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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: June 2011

Can Michele Bachmann Survive Being Taken Seriously?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
If you had to sum up the favorable impression Representative Michele Bachmann has made thus far on the 2012 campaign trail, it might be with the words: “She doesn’t seem crazy at all!” Expectations surrounding Bachmann, based on her well-earned reputation as a fringe character in the House Republican Caucus, have made it easy for her to make a positive impression. Reading the reviews of her performance at the June 13 presidential candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, sprinkled with words like “articulate” and “polished” and “disciplined,” it’s very clear she’s had a low threshold to cross.
But this week, with the impeccably timed formal launch of her presidential campaign, Bachmann is about to enter a period of enormous peril in which her background, ideology, and rhetorical habits are about to get the kind of exposure only a Kardashian could enjoy. Can she possibly survive as a viable contender?
The hard-core Christian Right/Tea Party folk who are Bachmann’s base in Iowa and elsewhere, of course, don’t need any introduction to her. She’s been on the television and radio shows they patronize, and many have undoubtedly contributed to her vastly expensive congressional campaigns. They’re fine with the more outlandish things she’s said over the years, but also understand it may be necessary to bring Americans along slowly to the recognition of the high-stakes holy war that Bachmann is waging on their behalf as a self-described “constitutional conservative” (a heavily loaded term connoting a belief that liberalism–fiscal, economic, or cultural–is literally un-American and needs to be permanently vanquished) in the field.
For the rest of the GOP, however, attitudes towards Bachmann may depend on what tack her critics choose. The clear template available is the sort of questioning and mockery faced by Sarah Palin, with whom the media inevitably identify Bachmann for all sorts of good and bad reasons. You could call it the “civics test” approach, where the candidate is directly questioned about her knowledge of American history and world events, and “gotcha’d” for unforced errors (e.g., Palin’s recent revisionist account of Paul Revere’s ride, and Bachmann’s relocation of Lexington and Concord from Massachusetts to New Hampshire). As Palin’s experience shows, this sort of scrutiny can be devastating over time, particularly if the target reinforces it by constantly complaining about the treatment. But what if Bachmann, unlike Palin, keeps on proving she’s not “a flake” and doesn’t do the sort of thing that makes it hard to take her seriously–e.g., resigning her office?
Indeed, unlike Palin, the scrutiny to which Bachmann is most vulnerable is not about what she does or doesn’t know, but about what she believes. As Michelle Goldberg, an expert on “Christian nationalism,” recently explained, Bachmann’s worldview has marinated in many years of extremist training and advocacy:

Bachmann honed her view of the world after college, when she enrolled at the Coburn Law School at Oral Roberts University, an “interdenominational, Bible-based, and Holy Spirit-led” school in Oklahoma. “My goal there was to learn the law both from a professional but also from a biblical worldview,” she said in an April speech.
At Coburn, Bachmann studied with John Eidsmoe, who she recently described as “one of the professors who had a great influence on me.” Bachmann served as his research assistant on the 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy, and that it should become one again. “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,” Eidsmoe wrote. “In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

Bachmann’s long history of identification with truly hard-core Christian Right causes, from religiously oriented charter schools and home-schooling, to the picketing of abortion clinics, to her singular hostility to gays and lesbians, would surely trouble more than a few voters if fully exposed. The big question is who, specifically, will raise them, and how much credibility will the person have?
It’s doubtful, for instance, that Republican caucus-goers or primary voters will be upset by the sort of insult-laden outrage expressed recently by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi in his review of Bachmann’s ideological history. But you have to assume that more than a few Republican elites are worried about her recent ascendency, and the possibility that she could quickly eliminate the inoffensive conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, in Iowa, creating a divisive slugfest down the road.
On the other hand, Republican elites have long had to learn not to snicker out loud at some of the religious views of their Christian Right allies. This is probably why they chose to attack Mike Huckabee in 2008 on the basis of his heterodox economic policy sentiments rather than his theocratic leanings. Perhaps, then, they will find another angle to go after Bachmann, such as her occasionally isolationist-sounding foreign policy views. But the bottom line is that Bachmann’s moment in the sun makes her vulnerable to attacks that are being formulated as we speak, and we’ll know soon enough who takes the lead in cutting her down to size, and whether it actually works.


