RealClearPolitics has a useful roundup today of newspaper editorial reaction to the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Most of them were positive (New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, San Francisco Chronicle). One (USAToday) was worded in a positive fashion, but touted as legitimate every dumb and dishonest question about the judge.
What was most interesting about the negative editorials (Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Investor’s Business Daily) was their heavy and even angry focus on the “identity politics” and “activist” arguments against Sotomayor, each totally dependent on one out-of-context quote from one speech she delivered. Sure, editorials the day after a Supreme Court appointment tend to rely on the material at hand, but still, if the opposition to Sotomayor continues to sustain itself on this thin gruel, it probably won’t last long.

Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the smartest conservatives around, so it’s of more than passing interest to see (via Jason Zingerle) that his initial three-word take at The Corner on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was: “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”
Now maybe all Ponnuru means by that is that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity were factors in her nomination; some observers thought Bush picked Miers primarily because she was a woman (rather than because she was a slavishly loyal personal retainer to Bush, much like the un-confirmable Alberto Gonzales).
Beyond that, any comparison becomes rather ludicrous. Miers literally came out of nowhere when she was nominated by Bush; there were plenty of other conservative women available with judicial or academic backgrounds, and Miers was not even mentioned on most short lists. She was a tort lawyer who had worked for Bush for quite some time; her big credential was being elected president of the State Bar of Texas while in private practice. Sotomayer has been a federal judge since 1991, after work both in private practice and as a prosecutor in one of the most visible jurisdictions in the country. She’s been at the top of everybody’s short-list from the moment Justice Souter announced his retirement.
But that’s not what makes the comparison–implying the vain hope that Sotomayor, like Miers, will eventually have to withdraw–so silly. The conservative legal activists who forced Bush to drop Miers may have mentioned her lack of credentials on occasion, but their real beef with her was the lack of any judicial or academic paper-trail that could have firmly established her views on key constitutional issues, and most notably Roe v. Wade. Having been burned badly by Bush’s father with the choice of David Souter, and arguably by their idol Ronald Reagan with Sandra Day O’Conner and Anthony Kennedy, conservatives were in no mood to trust Bush’s word for it that Miers would serve as a reliable vote on the Court. (For a good account of conservative legal strategy in recent years, see Jeffrey Toobin’s fine book, The Nine).
None of these considerations are in the least bit relevant to the Sotomayor nomination, aside from the fact that her credentials are vastly more impressive than were those of Miers (and the fact that no one, actually, is saying she’s not smart or able enough to serve on the Supreme Court; her anonymous detractors in a single magazine article were simply saying she’s no William Brennan capable of waging high-toned constitutional battles with the conservative bloc on the Court. This point was made today by the author of said article, who urged her confirmation).
This is all so obvious that maybe we’ll soon stop hearing about Miers Redux. But in truth, the case against Sotomayor is pretty threadbare, aside from basic disagreement on judicial philosophy. Lots of conservatives are leaping on a comment she made in a speech referring to the Court of Appeals as “where policy is made.” It’s pretty clear from the context of the quote that she was talking about the relative importance of the Courts of Appeal, as opposed to District Courts or even SCOTUS, as the source of federal legal precedent, not about judicial versus legislative authority (as her jocular disclaimer of any advocacy for the belief that judges “make law” should show).
I guess conservatives are playing the hand they’ve been dealt, but as I (and many others) have already noted, they may be playing with fire in casting around so widely for reasons to oppose the first Latina Supreme Court nominee.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

A case against Sotomayor based on her “credentials” or “intelligence” is false on its face–this is a kind of Southern Strategy all over again. By stoking white resentment over the rise of allegedly unqualified minorities getting prominent positions, the GOP is hoping to derail her nomination. It probably won’t work, but it’s another sign of how little the GOP learned from last year’s election.

In other words, Republicans still seem to think the Joe the Plumber constituency is the key swing vote in American politics–even though Joe himself has noisily left the GOP.

