This item is by TDS Co-Editor William Galston.
A Gallup report out today–a 50-state synthesis of the past six months of surveys–provides both a revealing snapshot of Barack Obama’s current political vulnerability and an X-ray of the emerging shape of the 2012 campaign. The report finds that during the first six months of 2011, the president’s national approval ratings averaged 47 percent (it stood at only 42 percent last week). His approval in the states ranged from a high of 60 percent in Connecticut to a low of 27 percent in Idaho.
As the general election nears, the president’s job approval tends to converge toward his eventual vote total. Right now he enjoys majority support in 16 states plus the District of Columbia, totaling 215 electoral votes and trails in the other 34. If an election between Obama and a Republican the people regarded as a credible occupant of the Oval Office were held tomorrow, the president would probably lose.
That’s the snapshot. A finer-grained analysis yields the X-ray. Suppose use the Gallup findings to divide the states into the following categories: (1) Obama won in 2008 and will win in 2012; (2) Obama lost in 2008 and will lose in 2012; (3) Obama won in 2012 but will lose in 2012; (4) Obama lost in 2008 but will win in 2012; and (5) states that are clearly in play based on the combination of the 2008 results and the Gallup numbers.
We can dispose of category 3 quickly: there are no states Obama lost in 2008 that he seems even moderately likely to win next year. Category 4 has one entrant: Obama prevailed in Indiana last time by the narrowest of margins but won’t get close this year unless the Republicans commit creedal suicide during their nominating process. Category 2 (lose in both elections) contains 21 states, including Missouri, in which McCain earned a razor-thin edge but which seems out of reach this time around. Combining 2 and 4, the 2012 Republican nominee will begin with a base of 175 electoral votes.
That leaves the dozen states with a total of 148 electoral votes that will decide the election. Obama carried 11 of them, and McCain just one. I’ve listed then in descending order of presidential approval, with Obama’s 2008 percentage in the next column and the difference in the last.

Some of these results were predictable: states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania are typically within hailing distance of the national total and outcome. (Indeed, John F Kennedy was the last Democrat to win the presidency without Ohio, and no Republican ever has.) Other findings are more surprising and raise intriguing questions:

Is it possible that Obama is stronger in Georgia than he was three years ago? If so, a major investment there could counterbalance the loss of either Virginia or North Carolina.
What’s happening in the Rockies and Southwest, where Obama’s decline has reached double-digits in key swing states? I suspect some combination of disaffection among independents and declining enthusiasm among Latinos.
And what accounts for Obama’s collapsing support in Oregon and New Hampshire? In these states, the desertion of independents is the most likely culprit.

Even at this early stage, two things are clear: The Obama campaign has its work cut out for it. And his strategists had better abandon fantasies of expanding the playing-field and focus their attention and resources on the states without which they are unlikely to prevail. As is so often the case, that begins (though doesn’t end) with Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida.

In the midst of a angry post about Drew Westen’s Sunday New York Times op-ed excoriating Barack Obama’s failure to use the bully pulpit to school Americans on the necessity of Keynsian fiscal stimulus, Jon Chait offers a useful comment about the need for precision in recounting past political events. Westen contrasted Obama’s passivity in resisting deficit hawkery with FDR’s aggressive advocacy of fiscal stimulus. Chait notes that (1) FDR was luckier than Obama in taking office at a much later stage in the economic downturn that defined his election; and (2) Roosevelt took quite a while to embrace Keynsian pump-priming, and never succeed during his first term in convincing Americans that was the right course.
On this last point, Chait quotes none other than Paul Krugman, who unearthed Gallup polls showing that Americans favored a balanced budget and debt reduction by a 70-30 margin at the end of 1935, and still favored a balanced budget by a 65-28 margin in November of 1936, just as they were re-electing FDR by a historic landslide.
None of this data suggests that Obama’s fiscal policies have been right, but it does undermine the assumption that the president of the United States can easily act as Economics-Professor-In-Chief, brushing away simplistic “family-budget” analogies of what a nation should do in a recession or depression with big doses of Keynes. Progressives in general have failed over a long period of time to promote a decent level of public understanding about what to do in a recession, and however much Obama has contributed to that failure, he’s hardly alone.

