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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Editor’s Corner

August 26: Let’s Don’t Drag the Vice President Into the 2016 Presidential Contest

I don’t know about you, but the runaway talk about Joe Biden being on the brink of running for president in response to the demands of a “panicked” Democratic Party are making me a little crazy. I rebelled against the meme today at TPMCafe.

All this speculation is second- or third-hand and unsourced, with the exception of a few quotes from famed media manipulator Dick Harpootlian of South Carolina. The meeting between Biden and Warren–between the president of the Senate and a senator, to put it another way–could have been about anything or nothing. There are zero indications Warren’s fans are the least bit interested in Biden; they are mostly already signed up to ride with Bernie Sanders, and probably remember Biden was on the wrong side in the battle over bankruptcy “reform” that really launched Warren’s national career.
And of course the White House spokesman, when pressed, is going to say nice things about the number two figure in the administration. For that matter, why should Joe Biden go out of his way to make a Sherman Statement disclaiming any interest in a presidential run five months before a single vote is cast?
So much for the supply side of the equation. What about the demand side?
Notwithstanding attributions of “panic,” and despite heavy, heavy negative press for months now, Hillary Clinton is maintaining a lead over all potential Republican nominees in the RealClearPolitics polling averages. In the last national poll to be released, from CNN/ORC, she led Bush by nine points, Fiorina by ten points, and Walker and Trump by six points. In the Democratic nomination contest, she’s leading Sanders nationally two-to-one, even though pollsters are choosing to muddy the waters by including Biden in the surveys, and is leading Bernie in every state other than (in some polls) New Hampshire. Biden’s running a weak third at around 12 percent. Having run twice before and failed dismally twice before, amid signs he did not or could not raise the kind of money needed for a serious candidacy, he’s not exactly a natural magnet for moneyed or tenured elites, either.
The more you look at the Biden bandwagon, it looks more like a ghost ship being pulled through the mist by a combination of hungry political reporters, Hillary haters (including most of the conservative media), and Delaware-based Friends of Joe who, of course, would love to see him run. Plus there’s Harpootlian!
Now as Michael Tomasky pointed out this week, Biden (with or without Warren) as a fallback contingency for the Democratic Party in case all the fears about HRC actually do materialize is one thing. Leaping into the race now would be not a rescue, but a demolition mission. For starters, it would be received bitterly by the many Democratic women who figured HRC’s final assault on the political glass ceiling was a natural follow-up to Obama’s historic presidency. And worse yet, it’s hard to imagine Biden would have any compelling rationale for a candidacy that did not depend on feeding MSM and GOP attacks on her character.
To the extent that there are some voices Biden listens to on this matter, whether it’s Obama’s or vox populi, let’s hope they are telling him to stay well to this side of the failsafe point no matter how many reports pop up at Politico flattering him on his prospects. Should HRC’s candidacy crash and burn before Iowa, let the party as a whole sort it out and choose its own rescuer. If Bernie Sanders defeats her in the Caucuses and primaries, let him reap the rewards of his own remarkable campaign. And more likely, if Clinton can overcome the obstacles before her, real and imaginary, the last thing Democrats need is some deus ex machina lurching onto the stage at a crucial moment. Let the Republicans enjoy all the drama.

By all credible accounts, the Vice President is still mourning the death of his son Beau. He should be allowed to take his time, instead of being dragged into an unnecessary and potentially destructive presidential race.


August 21: The Fire This Time?

There’s a fascinating debate going on in punditland and in the political science community over the craziness breaking out in every direction in the GOP presidential nominating contest. The conventional wisdom remains that it’s all a mirage, and that eventually sane “adult” voices in the GOP will resume command and the restless grassroots elements supporting various extremist candidates will fall into docile place, just as they always do. In other words: nothing to see here folks, move along.
But it ought to set off some alarms when AEI’s Norm Ornstein says he doesn’t think this is all political business as usual, as I discussed at Washington Monthly today:

Us old folks remember a time when AEI’s Norman Ornstein was the very voice of The Conventional Wisdom. So his new column at The Atlantic ought to come as a particularly significant warning about this election cycle and the particular level of conservative freakout we are dealing with:

Almost all the commentary from the political-pundit class has insisted that history will repeat itself. That the Trump phenomenon is just like the Herman Cain phenomenon four years ago, or many others before it; that early enthusiasm for a candidate, like the early surge of support for Rudy Giuliani in 2008, is no predictor of long-term success; and that the usual winnowing-out process for candidates will be repeated this time, if on a slightly different timetable, given 17 GOP candidates.
Of course, they may be entirely right. Or not entirely; after all, the stories and commentaries over the past two months saying Trump has peaked, Trumpmania is over, this horrific comment or that is the death knell for Trump, have been embarrassingly wrong. But Trump’s staying power notwithstanding, there are strong reasons to respect history and resist the urge to believe that everything is different now.
Still, I am more skeptical of the usual historical skepticism than I have been in a long time. A part of my skepticism flows from my decades inside the belly of the congressional beast. I have seen the Republican Party go from being a center-right party, with a solid minority of true centrists, to a right-right party, with a dwindling share of center-rightists, to a right-radical party, with no centrists in the House and a handful in the Senate. There is a party center that two decades ago would have been considered the bedrock right, and a new right that is off the old charts. And I have seen a GOP Congress in which the establishment, itself very conservative, has lost the battle to co-opt the Tea Party radicals, and itself has been largely co-opted or, at minimum, cowed by them.
As the congressional party has transformed, so has the activist component of the party outside Washington. In state legislatures, state party apparatuses, and state party platforms, there are regular statements or positions that make the most extreme lawmakers in Washington seem mild.

Perhaps he’s thinking of the widespread subscription to the lunacy of Agenda 21 conspiracy theories, or there’s something even more alarming crawling around out there. But I digress…

Egged on by talk radio, cable news, right-wing blogs, and social media, the activist voters who make up the primary and caucus electorates have become angrier and angrier, not just at the Kenyan Socialist president but also at their own leaders. Promised that Obamacare would be repealed, the government would be radically reduced, immigration would be halted, and illegals punished, they see themselves as euchred and scorned by politicians of all stripes, especially on their own side of the aisle.

So the forces favoring a big-time right-wing insurgency, says Ornstein, are already at the kind of levels that produced conservative uprisings in the GOP in 1964, 1976 (Reagan’s primary challenge to incumbent president Ford), 1980 and 1994. But wait: it could be worse than those:

[I]s anything really different this time? I think so. First, because of the amplification of rage against the machine by social media, and the fact that Barack Obama has grown stronger and more assertive in his second term while Republican congressional leaders have become more impotent. The unhappiness with the establishment and the desire to stiff them is much stronger. Second, the views of rank-and-file Republicans on defining issues like immigration have become more consistently extreme–a majority now agree with virtually every element of Trump’s program, including expelling all illegal immigrants.

There’s more from Ornstein, but you get the idea. For years right-wing insurgent energy has flamed up and died down in a cycle that keeps getting more dangerous. This time the fire may be out of control.


August 19: The GOP’s Amateur Hour

For the first time ever, not one, not two, but three non-trivial presidential candidates are people who’ve never held public office. And they’re all Republicans. Is that significant? I tried to answer this question at TPMCafe today:

The intense focus on Donald Trump among the Republican presidential candidates has obscured a phenomenon in which he is a part of but is not unique to him. Consider this recent take from the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump:

Fox News released the results of the first major-outlet national poll since the first Republican debate three months two weeks ago. Comparing those results to the Fox poll released immediately before the debate, we can, as objectively as possible, declare a winner: Ben Carson, who saw a five-point jump in the polls — a 71 percent increase over where he was two weeks ago…
Carly Fiorina gained three — impressive because it more than doubled her support. She clearly won the early-bird debate…
In total, 42 percent of the support from Republican voters went to people who have never held elected office: Trump, Fiorina and Carson.

