This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Among the many striking features of Georgia-based radio talk show host Herman Cain’s presidential announcement speech in Atlanta on May 21, the most surreal was to hear an African-American in front of a heavily white audience of hard-core conservatives, at a site within shouting distance of the Martin Luther King Center, end his remarks by declaring, “When Herman Cain is president, we will finally be able to say, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, America is free at last.'” Cain’s decision to appropriate those famous words from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is in many ways characteristic of the man himself and the kind of campaign he’s been running. But give him credit: Outperforming Tim Pawlenty in many recent polls, running tied for second in Tuesday’s latest PPP poll of Iowa, Cain is surging on the backs of the Tea Party faithful. He is nothing if not audacious, and his popularity is due in large part to the fact that he has come to embody some of the more dubious but emotionally central claims of the Tea Party Movement.
The first thing Cain has going for his fan-base is his biography. He’s a successful business executive who saved at least one company, Godfather’s Pizza. He made his bones on the national political stage by attacking the Clinton Health Reform plan in 1994. And after liquidating his business holdings, he became a motivational speaker and author, with many opportunities to hone his communications skills. Following his one, unsuccessful race for office–a surprisingly strong second-place showing in a primary won by now-Senator Johnny Isakson–Cain worked his way into the world of conservative talk radio under the tutelage of the veteran quasi-libertarian gabber Neal Boortz, who has a big national audience. He soon got his own syndicated show, in which he identified himself with one of the most durable conservative pet rocks, the Fair Tax proposal (a flat consumption tax that would theoretically replace federal income and payroll taxes). And unlike other pols who have since tried to ingratiate themselves with the movement, Cain was a big Tea Party proponent from day one, quickly becoming a fixture at Tea Party events in Georgia.
And then, of course, there’s one other item in Cain’s background that matters politically: his race. Cain’s popularity among conservative activists provides a sort of ongoing inoculation against the charges of racism that have been levied–sometimes speciously, sometimes fairly–against them, and he cleverly cultivates this element of his popularity with the stock-speech line, “People who oppose Obama are said to be racists–so I guess I’m a racist.” Like South Carolina congressman Tim Scott and Florida congressman Allen West, as a hard-core conservative African-American Cain has quickly become one of the most popular pols in the Tea Party universe.
But beyond serving as a counter-race-card, Cain’s rhetoric offers vital ammunition in the fight over the endlessly contested American value of “opportunity.” Indeed, at a time when many white Americans believe that anti-white bias is now a greater social problem than anti-black bias, Cain’s words and deeds coincide nicely with the common conservative belief that minorities who embrace traditional values, work hard, and become entrepreneurs can avoid the liberal “welfare trap” that leads to dependence on government, broken homes, and crime. And Cain’s angry defiance of liberals validates the Tea Party conviction that white liberal elites have corrupted minority Americans by, for instance, encouraging them to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford, thus triggering the recent housing and financial crises. In other words, Cain has become not a role model but an implicit living rebuke to his fellow African-Americans, who have, in the imaginations of many white conservatives, been led like sheep to the slaughter by the shadowy forces who use them as pawns in their socialist schemes.
Nothing illustrates Cain’s ability to turn his race into a weapon against white liberals than the racial spin he has placed on the abortion-as-Holocaust meme of the anti-choice movement (of which he is a long-time champion, at least since he spent most of his 2004 senatorial campaign attacking Johnny Isakson for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical ban on abortions). Here’s what he told the conservative website CNSNews.com in March of this year regarding his support for congressional Republican efforts to ban any use of public funds by Planned Parenthood:

Here’s why I support de-funding Planned Parenthood, because you don’t hear a lot of people talking about this, when Margaret Sanger–check my history–started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.
You don’t see that talked that much about … It’s not Planned Parenthood. No, it’s planned genocide. You can quote me on that.