The definition of a political “dog whistle” is a communication (or series of communications) that convey to key members of an interest or constituency group gratifying but potentially controversial affirmations of their views without the mainstream media or the broader electorate catching on. By that standard, Rick Perry’s big “day or prayer and fasting” in Houston over the weekend was a very successful dog whistle.
Mainstream and secular-conservative media coverage of the event (dubbed “The Response,” itself a dog whistle reference to an ongoing series of dominionist events operating under the brand of “The Call” aimed at mobilizing conservative evangelicals to assume leadership of secular society) generally concluded that it was a largely “non-political” gathering–just some Christians upset about the bad economy and their own moral failings who got together to pray over it.
A few reporters who watched and listened more carefully, and had a Christian Right decoder ring on hand, had a very different take. Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner, who knows the ins and outs of dominionist thinking exceptionally well, and who attended the Houston event, explained its intent as an act of political mobilization:

“[C]ommand” and “obedience” were the day’s chief buzzwords for many speakers, as repentance was required on behalf of yourself, your church, and your country for having failed to commit yourself to Jesus, for having permitted abortion and “sexual immorality,” for failing to cleanse yourself of “filthiness,” and to repent for having “touched what is unclean….”
The people who gathered at Reliant Stadium are not just Rick Perry’s spiritual army, raised up, as Perry and others imagine it, in the spirit of Joel 2, to sound an alarm and prepare the people for Judgment Day. They are the ground troops the religious right set out four decades ago to create, and duplicate over generations, for the ongoing culture wars. One part of that army is people like Perry himself, supported by religious right political elites who aimed to cultivate candidates, advocates, and political strategists committed to putting God before government.
That a sitting governor would laugh off charges that his “instigation” of an exclusively Christian–and, more specifically, a certain kind of Christian–event is proof of the success of the cultural and spiritual warriors, who believe they are commanded to “take dominion” over government and other spheres of influence. Perry is their man in a high place, in this case an especially courageous one, willing to rebuff charges from the “radical secularists” that he’s crossed the line between church and state. That makes him something much more than just a political or spiritual hero; he is an exemplar.

Slate‘s Dave Weigel was also in Houston, and his report debunks the talk of the event being “nonpolitical” by understanding, like Posner, the political freight of the particular strain of evangelical Christianity mostly represented there:

[According to] Pete Ortega, one of dozens of people who’s come up from San Antonio on buses from John Hagee’s church…there is nothing political about the event, he says. He just wants to praise Perry.
“If this is successful here,” he says, “I think other governors, or other politicians, will come out of the closet. Christianity is under attack, and we don’t speak out about it.”
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That’s the brilliance of what Perry has done here: These ideas don’t contradict each other at all. He doesn’t need to talk about politics, or do anything besides be here and understand this event. The religion is the politics. These worshippers understand that if they can bring “the kingdom of God” to Earth, economic problems, even macroeconomic problems, will sort themselves out….
The soon-to-be Republican presidential frontrunner, who is best known among liberal voters for raising the prospect of secession and for presiding over hundreds of executions, has just presented himself as a humble messenger of obvious biblical truth. “Our heart breaks for America,” he says. “We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government.” It’s one day since S&P downgraded America’s bond rating, in part because the agency worried that conservative Republicans had proved that they would never agree to a debt-reducing bargain that included tax increases. Perry was pulling off an impressive act of transference.

Observers who don’t get any of what Posner and Weigel are talking about are in effect assisting him in the effort to execute his dog whistle appeal to activists whose world-view is entirely alien to nearly all secular Americans and most mainstream Christians. But just because much of the country can’t hear it doesn’t mean it cannot serve as a powerful inducement to political activity in a presidential nominating process where small determined groups of people can have a big impact.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Just days after Congress averted a much-discussed debt limit crisis that some feared would produce a market crash and an economic catastrophe, older fears of a “double-dip” recession have quickly reemerged. So what, if anything, can our gridlocked political system, already ensnared in the complex deficit-reduction doomsday machine created by the August 1 deal, do to head off or mitigate another crisis?
Some observers are predicting that an aroused public or chastened politicians will suddenly rediscover the merits of good old-fashioned Keynesian fiscal stimulus measures. Here’s what business writer John Cassidy predicted in Fortune even before the debt limit deal was enacted:

With the economic picture darkening daily, the burden of preventing another slump is falling on the White House and Congress. The Fed, which has just finished its second dose of quantitative easing, seems determined to sit on its hands. Before long, incumbents in both parties will start to panic about next year’s election. Debates about the size of the federal government will take a back seat to getting reelected, and the result will be more tax cuts and spending increases.

