The blogosphere is awash with references to Tim Pawlenty’s limp performance in the GOP opening debates, paired with positive spin about Michelle Bachmann’s comparatively strong presentation, prompting considerable snarkage about who really leads the MN GOP (Hint: It ain’t the ex-guv).
The punditariat is a tad mystified as to why Tim-Paw refused to elaborate on his pre-debate “Obamneycare” trial balloon, which many observers thought was a pretty clever zinger against the front-runner. Perhaps Pawlenty figured Romney had an equally-clever counter-punch at the ready, so why blunder into it. But the wide read on Pawlenty’s reluctance, especially after being pressed by CNN moderator John King, is that it did make him look evasive. Here’s how Josh Marshall described it in his post “Pawlenty’s Pitiful Moment” at Talking Points Memo, which also includes the video clip :

…The key moment where Gov. Pawlenty hemmed and hawed and ducked and weaved and wasn’t willing to repeat his criticisms to Romney’s face. Embarrassing. People get that. They have words for it.

Elsewhere at TPM, Marshall adds:

…The big story here was Pawlenty. He choked at a critical moment when he wouldn’t repeat the criticisms he’s made of Romney to his face. That makes him look weak. And more than weak I think it cuts against people’s sense of fair play and just being what we Jews call being a mensch. If you criticize someone when they’re not around. Be ready to stay it to their face. If you’re not, you’re just not for real. That’s elemental and I think people understand and remember that in a way they just don’t with the endless run of policy details candidates toss out.

Well, it wasn’t pretty. But I doubt it will prove fatal just yet, although another such choke would likely do him in as a viable candidate. Marshall is not alone in giving the night to Romney, and others give Bachmann a thumbs up as well, if only because she avoided making any characteristic blunders.
Newt and the others failed to make much of an impression, either way, although Ron Paul was gutsy, in GOP context, about bailing out of Afghanistan. I doubt he’ll get much cross-over support from anti-war moderates as a result, though, owing to his past association with some of the ugliest expressions of racial bigotry in recent times, even though the mainstream media has been too timid to call him on it.
No doubt the Romney camp is all smiles today. It won’t last. The GOP field, such as it is, will soon come after him with well-honed verbal pitchforks. I gather Romney’s nomination strategy includes letting the more conservative candidates divide the wingnut/tea party vote, so he can squeak by with the support of the saner Republicans. It’s not all that bad of a strategy, but the road ahead is increasingly pocked with political landmines bearing his name.

The long-awaited congressional and state legislative maps generated by the new California Citizens Redistricting Commission are now out, and unless public hearings or lawsuits change things, Democrats stand to pick up seats at every level, perhaps even gaining the two-thirds legislative majority that could theoretically break the state’s long-standing budgetary gridlock.
But the party’s gains could come at the expense of some Democratic incumbents, since the maps, drawn up to make more districts competitive, place ten of them in districts with each other, and another four in districts with Republican incumbents.
To understand the heavy turnover likely to ensue, it’s important to know that California is a state where the last two redistricting cycles pursued bipartisan incumbent protection to an extraordinary degree, creating very few marginal districts at the federal or state levels. Some Democrats have long felt this tradition limited Democratic opportunities to exploit big demographic advantages in California, which is why the new maps could help.
According to redistricting wizard Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California (as reported at CalBuzz):

[T]he number of competitive districts, counting both houses of the Legislature and Congress, increases from 16 to 34 under the draft plan; the total includes 7 additional Assembly districts (9 competitive to 16); 6 additional Senate districts (3 to 9) and 5 additional House districts (4 to 9).

At the congressional level, initial estimates are that Democrats are likely to pick up around four new House seats, according to Chris Cillizza:

Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell projects that the proposed map includes 32 Democratic seats and five Democratic-leaning seats, with 13 Republican seats and three seats that lean Republican. If each side won the seats that were solidly or leaning in their favor, Democrats would see a net gain of three seats in the delegation in 2012.
Similarly, Republican consultant Matt Rexroad estimates the Democrats’ advantage at 3-5 seats, though other Republicans place the estimate slightly lower and insist they will also get new opportunities from the map.

