Democratic oppo researchers should surf over to Facing South, and read some of Kris Kromm’s excellent reportage on the increasingly influential conservative benefactor (and former state legislator) Art Pope, who was instrumental in the GOP’s 2010 sweep in NC. In October Facing South joined with the Institute for Southern Studies and began a series of investigative reports about “the scope and nature of Pope’s political empire.” Among the revelations, according to Kromm:

…About 90 percent of the funding of the state’s leading conservative think tanks and advocacy groups comes from Pope’s family foundation, which he runs. Pope is also installed on the board of directors of most of these groups.
…Three groups backed by Pope — Americans for Prosperity, Civitas Action and Real Jobs NC — joined with Pope family members to spend over $2.2 million targeting 22 key state races last November. Republicans won 18 of the contests.
…Pope’s groups have worked closely with the Tea Party Express, whose leaders have been widely condemned for making racially-charged statements, and Pope’s foundation has funded many groups that deny the scientific consensus about global climate change.
…Pope has taken a leading role in the right’s crusade against “voter fraud.” But the groups he supports still can’t prove it’s a real problem.
…North Carolina conservative groups founded and largely funded by Republican benefactor Art Pope are calling for an end to the state’s widely-used ‘clean elections’ program. Maybe it’s because Pope’s record-shattering spending in 2010 was so successful in fueling the GOP’s capture of the state legislature.

The Facing South investigation of Pope’s influence and activities is obviously important for Dems in formulating strategy for the 2012 election. Many political observers were surprised at the extent of the GOP’s lavishly-funded takeover of the NC state legislature in 2010. NC’s African Americans (25.3 per cent of the state population) and research triangle progressives were instrumental in Obama’s 2008 victory the tarheel state. But it’s a safe assumption that Art Pope will use all of the considerable resources at his command to put the state back in the GOP column next year. He could make a pivotal difference nationally, since NC ranks 10th in electoral college votes ( tied with GA and NJ) among the 50 states.
Pope’s economic empire is rooted in his Variety Wholesalers chain, which includes Roses, Super Dollar, Value Mart and Maxway, bargain retail outlets that are familiar to southern shoppers, and now reportedly targeted for boycotts by the state Democratic party. According to Andrew Whalen, the executive director of the NC Dems, “Pope’s company, Variety Wholesalers, has directed hundreds of thousands of dollars – profits taken from hard-working North Carolinians who shop at his stores – to fund organizations that attack Democratic candidates.” (More on Variety Wholesaler stores here)

There’s obviously been a ton of polling on federal deficits and budget cuts, showing variable levels of concern (often depending on the wording) about deficits and debts, but nothing like majority support for any but a very few specific cuts (typically, “foreign aid” is at or near the top of disposable spending categories in the eyes of the public).
But a new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows sophisticated breakouts of support-levels for budget cuts that nicely illustrate the trap congressional GOPers are struggling to avoid.
There’s a sizable gap between the deficit-hawkery levels of rank-and-file Republicans (and Tea Party supporters) and the public at large:

More than seven in 10 tea party backers feared GOP lawmakers would not go far enough in cutting spending. But at the same time, more than half of all Americans feared Republicans would go too far.
Among those most fearing spending cuts were younger voters, independents, seniors and suburban women–groups that include many swing voters in national elections, who potentially could turn against the GOP.

So Republican pols are truly caught between a core constituency demanding more budget cuts than they are comfortable with enacting, and a broader electorate that fears they are already going too far.
Comments Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democrat Peter Hart:

“It may be hard to understand why someone would try to jump off a cliff” to solve the debt crisis, Mr. McInturff said of his fellow Republicans, “unless you understand that they are being chased by a tiger, and that tiger is the tea party.”