But that suggestion seems to assume Republicans have any vested interest in changing their minds on the efficacy of fiscal stimulus and, moreover, can escape the logic of their recent collective decision to simultaneously demand lower taxes and reduced debts and deficits. Meanwhile, with Democrats huddled around their own sacred cow of protecting entitlement programs at all costs, don’t expect them to make an impassioned case for immediate increases in discretionary spending either.
In the short-term, the Obama administration is already dusting off mildly stimulative initiatives that didn’t make the cut in the debt limit negotiations, notably an extension of the payroll tax relief and unemployment insurance extensions enacted as part of the deal to extend the Bush tax cuts last December. The president is also showing signs he will return to the small-bore “winning the future” investment agenda he talked about in his State of the Union Address.
When it comes to gaining Republican support, is the apparent popular rejection of Keynesianism enough to make conspicuous Hooverism acceptable? Don’t even non-Keynesians accept that drastic domestic spending cuts tend to directly boost unemployment, even if you deny claims of its other economic effects? Maybe so, but conservatives are so entrenched in the conviction that public-sector jobs aren’t “real,” and so focused on destroying public-sector unionism as a critical political asset for Democrats, that they’re likely willing to run the risk of boosting short-term unemployment. As recently as Tuesday, the GOP was getting lathered up to go after deeper cuts in FY 2012 domestic appropriations. And while progressive claims that Republicans are deliberately trying to sabotage the economy are perhaps unfair, there’s no question they realize the president and his party will get the bulk of the blame in 2012 for perpetually bad economic conditions.
Indeed, a better bet is that conservatives will double down on their own conviction that the only way to bring back economic growth is through deregulation and tax cuts, accompanied by spending cuts. And Democrats, who for their part still believe in Keynes even though they’ve concluded most of the public doesn’t, will resist new austerity measures, but they will also resist new high-end tax cuts in order to accommodate the remorseless demands of the deficit reduction process. Moreover, as the contents of the debt limit deal illustrated, Democrats have decided to make their chief partisan fiscal stand on the politically strong ground of opposing major long-term changes in Medicare and Social Security, even though entitlement reform is probably the only avenue to big-time deficit reduction measures that do not savage discretionary spending. So instead of coming together to deal with what could quickly become a genuine economic emergency, the two parties may soon be farther apart than ever.
When the “super-committee” convenes to accept or come up with an alternative to automatic spending cuts, mostly of the discretionary variety, an extended economic slump will only further reinforce the fact that there is no obvious “solution” that will be acceptable across party lines. That’s one reason analysts like Cassidy think both parties will figure out a way to junk the entire process. But with the spending-cut-obsessed Tea Party faction howling on the sidelines, it seems inconceivable that Republican congressional leaders will be in a position to suddenly announce that it’s decided Dick Cheney was right back in 2002 when he famously said, “Deficits don’t matter.” Indeed, it would take a truly monumental economic crisis to call off the deficit reduction doomsday machine and bring John Maynard Keynes back from the dead.

If you enjoy insider-y accounts of turmoil in a presidential campaign–and what political junkie doesn’t?–you definitely need to read the long Jonathan Martin piece at Politico on the increasingly public implosion of Huntsman ’12. Based on campaign sources (most notably former eminence grise and Huntsman family friend David Fischer, who went on the record), Martin has written a tale of a campaign that seems to have become a rolling ball of madness. There’s vicious infighting, logistical incompetence, frequent staff departures, money problems, F-bombs being dropped regularly in business meetings, and the candidate’s family frequently wondering what’s wrong. One story involves Fischer getting into a nasty dispute with the central figure in the drama, the famous on-again, off-again McCain strategist John Weaver, over Fischer’s report that the campaign had just hired a staffer who “had a reputation for preying on young female volunteers.”
You can check your schadenfreude tolerance levels and read the whole piece yourself. But what I found most interesting is that having helped Martin expose all this juicy material to the world, David Fischer himself wants to make it clear that wasn’t really his chief beef with Weaver:

[I]f the story gets told, I want the story to be, because Weaver’s history in past campaigns is when they don’t work out, for whatever reason, he attacks the candidate. And in this case, I am hoping that people at least focus on, well, what went wrong here? The strategy went wrong. The strategy didn’t work. At least to this day it hasn’t worked.