In a widely predicted development, the California Supreme Court upheld, by a 6-1 vote, the constitutionality of last November’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages in the state. But it also upheld the validity of approximately 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to passage of Prop. 8. That’s significant, not only in terms of the lives of those 18,000 couples, but also because their existence will steadily undermine all the scare tactics employed by opponents of same-sex marriage alleging a corrosive impact on heterosexual marriages or “religious freedom.”
Prop 8 could be rescinded as early as 2010 by another initiative or by an act of the legislature followed by a successful referendum. There’s no question that marriage equality activists in California will take immediate steps to make that happen, in hopes that the lessons of the Prop 8 campaign (see Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s early analysis of those lessons, which we published in November) will be thoroughly learned and a different result will be achieved next time around.
National GLBT rights advocates will, of course, make their own calculations of where to allocate resources going forward. Today Richard Kim at The Nation argues that the domestic-partnership rights in California that were not affected by Prop 8 are strong enough that perhaps other states with no such rights should become the primary targets for activists in the immediate future. We’ll hear more about this debate in the near future.

One of the ironies of the current conservative mania for “state sovereignty” is that it seems to have magically reappeared as part of the conservative mindset at the precise moment Barack Obama took office. George W. Bush was famously inclined to favor federal policies that preempted state laws that affected business interests, along with so-called unfunded mandates that pursued conservative policy goals, particularly in the law enforcement area.
So I guess it was no surprise that silence is pretty much all we heard from the deeply principled ranks of conservative Tenth Amendment fans when the President issued a landmark directive last week aiming towards reversal of Bush’s preemption habit:

Obama, in a memorandum to federal agency heads issued late Wednesday, said his administration should undertake regulations preempting state laws in rare instances and “only with full consideration of the legitimate prerogatives of the states and with a sufficient legal basis for preemption.”
The president ordered department heads to review all regulations issued in the past 10 years that are designed to preempt state law and determine whether they are justified under the new policy. If they cannot be justified, Obama said, his administration should consider amending the regulations.
Bush administration officials inserted preemptive language into dozens of federal regulations, in many cases shielding corporations from restrictive state laws. For instance, federal preemption provisions stopped California from enforcing a law limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
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“It’s environmental law, it’s drug law, it’s mortgage law, it’s a whole host of areas where the Bush administration was really aggressive about using regulatory action to clear state and local laws that businesses and corporations didn’t like,” said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center.

You will notice that many conservative states-rights people only get upset at expanded federal power if it disturbs state control of, say, gun policy, or tempts states to participate in federal-state programs aimed at addressing inequality.
So don’t hold your breath for anyone like Bush’s protege Rick Perry–a big-time State Sovereignty advocate these days–to cheer the President for actually respecting state policy prerogatives. States are cool only when they do as conservatives want.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

It is hard to overstate how important the new Obama regulatory standard respecting state regulations and arguing against blanket preemption of state laws will be for progressives. It means that local activism and innovation will actually be effective in holding corporations accountable locally and allow such local legislation to become models for broader federal reforms. That version of collaborative federalism could be one of the most important legacies of the Obama administration.

Bob Herbert’s latest New York Times column, “Our Crumbling Foundation,” updates the argument for major infrastructure upgrade projects as a near-perfect match for the nation’s employment needs. It’s a familiar argument that’s been made for decades, though seldom with such supportive economic realities, and Herbert makes his case about as good as can be done in the columnist’s limited format:

It’s not just about roads and bridges, although they are important. It’s also about schools, and the electrical grid, and environmental and technological innovation. It’s about establishing a world-class industrial and economic platform for a nation that is speeding toward second-class status on a range of important fronts.
It’s about whether we’re serious about remaining a great nation. We don’t act like it. Here’s a staggering statistic: According to the Education Trust, the U.S. is the only industrialized country in which young people are less likely than their parents to graduate from high school…We can’t put our people to work. We can’t educate the young. We can’t keep the infrastructure in good repair. It’s hard to believe that this nation could be so dysfunctional at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. It’s tragic….The link between the need to rebuild the nation’s crumbing infrastructure and the crucial need to find rich new sources of employment in this economic downturn should be obvious, a no-brainer.

