the Egyptian protests as “destabilization,” and is almost certainly channeling Israeli appreciation of Mubarak’s longstanding support for Egypt’s treaty with Israel.
My very favorite right-wing reaction, though, is from a pseudonymous front-page blogger at the influential Red State site who is blaming all the upheaveals of the Middle East on a conspiracy of unions, new media companies, and the socialists of the Obama administration. Gaze in awe:

Given the State Department’s involvement with a group committed to using the internet for “social change,” which calls into question both the President’s as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call to restore the internet, it appears the world may be witnessing the first internet-led attempts at “regime change,” orchestrated by President Obama and his allies on the Left.

It’s interesting to see what conservatives come up with to say in a situation where there’s no talking points to follow.