The new maps are by no means, however, final: the commission is going through a formal public hearing process next, and perhaps more importantly, the maps could be challenged on Voting Rights Act grounds, either in terms of the effect on incumbents from minority groups, or a failure to achieve optimal minority representation overall.
So far, however, in a redistricting cycle expected to produce a fair amount of bad news for Democrats, California is offering good news, and gains achieved not by gerrymandering but by better representation of this diverse and Democratic-trending state.

Just in time for tonight’s first field-wide candidate debate, Tim Pawlenty has come up with a cute sound-bite for the contention that ObamaCare–the greatest threat to American liberties since the British gun control initiatives that touched off the Revolutionary War–was essentially pioneered in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. It’s “ObamneyCare,” a term I am certain we will hear during the debate.
Romney will presumably try to deflect attention from attacks on his health care record by talking about his obsessive, maniacal, and above all hyper-competent focus on jobs and the economy. This is, after all, the strategy being urged on him by most of the punditocracy, who appear (viz. this counter-counter-CW piece from Alexander Burns at Politico) to assume that jobs and the economy are clearly distinguishable from health care as topics of public debate.
Since I wrote a full column just last week challenging the idea that the sluggish economy could vault Romney to the nomination, I won’t repeat my whole argument. But I will reiterate a point that the MSM seems to be missing entirely: today’s conservatives do not think of the economy and “ObamneyCare” as in any way separate issues. They believe, or at least so they incessantly say, that the sole cause of our economic problems is “big government,” of which health reform is the most notorious recent example, and the only route to economic revival is to disable “big government,” beginning with health reform. So for Romney to essentially say “I don’t want to talk about big government any more, I want to talk about the economy,” translates to conservative audiences as “I don’t want to talk about the causes of or solutions to our economic problems, I just want to talk about what a great manager I am.”
Maybe some Republican primary voters want a presidential nominee who will do a more competent and/or tight-fisted job of managing the satanic enterprise of the federal government than other candidates, but that’s more generally considered a deeply suspect RINO credential. I suspect Romney’s rivals, including T-Paw, are smart enough to figure that out, and we will see it tonight.

There seems to be a disconnect between the deficit reduction views of conservative leaders and the more level-headed views of the public. In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains:

It really is quite remarkable, even by the standards of today’s conservatives, how far their plans for reducing the deficit are from the public’s. Conservatives don’t want to raise taxes in any way, especially on the rich and corporations. They don’t want to touch the military. And they think it’s a dandy idea to take a meat axe to domestic spending programs and Social Security. The public is exactly the opposite, as a recent Pew Center poll shows.
So what does the public approve of for reducing the deficit? They approve of reducing U.S. assistance to foreign countries (72 percent), raising the cap for Social Security contributions (67 percent), raising income taxes on the rich (66 percent), reducing military commitments overseas (65 percent), and limiting tax deductions for large corporations (62 percent)…

Conservative priorities for deficit-reduction seem tethered to some alternate reality, in stark contrast to the views of the public — “exactly backwards,” as Teixeira says. Democrats, on the other hand, are in the enviable position of being in synch with the views of the public regarding deficit-reduction and need only to stay grounded to benefit from the conservatives’ discrepancy.

GOP Rep. Paul Ryan has provided an instructive lesson in the folly of advocating the privatization of Medicare, the latest form of self-mutilation for his party. Now comes a new wave of Medicare critics, who hope to appease the knee-jerk Republican ideologues with more modest, but equally ill-considered “reforms.”
Fortunately, New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman eviscerates the latest version of the raise-the-age-of-Medicare-entitlement proposal in his Sunday column, “Medicare Saves Money”:

Every once in a while a politician comes up with an idea that’s so bad, so wrongheaded, that you’re almost grateful. For really bad ideas can help illustrate the extent to which policy discourse has gone off the rails.
And so it was with Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposal, released last week, to raise the age for Medicare eligibility from 65 to 67.
Like Republicans who want to end Medicare as we know it and replace it with (grossly inadequate) insurance vouchers, Mr. Lieberman describes his proposal as a way to save Medicare. It wouldn’t actually do that. But more to the point, our goal shouldn’t be to “save Medicare,” whatever that means. It should be to ensure that Americans get the health care they need, at a cost the nation can afford.