And unfortunately, once poll respondents were asked to focus on options for reducing the deficit, they reacted in a way that should frighten Republicans nearly as much as the “tiger” at their backs:

The most popular: placing a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year (81 percent said that was acceptable), eliminating spending on earmarks (78 percent), eliminating funding for weapons systems the Defense Department says aren’t necessary (76 percent) and eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries (74 percent).
The least popular: cutting funding for Medicaid, the federal government health-care program for the poor (32 percent said that was acceptable); cutting funding for Medicare, the federal government health-care program for seniors (23 percent); cutting funding for K-12 education (22 percent); and cutting funding for Social Security (22 percent).

Among the popular ideas, one (killing earmarks) has already been “banked” in order to fund the two-week continuing resolution signed by the President. Another (cutting weapons system not wanted by the Pentagon) has some bipartisan support in Congress, though there will probably be areas (e.g., missile defense) where Republicans will want to force spending on DoD. The other two are violently opposed by Republicans.
The least popular ideas are supported pretty much only by Republicans, and to a considerable extent force unsavory choices (i.e., if the GOP decides against unilateral attacks on “entitlements,” cut in programs like education will have to be even larger).
All of those pundits who think congressional Republicans have Obama and Democrats on the run as the budget showdown grows nearer should take a good look at this poll.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
After many feints in this direction dating back to 1996, Newt Gingrich seems to be finally preparing a run for president. Generally, he is not being taken as seriously as potential candidates like Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee–or even D.C. insider heartthrobs such as Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie. I agree with this assessment of Gingrich’s potential, to an extent; he’s the opposite of a fresh new face, and the guy’s baggage rivals Charlie Sheen’s. Yet having carefully watched Gingrich up close since he was a Rockefeller Republican in the 1970s, I also know that he is a master of tactical reinvention: a microcosm of the modern Republican Party contained in one complicated man. And at least superficially, he seems to have transmuted himself into exactly what the lost Tea Party Republican is yearning for this election cycle.
In the 1970s, I was a budding Georgia political junkie (and, actually, a Republican activist). I recall Gingrich, whom I first met at a Republican state party convention, as an overtly eccentric and extremely talkative history professor at West Georgia College who lived a sort of strange double life as a politician obsessed with getting elected to Congress. He had been born in Pennsylvania, landed in Georgia during high school, and as a graduate student at Tulane University in 1968 became the Southern regional director for the brief and unsuccessful presidential campaign of the liberal Nelson Rockefeller–not the sort of item a Southern Republican in those days usually wanted on his resume, but a first step on the political ladder nonetheless.
A few years later, having fathered two children with his high school math teacher (whom he had married at the age of 19), Gingrich returned to Georgia and launched his electoral career, running for Congress in 1974 and again in 1976. His incumbent opponent was John Flynt, an old-fashioned conservative Democrat best known for being on the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list of environmental reactionaries. Unlike many Georgia Republicans who sought to out-flank Dixiecrats by coming across as better-bred right-wing extremists, Gingrich ran to Flynt’s left, emphasizing environmentalist and “reform” themes, and enlisting significant support from liberal Democrats. Unfortunately for him, these were the two worst election cycles for Georgia Republicans since the 1950s (the Watergate election of 1974 and Jimmy Carter’s Georgia landslide of 1976), and he lost narrowly both times.
But then Flynt retired, just as Gingrich’s form of liberal Republicanism was falling out of fashion nationwide, in the run-up to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. When Gingrich ran for Congress again in 1978, this time against a more conventional Democrat, he reinvented himself as a fighting conservative focused on anti-tax and anti-welfare messages. He also burnished his conservative credentials by heading up a statewide group opposed to President Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty, a major right-wing (and specifically Reaganite) cause at the time. Gingrich won as a newly minted conservative, riding a conservative trend in his state and the country. It’s hard to know whether his earlier liberal persona, which seemed consistent with his private behavior and the polyglot crew of environmentalists he hung out with at West Georgia, or his later conservative incarnation was more genuine. But it is clear his turn to the right was well timed, and launched him not only into Congress but into a career as a national political celebrity.