Obama’s Sweet Spot

Veteran political observer Mike Tomasky, from his new digs at Newsweek, does a good job of putting together the factors–demographic, geographic and psychological–that will dominate Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. He looks at three counties in swing states–Colorado’s Arapohoe, North Carolina’s Wake, and Ohio’s Franklin–that Obama won by surprising margins in 2008, and weighs some of the pros and cons about whether they can be won again next year.

The base vote can still emerge in large numbers, but the dominant factor this time won’t be hope and change. Instead, the factors will be fear of the other side, state and local political conditions (think of how motivated Democrats are to regain control of their politics in Wisconsin), and demographic changes that are still redounding to the Democrats’ benefit. And because we elect presidents by states, the place to assess Obama’s prospects is on the ground.

Arapohoe’s challenge is all about taking advantage of demographics:

In the last decade, the Latino population of Arapahoe County has more than doubled, to 105,249. If the Democratic Party can register and mobilize this key Obama constituency–Latinos gave him 67 percent of their votes nationally last time–the president would likely carry Arapahoe by a far larger margin than he did in ’08. But Olivia Mendoza, executive director of the nonpartisan Colorado Latino Forum, says the community’s temperature about Obama is awfully lukewarm. “This is very anecdotal,” Mendoza ventures, “but overall, in my experience? General dissatisfaction.”
Todd Mata, the county Democratic chairman, acknowledges that “a lot of people are a little disillusioned, rightly or wrongly,” with Obama, but he says that on the ground, the party structure is working much more closely than last time with Organizing for America (OFA), the Obama get-out-the-vote vehicle.

The “enthusiasm” factor is unavoidable, and it may simply be naive to think Team Obama can ever come close to recapitulating the atmospherics of the 2008 campaign. But fear of Republican rule–in some cases, as in Ohio, refreshed by recent state-level experience–can have almost as strong an effect.
And then there are campaign mechanics, and we are only beginning to be able to assess the extent to which Obama ’12 is or isn’t based on the appropriate lessons from the last two election cycles.


Dems Must Dramatize GOP Jobs Blockade

There’s been a lot of discussion in Democratic circles lately about what Dems can do with the fact that Republicans clearly want the economic recovery to fail, at least until the November ’12 elections. Of course, the smarter Republicans deny it, while others like Rush Limbaugh have said it plain.
Wanting the economy to fail is not only unpatriotic; it’s also callously self-serving on a purely human level. it’s a sick political party that will let millions of Americans suffer so it can gain electoral advantage. The question is, how can Democrats turn the GOP’s obstruction of the recovery against them?.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi may have come up with an effective way to address Republican obstructionism. In an interview with CNN’s Candy Crowley, Pelosi explained, “When the … unemployment rate is high, it’s hard for the incumbent to win. I remind you though, we’re not the incumbent. The Republicans are the incumbent.”
Some might say it’s a tough sell, arguing that Republicans are “the incumbent” because they control the House of Representatives, when Dems are a majority of the Senate and hold the white house. But Republicans are exercising functional veto power by obstructing any bipartisan reforms.
The TDS bumper sticker, GOP=Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis is even more painfully true today than it was when we first made it available.
But Pelosi is right that the Republicans are the “incumbents” in the sense that they are the force that is preventing congressional action on needed legislative reforms. The House Republicans represent the status quo that is obstructing public service employment, infrastructure renewal, restrictions on outsourcing jobs and increased tax revenues from multi-millionaires and corporations that are awash in exorbitant profits. They exercise a knee-jerk veto power on all progressive economic reforms that could put people to work and balance the budget. For a good graphic representation of their strategy, see here.
So maybe dubbing the GOP as “the real incumbents” could be an effective meme that might make some of the more thoughtful swing voters pause before blaming Dems for inaction on needed reforms to expand employment. Dems must have a soundbite-sized meme to capture the GOP’s obstructionist opposition to needed economic reforms, and Pelosi’s point is a good one.