Krugman’s lazer-like analysis will leave Medicare-slashers sputtering predictable government-bashing drivel, which convinces almost no one outside the wingnut choir. As Krugman explains further:

…Medicare actually saves money — a lot of money — compared with relying on private insurance companies. And this in turn means that pushing people out of Medicare, in addition to depriving many Americans of needed care, would almost surely end up increasing total health care costs.
The idea of Medicare as a money-saving program may seem hard to grasp. After all, hasn’t Medicare spending risen dramatically over time? Yes, it has: adjusting for overall inflation, Medicare spending per beneficiary rose more than 400 percent from 1969 to 2009.
But inflation-adjusted premiums on private health insurance rose more than 700 percent over the same period. So while it’s true that Medicare has done an inadequate job of controlling costs, the private sector has done much worse. And if we deny Medicare to 65- and 66-year-olds, we’ll be forcing them to get private insurance — if they can — that will cost much more than it would have cost to provide the same coverage through Medicare.
By the way, we have direct evidence about the higher costs of private insurance via the Medicare Advantage program, which allows Medicare beneficiaries to get their coverage through the private sector. This was supposed to save money; in fact, the program costs taxpayers substantially more per beneficiary than traditional Medicare.

We pause here to allow privatization ideologues a few moments to squirm. Krugman then notes the global evidence, which clearly shows the U.S. performing poorly in terms of cost and quality, compared with other industrial nations, and explains, “…High U.S. private spending on health care, compared with spending in other advanced countries, just about wipes out any benefit we might receive from our relatively low tax burden.”
Then there is the thorny problem of many 65-67 cohorts being unable to qualify for or afford private insurance coverage, delaying needed and preventative health care and becoming more expensive Medicare recipients later, when they do qualify.
Krugman acknowledges that “major cost-control” measures are needed, exactly “the kinds of efforts that are actually in the Affordable Care Act.” He concludes, however, that “…If we really want to hold down costs, we should be seeking to offer Medicare-type programs to as many Americans as possible.”
The partial privatization proposals of Sen. Lieberman and others are as economically untenable as they are morally regressive. Krugman’s simple, but compelling analysis of the true costs of even partial privatization should be noted and mastered by Democrats, who want to hold the white house and take back congress next year.

One of the byproducts of Newt Gingrich’s meltdown is a resurgence of interest in the possibility of Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a late entrant in the GOP 2012 field. Partly that’s because two of his long-time political advisers were among the hordes who have just left Gingrich’s campaign. Perry himself has been making slightly more positive noises about his interest in becoming the 45th president of the country he once implied Texas might consider abandoning (he will supposedly announce his intentions at the end of the current special session of the Texas legislature, which is due to wrap up before Independence Day). And he’s always been a favorite of handicappers on grounds of his fundraising potential and his popularity among Tea Folk.
I’m a little less sold on Perry as a candidate, if only because he’s never been wildly popular with the people who know him best, Texans (yes, he fought off a primary challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison last year, and won a relatively close general election race against Bill White, but you have to ask why Perry was so vulnerable in the first place). I’m not sure he’s a great cultural fit for places like Iowa (where he’d been starting from scratch very late) and New Hampshire, either.
But in any event, the game for the immediate future will be guessing how a Perry candidacy would affect the rest of the field, most notably quasi-front-runner Mitt Romney. RedState’s Erick Erickson has an interesting post on that subject making a counter-intuitive but persuasive argument that Perry would help the Mittster:

The constant factor in the 2012 Republican Presidential race right now is that Mitt Romney has the highest name ID of declared candidates. While you and I know who Rick Perry is, we are not normal primary voters. Those people are only now just becoming engaged and they remember Romney from 2008, but many do not know Perry.
So Perry would have to build up his name identification and raise money. This leaves Romney in the lead as the clock continues ticking.
Every day that the media is focused on the ups and downs of other candidates, including an obsessive media rectal exam of Rick Perry as he gets in and starts hitting the stump is another day that Mitt Romney stays in the lead….
There is a lot of money on the sidelines waiting to find who is going to be the legitimate leader of the anti-Romney coalition. Rick Perry getting in delays finding that leader, keeping that money on the sidelines, keeping Mitt Romney on top. It really is that simple.