From the moment he arrived in Congress, Gingrich aligned himself with a rapidly growing group of young supply-side Republicans, and became especially well known for advocating confrontational tactics against Democrats, to the chagrin of his old base of moderate-to-liberal supporters back home (many of them were also close to Gingrich’s wife, whom he divorced in 1980 while she was recovering from cancer, after a bitter financial dispute). He was also an energetic purveyor of right-wing agitprop: As a staffer in the Georgia governor’s office during that period, I recall having to find a nice way to reject his pleadings that the state officially declare a “Lessons of Granada Day” to impress upon schoolchildren and the citizenry at large the importance of that great Reagan military victory. By the mid-to-late 1980s, when Gingrich began his climb into the House Republican leadership, he was considered more a threat to the traditional mores of the congressional GOP than to Democrats. His own ideology, now staunchly conservative but sprinkled with vague futurist themes (“I see myself as representing the conservative wing of the postindustrial society” he once said), was nicely attuned to the “Morning in America” times.
Gingrich, of course, rose to the summit of power in 1994 and then quickly descended into infamy when he lost a humiliating budget battle with Bill Clinton, and subsequently attempted to impeach the president over Monica Lewinsky amid revelations about an extramarital affair of his own. But the lesson of Gingrich’s early years is that he has a jeweler’s eye for a political opening and a willingness to transform himself as necessary to exploit such opportunities when they arise. This could be one of those times: Because the 2012 Republican field is exceedingly weak in ways that would benefit Gingrich, he could end up in a surprisingly good electoral position if he decides to run.
Take Iowa, where ostensible frontrunner Mitt Romney is likely to put in a minimal effort (given his upset loss to Mike Huckabee in 2008), and popular Fox News contributors Huckabee and Palin may not show up at all because they prefer to keep their day jobs. According to a recent analysis by Iowa Republican insider Craig Robinson, Gingrich actually ranks first in terms of positioning for the Iowa Caucus: He has already spent considerable time there, along with other early caucus and primary states, and cozied up to the state’s very powerful Christian Right faction by writing a book alleging an abandonment of God by American liberal elites. Moreover, one of his ideological heresies that annoys conservatives elsewhere–his longtime support for ethanol subsidies–is actually a big plus in Iowa. If he wins or places there, and then survives Nevada and New Hampshire, he could do well in the Southern primaries thanks to his ties to the region.
More generally, he has positioned himself well to take advantage of a number of issues that obsess the modern right. In addition to courting the Christian Right and describing the Obama administration as a “secular socialist machine,” he has gone further than any putative presidential candidate in railing against the alleged threat of Islam at home and abroad, even hyping the phantom menace of creeping Sharia law in the United States. And, in a Republican electorate that is hungry for a fiery, uninhibited radical like Palin or Michele Bachmann–but is also attracted to wonky “ideas men” like Paul Ryan or Mitch Daniels–Gingrich can plausibly claim to be both. As the last speaker to shut down the federal government and the leader of the “Republican Revolution,” he has serious bomb-thrower credentials; and, ironically, his fall from grace in 1998 saved him from complicity in George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism, which Tea Partiers deplore. Yet he is also constantly spitting out sunny, whiz-bang ideas, from a pet scheme to fix Social Security to a plan that would force every American child to take gym class. He’s still very much the college professor intent on impressing his students with interesting, if half-baked thoughts, all delivered with the deceptive certainty of a born salesman.
The downside of a Gingrich candidacy is quite clear. He did, after all, become something of a national pariah the last time he got his hands on power in Washington. His marital history alone–which includes two divorces from chronically ill wives, quickly replaced by younger women–could provide fatal ammunition for an oppo researcher who wants to tar him in the eyes of Christian conservatives and ordinary women voters alike. But the Republican Party electorate is clearly desperate, deluded, and filled with ennui right now. Everything we know about the adaptable Gingrich tells us that he will bend over backwards to give Republican audiences what they want, whether or not it comports with what he was saying the day before yesterday. In this strange environment, that might be all that’s necessary.

