We’re all used to being told that the Christian Right as we used to know it is dead, dying, moribund, divided, leaderless or rudderless. But for at least two putative candidates for president in 2012, the Old Time Religious Right in all its atavistic glory is an important constituency to be wooed. And that’s why (as Sarah Posner discusses in today’s edition of her FundamentaList column for TAP) southern Baptist minister Mike Huckabee and Baptist-turned-Catholic Newt Gingrich recently went to one of the Christian Right’s holy cities, Virginia Beach, for a “Rediscovering God in America” event that was webcast live by God.TV (an interesting site, BTW).
It’s no surprise that Huckabee showed up; he’s struggling to hang onto the Christian Right as an electoral base. Those who remember his 2008 campaign as representing a refreshing and light-hearted break in the grim and monotonous presentation of Republican dogma might not recognize him now. According to the local newspaper in Virginia Beach, here’s some of what he had to say to the event:

Huckabee told the audience he was disturbed to hear President Barack Obama say during his speech in Cairo, Egypt, on Thursday that one nation shouldn’t be exalted over another.
“The notion that we are just one of many among equals is nonsense,” Huckabee said. The United States is a “blessed” nation, he said, calling American revolutionaries’ defeat of the British empire “a miracle from God’s hand.”
The same kind of miracle, he said, led California voters to approve Proposition 8, which overturned a state law legalizing same-sex marriages.

Nice, eh?
Other speakers included the Virginia-based Christian Right warhorse Ollie North, and David Barton, the leading advocate of “Christian Nation” revisionist history.
But this was really Gingrich’s event, as you might guess from the name, which is also the title of his latest book and movie.
The Newtster wasn’t about to let Huckabee outdo him on the subject of America’s unique divine mission:

“I am not a citizen of the world,” said Gingrich, who was first elected to the U.S. House from Georgia in 1978 and served as speaker from 1995 to 1999. “I am a citizen of the United States because only in the United States does citizenship start with our creator.”

I guess Newt has never heard of Saudi Arabia.
In any event, Newt’s maintenance of close ties to the hard-core evangelical Right is interesting because he recently left Protestantism altogether and was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church (for those interested in how this twice-divorced confessed philanderer managed that, the answer is that his first wife died after their divorce, and his second marriage was annulled by the Archdiocese of Atlanta because that wife had been previously married; thus officially, Newt is merely a remarried widower with a very bad habit of engaging in fornication, adultery and illicit cohabitation).
Newt’s long transition from Southern Baptist to Catholic tells you a lot about the past and present of both faith communities in the United States.

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As the high-stakes battle over health care reform gets very serious in Washington, we have a well-timed reminder from TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg at TNR today about what happened to the Clinton administration’s health reform plan in 1993 and 1994, when he was Clinton’s top pollster.
Greenberg stresses the exceptional similarity of public opinion on health care then and now:

Then and now, the country proclaimed its readiness for bold reform. In both instances, one-quarter say that the health care system “has so many problems that we need to completely rebuild it”; half the country sees “good things” in the current system but believes “some major changes are needed.” Then and now, about 60 percent of the public feel dissatisfied with the current health insurance system. Yet three-quarters are satisfied with their own health insurance–once again eerily parallel numbers.

And yet again, says Greenberg, cost-containment arguments for universal health coverage will be difficult to make on a macro level, and essential to win on an individual family level, where calculations of the net effect of reform will be made sooner or later.
One ironically positive factor for Obama’s health plan is that the fear of losing insurance coverage due to unemployment is higher than it was 16 years ago. Another is that union members, who are often happy with their own health insurance, are feeling a lot more insecure.
But in the end, Greenberg argues, it’s the President’s advocacy for his plan that most needs to rise to the occasion:

At the moment, the country is tilting toward enacting Obama’s reforms, and it will do so more enthusiastically if Obama learns from the Clinton experience and rises to the educative role that he relishes. He must respect the thoughts, feelings and calculations of ordinary citizens who are not easily spun on important issues. People will take out their calculators when he lays out his plan, and he can’t avoid speaking candidly about its costs and consequences. And he can’t forget that he has a big story to tell about a changed America, one in which health care is but a pile of bricks in the new foundation he is laying.