Erickson might have added more specifically that a Perry candidacy could delay or even endanger the emergence of Tim Pawlenty as the electable-conservative-alternative-to-Romney, which is already being threatened by the strength being shown in Iowa by Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. But that leads me to a contrary observation: If Perry runs, the number of electable-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney would double. By the same token, the odds drop that Romney will get a post-NH match-up against someone (i.e., Cain or Bachmann) considered unacceptable by the Republican Establishment, and/or unelectable against Obama. That’s bad news for Mitt, since the one-on-one-with-a-crazy-person scenario may be the only way Republicans will hold their collective noses and nominate a guy they don’t actually like.

Has any political party in history been as hypocritical as the modern GOP in terms of paying lip service to principles they undercut with policies?
Republicans say they are all about supporting our troops, and then they slash veterans benefits. They loudly proclaim their religious devotion to gatherings of evangelicals, but their philosopher queen is the faith-hating atheist Ayn Rand (see video in Noteworthy box above). Turns out they have two faces even for matters of critical national security, as yesterday’s editorial in the New York Times, “Budgeting for Insecurity,” makes disturbingly clear. An excerpt:

House Republicans talk tough on terrorism. So we can find no explanation — other than irresponsibility — for their vote to slash financing for eight antiterrorist programs. Unless the Senate repairs the damage, New York City and other high-risk localities will find it far harder to protect mass transit, ports and other potential targets.
The programs received $2.5 billion last year in separate allocations. The House has cut that back to a single block grant of $752 million, an extraordinary two-thirds reduction. The results for high-risk areas would be so damaging — with port and mass transit security financing likely cut by more than half — that the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Peter King of New York, voted against the bill as “an invitation to an attack.”

The Times editorial goes on to explain that the “Republicans made clear that budget-cutting trumped all other concerns…One $270 million cut, voted separately, would eliminate 5,000 airport-screening jobs across the country, according to the Transportation Security Administration.” They also fought to cut more than half of funding for first responder training, but the Democrats were able to restore most of it.
As the Times editorial asks, “Are these really the programs to be cutting?” Not if we put national security before politics.

Recent highly publicized national jobs reports showing private-sector gains being offset by public-sector losses have drawn attention to the macroeconomic costs of the austerity program already underway among state and local governments, and gaining steam in Washington. But the effect on the most vulnerable Americans–particularly those out of work–is rarely examined in any systematic way.
At The American Prospect, Kat Aaron has put together a useful if depressing summary of actual or impending cutbacks (most initiated by the states, some by Congress) in key services for the unemployed and others suffering from economic trauma. These include unemployment insurance, job retraining services, and family income supports. In some cases, federal funds added by the 2009 stimulus package are running out. In others, the safety net is being deliberately shredded.
A recent report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the most important family income support program, TANF (the “reformed” welfare block grant first established in 1996) is becoming an object of deep cuts in many states, precisely at the time it is most needed:

States are implementing some of the harshest cuts in recent history for many of the nation’s most vulnerable families with children who are receiving assistance through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. The cuts will affect 700,000 low-income families that include 1.3 million children; these families represent over one-third of all low-income families receiving TANF nationwide.
A number of states are cutting cash assistance deeply or ending it entirely for many families that already live far below the poverty line, including many families with physical or mental health issues or other challenges. Numerous states also are cutting child care and other work-related assistance that will make it harder for many poor parents who are fortunate enough to have jobs to retain them.

This is perverse precisely because such programs were once widely understood as “counter-cyclical”–designed to temporarily expand in tough economic times. Not any more, says CPBB:

To be effective, a safety net must be able to expand when the need for assistance rises and to contract when need declines. The TANF block grant is failing this test, for several reasons: Congress has level-funded TANF since its creation, with no adjustment for inflation or other factors over the past 15 years; federal funding no longer increases when the economy weakens and poverty climbs; and states — facing serious budget shortfalls — have shifted TANF funds to other purposes and have cut the TANF matching funds they provide.