Bachmann Up, T-Paw Down

The ever-fickle political news media is seizing on a new poll in Iowa to further inflate the expectations surrounding Michele Bachmann’s formal campaign launch today, and to all but bury Tim Pawlenty’s chances.
The first Des Moines Register poll of likely Republican Caucus-goers came out yesterday, and the major buzz involved Bachmann’s amazingly good showing–22 percent, and just a point behind Mitt Romney–and Pawlenty’s pallid 6 percent.
The punditocracy’s reaction to Pawlenty’s poor performance in the poll was to take another step towards the conclusion that the man just lacks the positive appeal to get people who like him to actually vote for him.
Meanwhile, the hey-she’s-not-all-that-crazy response to Bachmann’s performance in the first New Hampshire candidates’ debate was intensified by her Iowa poll numbers. She is clearly benefitting from Newt Gingrich’s implosion, Herman Cain’s predictable fade, and whatever it is that is keeping conservative evangelicals from taking the practical route to Pawlenty-land.
Nate Silver suggested that this poll, and T-Paw’s struggles generally, could create enormous impetus for a late entry by Rick Perry. I dunno. Sure, the overall dynamics of the contest continue to favor someone who is not named either Mitt Romney nor Michele Bachmann. It’s not clear, however, that Perry has enough time to put together a competent Iowa effort, and moreover, the Texas has a history of crazy utterances that easily rivals Bachmann’s.
It’s important to remember that the Register poll is of likely caucus-goers, not of likely straw poll attendees. T-Paw still has a clear chance to get back on track through sheer organization muscle at the August 13 straw poll event. That’s what Mike Huckabee did in 2008 after coming it at 4% in the first Register poll of likely caucus-goers.
Here’s The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson offering an interesting take on Pawlenty’s problem and a possible solution:

Bob Haus, a multi-cycle caucus veteran, best described the Pawlenty campaign’s mentality when he told the Huffington Post that he’s taking a “Field of Dreams’ approach, if you build it, they will come.” The only problem is the people are not coming. What Pawlenty has built here in Iowa is impressive, but paying certain consultants and hiring a certain amount of staff has never been the key to building a winning caucus campaign. While his team has studied the campaigns of caucuses past, it seems they forgot to factor in the recent mood of the electorate.
The non-aggression pact that Pawlenty seems to be operating under is a recipe for failure. Maybe instead of trying to prove to he’s tough by telling Iowans that he opposes ethanol subsidies, he should get tough with the people he’s actually competing against for the Republican nomination.


