Over at The American Prospect, Tom Schaller goes through the various reasons that conservatives are unhappy with the Big Three Republican front-runners for the 2008 presidential nomination–Giuliani, McCain and Romney–and comes up with an interesting suggestion: GOPers could decide it’s more important to make a “statement” of conservative principle than to win, and may prove it by uniting behind a second-tier candidate that they, but not general-electorate voters, like.I’m with him on his brisk diagnosis of the problems conservatives have about the Big Three. Giuliani is unacceptable to social conservatives on the issues social conservatives most care about. McCain has accumulated a long record of heresies, concluding with his terrible mispositioning on the emerging hot-button issue of immigration. And Romney’s Massachusetts record and Mormon religion are big millstones.But the problem with Schaller’s hypothesis is that there’s not an obvious vehicle for the let’s-take-a-dive-for-conservatism bandwagon. Looking at the GOP field, Tancredo for sure, and probably Brownback, have views too extreme to qualify them for the consensus-conservative mantle.Huckabee and the Thompson Twins could each serve as conservative lighting rods, but they’d probably become viable general election candidates if they got within striking distance of the nomination.The only potential candidate who meets Schaller’s congenial-loser profile is Newt Gingrich. And just today, on Good Morning America, the Newtster invited speculation that he may indeed toss his well-worn tinfoil hat into the ring.But in order to emerge as the Good Loser candidate, Gingrich would need to make a big splash in Iowa. He’s repeatedly said he won’t announce any candidacy before the end of September, and Iowa is the worst possible place for a late start.So Schaller’s hypothesis is interesting as an abstract exercise in what a conservative party might do given a not-so-conservative field of front-runners, but perhaps not terribly relevant to the actual conditions of Campaign ’08. My own opinion, for what it’s worth, is that Fred Thompson’s still the New Candidate To Watch. Check out the large, puffy profile of Ol’ Fred that recently appeared in The Weekly Standard. Remember that his proto-campaign was first launched in the media by that reliable sounding board for cultural conservatives, Bob Novak. Check out today’s report that religious conservatives are active in promoting his candidacy.And remember–particularly if you, like Tom Schaller, believe that Republicans have become the Party of Southern Identity–that Fred Thompson is from the South, and unlike Newt Gingrich, looks and sounds the part.Fred’s underwhelming by many measures, but he’s not an obvious general-election loser, and he may be the best the Right’s got in their spring of discontent.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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July 3: The Democratic Message on Trump’s Megabill Isn’t Reaching the Voters Who Need to Hear It
After months of watching and writing about Trump’s huge budget reconciliation bill, I wrote my final assessment today…but then saw a poll that made me rethink the whole thing, and wrote that up at New York:
When top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries chose to exploit a loophole in the House rules, which allows party leaders to talk as long as they want, to discuss at record length the baleful effects of Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, it initially looked like a bit of a publicity stunt, albeit it a good one. It delayed for hours a very big moment of Republican self-congratulation over the final passage of this enormous package of legislation. It probably screwed up a lot of congressional flight arrangements to get members home for Independence Day. And it likely put a few kinks into plans for Trump’s own festive July 4 signing ceremony, wherein the president will surely praise himself, thank his vassals, and tell more than a few fibs about what his grim masterpiece will do.
But beyond all that, it’s becoming clear that Democrats need to do a much better job articulating their take on this bill and its profoundly reactionary effects on the social safety net. To those of us whose job it is to listen to arguments over 940-page bills as they chug through Congress for months, it may seem like congressional Democrats have been grinding away at the message that Republicans are cutting Medicaid to give a tax cut to billionaires. Some of them held up signs about Medicaid cuts when Trump delivered his belligerent address to a joint session of Congress four months ago. Yet a startling new poll shows the extent to which that messaging — and for that matter, Republican messages hailing the megabill as a people-pleasing growth engine for the U.S. economy that doesn’t touch Medicaid benefits at all — isn’t really breaking through, as Sam Stein reported:
Meanwhile, the kind of people Democrats need to reach but often don’t aren’t hearing much at all:
“73% of 2024 Trump supporters who didn’t vote in 2020 and 56% of Biden-to-Trump flippers have heard nothing about the bill. These shares are 20 points higher than their Harris supporting counterparts — indicating the urgent opportunity if Democrats break out of our own media silos.”
Part of the problem, to be sure, is that Trump’s megabill is incredibly broad and complicated, and the budget reconciliation process by which it was developed, debated, and enacted is insanely complex and obscure. It’s all about as remote from the civics-book understanding of how laws are made as you can get, and it has been understandably difficult for Democrats to describe it compellingly in a sound bite, a protest sign, a TV ad, or indeed, in Jeffries’s eight-hour speech. It was designed that way, and that’s why half the public isn’t absorbing anything about it, and a lot of others are simply processing it via big, vague party-driven narratives.
The bottom line is that the struggle to define this consequential legislation has just begun. For Democrats, finding ways to convey the horror the megabill inspires in those who have studied it closely, and the concrete damage it will do to actual people, must continue right up until the midterm elections. Yes, Trump and his allies will do many other things that might galvanize voters, from his reckless foreign policies to his cruel mass-deportation initiative to the lawless conduct he exemplifies and encourages among his appointees. But nothing is likely to match the megabill in magnitude or in the malignancy of its authors. If voters march to the polls in 2026 or 2028 with no better than a rough idea of what it means, America will get more of the same.