This sort of talk is immensely useful–and powerful–for conservative activists who have a complicated view of minority Americans as both perpetrators and victims in the ongoing destruction of the country as they know it.
In this as in other areas, the third thing going for Cain is simple: He does not hold back. Indeed, he gives conservative audiences the full, rich, red-meat diet they crave, along with the occasional dog-whistle appeal only they can hear. For example, in his announcement speech, he made a casual reference to the Constitution’s language guaranteeing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Since the language in question appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, Cain was subsequently accused of an ignorant gaffe by observers who themselves did not seem to understand the Christian Right/Tea Party tenet that the former document was incorporated into the latter via the manifest intent of the Founders. This is how God and the idea of divinely derived “natural law” (including protection of the unborn and, for some, absolute property rights) are read into the Constitution by constitutional conservatives who consider twentieth-century social legislation and court rulings un-American.
Add all these factors up, and it’s not that surprising Cain has been wowing audiences in early caucus and primary states and developing the kind of online following that only Ron Paul can typically command among Republicans. He has routinely won audience straw polls after candidate forums–most famously, at the Tea Party Patriots convention in Arizona in February and at Steve King’s Conservative Principles Conference in Iowa in April. He also greatly enthused a focus group convened by conservative pollster Frank Lutz to watch the first televised candidate debate in South Carolina in May. As a result, he’s now surging in the polls (registering 8 percent in the latest Gallup poll of Republican presidential proto-candidates, 10 percent in the latest CNN poll, and 11 percent in a recent Insider Advantage poll), and regularly running ahead of supposedly more serious candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. And all this is happening, as Nate Silver has pointed out, in spite of the fact that Cain still has low name ID and hasn’t, until now at least, gotten much media attention (in both respects, this is the exact opposite of the context surrounding Donald Trump’s earlier surge in the polls).

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Nate Silver’s investigation of the relationship of the unemployment rate to presidential re-election prospects will probably become a staple of poly sci courses, with its rigorous analysis of the data and prudent conclusions. It might also be good for Journalism majors to chew on it, especially aspiring political writers, since it provides a good example of why the rag of record hired Silver — to give some data-driven heft to their reportage.
Credit Silver with doing a lot of good work and providing intelligent analysis, such as the following:

…Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance at the next election is complicated and tenuous…An article in today’s Times notes, for example, that “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” The 7.2 percent figure refers to Ronald Reagan, who resoundingly won a second term when the unemployment rate was at that number in November 1984.
This type of data may be of limited utility for predictive purposes, however. Reagan won re-election by 18 points in 1984, suggesting that he had quite a bit of slack. An unemployment rate of 7.5 percent would presumably have been good enough to win him another term, as might have one of 8.0 percent, 8.5 percent or even higher.

Silver then speculates that FDR’s experience may be relevant since he won re-election with serious double-digit unemployment (16.6 in ’36 and 14.6 in ’40), but it was headed downward.
Silver argues that “the rate of change over a president’s term — is probably the more worthwhile approach. But it too is not always reliable.” He cites the examples of Nixon, W and Ike, all of whom who got re-elected with rising joblessness, although Ford, Carter and Papa Bush got defeated. Silver crunches the numbers for the last century and demonstrates that there is no positive correlation between “the unemployment rate to the incumbent party’s performance in the popular vote” and only a “weak” correlation between “the change in the unemployment rate over the course of a presidential term” and incumbents’ reelection prospects.
Silver concedes that there may be a predictive formula relating joblessness and other economic statistics to reelection prospects that works, but he cites a host of complicating factors and notes,

Some political scientists prefer other economic indicators to the unemployment rate, and there is evidence that measures like growth in real disposable income do a better job of predicting election results. Here too, however, we ought to be cautious. There are literally thousands of plausible models that one might build, using different economic indicators measured in different ways and over different time periods, taken alone or in combination with one another, and applied to different subsets of elections that are deemed to be relevant.

In the comments following Silver’s post, various responders suggest factoring in underemployment, “the change in unemployment during the final 12 to 24 months of a presidency,” gas prices, The CPI etc. It’s possible that there may be some formula that does a credible job of predicting electoral outcomes. Perhaps another stat wizard, like Alan I. Abramowitz could ferret it out.
As Silver acknowledges, however, the common sense argument for reducing unemployment is strong enough, even without statistical verification. For Dems, job-creation must remain a critical priority, the daunting difficulties of doing so cited by Andrew Levison in his recent TDS Strategy Memo notwithstanding. As Levison shows, Keynesian job-creation remains a tough sell with a significant segment of the public. Same goes for encouraging the private sector to invest in jobs when consumer demand is limp. Fresh ideas to break these two logjams are urgently needed.

Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of a 2012 presidential candidacy today, perhaps because it is hardly an unexpected event, is spurring some deeper thinking about the chimera of a successful blue-state Republican governor who can hardly be called a liberal struggling to obscure his own record to run for president. Jon Cohn and Jon Chait are conducting a colloquoy at The New Republic to debate whether Romney’s past dooms his future. But also at TNR, Mark Schmitt has penned a valuable rumination on Romney’s status as among the last in a wave of successful Republican governors who have now been replaced by highly controversial confrontationists like Scott Walker, Rick Scott and John Kasich.
I’ve always thought the rave national media reviews of the Republican governors of the late 1990s–people like Tommy Thompson, John Engler, and yes, George W. Bush–underestimated the extent to which the Clinton-era economic boom made it easy to cut taxes without significantly reducing services, making everyone happy. But as Schmitt notes, the style of these governors, depending on at least some cooperation across party lines, now seems completely alien to the national GOP mood. In any event, Schmitt is spot-on in his assessment of Romney’s plight:

With that golden-era model of Republican governors so thoroughly rejected, Mitt Romney looks like a relic from a long-forgotten time–like his father’s actual moderate Republicanism–even though it’s only been five years. Were Romney trying to check off the “served in government” box on his resumé today, he’d probably pick a different state and adopt a showdown style more in keeping with the times. But it’s too late for that. The shape-shifting Romney will surely adapt to whatever he’s required to say, but, in doing so, he will have to renounce not only his governorship–his own principal credential for the presidency–but also his party’s most important political triumph in recent memory.

It’s one thing for a presidential candidate to be forced to reshape his or her record to fit a new environment or a national as opposed to a local or regional context. That happens all the time. But it’s another thing altogether to be forced to deny the very accomplishments that made the candidate noteworthy in the first place. And that’s Mitt Romney’s main problem today.

By now, almost everyone is aware that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare is a disaster in terms of public opinion. But, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…The Ryan budget’s commitment to dismantle Medicare is by no means the only unpopular part. Consider a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll that asked about ending Medicaid as we know it, which is also part of the Ryan budget.
First, the poll asked whether respondents supported major reductions in Medicaid spending (as the Ryan budget does), minor reductions, or no reductions. Only 13 percent supported major reductions. Thirty percent supported minor reductions, and a majority (53 percent) supported no reductions.

As unpopular as Medicaid reductions are with the public, delegating administration of the program to the states is even more of a loser with the public, as Teixeira explains:

Then the poll directly asked about Rep. Ryan’s proposal to change Medicaid fundamentally by “giving each state a fixed amount of money and eliminating federal minimum standards for Medicaid.” This would replace the current arrangement where “the federal government guarantees health care coverage and long term care for certain low income people” and “each state administers its own Medicaid program … but all states are required to provide coverage to anyone who meets minimum criteria set by the federal government.” The Ryan proposal, which truly would end Medicaid as we know it, was rejected by a thumping 60-35 margin.

If Republicans were hoping that changing the topic from screwing the elderly out of their health security to ripping off health care services for the neediest Americans would give them some breathing space, they were clearly mistaken.

During a rumination on the proposition that a slow-to-develop presidential campaign cycle could reduce opportunities for the thorough media vetting of candidates, Jonathan Bernstein makes this simple but important observation:

[W]hile I’m generally reluctant to be one who says that the internet changes everything, I do think this is at least plausibly a case where it matters. For one thing, in the old days — say, before the debut of the Hotline in the 1988 cycle — it was still possible for a local story to sit out there for a long time without anyone knowing it. No way could that happen now.