Tim Pawlenty: Why It’s Way Too Soon To Count Him Out

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As the 2012 Republican presidential field began to take shape earlier this year, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty looked like the perfect on-paper candidate: a former blue-state, blue-collar governor from the Midwest who was cozy with both social conservatives and Tea Party folk, and who didn’t have Mitt Romney’s problem of heretical past positions. Nobody, to be sure, was going to confuse him with the fire-breathing orators whose rhetoric he purloined, but at a time when a generic Republican was consistently running more strongly against Barack Obama than any actual candidate, he was, as David Frum noted, the most “generic” of those available, and virtually everyone’s second choice.
But in the months that have transpired, T-Paw-mania has stubbornly failed to develop. Pawlenty remains mired in the single digits in both national polls and most surveys of early primary states, now routinely trailing the previously obscure and entirely untested pizza magnate, Herman Cain. His stump style continues to provoke mockery and yawns. His big policy announcement, an “economic plan” that proposed gigantic new upper-end tax cuts and relied on hallucinatory levels of economic growth, was trashed by experts, including some Republicans. And when he finally produced some campaign trail heat by taunting Mitt Romney with a description of the Affordable Care Act as “ObamneyCare,” Pawlenty immediately invited bipartisan catcalls for refusing to defend the label in the first major Republican candidates’ debate. So is T-Paw just another overreaching politician who looked in the funhouse mirror of ego and flattery and saw a boring nebbish transformed into a putative leader of the free world? Were the initial hopes inspired by his candidacy as overblown as his bombastic video ads?
Perhaps. But the available evidence suggests that he is simply playing a different game than his critics imagine: a small-ball strategy focused not on gaining national media attention, or destroying Mitt Romney, or gaining millions of Facebook or YouTube followers. Instead, his campaign is all about doggedly pursuing a path to victory that begins in Ames, Iowa, on August 13.
To many national political observers, the Iowa GOP Straw Poll in Ames is just a bit of meaningless pageantry that typifies Iowa’s excessive role in the presidential nominating process. But it serves the objective function of winnowing the field, particularly among candidates with similar constituencies. In 2008, for instance, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback was considered a viable contender until Mike Huckabee beat him for second place in Ames, establishing himself as the preferred candidate of conservative evangelicals and other social conservatives in the state. Huckabee, of course, went on to upset Mitt Romney in the actual Caucuses five months later.
T-Paw’s strategy is to do to his social conservative opponents–Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann–what Huckabee did to Brownback. And he’s poured everything he has into putting together the most impressive organization of any candidate in Iowa, including a large field staff, Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, Romney’s 2008 straw poll coordinator, and a host of local luminaries. He’s also become the first candidate to buy TV ads in Iowa. He’s poor-mouthed his prospects, saying that he only needs to gain “one of the top few spots” in Ames. But as The Iowa Republican‘s Craig Robinson observed:

Tim Pawlenty isn’t trying to sneak up on anyone in Iowa. When you look at the size of team that he has assembled, it is clear that he intends to do more than just compete here in Iowa. He intends to win it.

Pawlenty will be aided, as well, by the fact that Mitt Romney has announced he’s skipping the Straw Poll he won in 2008, and that Jon Huntsman is skipping Iowa altogether. And even if Texas’s Rick Perry, who has theoretical appeal to the Tea Party and social conservative activists in Iowa, jumps into the race in a few weeks, he’s not going to have time to assemble the kind of labor-intensive bus caravan effort necessary to show well in Ames. A decisive win over Bachmann and Cain in the Straw Poll–a real possibility since Bachmann is 18 Iowa visits behind Pawlenty in her native state, while Cain has shown signs of organizational weakness–could help Pawlenty begin consolidating social conservative support to win the Caucuses, and go a long way towards his ultimate goal of becoming the “true conservative” alternative to Mitt Romney.
At that point, all sorts of horizons could open up for the Minnesotan. While he’s shown very little strength in New Hampshire, Romney’s long-standing front-runner status in that state makes him vulnerable to the kind of less-than-expected, Pyrrhic victory that unraveled the campaign of Democrat Ed Muskie (another New Hampshire neighbor) back in 1972. Indeed, if Jon Huntsman somehow gets traction among independents in the Granite State, the state primary could begin to resemble its 2010 Republican Senate primary, when long-time frontrunner Kelly Ayotte nearly succumbed to a left-right squeeze from wealthy centrist Bill Binnie and social conservative Ovide Lamontagne.
And even if Romney wins New Hampshire decisively, T-Paw has some hidden strengths when the contest moves south. Pawlenty has slavishly pandered to the litmus-test demands of Palmetto State kingpin Jim DeMint and celebrity governor Nikki Haley, who shares a pollster with Pawlenty and is rumored to be in his camp. (Celebrity congressman Joe “You Lie!” Wilson, for his part, has already endorsed him). His campaign manager, wunderkind Nick Ayers, got his start in Georgia politics, which helps explain why Newt Gingrich’s national co-chair, former Governor Sonny Perdue, endorsed Pawlenty the moment Newt’s campaign imploded. And while Rick Perry could make a regional appeal in the South, that’s a long way off, and southern conservatives have long shown a willingness to back conservative Yankees against regional favorites (e.g., Bob Dole over Lamar Alexander in 1996).
In any event, this scenario helps to explain why Pawlenty’s doing what he’s doing: obsessively campaigning in Iowa and not worrying much about his national standing. Even his infamous wimp out on “ObamneyCare” makes sense given Iowans’ well-known antipathy for intraparty negative campaigning, and the more obvious fact that Romney is not his target in that state. The fact that Pawlenty has a clear strategy with a plausible path to victory does not, of course, mean it will work. In a year when Republicans seem to want an ideological crusader as much as a conventional candidate, T-Paw’s lack of charisma–which once led a Minnesota magazine to entitle a sympathetic profile of the governor, “The Cipher”–could be the political death of him. But if he fails, it will be because he couldn’t overcome who he is, not because he’s running a bad campaign for president.