Add in the standing of the least experienced elected official in the race, Ted Cruz (Senate Class of 2012), who is also the loudest disparager of his fellow GOP members of Congress, and you’ve got more than half the Republican electorate preferring as little time on the public service clock as possible. Meanwhile, the rest of the field has compiled a total (through 2016) of 144 years in elected office.
A year ago a much-discussed piece that focused on Rand Paul’s campaign suggested this cycle might represent a “libertarian moment.” It’s now looking more like amateur hour….
All three amateur candidates–along with their spiritual ally Sen. Cruz–are clearly benefiting from a climate of opinion among rank-and-file Republicans in which the habitual anti-Washington sentiment has turned sharply against Republican office-holders, and not just in Washington. Decades of alleged betrayal of the conservative movement and its constituent elements (especially the Christian Right and those who bristle at any compromise with liberals or Big Government) by Republican elected officials at every level have made short work of long resumes. The most alarming thing for the Republican Establishment is that their usual peremptory dismissal of unsuitable candidates like Trump and Cruz does not seem to be working its magic this time.
Ultimately the Establishment could well have the last laugh of the 2016 “clown show.” For one thing, the amateurs could help destroy each other; Trump has already been the first fellow Republican to point a finger at Fiorina and call her a loser. And if Trump’s long history in the public eye supplies his rivals’ Super-PACs with abundant ammunition, Carson’s brief history of association with extremism could be enough to scare off voters once they understand his idea of the “political correctness” he despises includes much they hold dear.
But it’s clear these candidates will not go away quietly, and won’t go away at all if a lack of experience is the only problem they exhibit. All these years of despising the public sector have finally taken a toll on a Republican Party that considers itself proudly on the brink of total power in Washington. “The base” is not impressed.
And even if the GOP can end the “amateur hour” during its nomination process, there’s always the chance a third-party candidacy will emerge from the wreckage. The last two times an amateur appeared on the general election ballot, in 1992 and 1996, Republicans lost.

No wonder Republicans are worried about an independent candidacy by Donald Trump.


August 14: Polarization and the Ideological “Bang for the Buck”

I was staring at some polls the other day and a question hit me: what if “electability” were more or less taken out of the equation in presidential nominating contests? I decided to discuss that hypothesis and its implications at Washington Monthly:

One of the solid truisms of contemporary politics is that partisan and ideological polarization has significantly reduced the number of “swing voters” in most elections–especially presidential elections where major-party candidates are pretty well known by the time the campaign reaches its decisive phases. That also means there’s something of a “floor” beneath major-party candidates given the higher percentage of people who will eventually vote with their party (even if they prefer to call themselves “independent”) no matter what. So even if, say, Ted Cruz is Barry Goldwater reincarnated, he would, if nominated, do a lot better than Barry’s 38.5%.
But what if polarization (and for that matter such “fundamentals” as the economy) is even more powerful than we realize, and the exact identity of the candidates is pretty much irrelevant to the outcome? That could have a pretty profound impact on the nomination process, wouldn’t it, especially in a cycle like this one where partisans are understandably very anxious to win?
We’ll, it’s just one general election poll in one battleground state, and I’m pointing to it strictly as an example of something that might turn into a trend later on–but a new PPP survey of Iowa has this rather amazing range of general election trial heats:

PPP’s new Presidential poll in Iowa finds a tight race in the general election for President in the state. Hillary Clinton leads 7 of her Republican opponents while trailing 4 of them, but in none of the cases are the margins larger than 4 points. The strongest Republican against Clinton in the state is Ben Carson, who leads her 44/40. The other three GOP hopefuls ahead of Clinton all lead her by just a single point- Mike Huckabee at 44/43, Scott Walker at 44/43, and Marco Rubio at 43/42.
The Republicans who fare the worst against Clinton are Jeb Bush who trails by 4 at 44/40, and Rand Paul and Donald Trump who each trail by 3 at 43/40. The rest of the GOP hopefuls each trail Clinton by 2 points- Ted Cruz at 44/42, Carly Fiorina at 42/40, and Chris Christie and John Kasich each at 41/39.

PPP doesn’t test Bernie Sanders against the entire GOP field, but the tests it does offer show very small differences between his performance and HRC’s (he leads Trump 44/40; HRC leads Trump 43/40;) he leads Jebbie 41/40; she leads Jebbie 44/40).
If this does turn out to be a trend, what do you suppose might be the psychological effect among party activists, donors and “base” voters? They’d worry a lot less about electability and a lot more about how much they agree with–or would benefit from–the ideologies and policies of the various candidates, wouldn’t they?….
[W]hile my knee continues to jerk in a negative response to the proposition that ideological candidates are the only true or honorable candidates–sometimes “centrists” actually do believe in what they are proposing–it is entirely rational for ideologically motivated players in the presidential nominating process to prefer the maximum bang for their buck should their party win all other things being equal. My point here is that we may be approaching the day when all other things really are equal between “ideologues” and “centrists” in both parties when it comes to electability.