Over the years, numerous Democratic candidates for congress and the white house have urged making infrastructure upgrades as a major federal priority. Yet the idea never gets much traction, despite the clear logic of the need for action. The political will ought to be there, but it hasn’t emerged thus far. Democrats just didn’t have the votes in congress to significantly increase expenditures for fixing America’s decaying roads, bridges, sewerage systems, port security and other critical public facilities.
Herbert didn’t analyze opinion polls for clues to how voters feel about infrastructure projects as a major federal investment. If he had, he would have seen that there is strong public support for the concept of a major government investment in shoring up our infrastructure. A poll conducted 12/22/08 by Luntz Maslansky Strategic Research (yes, that Frank Luntz) for Building America’s Future, an organization which promotes infrastructure projects, found 81 percent would pay an extra 1 percent on their taxes to pay for infrastructure repairs, while 84 percent believe their state governments should increase spending on public works.
But he would also have seen that the government does have a persistent image problem, which prevents needed political action. The BAF poll found, for example, that 51 percent said their governor had been very effective in improving infrastructure in the last five years, compared with only 22 percent who said the same for political leaders in Washington. (although here I wonder if Luntz’s Republican leanings have biased questions to get a desired the result). Government-bashing is still fashionable among conservatives and some moderates, though to a lesser extent than a decade ago. Asked “…which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future: big business, big labor, or big government?,” 55 percent of respondents in a Gallup poll conducted 3/27-29 said ‘big government,’ compared to 10 percent for ‘big labor’ and 32 percent for ‘big business.’ Other recent polls show public opinion more evenly divided on the question of whether the federal government should do more or less.
Knee-jerk government-bashing is now boilerplate rhetoric for GOP politicians. Thus far the Democratic response has been decidedly limp, usually changing the subject or ignoring the Republicans. What is absent is any party-wide commitment to address the problem head-on — to use the resources of the white house and the Democratic Party to strengthen the image of the federal government. I’m not talking so much about individual Democrats more assertively defending the federal government. What is needed is a major national campaign to educate the public about the positive accomplishments of the federal government, including federally-funded documentaries on key government agencies broadcast on PBS and major networks, public service advertising on television, radio and the internet, and generally making more aggressive use of public relations to educate taxpayers about the bargain they get for their taxes.
Ken Burns is premiering his new 12-hour documentary series on America’s national parks on PBS this Fall.. Presumably he will show viewers the wonderful resources of the federal parks and also reveal the need to better protect those resources. After giving due credit to Burns as a great private-sector documentary-maker, the question arises, why isn’t there already a great federally-funded documentary series on the federal parks? Or the FDA, NTSB, the NLRB and numerous other federal agencies that save taxpayers’ lives and money.
That’s what the private sector does when a company or industry develops an image-problem. They educate and advertise, and they do it because it works. It makes little sense for the Dems, including President Obama, to cede the case for government-bashing to the GOP, especially when we have a strong counter-argument and the resources to publicize it. A public education campaign about the very real accomplishments of the federal government, on the other hand, might help millions of taxpayers to see the folly in the GOP’s trashing of government and be more supportive of Democratic reforms.

Now that the President has named Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first Supreme Court nominee, Republicans will have to make up their minds exactly how far they want to go in opposing her confirmation, which is virtually certain absent some startling revelations during hearings.
It’s not as though there’s any uncertainty about their line of attack on Sotomayor; it’s been scripted for weeks, as noted by Ben Allen and Jonathan Martin in Politico today:

Previewing the right’s planned reaction, Wendy E. Long, counsel to the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, said in a statement: “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written. She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”

It’s this last clause in Long’s statement that presents the really tempting, and potentially self-destructive conservative line of attack on Sotomayor. To see why it will be tempting, check out this long fretful article by National Journal‘s Stuart Taylor published this weekend, complaining about scattered comments by Sotomayor suggesting that she views her gender and ethnic identity as legitimately and positively affectign her thinking as a judge. And remember that her most famous case involved a claim of reverse discrimination against a municipality by white male firefighters.
Conservatives could definitely try to turn Sotomayor into a latter-day Lani Guinier, and turn her confirmation hearings into a white male pity party, all about identity politics. This would not, of course, go over very well with Latinos, who will naturally feel strongly about their first-ever Supreme Court nominee, and who probably think white men have been pretty well represented in the Court’s history.
Some conservatives may seize on the already-infamous New Republic article by Jeff Rosen suggesting that unnamed former clerks and associates think she’s insufficiently brilliant and/or temperamentally unsuited to be on the Court. This is an even more perilous line of attack, since the whole premise of Rosen’s piece was the progressive hunt for a strongly ideological judicial titan who could go toe-to-toe with the Court’s conservatives. Most regular folks will also have a hard time accepting that someone who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was then on the law review at Yale isn’t smart enough for the Court. And she is classically prepared for the appointment, having taken a textbook path to the Court, from prosecutor to district court to Court of Appeals. She doesn’t have the Harriet Miers problem of a skimpy resume.
Given the built-in investment that conservatives have in Supreme Court fights these days, Sotomayor will not get anything like a free ride. But there’s a chance that in the Senate itself (though not out there in the advocacy groups, where apocalyptic talk will predominate) Republicans will keep some powder dry, as noted by Jeff Goldstein at SCOTUSblog:

The most likely dynamic by far is the one that played out for Democrats with respect to Chief Justice Roberts. Democratic senators, recognizing the inevitable confirmation of a qualified and popular nominee, decided to hold their fire and instead direct their attacks to President Bush’s second nominee. Justice Alito was the collateral damage to that strategy. Here, with Justice Stevens’s retirement inevitable in the next few years, Republican senators are very likely to hold off conservative interest groups with promises to sharply examine President Obama’s second (potentially white male) nominee.