Romney Leads With Chin on Jobs

Many have noted the irony of GOP front-runner Mitt Romney having to downplay his most impressive achievement, ‘Romneycare.’ As his attack ads blasting President Obama for weak job-creation begin to appear, however, Romney has an even more troublesome record that he will hide, distort and deny, — his utter failure to create jobs as Governor of Massachusetts.
As Andrew Sum and Joseph McLaughlin, director and research associate respectively of the Center for Market Studies at Northeastern University, noted in a Boston Globe article back in 2007,

…Our analysis reveals a weak comparative economic performance of the state over the Romney years, one of the worst in the country.
On all key labor market measures, the state not only lagged behind the country as a whole, but often ranked at or near the bottom of the state distribution. Formal payroll employment in the state in 2006 was still 16,000 or 0.5 percent below its average level in 2002, the year immediately prior to the start of the Romney administration. Massachusetts ranked third lowest on this key job generation measure and would have ranked second lowest if Hurricane Katrina had not devastated the Louisiana economy. Manufacturing payroll employment throughout the nation declined by nearly 1.1 million or 7 percent between 2002 and 2006, but in Massachusetts it declined by more than 14 percent, the third worst record in the country.
While the number of employed people over age 16 in the United States rose by nearly 8 million, or close to 6 percent, between 2002 and 2006, the number of employed residents in the Commonwealth is estimated to have modestly declined by 8,500. Massachusetts was the only state to have failed to post any gain in its pool of employed residents. The aggregate number of people 16 and older either working or looking for work in Massachusetts fell over the Romney years.
We were one of only two states to have experienced no growth in its resident labor force. Again, without the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina on the dispersal of the Louisiana population, Massachusetts would have ranked last on this measure. The decline in the state’s labor force, which was influenced in large part by high levels of out-migration of working-age adults, helped hold down the official unemployment rate of the state. Between July 2002 and July 2006, the US Census Bureau estimated that 222,000 more residents left Massachusetts for other states than came here to live. This high level of net domestic out-migration was equivalent to 3.5 percent of the state’s population, the third highest rate of population loss in the country. Excluding the population displacement effects of Hurricane Katrina on Louisiana, Massachusetts would have ranked second highest on this measure. We were a national leader in exporting our population.

The authors go on to note an equally-dismal litany of related economic statistics from Romney’s tenure regarding productivity, income, housing prices and outmigration. As the authors conclude, “Jokes about Massachusetts may receive some half-hearted laughter on the national campaign trail, but few working men and women in Massachusetts should see anything funny about the state’s lackluster economic performance during the Romney years..”
It’s not just his record in elective office. Writing in today’s edition of the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen notes in “The Jobs Issue is Romney’s Weakest issue” that Romney’s much-trumpeted success as a businessman (hedge funds) does not exactly merit kudos for job-creation:

Romney slashed American jobs as if his career depended on it — and it did. Indeed, it’s tempting to wonder how many of those folks in Romney’s new web ad, waiting in the unemployment line, were put there by Romney’s hedge fund?…Romney should also be aware of the fact that the more his campaign focuses on employment, the more Romney leads with his chin. Put simply, the jobs issue is Romney’s weakest issue…The more he pushes this, the more the public should be reminded of Romney’s atrocious record.

Before campaign 2012 is over, Romney may well become the new poster-boy for political denial — with his dodgy record on jobs as exhibit “A.”


Oh, Shut Up, Karl!