Bingo. Whatever else is going on inside the Huntsman campaign, it’s Weaver’s strategy–first laid out even before the future candidate made the unwise decision to become part of the Obama administration as ambassador to China–that was the fundamental problem. In what appeared to be, from a distance anyway, something of an effort to relive his salad days as the architect of McCain’s brief breakthrough in the 2000 presidential race, Weaver insisted that Huntsman run as a mavericky moderate hostile to the ideological bender his party is currently on, in hopes of appealing to independents who get to vote in Republican primaries in states like New Hampshire. This is how Weaver had Huntsman talking even before he left the U.S. for Beijing (as shown in Zvika Krieger’s fine 2009 profile), and nothing changed when the former governor returned and Weaver presented him with a prefab campaign and message.
Even in 2009, it was pretty obvious the GOP was going in a direction that made Huntsman’s “move to the center” rap positively suicidal. This year it has quickly made him a non-factor in the presidential race, surviving basically on the fumes of the candidate’s popularity among the Beltway pundit crowd that likes to imagine that a genial Mandarin-speaking business tycoon is just what the doctor ordered, even though virtually everything the man says and does is anathema to the activists who will determine his fate. In the wake of this latest furor, Huntsman has sought to minimize the damage and has restated his confidence in Weaver. But if as appears certain Huntsman continues to go nowhere fast in his pursuit of the presidency, Weaver’s disservice to him is a lot more basic than whatever sins he might have committed in running off campaign staff or wasting time waging internal battles: He sold Huntsman a strategic bill of goods from the get-go, and as Fischer says, it ain’t working.
It’s ironic that this simple reality may be buried in all the lip-smacking over “turmoil in the Huntsman campaign,” with Fisher supplying the ammunition. Strategy really does matter, sometimes a lot more than its execution.

There’s been a lot of puzzled commentary on polls taken after the debt limit deal showing that Americans were not, by and large, all that grateful for the avoidance of a debt default calamity. But National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein looks at the numbers and sees the possibility of something that’s never really happened in American political history: a full-on bipartisan rejection of incumbents from both parties.

In a CNN/ORC poll conducted on Monday and released on Tuesday, just 14 percent of those surveyed said they approved of the way Congress is handling its job, while 84 percent disapproved. That was not only the lowest level of approval, and the highest level of disapproval, that the CNN poll has recorded — the gap between the approval and disapproval numbers were as wide as Gallup has recorded in any of its polls measuring congressional performance dating back to 1974. The public verdict on Congress today is more negative than it was just before the election landslides that switched control of Congress in 1994, 2006, and 2010: Gallup surveys in the fall of those years put congressional approval between 21 percent and 26 percent….
Among independents, Congress’ approval rating in the new CNN poll stood at just 11 percent. That’s significantly worse even than the results in an October 2006 CNN survey conducted shortly before the wave that swept Democrats to control of both chambers that year: at that point 26 percent of independents approved of the performance of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Since control of Congress is divided, the kind of “anti-incumbent backlash” that those citing widespread unhappiness with the status quo often predict would have to hit both parties, with voters, moreover, splitting tickets between presidential and congressional candidates. In reality, though, as Brownstein acknowledges, ticket-splitting isn’t remotely as common a practice as it used to be, and a big percentage of self-identified “independents” really aren’t.
But if “wrong track” sentiment is unlikely to hit both parties equally, it certainly can have that effect over time in an unstable electorate and political system, as Browstein notes:

[E]nduring shifts in political advantage have punctuated most of American political history: Democrats in 1800, 1828, and 1932, and Republicans in 1860 and 1896 each engineered decisive shifts in voter allegiance that allowed them to hold both the White House and Congress for most of the next generation. But since 1968, neither side has managed such a breakthrough or built such an abiding connection with voters. Over the past four decades, the result has been to make divided control of Congress and the White House much more common than at any previous point in American history. Lately, that instability has been compounded by more rapid turnover in control of the House and Senate.

Considering the changes in the composition of Congress since the day before the 2006 elections, that’s an understatement.

As you have probably noticed, stock markets have been sliding pretty steadily from the very moment it became apparent that Congress was going to enact a debt limit agreement to avoid a default and an immediate downgrading of the federal government’s credit rating.
No, the markets weren’t reacting to the deal; it’s more like they didn’t care, or had assumed it all along. What they cared about was precisely what we were told was irrelevant to the debt limit deal: weak consumer demand and slow economic growth.
Strangely enough, the financial sector seems to be buying into the idea that the United States Congress might react to the threat (or reality) of a double-dip recession by, you know, doing something about it. This is from a Bloomberg report:

Speculation of new stimulus is increasing after U.S. data this week showed manufacturing grew at the weakest pace in two years, spending unexpectedly fell and the services industries grew at the slowest pace since February 2010.