This retrenchment, mind you, is what’s already happening, and does not reflect the future blood-letting implied by congressional Republican demands for major new cuts in federal-state safety net programs–most famously Medicaid, which virtually all GOPers want to convert into a block grant in which services are no longer assured.
If, as appears increasingly likely, the sluggish economy stays sluggish for longer than originally expected, and both the federal government and states continue to pursue Hoover-like policies of attacking budget deficits with spending cuts as their top priority, it’s going to get even uglier down at the level of real-life people trying to survive. If you are unlucky enough to live in one of those states where governors and legislators are proudly hell-bent on making inadequate safety-net services even more inadequate or abolishing them altogether, it’s a grim road ahead.

I swear I didn’t intend to do two posts today about doomed Republican presidential candidacies, but it’s hard to avoid comment on the mass resignations of most of Newt Gingrich’s campaign staff.
Chris Cillizza confirms that the deal-breaker for Team Newt wasn’t so much his disastrous campaign launch as his decision to follow that up with a Mediterranean cruise with Callista, leaving his minions to clean up his mess. The canary in the mine-shaft for that dumb decision was the resignation last week of Newt’s Iowa political director, Will Rogers, who publicly doubted his candidate’s willingness to run a viable campaign.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jim Galloway reports this rather telling quote from Bill Byrne, a long-time Gingrich backer from Georgia:

When on a national news station, Newt slammed Congressman Ryan and his proposal as right wing extremist, at that point in time his campaign ended,” Byrne said. “And I think if you watch any of the polling data from any source — Republican, Democrat, Independent — Newt never breaks in to double digits.
“Of the announced candidates he’s always been at the very bottom and the last poll I saw yesterday showed Herman Cain has passed him. Political people realize his campaign is over with and he has self-destructed. Those who signed up now realize that,” Byrne said.

Newt, of course, is pledging to move on to victory without his staff. That’s probably a brave, temporary holding position while he figures out exactly how to bow out. But maybe he’s going to emulate the post-disaster strategy of Democratic candidate Gary Hart in 1988: running a quasi-campaign that mainly depends on free media opportunities like televised debates, and getting a reputation for saying impolitic things no serious candidate would say. It would certainly help boost Newt’s book and video sales, which he’ll now need more than ever.

A lot of Republicans have been pining for late entries into their 2012 presidential nomination contest. The apparently imminent announcement of a campaign by Rudy Giuliani is probably not what most of them had in mind.
But Bill Kristol gives the old college try to an argument that somehow the former America’s Mayor could succeed in 2012 despite his abject failure in 2008:

Rudy’s theory of the race: In the fall of 2007, he decided he couldn’t compete with both Mitt Romney and John McCain in New Hampshire, and disastrously decided to try to pull back there and pitch his tent in Florida. This year, he’ll commit everything to New Hampshire, where he thinks he has a good shot at beating Romney–whom he criticized there earlier this week. He then thinks he can beat whichever more socially conservative candidate(s) is left by winning what are still likely to be winner-take-all primaries in big states like California, New York, and New Jersey.

It’s not at all clear to me why Rudy has “a good shot of beating Romney” in New Hampshire in 2008 any more than he had a good shot in 2008. And bad as his back-loaded strategy of waiting until Florida turned out in 2008, waiting for late-season primaries in big states in 2012 sounds even worse. Sure, you can construct some scenario where Rudy’s slugging it out with Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain in California and New York after the rest of the field has vaporized, but in today’s GOP, it’s not all that obvious Giuliani would win even with that fortuitous series of developments.
Put aside all the negative stuff about Giuliani you can imagine–his marital history, his questionable associations, his less-than-Reaganesque personality–and the simple fact remains that the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-choice candidate for president. The very idea that John McCain was considering a pro-choice running mate in 2008 nearly produced a convention revolt, and instead led McCain to bend the knee by selecting anti-choice ultra Sarah Palin. The powers-that-be in the conservative movement will destroy Rudy the moment it appears–if it ever appears–he looks viable. They would rather take their chances with a nominee who looked weak against Obama than to give up their iron control over the GOP.
Put it in the bank: Rudy 2012 ain’t happening.