Spiking world oil prices, mainly attributable to the instability in the Middle East, are helping (and I wouldn’t use a stronger word, given the well-known propensities of the oil industry to take advantage of news on oil prices to disproportionately jack up U.S. retail prices and harvest higher profits) boost pump prices.
Can we now expect a return to “Drill, Baby, Drill” rhetoric from Republicans who want to promote the utterly false belief that we can somehow divorce the domestic petroleum market from global markets by expanded U.S. production?
Maybe, but thanks to memories of the BP spill, Republicans are a little hesitant to cry for expanded offshore drilling. For one thing, there are a lot bigger economic problems facing the country and its citizens than $4 gasoline. As the New York Times‘ Caucus blog explains:

[T]he political dynamics surrounding oil exploration are very different in 2011 than they were in 2008, making it less obvious that Mr. Obama’s Republican challengers can use the issue to their advantage.
And despite the consumer pain, most economists from across the political spectrum say that they do not yet expect the price of oil to do significant damage to the economic recovery in the coming months.

Still, the web page of American Solutions, the Newt Gingrich-created group that originated the 2008 “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign among Republicans, is full of daily attacks on Obama for allegedly abetting gas price increases through his stubborn opposition to maximum domestic oil drilling.
As the 2012 presidential cycle warms up, it wouldn’t be surprising if Gingrich and/or some of his other potential rivals raise the old battle cry again, particularly in states where there’s no immediate fear of the consequences of expanded offshore drilling. It’s not as though anyone in today’s GOP is going to object to dependence on fossil fuels out of concern for global climate change.

When Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour went out of his way in Washington this week to disrespect Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health reform law, it was understandably covered as a political story. Yes, Barbour’s snark was yet another indication that Romney is going to have to defend “RomneyCare,” and try to distinguish it from “ObamaCare,” virtually every day on the 2012 presidential campaign trail. I’m among the considerable number of political observers who don’t think he’ll be able to successfully pull that off.
But pure politics aside, Barbour’s statement offers a rare candid glimpse into the underlying thinking of conservatives about health reform that is often buried under all the rhetoric about “socialism” and “government takeover of health care” and “death panels” and so forth. TNR’s Jonathan Cohn pointed this out in a very succinct manner:

Perhaps the best testimonial for the Romney plan comes from its most recent critic. That would be Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who on Tuesday told a congressional committee that his state wanted nothing to do with Massachusetts-style reforms. “We don’t want community rating. We don’t want extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages.”
Community rating, of course, is the practice of charging the same premium to different customers, even the diabetics and cancer survivors. “Extremely high mandatory standard benefits packages” in this particular case means insurance plans that cover what most of us would define as basic care, without gaps and loopholes that force the chronically and severely ill to pay exorbitant bills.
Insurance available to all. Benefits that include the services sick people need. Yeah, why would anybody want that?

Democrats really need to do a better job of focusing on these fundamentals. The whole idea of health reform is to make affordable insurance available to people the private markets have excluded. This idea is, in fact, demonstrably popular. When a Republican leader like Haley Barbour comes right out and says he prefers the status quo ante on health care even if it means no insurance or extremely costly insurance for basic coverage, he needs to be called on it early and often.

So the McClatchey newspapers and the web site The Iowa Republican held a focus group of conservative activists in the First In the Nation Caucus state and came away with some findings that won’t make headlines, but could greatly influence funders and other movers and shakers in national GOP politics. Its big conclusion: Palin and Romney are all but being written off already:

The group was unanimous, or near unanimous, on several topics. The most interesting conclusion is that most of them believe Sarah Palin is unelectable.
All but one of the focus group member felt Palin could not beat President Obama. That is a key factor in determining who they will support in the Iowa Caucus. The group concurred that Palin stepping down as Alaska’s governor midway through her term represents a major problem. Although Palin certainly had solid reasons for doing so, explaining that to voters will not be easy. The field appears it will be stacked with governors who finished more than one term, so Palin will have a difficult time matching her leadership abilities with theirs. Although most members of the focus group like Sarah Palin, they do not view her as “presidential”.
The attendees, including a diehard Mitt Romney supporter, also agreed that healthcare could doom Romney’s candidacy. He must come up with a credible explanation for his support and implementation of statewide healthcare mandates in Massachusetts. Romney has avoided talking about the issue so far. The group loathes Obamacare and feels Romney will have little chance of winning the GOP nomination unless he is able to capably distance himself from the similar plan he installed in Massachusetts. “Until he man’s up on healthcare, he moves way down the list,” said Ryan Frederick, 25, of Orient.

Beyond their less than positive views about Palin and Romney, this conservative focus group offered some additional thoughts on the 2012 field:

-Mike Huckabee will be the odds-on favorite to win the Iowa Caucus if he runs
-None of the likely 2012 candidates that did not run last time have made much headway. However, two members of the group have Mitch Daniels at or near the top of their list.
-Despite numerous visits to Iowa, former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty is not connecting with voters so far. Two of the attendees who have seen Pawlenty speak more than once feel he lacks the charisma necessary to win.
-Rick Santorum stands little chance of emerging victorious. “He is the Sam Brownback of the 2012 election,” said one attendee. “He will be everywhere, all over Iowa, visiting 300 times, and wind up having 12 people in Decatur County caucus for him.”

Ouchy, ouchy!
I’m drawing attention to this focus group because it appeared at a site most readers would probably never look at, and because it rather strikingly contrasts with the conventional wisdom that the folk who will have so much to say about the 2012 GOP presidential nomination are patiently waiting on the DC Establishment to present them with a savior like Haley Barbour or Chris Christie. Political activists in a place like Iowa view themselves as at least as sophisticated as the people who whisper to Politico every day, and more to the point, they are in a position to make their preferences matter.

Yesterday TNR’s Jonathan Chait took notice of a remarkable speech by Tim Pawlenty to a Tea Party Patriots conference, in which the probable presidential candidate indulged in some crowd-pleasing “rise up and take back our country” rhetoric. As Chait indicated, this sort of talk is too rarely analyzed for its underlying insurrectionary themes:

Why do I say this is inflammatory? Because conservatives are writing President Obama completely out of the American political tradition. Conservatives claim not only to have a superior vision for securing American prosperity, which is an understandable thing for a political movement to believe, but to represent the sole legitimate custodians of the Constitution. It follows from all this that Obama represents a unique threat to American freedom, and moreover — a point that is often made explicit — that the threat he poses requires a response that goes beyond normal politics. The whole metaphor of the Tea Party is to re-imagine conservatism as a proto-revolutionary guerrilla response to tyranny, rather than a movement that operates through normal political channels.

I couldn’t agree more. But what’s most remarkable to me about this incident is that it’s Tim Pawlenty stirring up the mob at the barricades. That this quintessentially bland and conventional pol is talking this way is an alarming indicator of the Republican zeitgeist. It’s like hearing someone drop an F-bomb on the Hallmark Channel–just not a good sign of civic health.

Gerald Seib of the Wall Street Journal articulates a reasonable-sounding but completely erroneous notion of the relationship between federal and state governments in a piece today glamorizing governors for wanting to turn down or turn back federal assistance:

For decades, the implicit deal between Washington and state capitals has been that the feds would offer chunks of cash, and in return would get commensurate influence over the states’ social policies. Now that flow of federal goodies has begun what figures to be a long-term decline, as the money Washington has available to pass around to the states is squeezed. Already the funds the federal government offered states as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package have nearly run out, and the budget-cutting that has begun in Washington is curtailing the other money available to dole out.
A loss of federal largess means a loss of influence in state capitals–particularly if states succeed in winning more autonomy in running the Medicaid health program for the poor, one area where money from Washington continues to grow.