We’ll see soon enough, once Sotomayor gets through her first few days in the harsh glare of national publicity.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
UPDATE II: Jeff Rosen himself has now put up a post at TNR endorsing Sotomayor’s confirmation, and rejecting use of his earlier remarks about her to deny her a position on the Court:

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court–not that she didn’t have the potential to be a fine justice.

This doesn’t completely eliminate the damage wrought by his earlier article, but will at least force conservatives to put in an asterisk when they quote it.

So even as we all wrangle about the Pew and Gallup surveys suggesting a shift in public opinion on abortion in one direction, CNN releases a new poll that suggests a shift in the opposite direction.
It shows Americans opposing by a 68-30 margin a hypothetical action by the U.S. Supreme Court to “completely overturn” Roe v. Wade. Nate Silver says this is the highest level of support for Roe he can find in the last decade or so.
Nate notes that there are some legitimate criticisms to be made of the wording of this CNN poll. But you know what? There are legitimate criticisms to be made of the wording of virtually every poll on abortion, particularly those that toss out identifers like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” that mean different things to different people. At least the CNN poll involves a specific hypothetical situation, and precisely the one that is relevant as the President prepares to choose a new Supreme Court nominee.

Editor’s Note: this is a guest post by Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall, which we are publishing as part of the intra-Democratic debate over President Obama’s national security policies, and the recent Democracy Corps analysis of the popularity of those policies.
When Democrats splintered over an unpopular war a half-century ago, Republicans became by default the national-security party. According to a new Democracy Corps poll, however, Democrats have pulled even with their rivals on matters of defense and foreign policy. This closing of the national-security confidence gap is the strongest sign yet that America is entering a new progressive era.
After all, Democrats’ “soft on defense” image played a key role in driving millions of blue collar voters (as well as a small but influential band of Cold War liberals later called neoconservatives) into the GOP’s arms. With the possible exception of race, no issue did more to perpetuate the Republican near-stranglehold on the White House—which began in 1968 and seems to have ended in 2008.
The new poll finds that the public strongly approves of how President Obama is managing the security dilemmas he inherited – so much so, in fact, as to erase many (though not all) of the public’s lingering doubts about his party. If that trend holds, it will be the political equivalent of dismantling the last megaton warhead in the GOP’s once fearsome arsenal. The only catch, of course, is that the president’s policies must actually succeed.
Still, Americans clearly welcome Obama’s thoughtful and nuanced approach to challenges of enormous complexity. According to Democracy Corps, 64 percent of the public approves of the President’s handling of security issues. Apparently, Vice President Dick Cheney’s campaign to convince Americans that Obama is making them more vulnerable to terrorism isn’t getting much traction. Not only do voters believe Obama is making the country safer, but (by a whopping 22-point margin) they give him higher marks on national security than President Bush.
More worrisome for the president than the GOP’s boilerplate attacks, however, is growing restiveness on his left. The White House could hardly ask for a better foil than Cheney. But anti-war activists and civil libertarians are part of Obama’s political base, and many feel disappointment or even betrayal by decisions he’s made that seem to continue the main thrust of Bush’s policies.
In characteristic fashion, Obama confronted such criticism head-on this week in a major speech at the National Archives. While affirming his constitutional responsibility to keep Americans safe, Obama was at pains to describe the ways his policy differs from Bush’s – banning torture, closing Guantanamo, strengthening military commissions, and seeking new legal authority to detain terrorists. He described his approach as a via media between the “anything goes” policy of Bush and Cheney and the absolutist claims of civil-liberties groups demanding totally transparent legal procedures and due-process rights for terrorist suspects.
The speech underscored Obama’s political challenge: convincing independent and moderate voters that he and his party can keep Americans safe while at the same time mollifying liberal critics of Bush’s “war on terror.” To this end, the policies he outlined were carefully calibrated to combine pragmatism and principles of democratic accountability. But in a sense, Obama’s progressive critics are right: in some respects, he is winning the wider public’s trust not by radically changing his predecessor’s policies, but by promising to execute them more deftly and with greater awareness of the big picture of American values and interests.