Many years ago, when the late Howard Cosell was ubiquitous in American sports journalism, I used to shout at his image on the television a lot (particularly during the brief period when he was unwisely deployed to do broadcasts of baseball, a sport he did not understand or even like). “Oh, shut up, Howard!” I’d often say in response to one of his pomposities or non sequiturs.
I’m beginning to feel the same way every time Karl Rove shows up in print or on the tube. Put aside, if you can, partisan feelings about the man, who pioneered so many of the conservative tactics that have had a baleful effect on the political system during his entire career. He also ought to be a pariah to Republicans, particularly now that they’ve decided his signature swing-vote-baiting policy initiatives–comprehensive immigration reform, No Child Left Behind, and the Medicare Rx Drug program–were actually satanic, and the reason Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Instead, he’s everywhere, spinning madly. The latest travesty is a Wall Street Journal column entitled: “Why Obama Is Likely To Lose in 2012.” The title isn’t the problem, but the “evidence” this supposed wizard of American politics offers in its defense is cheesy in the extreme. There’s a whole section where Rove asserts, without a spot of proof, that Obama’s in big trouble with Jewish voters (part, of course, of the GOP effort to paint Obama as some sort of Hamas-lover), and then races off into speculation about the potential impact in Florida. And then there’s this passage:

Mr. Obama’s standing has declined among other, larger groups. Gallup reported his job approval rating Tuesday at 45%, down from 67% at his inaugural. Among the groups showing a larger-than-average decline since 2009 are whites (down 25 points); older voters (down 24); independents and college graduates (both down 23), those with a high-school education or less, men, and Southerners (all down 22); women (down 21 points); married couples and those making $2,000-$4,000 a month (down 20). This all points to severe trouble in suburbs and midsized cities in states likes Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
There’s more. Approval among younger voters has dropped 22 points, and it’s dropped 20 points among Latinos. Even African-American voters are less excited about Mr. Obama than they were–and than he needs them to be.

All sounds pretty scary, right? Unless you notice that Rove is comparing the president’s current approval ratings to those he enjoyed at his inaugural, that universal honeymoon moment which is absolutely meaningless in terms of any president’s reelection. Lord knows there’s enough negative data out there to cast doubt on Obama’s re-election prospects; why does Rove feel the need to grossly exaggerate it?
Ah, but Rove’s shamelessness is limitless, viz. this incredibly hypocritical piece of pious nonsense:

Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency’s great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change.

It’s bad enough that Rove has completely and with malice aforethought mischaracterized the partisan dynamics of Washington at present–one in which the president continues to chase Republicans around the Capitol in search of someone with whom to negotiate in a pack of pols who constantly describe him as an incompetent socialist knave. But it’s particularly rich coming from the man who turned the policy apparatus of the Bush administration into an all-politics, all-the-time exercise, as so perfectly captured by former White House staffer John DiUilio is his 2003 description of the Rove-dominated team as “the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
Please, Karl, spare us the moralizing, or just shut up.