I’d agree, with the crucial qualification that in the past a “local story” about a presidential candidate did not have to be completely unknown nationally to be functionally invisible or at least unimportant. A great example was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter’s fairly elaborate and not-too-distant history of flirtation with segregationists was hardly a secret, but never became a factor during the Democratic primaries or the general election. Indeed, one aspect of that history, his vote for arch-segregationist Lester Maddox when the Georgia legislature was forced to elect a governor of Georgia in 1966, went almost entirely unnoticed.
Now it’s true that the staunch support of Andrew Young and the King family helped inoculate Carter from charges of past racism in 1976, along with Carter’s own decent civil rights record once he actually became governor in 1971. Indeed, Carter was very popular among African-American primary voters around the country (just like Bill Clinton years later, even though Clinton, like Carter, was perceived as less than ideally progressive, albeit never vulnerable to accusations of racism). But you have to wonder if Carter could have survived the kind of early exposure of and daily questioning about his past positioning on civil rights if he had been subjected to today’s levels of scrutiny and discussion.
My point is that modern media have not only made it harder to hide damaging information about politicians, but have made it harder to hide such information in plain sight, passed over as irrelevant or unimportant. To cite a seminal example, Trent Lott’s 2002 remarks expressing regret that Strom Thurmond hadn’t been elected president back in 1948 were widely reported, but it took relentless discussion of them by blogger Josh Marshall and others to make it something other than a “local story” of brief interest to Beltway insiders and Mississippians.
While it’s still possible for candidates and political parties–supported by friendly media–to “control the narrative” in a way that shoves negative information under the rug, it’s simply not as easy as it used to be. And that could very well be a factor in the decisions of potential 2012 presidential candidates to take a pass.

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Brendan Nyhan has a fascinating analysis of the absence of major scandals in the Obama administration, and of the likelihood that the political environment will soon produce one.
Nyhan defines “major scandal” as “a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.” By that standard, Obama has done very well:

In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Nyan believes the availability of competing news has a big impact on the emergence of scandals, and that Obama (like Bush) has benefitted from big, dominant developments that inhibited the growth of reports, rumors or smears into scandals. But totally aside from any assessments of its integrity, the Obama administration is overdue in the scandal department, particularly since opposition hostility is a big factor in increasing the likelihood of scandals:

Obama already faces low approval among GOP identifiers and a similarly hostile climate in Congress. Back in March, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans hadn’t yet made a serious effort to back up claims that the Obama White House is “one of the most corrupt administrations.” As more time passes, pressure to find evidence of misconduct is likely to build — my data suggest that the risk of scandal increases dramatically as the period without a scandal stretches beyond two years.

Indeed, notes Nyhan, Republicans are already busily trying to fan the flames beneath a number of “stories” that could theoretically become “scandals:”

Recent examples include allegations of an administration “enemies list” as a result of a National Labor Relations Board complaint against Boeing; claims of favoritism in decisions to grant waivers from regulations imposed under health care reform; and allegations that Department of Justice officials allowed straw purchases of guns that were smuggled to Mexico, prompting a standoff with Congress that House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) recently compared to Iran-Contra.

Since a couple of weeks of concentrated conservative media hyperventilation coordinated with, say, a congressional hearing, are entirely capable of moving just about any negative “story” to the threshold of a scandal, the key variable could actually be which mini-scandal the Right decides to make an obsession. If Nyhan is correct, that should happen pretty soon, absent another competing mega-story.

Into the ragged and treacherous landscape of the 2012 Republican presidential contest now comes a simple and elegant solution: Just nominate Jim DeMint and get it over with.
That’s the thinking of a growing conservative band, according to The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton:
Two GOP factions have begun to draft DeMint for a presidential run.

One is organized by Richard Viguerie, a conservative pioneer in the field of direct-mail political marketing, who helped Reagan win election in 1980.
The other is Conservatives4DeMint, which claims to have about 4,700 members and regional coordinators in 35 states.
Viguerie held a Saturday conference call with allies to plan the initial stages of the draft movement.
“I’ve asked him about the presidential thing twice in the last five or six weeks,” Viguerie said of his recent conversations with DeMint.
“I think he’s giving it serious consideration. Hopefully this will push him over the line and give him the encouragement that there would be a strong base of support,” Viguerie added.
He said DeMint compares to Goldwater in 1964, whom conservatives drafted to challenge President Johnson, and Reagan in 1976 and 1980 respectively.
“He would be the dominant movement conservative leader,” Viguerie said. “He would be the front-runner overnight.”

I think that’s probably true, given DeMint’s national base, cemented by his aggressive (and largely successful) intervention in 2010 Republican primaries.
A DeMint nomination would also be highly appropriate, since he’s the living symbol of the very deliberate turn to the right that the GOP executed after the 2008 elections. Once a lonely crank in the Senate, he’s now clearly more powerful than the alleged Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who jumps when DeMint says “Frog.”
Democrats would probably be fine with a DeMint nomination, too, since he’s been a bit more frank about the conservative agenda, calling public schools “government schools” and talking about the role of Social Security and Medicare seducing the American middle class into heathen socialist ways.
It would save everybody an enormous amount of time and trouble if we could just make this election a referendum on the philosophies of the two major parties. There are very few Republicans who would publicly deny that DeMint is an exemplar of their own philosophy. So bring him on!