Read more…

Ronald Brownstein has a new National Journal article, “For GOP, A Southern Exposure” discussing how much of the Republican’s hopes for a return to domination are anchored in the south. Much of Brownstein’s article will be of more interest to political historians than those concerned with forward-focused political strategy. But he does provide insightful observations, including this about the Republicans’ recent experience in the region :

In the House and Senate, nearly half of all Republicans were elected from that region, defined as the 11 states of the Confederacy, plus Kentucky and Oklahoma. In each chamber, Southerners are a larger share of the Republican caucus than ever before. Similarly, beginning with the 1992 presidential election, the South has provided at least 59 percent of the Electoral College votes won by the GOP nominee, including by George W. Bush in his 2000 and 2004 victories. That percentage is nearly double the South’s share of all Electoral College votes and by far the most that GOP presidential nominees have relied on the region over any sustained period.
…Elsewhere, though, the GOP’s presidential performance has tumbled in recent election cycles. Democrats have won at least two-thirds of the Electoral College votes outside the South in each of the past five elections. Even Bush won only about 30 percent of the non-Southern Electoral College votes in 2000 and again in 2004.

Of course, this is not the same thing as saying the region is hopeless for Democrats, as (then) Senator Obama so ably demonstrated in NC, VA and FL and as is indicated by southern Dems holding office in the U.S. congress, governorships, state legislatures and mayoral postions across the region. However, as Brownstein explains:

In both chambers, Republicans have surrendered some Southern seats since 2006 because of the public’s widespread disillusionment with Bush’s performance. (Most notably, Democrats have gained 11 Southern House seats.) But, the GOP still holds 56 percent of the region’s House seats and 19 of its 26 Senate seats.

Brownstein points out that the GOP share of non-Southern House seats has plunged to just 33.5 percent and 28 percent of U.S. Senate seats as a result of the last two elections, and “In both chambers, the Republican conference is now considerably more concentrated in the South than ever before.” He quotes GOP pollster Whit Ayres, an expert on Southern races, noting that Republican control of the South “looked great when we were holding on to our Northeastern and Midwestern seats and continuing to sweep the South…The challenge arises when the rest of the country says, ‘I don’t believe the same things,’ or ‘I don’t admire the same candidates,’ as the South does.” Brownstein continues,

Since Bush’s re-election in 2004, the GOP has lost ground electorally in the South and the rest of the nation. But the erosion has been much more severe outside the South. That dynamic has threatened Republicans with a spiral of concentration and contraction. Because the party has lost so much ground elsewhere, the South represents an increasing share of what remains — both in Congress and in its electoral coalition. The party’s increasing identification with staunch Southern economic and social conservatism, however, may be accelerating its decline in more-moderate-to-liberal areas of the country, including the Northeast and the West Coast. “Many of the things they have done to become the dominant party in the South have caused them to be less successful in other places,” said veteran Democratic strategist Bill Carrick, a South Carolina native.

And the concentration of Republican power in the South has a price:

…Some GOP strategists are gingerly suggesting that staunchly conservative Southerners are putting too much of their own stamp on the party, especially on social issues. GOP consultant Mike DuHaime, political director of McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said that “everybody in the party is concerned” about the GOP’s decline along the coasts and in the Upper Midwest. “It’s important that we always keep our base [in the South] as part of our party, but we need to have the ability to disagree on certain issues. That’s the only way we are going to expand,” he said. Republican pollster Ayres concurs. “The South is an incredibly important part of the Republican coalition, but it’s not sufficient to win,” he said. “You may very well have standards that are somewhat different for a Republican in the Philadelphia suburbs than you do for a Republican in Alabama.”

He argues that the Dems’ great southern hope is the rapidly growing percentage of Latinos and Asians in the region.