Dave Weigel’s comment on that “speculation” is spot-on:

At some point, investors are going to have to start paying attention to how Congress actually works. It’s more likely to declare National John Wayne Gacy Appreciation Day on August 5 than it is to pass more stimulus.

That’s true. If the economy tanks again, we’ll hear calls for really draconian spending cuts. I mean, nothing could help the economy more than a couple million layoffs of public sector workers, right? All those wages could be useful to job-creators.
The grand irony is that “the markets” seem to be the last redoubt of Keynsian economics

In his Daily Kos post, “Democrats’ message in Wisconsin recall: don’t cut safety net to pay for corporate tax breaks,” Chris Bowers finds their ad message promising for Dems, not only in Wisconsin, but nation-wide. Bowers explains:

The closing television ads from We Are Wisconsin, the labor-dominated coalition group coordinating pro-Democratic independent expenditures in the Wisconsin recalls, takes exactly the same angle we are taking in our closing online ads (which start running tomorrow). The ads argue that this election is fundamentally about Republicans cutting vital aspects of the social safety net for the working and middle class, such as public education and health care, in order to pay for tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy. For example, here is their closing ad against Sheila Harsdorf:

We Are Wisconsin is running the exact same ad, changing only the names, against Republicans Alberta Darling and Luther Olsen. As such, this message of Republicans cutting public services to pay off corporations appears to be the centerpiece of their closing campaign. As Greg Sargent notes, Scott Walker also features prominently in these ads, so the message is perhaps most accurately described as “fighting back against Scott Walker’s class war.”
Still, even if it is largely tied into an unpopular figure like Walker, it is notable that a group like We Are Wisconsin has chosen a class war themed message at all for its closing ad. By their very nature, umbrella organizations like We Are Wisconsin do not often take risks. If this is the message that they are closing with, then it must have proven, quantifiably, to be their most successful message during polling and voter contacts.
That’s the real story here: the strongest possible Democratic message right now is that they oppose Republicans who would take from the working and middle classes in order to give to the rich. Further, given that all six of the Republicans facing recalls won their most recent elections in 2008 despite the national Obama wave, if Democrats are able to defeat those Republicans using this message in 2011, then it will stand out as perhaps the strongest Democratic message in a generation.

Bowers concludes with a pitch for ActBlue’s Wisconsin support campaign and adds, “Democrats should run on this message, and not just in Wisconsin and not just in this electoral cycle. This should be exactly what we stand for as a party, both in elections and in terms of what we deliver when we are in governance.”

In the wake of the debt limit deal, a lot of attention now is being focused on the “super-committee,” or whatever you want to call it, of six Democrats and six Republicans that is supposed to come up with a vast deficit reduction package in order to avoid automatic cuts in (mostly) discretionary spending.
Steve Benen notes that a group of six conservative Senators have sent a leader to the GOP leadership demanding that the deliberations of the “super-committee” be held in public and televised. And he wonders about that:

I find this terribly odd. Do these Republican senators not realize the GOP members of the committee will be pushing a wildly unpopular agenda?
We don’t know who’ll serve on this panel, but we can guess with confidence what its members will say. Republicans will argue for deep cuts to Medicare and Social Security, will fight tooth and nail to protect tax breaks for the wealthy and the oil industry. Democrats will largely be doing the opposite.
You don’t have to be a polling expert to know the Democratic approach will enjoy vastly more public support.
If these six GOP senators seriously believe their party would benefit from a more transparent process, they clearly need to get out more.