It’s just a hypothesis, mind you, but it’s something to watch.


August 12: The Un-Vetted Carly Fiorina

Though there’s considerable disagreement over the damage, if any, done to Donald Trump in last week’s first official Republican presidential debate, there’s no question one candidate is getting roses strewn in her path for her performance in the “Happy Hour” forum among those who didn’t make the debate cut. I discussed the Carly Fiorina phenomenon, and the glaring question it raises, at Washington Monthly yesterday:

She’s basically running even with Jeb Bush, Scott Walker and Marco Rubio in the only national GOP poll (from Rasmussen) taken since the debates, as is also the case in a new poll of Iowa from PPP. She’s not quite so strong in another new Iowa poll from Suffolk, but is running ahead of Bush, Huckabee and Paul there. Hell, Huck was campaigning in Iowa at a time when Carly was still counting her please-go-away money from HP and thinking about launching a losing Senate campaign. So her standing is pretty impressive.
It will be interesting to see if and when her standing compels her rivals or media to begin challenging her extremely thin qualifications to become president of the United States. Yes, the whole GOP needs her for gender diversity and for launching toxic attacks on Hillary Clinton into the atmosphere without too much gender backlash. But at some point, if you’re Jeb Bush with your two terms as Governor of Florida or Mike Huckabee with your two-plus terms as Governor of Arkansas or Rick Perry with your three-plus terms as Governor of Texas, you might get tired of looking up the leader board at Fiorina while pretending it’s non-germane that she blew up the company in her one CEO gig and lost her one political campaign by a near-landslide in the best Republican year since World War II…..
Maybe none of this matters to Republicans looking for an “outsider” candidate who’s done more than her share of Power Point presentations and has a good personal story (including being a cancer survivor). But we’ll never know until the questions get asked.

Tick tock.


August 7: Fox Takes the Wheel

Yesterday’s two events on Fox News, involving all 17 Republican presidential candidates, offered quite an extended show. But Fox took a more aggressive role in shaping the field than any media operation in memory. That’s what I wrote about this morning at TPMCafe:

The Republican Party has famously missed most of the markers set out for it in the RNC’s so-called “autopsy report” in March of 2013.
[But] here’s one thing Republicans promised themselves to do after the last cycle that’s actually been implemented: partner with conservative media so that the GOP candidates weren’t being subjected to hostile questioning from “outsiders.”
So today we had the first official GOP presidential debate, and the seven-candidate “undercard” forum earlier in the day, both sponsored by Fox News. And they put their stamp on the events in a way that is almost certain to shape, if not winnow, the gigantic GOP field.
At the 5:00 p.m. “Happy Hour” debate, virtually all of the questions were framed from the point of view of a conservative movement vetting the candidates, beginning with a battery about electability and exploring potential ideological heresies like Lindsey Graham’s openness to compromise with Democrats and Rick Santorum’s strange interest in wage levels for working-class people.
The candidate Republicans in general most wanted to promote to a higher tier, Carly Fiorina, was universally proclaimed the winner of the early forum, partly because she was one of two candidates who drew a question that enabled her to take a shot at Donald Trump even as she pandered to his followers. No one asked her (not in the forum, or in the extensive pre- or post-forum discussion at Fox) about her uniquely disastrous business and political record. It helped that Santorum, Pataki and Gilmore were clearly living in the 1990s, while Rick Perry returned to his inarticulate and gaffe-ridden 2012 ways. Bobby Jindal hung on to his prospects of serving in somebody else’s cabinet. All in all, it’s exactly what Republicans wanted from this event.
Fox News’ purpose in the main 10-candidate event was made plain with the first question: an in-your-face spotlight on Donald Trump’s refusal to promise not to run as an independent candidate. And the relentless pounding of Trump–on his bankruptcies, his past support for single-payer health care and abortion rights, his “specific evidence” for claiming Mexico has dispatched criminals to the U.S. (slurs about immigrants by other candidates didn’t come up) and even his sexist tweets—continued right on through to Frank Luntz’s post-debate focus group, designed to show how much damage Trump had sustained. It was by far the least impartial showing by debate sponsors I have seen, up to and including the disgraceful ABC-moderated 2008 Democratic event that involved a deliberate trashing of all the candidates.
The Trump-bashing agenda distracted from the other candidates significantly. In what may have been another example of Fox carrying water for the GOP and conservative orthodoxy, Chris Christie was invited to savage Rand Paul on surveillance policy and aid to Israel. Paul responded with a nasty crack at Christie’s famous hug of Obama, and Christie responded by citing the 9/11 survivors he had hugged (and that Paul had implicitly disrespected by objecting to warrantless wiretapping and so forth). On a separate front, Christie and Huckabee were invited to mix it up on “entitlement reform,” and they did so rather cordially. But these were the rare non-Trump points of collision.
The strange direction of the questioning made it hard to name a “winner.” Jeb Bush deftly handled a Common Core question. Scott Walker misdirected his way around a pointed question about his jobs record. Ben Carson gave some glimpses of the craziness of his world view (a reference to Saul Alinsky, an apparent dismissal of complaints about torture as–you guessed it!–political correctness), but recovered with a nice rap about his surgical successes in his closing. Rubio apparently impressed people who hadn’t heard his well-worn up-from-poverty story; he also covered his ideological flanks by denying he was for a rape/incest exception to a hypothetical abortion ban. And Kasich (who benefited from a home-crowd advantage) probably struck a chord with people who are not “base” conservatives and are thus open to his defense of his Medicaid expansion and his interest in people “left in the shadows.”
From the perspective of Fox News and its GOP allies, you’d guess the ideal denouement would be Trump crashing in the polls, to be replaced in the top ten by Carly Fiorina. We’ll see how avidly and universally the conservative spin machine pursues that outcome in the days just ahead.