…The growth of other nonwhite populations, such as Hispanics and even Asians, is strengthening Democrats across the region, especially in the outer South, and even in portions of the Deep South such as Georgia. These “new minority” voters functioned like a thumb on the scale last year for Obama in Virginia (where they reached 10 percent of the vote) and North Carolina (where they comprised 6 percent). They were also instrumental in tipping Florida to the Democratic presidential nominee. “When you add the Democratic vote among African-Americans with that of the new minorities, that means the share of the white vote a Democrat needs to win goes down,” notes Merle Black.
Eventually, Hispanic population growth might even threaten the Republican hold on Texas, where whites last year constituted just 63 percent of the vote, the same as in California. Demography alone probably won’t flip Texas: To capture it, Democrats will almost certainly need to improve their performance among whites there, too. (Obama won just one-fourth of them, compared with twice that in California.) But at the least, Black notes, the growing nonwhite vote is allowing Texas Democrats to become competitive again in the state that has functioned as the jewel in the crown for Southern Republicans.

As Latinos and Asians pour into the region, a more vigorous pace of naturalization becomes a critical challenge for Democrats hoping to take a larger bite out of the South. A few well-funded naturalization projects could make a great difference in Democratic prospects in the southern states. Forcing Republicans to invest more resources in defending their southern base, even as they struggle to make needed gains in other regions, could weaken their prospects everywhere — and help to secure a new era of Democratic growth across the nation.

For Republicans obsessed with holding on to their tenuous position in the U.S. Senate, it was big and happy news when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced he was running for the seat of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez. Yes, former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio, a conservative protege of Jeb Bush, had already announced for the seat. But given Crist’s high approval ratings and huge early polling lead over Rubio, that was easy to ignore. So it wasn’t surprising when TX Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, endorsed Crist, hoping to clear the field for the governor.
Turns out Cornyn may have forgotten to respect the tender sensibilities of conservative activists, who are still angry at Crist for spitting on the political grave of Katherine Harris by championing felon re-enfranchisement, and who really went wild when Crist endorsed the Obama stimulus package.
As Jonathan Allen and Bart Jansen of CQ explain today, two of the more prominent conservative bloggers, Eric Erickson of RedState and John Hawkins of RightWingNews, have helped organize a campaign and website called “Not One Red Cent” to boycott contributions to the NRSC and push Cornyn to resign as its chairman.
The CQ piece has an interesting quote from Hawkins:

The leadership of the Republican Party keeps saying we need to get back to our principles and talking about how important it is to attract more young voters and Hispanic Americans. Then, we get a viable, young, conservative, Hispanic candidate running for Senate and they arrogantly try to shove him aside to make way for a better connected, moderate pol who’s more acceptable to the GOP establishment.
This cuts to the core of what’s wrong with today’s Republican Party.

The dude does make a valid point about Republican hypocrisy. Since the last election, and arguably since the one before that, Republican pols have chirped like cicadas in unison with the delusional activist belief that the GOP’s problem was insufficient conservatism, and that “diversity” could be accomplished by aggressively recruiting some black or brown candidates who happened to be frothing conservatives themselves. Rubio definitely appears to answer that casting call. So it’s probably fair for activists to get mad when GOP poohbahs pass over Rubio for the first pretty tanned face who comes along, with his fancy poll standings and his reputation as the Last Moderate Standing among Republican headliners.
The “Not One Red Cent” webpage is quite a piece of work. It features a sort of manifesto with the shouting headline: NOT ONE RED CENT FOR RINO SELLOUTS! (the exclamation point is a bit redundant, but I guess that’s a stylistic decision).
Yesterday the site included a post by Richard McEnroe, entitled “A Florida Parable!” and with a subtitle that I cannot reprint in a family-friendly blog, that played off a bizarre news story about two Russian tourists who got caught in Florida having sex with a porcupine. McEnroe “revealed” the identity of the tourists by displaying photos of Michael Steele and Charlie Crist.
Nice, eh? Now as it happens, Mr. McEnroe describes himself on his own blog site, Three Beers Later, as a “South Park Conservative” who believes in “Loose Women and Tight Borders,” so perhaps his particularly sophomoric contributions to the revolt against the RINO SELLOUTS shouldn’t be held against angry conservative activists generally. But if I were Charlie Crist, I wouldn’t laugh these guys off too quickly. They have some deep-pocketed allies in the Club for Growth, which just yesterday demanded that Crist pledge that he would “not follow fellow liberal Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party if he felt his political survival depended on it.” Since the Club is often credited with pushing Specter out of the Republican Party, that’s a rather pointed analogy they are drawing to Crist.
Whether or not the NRSC starts noticing a pinch in their banking accounts, it’s doubtful that Marco Rubio is going away any time soon. He’s definitely got friends in low places.