Uh, no. In areas like health care the feds aren’t just handing out cash to “influence” what state governments do. Medicaid represents a collective decision that states will deal with the health care and (to a lesser extent) income maintenance needs of low-income families (plus some other categories of the needy like seniors seeking long-term care) with financial help from the federal government, just as the feds deal with the health care and income-maintenance needs of non-impoverished, non-disabled seniors through Medicare and Social Security.
Most recent federal administrations (including the current one) have exhibited great flexibility in allowing states to choose the precise means whereby the program’s goals are met. But that’s not the flexibiity some Republican governors want: they want the flexibility to reduce eligibility and coverage–i.e., to abandon some of the program’s goals.
And that’s not some sort of noble or interesting “experiment” conducted by “laboratories of democracy.” We already know how experimenting with letting the needy take care of themselves will turn out.

It’s likely that we are going to see a lot more Madison-like protest demonstrations at state capitols across the U.S. Regardless of the outcome in Wisconsin, it’s fortunate that Madison is taking the lead among state capitols and providing a template for future protests in other states. Few, if any state capitols, have a more creative and energetic progressive community to show the way.
In terms of protest optics, I would give the Madison demonstrators high marks for signage that covers every angle. It might be good, however, to have more signs propagating variations on the Walker = Polarizer meme. The latest PPP poll, which I flagged yesterday, indicates that union families are now much more disposed toward dumping Governor Walker next election (2014), but there has been very little change in his image among non-union respondents. Make Walker the new poster boy for divisive, polarizing politicians at every opportunity. Same for his egocentric refusal to compromise. Ever the ambitious narcissist, Walker looks in the mirror and sees himself as Reagan 2.0, not a reasonable conservative who is willing to compromise to secure the best outcome for his constituents — which should be highlighted by the protesters.
The Madison demonstrators are making effective use of the American flag, and could even display a few more in the crowds. There’s a reason MLK always marched under the American flag. He knew his adversaries would try to portray him as somehow un-American. And when the opportunity was presented, King would leverage expressions like “the sacred heritage of our nation” to support his protests. Unlike the right wing, Progressives are often reluctant to tap the power of patriotic symbols and verbal expressions. But America is now awash in a rancid wave of neo-McCarthyism, in which every progressive reform is slimed by right-wingers as “Socialism.” The flag conveys a resonant visual impression that “We’re doing this because we’re good Americans,” and the more flags in this particular situation, the better.
Some spokespersons for the Madison protests have raised concerns about Walker’s attack as a an assault on the first amendment. While the first amendment does not explicitly reference the right of unions to organize, it comes close enough, as some constitutional scholars believe. Here’s the entire text:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The 1st amendment card could be played more effectively with a little more message discipline among spokespersons. Call out Governor Walker for trying to undermine workers’ constitutional rights. Make him waste time and energy defending himself with trifling terminology arguments that most people won’t relate to. Look, for example, at the traction the NRA has gotten out of a broadly interpreted 2nd amendment, despite the fact that the founders were talking about flintlocks, not high-capacity ammo clips. Walker’s initiative to crush workers’ rights to union representation is un-American, and it should be plainly said.
MLK also used prayer creatively. In tense situations, surrounded by armed adversaries, King would sometimes call his marchers to drop down on one knee and say a prayer for justice and a peaceful outcome. A third generation preacher, King and his followers were sincere in appealing for God’s help. But he also understood the power of humility in winning support from fence-sitters and in neutralizing potential adversaries. Prayer serves protesters well.
Lastly, leaders and spokespersons for the protest should always make a point of appealing for reconciliation in public statements, as did King, so that Wisconsin citizens can live together in a new spirit of cooperation and goodwill, in stark contrast to the chaos created by Walker’s stoking the fires of anger and resentment. It’s all about sharing a more inspiring vision of hope and opportunity for all, an invitation to real community most citizens will support.