Steve’s right, but I think he is missing the real motive for this “transparency” demand. Conservatives are always paranoid about Republican leaders selling them out behind closed doors. They want the cameras there not for the benefit of public education or even propaganda, but simply so that they can keep tabs on their negotiators. If that also makes Americans more aware of how extreme some of their ideas are, so be it.
Looking at the big picture, it’s increasingly obvious that a lot of conservatives figure they’re going to win or lose next year not based on anything in particular they say and do, but because of factors like the economy that are essentially beyond their control (not that the policies they are forcing on the country are helping things). So the key goal is to keep iron control of their party so as to maximize their power if the GOP does win the White House and the Senate and holds on to the House.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the passage of the debt limit increase package this week, many political activists and observers have undoubtedly heaved a sigh of relief and either headed off on vacation or refocused their attention on the “normal” business of American politics. Certainly the Republican candidates and campaigns have to be happy to dispose of the daily pressure of monitoring and commenting (or, in the case of Mitt Romney, avoiding comments) on the “debt crisis,” without getting crossways with the hyper-conservative activists that will dominate the early stages of the nominating contest, or saying anything that could fatally compromise them in a general election.
But they’d all better get used to it. The big debt limit vote in Congress, it is increasingly obvious, is just an appetizer for the divisive, voter-alienating struggles it has built into the schedule at key points during the 2012 presidential campaign, making an eventual GOP presidential nominee’s efforts to “pivot to the center” an athletic feat, at best. And as Tea Party activists and other conservatives have made clear in their reactions to the deal just signed, their efforts to force everyone in the GOP to join in future hostage-taking exercises aimed at middle-class entitlements and other targets beloved of voters have just begun.
Indeed, this week’s agreement didn’t really kick the can that far down the road. In September, after the field has finally filled out and been winnowed in Ames, congressional conservatives will be engaged in a savage fight to cut domestic appropriations–complete, no doubt, with government shutdown threats–below the levels spelled out in the debt limit deal. Another provision of the deal requires that when the current “temporary” debt limit is reached, probably around the end of September, the president must request another increase in the limit, which will lead to a “disapproval” vote in Congress and, if it passes, a presidential veto and a veto override vote (all just Kabuki theater, but a noisy and divisive exercise nonetheless). Soon after that, an even bigger battle over the “debt committee” recommendations, and the fallback automatic spending cuts that will be triggered in their stead, will break out, culminating in December when the candidates competing in the early primary states will be in a full-on teeth-grinding frenzy for votes. Both these fights will inevitably involve trade-offs–between entitlement cuts, defense spending cuts, and tax increases–that divide the GOP and the country, and they will force candidates to choose again and again between the views of Tea Party activists–including early primary-state Big Dogs like Jim DeMint–and the general public.
And that hardly ends the gauntlet of fiscal litmus tests. As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn explained yesterday, the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the next anticipated deadline for yet another debt increase, will coincide at the end of 2012, casting a long shadow over the presidential campaign. Budget guru Stan Collender has summed it up: “[I]t’s absolutely certain Congress and the president, the House and Senate, and Democrats and Republicans will all be fighting constantly over the budget during the next 18 months.”
This rocky road ahead raises a very fundamental question about the long-range strategy of the Republican presidential nominee. It is often asserted that presidential candidates “play to the base” during contested primary contests and then “pivot to the center” once they are playing on the expanded field of a general election. This desideratum is more important these days for Republicans than for Democrats, since the GOP is without a doubt the more ideological of the two major parties (consider the relative power of Blue Dogs and the hunted-to-extinction RINOs, or the eagerness of Republicans to call themselves “conservatives” or even “true conservatives,” as contrasted with the resistance of many Democrats to labels such as “liberal” or even “progressive”).
The “pivot to the center” is a lot easier said than done. It was certainly a major problem for John McCain in 2008, who had to repudiate much of his “maverick” record during the primaries and then struggled to recapture it, with conservatives thwarting his desire for a pro-choice running-mate and disrupting his general election rallies with complaints that he wasn’t talking constantly about ACORN and Jeremiah Wright.
How much harder might the “pivot to the center” be for the 2012 GOP nominee, who will head up a party convinced its recommitment to conservative principles and its partisan militancy won the 2010 midterm elections and now has Democrats on the run? Moreover, in a year where the last cycle’s “true conservative” candidate Mitt Romney has moved significantly to the right but is now considered dangerously moderate, the distance such a “pivot” would have to span appears daunting, if not downright impossible.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama (barring some truly shocking turn of events) will not only have the luxury of avoiding a base-tending primary challenge, but will have pursued what amounts to a general election strategy for the entire span of his presidency. From all appearances, Team Obama has long concluded its ace-in-the-hole for 2012 will be its ability to frighten both persuadable swing voters and unhappy progressives with the specter of what an extremist Republican government might do. Conservatives in Congress and in the early primary states are certainly doing everything they can to help Democrats paint devil horns on their eventual nominee.