Don’t Expect Republicans To Choose Electability Over Ideology

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As Mitt Romney gradually expands his lead in national polls of Republicans, and his would-be “true conservative” rivals struggle to emerge from the Lilliputian pack, there’s a growing consensus that GOP voters are more concerned about picking an electable nominee than in maintaining the conservative purity of their party. This belief nicely coincides with the abiding faith of Beltway pundits that the ideological bender represented by the Tea Party movement is coming to an end as the Great Big Adults of the Daddy Party reassert control. But while there is, in fact, plenty of evidence to suggest that “electability” is a significant factor in the calculations of the GOP rank-and-file, the implication that Republicans are becoming more pragmatic in their choice of candidates remains a big–and exceedingly unlikely–stretch.
The driving force behind the media’s new obsession with electability is a series of recent polls on the subject. A June 13 Gallup survey showed 50 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favoring “a candidate with the best chance of beating Barack Obama, but who does not agree with you on almost all of the issues you care about,” while 46 percent favored “a candidate who agrees with you on almost all of the issues you care about but does not have the best chance of beating Barack Obama.” A June 16 poll by PPP showed an even larger “pro-electability” margin: If forced to choose between “a candidate with conservative positions on every issue” and “one with the best chance of defeating Barack Obama,” the latter proposition led the former by a margin of 56 to 31. But it’s important to keep in mind that, back in January, a CNN poll with wording closer to Gallup’s showed a 68-29 margin for the “electable” candidate. The CNN poll indicates that while “electability” is clearly a factor, it’s not at all clear that it’s a growing concern among Republicans.
Indeed, despite elite GOP concerns that Barack Obama will be a very difficult candidate to defeat, there is a more prominent conservative narrative being promulgated about Obama’s immense unpopularity–one that has the effect of making his defeat appear exceedingly easy. The steady drumbeat of conservative media claims that Obama is a disastrous president–half Jimmy Carter, half Herbert Hoover–whose policies were decisively repudiated by the American people in 2010 has created a steady undertow of belief that virtually any credible GOP nominee could beat him. Rank-and-file Republicans, for example, are less inclined than elites to assume no candidate other than Romney (or perhaps Huntsman) is electable. A recent Daily Caller poll of Republicans on the question of which candidate best fit this profile placed Romney first at 30 percent, but showed non-candidate Chris Christie second at 15 percent, Herman Cain at 12 percent, and Sarah Palin–almost universally considered unelectable in elite opinion–at 10 percent. In other words, while voters might claim to care about electability, there’s no guarantee that they are anywhere near agreement about what the term means and to whom it could conceivably be applied.
In addition, it’s by no means clear that voters’ stated opinions about the candidates’ electability have any real translatable value to their popularity in the early primaries. Romney’s electability numbers are well below those registered by Rudy Giuliani, for instance, at this point in the 2008 cycle: Nearly half of Republicans considered him the most electable candidate in July of 2007. Giuliani’s support, of course, collapsed once voting got underway, even though Republicans were far more pessimistic about their odds of winning in 2008.
But however you choose to interpret the impact of the electability issue for Mitt Romney, the broader argument that the rightward lurch of the GOP since 2008 is a mirage or a tactic, soon to be abandoned for the sake of pragmatism or swing-voter opinion, is extremely dubious. In the wake of the 2008 debacle, to an astonishingly overwhelming degree, Republicans concluded that a more rigorous conservative message and a highly confrontational attitude towards Democrats were not only essential to the demands of their principles, but represented the only path to electoral victory. This has, of course, been a staple of movement-conservative belief ever since Phyllis Schlafly published A Choice Not an Echo back in 1964, but it has rarely secured the kind of apparent vindication among Republicans as it did in 2010. To the extent that conservatives worry about electability going into 2012, they are as likely to fear a nominee who is too moderate to one who is too conservative.
The best example of the enduring nature of the GOP’s rightward trajectory is, ironically, Mitt Romney himself. He ran as the true conservative alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in 2008, and is running as the establishment pragmatist candidate today. But in every significant respect, he’s much more conservative now than he was then. He certainly didn’t feel the need to explain away his Massachusetts health plan in 2008, and also would have never suggested a federal debt default might be necessary if draconian cuts in federal domestic spending were not enacted. It’s a sign of the times that the more conservative Romney 2.0 is having to defend his ideological bona fides.
To be sure, in a field composed almost entirely of conservative ideologues with little daylight between their beliefs, Republicans will compare candidates based on general election poll performance against Barack Obama, as well as perceptions of whether this or that candidate is insufficiently “presidential” (the rap against Tim Pawlenty) or “prepared to serve” (the rap against Cain and Palin). Depending on their alternatives when the voting gets underway, GOP primary voters could decide to give Romney a mulligan on his past health care reform heresy, since he’s sturdily conservative on every other issue and is now promoting a federal health care plan that is solidly right-wing. Or they could support Tim Pawlenty’s apparent gambit to depict himself as the most electable candidate who is willing to check every conceivable conservative ideological box.
But that’s very different from the idea that Republicans are looking for the most moderate, rational figure. The one candidate who seems to be marketing that old model of establishment Republicanism, Jon Huntsman, is likely about to find out very painfully that his party is not going to accept a presidential nominee, however electable, who is reluctant to call himself a “conservative” or attack his former boss in the Oval Office. So while Republicans might want to beat Barack Obama in the worst way, don’t expect them to believe they have to choose electability over ideology. In today’s GOP, that sort of thinking will earn you the dreaded label of RINO.