One final note: it’s interesting the biggest strategic decision facing the GOP in the days just ahead–whether to pursue various “defunding” demands up to and beyond the point of a government shutdown–came up briefly at the early event but not at all during the official debate. It makes you wonder if there was a call from the offices of the Senate Republican Leader to Fox News poohbahs indicating a candidate feeding frenzy on that subject would not be helpful.
That couldn’t happen, could it?


August 5: The Un-Magnificent Seven

After months of scheming and maneuvering to boost their national poll standings and thus qualify for the ten-candidate first Republican candidates’ debate on Fox News, the hammer finally fell on seven would-be presidents who did not make the cut. I talked about the implications today at the Washington Monthly:

Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore…have been relegated to a 5:00 PM “forum” on Fox tomorrow that will last an hour; the top ten will rumble for two hours at 9:00 PM.
One of the story-lines for the next couple of weeks will be the fate of the candidates who didn’t make the cut. Will the media start treating them like the Walking Dead? Will donors and previously committed activists abandon them? Will any of them see the handwriting on the wall and just drop out? Or could this whole make-the-top-ten obsession of the last couple of months turn out to have been a chimera?
You’d have to figure that three of the leftover candidates have a survival advantage. Perry has gotten off to a good start substantively and in terms of early Iowa impressions. He also has a lifeline to Texas and Christian Right money. Fiorina remains a candidate other Republicans want to push in front of cameras to savage Hillary Clinton without the appearance of male pigginess. And Lindsey Graham is this cycle’s clown prince, beloved by media for his jokiness, his moderation on some domestic issues, and his mad bomber hawkiness on foreign policy, making him a nice matched set with Rand Paul.
As long as Rick Santorum has Foster Friess willing to finance his Super-PAC, however, he can probably stick around. And what else does Bobby Jindal have to do? Govern Louisiana? Hah!
In the wake of not making the Fox cut, Team Jindal has settled on an interesting reaction: predicting Bobby will overwhelm the field with his Big Brain (per Buzzfeed‘s Rosie Gray):

The Bobby Jindal campaign likewise responded with a certain level of disdain for its fellow undercard debaters.
“Unlike other candidates, Bobby has a tremendous bandwidth for information and policy,” said Jindal spokesperson Shannon Dirman. “He’s smart, has the backbone to do the right thing, and his experience has prepared him well for debates on any number of policy topics. If anyone thinks they can beat him in a debate I’d love to learn about it.”

Bobby used the term “bandwidth” himself a couple of times during Monday’s Voters First Forum in NH. It’s apparently the new term for “smartest guy in the room,” which will probably be etched on Jindal’s political tombstone. He’s got all the arrogance of Donald Trump, but without the poll numbers.