The following article by political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
In recent American political history, changes in political momentum typically revolve around a seminal political battle.
After the Republican sweep in 1994, that battle was over the GOP plan to cut Medicare to provide tax cuts for the rich. It featured Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown and his subsequent retreat in 1995. From that point forward, Clinton built momentum and ultimately defeated the Republican nominee Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points.
A similar decisive battle turned the tide ten years later, after the Republican victory in 2004. In the months following their defeat, Democratic prospects looked bleak. Republicans controlled the Senate, House and the Presidency and were poised to seize control of the Supreme Court for a generation.
But then Bush and his Wall Street allies launched a massive effort to privatize Social Security — a move designed both to eviscerate the social insurance program that lay at the foundation of the New Deal and to allow Wall Street to get its hands on the Social Security Trust fund. President Bush toured the country to stump for his plan, the Republican leadership signed on in support.
Democrats stood solidly against the proposal and together — with the labor movement and other progressive organizations — ran a campaign that ultimately forced the Republicans to drop the proposal without even so much as a vote in Congress. It turned out that privatizing Social Security — which would have simultaneously lowered guaranteed benefits, and increased the deficit — had zero traction with ordinary voters who believed that the money they had paid into Social Security entitled them to the promised guaranteed benefits.
The battle to privatize Social Security shifted the political momentum in America. Democrats got back off the floor after being thrashed in 2004, regained their footing and self-confidence and went on the offense — attacking the increasingly unpopular War in Iraq and capitalizing on the unbelievable incompetence surrounding Hurricane Katrina. After Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006, that momentum continued through Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.
After their defeat in 2008, Republicans used the battle over health care reform to turn the political tide themselves. They didn’t win the fight over the health care bill, but they won the political war. They used that momentum to invigorate their base and to capitalize on the slow pace of economic recovery after the financial catastrophe that was actually caused by reckless Republican economic policies coupled with wild excesses on Wall Street.
Politics is like war — or for that matter competitive sport. Momentum is critical to victory and changes in momentum inevitably center on turning-point battles. Just as important, turning-point battles reframe the terms of debate. They become emblematic of whether or not a political leader is “on your side.”
Political momentum shifts have an enormous effect on political psychology. For one thing, there is the band-wagon effect. People don’t like to sign on with losers — or political parties that are despondent and divided. Voters, candidates and donors, want to be with self-confident winners — not losers who are searching for direction. They get on the train when it’s picking up steam — not when it is grinding to a halt.
That’s why the perception that political momentum has changed can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regaining the political momentum will do wonders for Democratic attempts to raise funds and recruit candidates for the elections in 2012. It has already encouraged several of the strongest contenders in the Republican presidential field to take a pass on the race.
And without iconic battles, momentum shifts in politics rarely occur.
After George Bush won the Presidency in 2000, the battle over the Bush tax cuts could have taken on that kind of iconic importance. Unfortunately, even though Democrats could have stopped his tax cuts for the wealthy, much as they stopped his attempts to privatize Social Security after 2004, some Democrats did not hold firm and draw a line in the sand. A few Democrats joined the Republicans to support the Bush tax cuts that have led directly to our current budget deficit. Their success passing tax cuts for the wealthy built momentum for the Republicans.
And, of course, there was another iconic moment that most defined the first years of the Bush Presidency: the attack on 9/11. The Republicans used that attack as a huge political momentum builder, and it served as the rationale for almost all of their policies for the next four years.
By proposing to eliminate Medicare, Republican Budget Committee chair Congressman Paul Ryan set the stage for exactly the kind of iconic battle that signaled fundamental changes in political momentum in the past. Over the last six weeks, that battle has played out in town meetings and talk shows across the country. It culminated last week in the stunning Democratic victory in New York’s blood-red 26th Congressional District, where it became crystal clear to everyone that the Republican plan to eliminate Medicare is a political kiss of death.