Imprisoned by a Budget Crisis

It doesn’t get much national attention, but the endless state budget crisis in California looks like a microcosm of what the national scene could soon resemble if the public is not presented with better information, real choices, and structural reforms in how decisions are made.
To make a very long story short, California’s decision-making process on fiscal issues is a real nightmare. Ballot initiatives have imposed a two-thirds requirement on legislative decisions at either the state or local level to raise revenues. Other initiatives have earmarked revenues for particular types of spending, and have created a vast shell-game where revenues and spending are traded back and forth between state and local jurisdictions. Republicans have long used the two-thirds requirement to keep greater revenues off the table. And the public seems to have no appetite for either specific revenue increases or spending cuts.
Believe it or not, it could be, and recently was, worse. Until Proposition 25 passed in 2010, even enacting a budget in California required a two-thirds vote. But given the two-thirds requirement on taxes, the practical effect of Prop 25 has simply been to offer the Democratically-controlled (but not by a two-thirds vote) legislature the choice of caving to Republican demands for spending-cut-only measures to balance the budget, or to resort to short-term fixes and accounting gimmicks.
The latter option is what the legislature has just chosen, frustrating Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to keep pressure on Republicans to agree to a referendum that would enable voters to approve a package of extensions of temporary taxes and fees established during the last mega-crisis. Brown promptly vetoed the budget, and then got an assist in his pressuring efforts from Democratic State Controller John Chiang, who issued a constitutionally dubious but popular order declaring the budget “unbalanced” and then suspending pay for legislators until they complied with the state’s balanced-budget law.
Meanwhile, public opinion polls show Californians would welcome Brown’s revenue referendum, but might very well vote against it. And moreover, polls consistently show majorities of Californians opposing spending cuts in virtually every area of state government other than corrections, where big majorities support cuts and oppose tax increases to pay the bills.
That’s ironic, since the U.S. Supreme Court (in a controversial 5-4 decision) recently ordered the state to take drastic actions to reduce prison overcrowding and supply better health care to inmates. You may recall that California was the original home to “three strikes” legislation and other mandatory sentencing measures, some imposed by ballot initiative.
So there is no apparent end in sight to the budget gridlock unless Brown and Chiang can force a handful of Republicans to risk their careers by voting for the revenue-extender referendum in defiance of party orthodoxy.
Californians may very well break the gridlock in 2012 by giving Democrats a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature, as initial readings of its new nonpartisan “citizens redistricting” system indicate might well happen. But it’s a really bad way to run a state, feeding the very public cynicism that leads to ever-greater restrictions on the ability of elected officials to make decisions. And it’s certainly what we can expect nationally if current conservative demands for arbitrary restrictions on fiscal policymaking are enacted.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Majority Favors Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage

From TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira’s weekly ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American progress web pages:

…In late March, I flagged recent results suggesting that we could be reaching the point where majority support for marriage equality solidifies…I noted a Washington Post/ABC News poll result where 53 percent said it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married compared to 44 percent who thought it should be illegal. This was the first time the poll found majority support for marriage equality since it started asking the question in 2003.

No, conservatives, it wasn’t just an outlier, as Teixeira reports:

Since then, two other major public polls have found that a majority of Americans support full marriage equality for same-sex couples. In an April CNN poll, 51 percent thought marriages between same-sex couples should be recognized by law with the same rights as marriages between a man and a woman…And in a May Gallup poll that used almost the same question wording, 53 percent endorsed legalizing marriage for same-sex couples.

Teixeira believes these polls “suggest we have reached the tipping point on this issue,” and he sees larger majorities ahead since “…this position as fair and reasonable” and continued opposition is “…both futile and mean-spirited.” Teixeira adds, “It’s time for conservatives to acknowledge the inevitable: They have lost and tolerance has won…”