Another theory is that the “undercard” debaters tomorrow will benefit from not having to share a stage with Donald Trump. If no one much is watching, though, the 5:00 PM forum will just be another place in America without a spotlight tomorrow.


July 30: Let’s Debate Mass Deportations

One of the frustrating things about the immigration debate is that many conservatives have gotten into the habit of complaining about any solution to the problem of 11 million undocumented people that involves citizenship or even legalization. But when it comes to an alternative the Right typically changes the subject to “securing the border,” which does nothing about the 11 million already here. Mitt Romney articulated the implicit position of many Republicans in 2012–“self-deportation”–favoring harassment of suspected undocumented people and immigrants generally until they choose to go “home.” But that was a political loser. And so most anti-immigration-reform Republicans now shut up or stay vague on the subject. But this week, Donald Trump kind of blew up the conspiracy of silence, which I wrote about at Washington Monthly.

The Donald has done a signal service to public debate by coming right out and endorsing the implicit immigration policy of much of the Republican Party (per a report from CNN’s Jeremy Diamond):

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential hopeful who shot up to the head of the pack over his controversial comments about illegal immigrants, is finally starting to lay out an immigration policy.
Trump said Wednesday in an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that as president he would deport all undocumented immigrants and then allow the “good ones” to reenter the country through an “expedited process” and live in the U.S. legally, though not as citizens….
Trump would not say how he would locate, round up and deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants he says must go. Instead, he deflected, saying that while it may be a task too tall for politicians, it isn’t for a business mogul like himself.
“Politicians aren’t going to find them because they have no clue. We will find them, we will get them out,” Trump said. “It’s feasible if you know how to manage. Politicians don’t know how to manage.”

Yeah, sure: it’s just a management problem, and any tycoon worth his salt can figure out a way via universal hourly traffic stops and police raids on workplaces and maybe house-to-house searches to “find them,” and then it’s just a matter of setting up a few thousand transit camps and deploying a few hundreds of thousands of cattle cars to round ’em up and “get them out.”
Estimates of the cost of mass deportation of the undocumented start at about $265 billion and range on up from there; one key variable is whether a sufficiently terroristic atmosphere would encourage some of these people to “self-deport,” as Mitt Romney surmised. Trump might even claim some of these folk will self-deport to get a prime place in the line to reenter the country as a permanent helot class if they pass muster. In any event, it would indeed make this country a very different place.
Now that Trump’s forced this issue right out in the open, it’s time for us all to ask him and other Republicans who won’t endorse a path to legalization exactly how much they are willing to spend in money and in lost civil liberties to implement their plans. No sense weaseling around and dog-whistling this issue any more.

We can only hope the subject comes up early and often in next week’s first GOP presidential candidates’ debate.


July 29: Antichoice Impatience With the GOP

The heavy maneuvering among Senate Republicans to get a vote on a symbolic, sure-to-be-filibustered-and-if-necessarily-vetoed amendment cutting off all federal funding to Planned Parenthood in response to the series of videos an antichoice sting operation is generating sure looks like Kabuki theater to most Democrats. But it reflects a bit of a panic among Republicans dealing with the fury of antichoicers over the failure of the GOP to keep its promises. I wrote about this at Washington Monthly yesterday.

[W]ho really cares how far down the road to perdition the [Planned Parenthood defunding} amendment was allowed to proceed?
But for serious antichoice types, the answer to this question would be: We do, and thus the entire GOP we’ve been propping up for decades should, too. That’s pretty much the message sent by conservative columnist Emmanuel Gobry at The Week today:

I sincerely believe in the pro-life agenda. And it frustrates me to no end that even as pro-lifers have delivered electoral majorities to the GOP over and over again, the GOP has not kept up its end of the bargain. Five Republican-appointed justices sit on the Supreme Court, and yet Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land.
Early this year, the GOP failed at what should have been a simple task: Pass an enormously popular late-term abortion ban. Passing a bill that polls well, and is symbolically very important to your biggest constituency, ought to be the no-brainer to end all no-brainers. But Republican politicians couldn’t even do that.
And now, after the devastating revelations that Planned Parenthood routinely engages in the sale of baby organs for profit — something that is illegal, unethical, and disgusting on at least 12 different levels — GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell couldn’t bring himself to allow to the Senate floor a bill to defund that activity by Planned Parenthood. Why not? Because he wants to pass a highway bill instead — a pork-laden monstrosity that comes with the disgusting cherry on top that is the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, a corporate welfare program that free-market conservative activists particularly detest.