The fact that Ryan and the Republicans chose political low ground to engage this battle is not entirely a result of Republican hubris or dumb luck. David Plouffe and the Obama team deliberately laid in wait for the Republicans, holding back at engaging the budget debate until Ryan and company made their incredibly unpopular proposal — and then the President’s budget speech sprung the trap.
They knew that once the Republicans had elaborated their strategy to eliminate Medicare in gory detail they could demonstrate graphically just what America would look like if the Republican ideologues had their way.
Amazingly, this weekend, Republican leaders doubled down on their proposal, pledging to make it part of the terms Republicans will demand to avoid default of America’s debts.
Apparently the Republican leadership’s desperate need to pander to the extremist Tea Party element in their ranks has overwhelmed their good political sense – and that is great news for Democrats.
The battle over Medicare — and the entire Republican budget — puts the question of “who’s on whose side” in clear, unmistakable relief. As in 1995, the issue is simple. In their budget, Republicans proposed to cut – actually eliminate – Medicare in order to give tax breaks to millionaires.
During the 2005 battle over privatizing Social Security, the Republican leaders never even came close to actually forcing their Members to cast a vote to support Bush’s radioactive privatization plan — yet the battle still turned the political tide. This year, the Republicans were so cowed by the Tea Party that they actually corralled all but four Republican House Members — as well as forty Republican Senators — into voting yes on a bill to eliminate Medicare. Astounding.
The decisive battle that has changed the political momentum between the conservative and progressive forces in American society has happened — and once again Progressives have stood up straight and are on the march.
Now we must press our advantage and use this iconic engagement to demonstrate clearly that the radical conservatives are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CEO/Wall Street class – the wealthiest two percent of Americans — while Democrats and Progressives stand squarely with the middle class.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Over the past decade, both Democrats and Republicans have pushed major initiatives to restructure our health and entitlement systems, arguing that significant changes were necessary in order to keep them afloat. So far, their proposals have consistently lurched too far either to the left or to the right of the median voter, and they’ve paid for it dearly each time at the polls. But both parties are right about one thing: The status quo is unsustainable. And until they can persuade average voters of this basic fact, the chances that our country will rise to meet this latest challenge look grim.
In 2004, President George W. Bush interpreted his reelection as a mandate to take on Social Security. Middle-of-the-road voters who had given Republicans their majorities in 2002 and 2004 didn’t agree, and they administered a stinging rebuke in the 2006 midterms. When Democrats regained unified control of the executive and legislative branches in November 2008, they took their success as a license to expand the size and scope of the federal government beyond what coping with the financial crisis required. Again, the voters in the middle didn’t agree, and they handed Democrats their worst midterm drubbing in decades.
Now this cycle of over-reaching is recurring yet again. Incoming House Republicans interpreted their victory as a mandate to dramatically shrink the size and scope of the federal government, and they voted for the Ryan budget with near-unanimity. Then came their defeat in New York’s 26th congressional district, a long-time Republican seat once occupied by Jack Kemp.
In January 2010, most Democrats attributed Scott Brown’s senate victory to the flawed personality and tactics of their party’s nominee–even though Brown had placed a single national issue at the center of his campaign. They learned last November that public discontent ran far deeper than that. In the wake of NY 26, some Republicans have been tempted to repeat the Democrats’ mistake, claiming that the phony Tea Party candidate drained support from their candidate. (If anything, the evidence suggests the reverse: The self-styled Tea Party candidate was a three-time former Democratic nominee for the seat, and as his support collapsed in the final weeks of the campaign, most of it went to the Democrat.)
Wiser Republicans know better: The central issue in the campaign was Ryan’s Medicare proposal, and that’s why they lost. But they still haven’t faced the full truth. In the previous cycle, Democrats made two claims: Republicans were misrepresenting their health care plan, and the people would change their minds when they learned more about it. The first was true, but the second wasn’t, and surveys show that it still isn’t. Now Republicans are offering the same two claims, and again, while the first is true, the second isn’t. The unpopularity of the Ryan Medicare proposal reflects a public judgment about its substance that isn’t likely to change very much. If Ryan himself had been running in NY 26 this year, he might have lost. And I don’t see how Republicans can “reframe” the unpopular facts away by next year. Just how, exactly, do you spin a plan that over the next two decades, according to CBO, will shift more than two-thirds of total costs to future Medicare beneficiaries?

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