The road Gobry wants the GOP to take on abortion legislation will inevitably end at a government shutdown that will backfire on Republicans. And Lord knows Senate Republicans have used every code word imaginable to elicit a negative position on Roe v. Wade from judicial nominees, especially since the Souter “stab in the back,” but hey, the current fly in the ointment, Anthony Kennedy, was the appointee of The Gipper himself, the man who made uncompromising opposition to reproductive rights an unchanging part of the GOP platform.
But I guess if you think legalized abortion is an American Holocaust, as folks like Gabry often suggest, then you’re probably going to insist on results for your decades-long investment of energy, money, votes and agitprop. I mean, if anti-choicers can successfully convey the lie that they are only concerned about a tiny number of late-term abortions that “shock the conscience” of the casual, murder-tolerating Good Germans in the political center–when their real goal is to ban the vast majority of abortions that occur in the first trimester, that do not shock that many consciences–then can’t the GOP contrive some way to get the ball over the goal line? So that leads to the sort of strict liability, “no excuses” demand that Gobry issues:

We should rule with fear. For the past 30 years, we’ve been bringing a hymnal to a gunfight. The Tea Party has shown how it’s done: Don’t like someone? Primary them. End their political career. That’s the only thing politicians fear.
I’m done waiting. I hope you are, too.

Before you chuckle at the arrival of another intra-GOP fight over priorities, keep in mind that if Republicans win the White House and hang onto the Senate, they will indeed run out of excuses for saying “later” to their antichoice activists. Perhaps they’ll be forced to resort to the “nuclear option” to get rid of any possible filibuster against antichoice legislation or the next Republican Supreme Court nominee. As for said nominee, I think we will see an end to all of the dog-whistling about abortion; no matter how much it violates every premise of our legal system to pre-commit judges to a position on future litigation, we’ll see nominees who are all but visibly frothing to overturn Roe. In other words, if 2016 goes their way, the antichoicers may be able at long last to call in what I’ve referred to as a balloon payment on their mortgage on the soul of the GOP.

Don’t be surprised if the antichoicers keep Republicans hopping.


July 24: 2014 Republican Advantages Are Gone

Something Democrats should keep in mind in trying to understand the opposition as that while we look at the last few election cycles and see massive discontinuity between presidential and midterm elections, many Republicans think of 2012 as a pure aberration in an upward spiral of support for them that reassume its strength in 2014 and is still building steam. At the Washington Monthly I addressed some fresh evidence that’s an illusion:

A lot of Republicans came out of their 2014 landslide fully expecting to keep the party going right into the presidential cycle. There were a lot of reasons to doubt that optimism, from the change to a presidential cycle with less positive turnout patterns for the GOP, to the end of a six-year midterm dynamic that was sure to fade, to an improving economy. But whatever changed, the evidence is growing clearer that the 2014 party’s over. Here’s some relevant data from Pew just out today:

The Republican Party’s image has grown more negative over the first half of this year. Currently, 32% have a favorable impression of the Republican Party, while 60% have an unfavorable view. Favorable views of the GOP have fallen nine percentage points since January. The Democratic Party continues to have mixed ratings (48% favorable, 47% unfavorable).

Part of the problem is that Republicans themselves are less enthusiastic, which is a bit strange since they are being offered the largest presidential field in recent memory. Perhaps it is the inability to blame Congress’ fecklessness on Harry Reid any more.
Interestingly, despite or because of all the shrieking among Republicans about the world being this terrible place where no American is safe, the GOP advantage on foreign policy has vanished since the last Pew survey on the parties in February, and its advantage on “the terrorist threat at home” has been cut in half. But perhaps most significantly, views of the two parties on economic policy are pretty stable for now.
Any way you slice it, any thoughts by Republicans that the landscape is tilting in their direction in this cycle really come down to the fairly abstract notion of an electorate that thinks it’s time for a change after the Obama administration. If contrary to that notion this turns out to be a “two futures” election in which voters are simply comparing the two parties and their candidates, the landscape just isn’t tilting Right.

There are some “ifs” in that last sentence, but then again, the last really boffo Republican presidential election performance was all the way back in 1988.