The new issue of Democracy magazine–the first since my esteemed friend Michael Tomasky took over as editor of the journal–feaures an essay, styled as a “re-review” of several books from a few years ago, by the equally esteemed journalist Ron Brownstein on the subject of why Karl Rove’s “realignment” project failed. It’s a good question worth pondering at some depth. But I think Ron’s take, which faults several of the authors of the “re-review” volumes for overestimating and emulating “base polarlization” as a political strategy, misses some key points.
Here’s his basic hypothesis:

To reread the major political books from the years around Bush’s reelection is to be plunged, as if into a cold pool, back into a world of Democratic gloom and anxiety. Those books were linked by the common belief that Republicans had established a thin but durable electoral advantage that threatened to exile Democrats from power for years, if not decades. Many books from that time assumed Democrats could avoid that eclipse only by adopting the tactics used by Republicans in general and Rove in particular. Liberal activists and thinkers all exhorted Democrats to attack Republicans in vitriolic terms, to find liberal “wedge issues” that could divide the electorate as sharply as the conservative stand-bys of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage, and most important to emulate Rove’s approach of seeking to win elections more by mobilizing the party’s base with an uncompromising message than by persuading swing voters with a more centrist appeal….
[But] Bush’s reelection proved the high point of Rove’s vision, and even that was a rather modest peak: Bush’s margin of victory, as a share of the popular vote, was the smallest ever for a reelected president. Through Bush’s disastrous second term, the GOP’s position deteriorated at an astonishing speed. By the time Bush left office, with Democrats assuming control of government and about two-thirds of Americans disapproving of his performance, his party was in its weakest position since before Ronald Reagan’s election. Rather than constructing a permanent Republican majority, Rove and Bush provided Democrats an opportunity to build a lasting majority of their own that none of these books saw coming.

I quoted this section at considerable length because Brownstein seems to be conflating two different if not contradictory themes: (1) that lots of people failed to understand the demographic “upside” for Democrats of the Republican focus on “wedge” issues that divided the electorate, and (2) that Rove failed because “base mobilization” and “polarization” drove a decisive number of voters into the Democratic coalition.
On the first point about demography, the puzzling omission in Brownstein’s “re-review” is any reference to The Emerging Democratic Majority, the 2002 book by (TDS Co-Editor) Ruy Teixeira and John Judis, that pretty much got it all right, not that they got much credit for it when it was published on the eve of a big Republican midterm victory.
The omission, I suspect, is attributable to Brownstein’s focus on the second point, and his concern that Democrats who wanted to emulate Rove with a counter-polarization strategy were wrong, and thus weren’t vindicated by Rove’s subsequent failure. This preoccupation may also account for an inclusion in the re-review that’s as odd as the exclusion of Teixeira and Judis: Tom Schaller’s Whistling Past Dixie, which sharply distinguished itself from other mid-decade handwringing progressive tomes by predicting a bright Democratic future, but which also endorsed an anti-southern polarizing strategy that Brownstein wants to knock down.
Since I share Ron’s general antipathy to political strategies that focus excessively on base mobilization and polarization, it pains me somewhat to say that I think he exaggerates the role of those strategies in Rove’s failure.

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By the time you read this, it’s possible that the U.S. House will have already voted on a conference committee report for a supplemental appropriations bill mainly dealing with funds for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But whichever way the vote goes, it’s very interesting to watch Republicans line up to vote against the bill in the teeth of years of harsh rhetoric they deployed against Democrats for failing to “support the troops” by voting for Bush-era war supplementals. Yes, they claim they are voting not against “the troops” but against non-germane amendments, but then they voted for bills with non-germane amendments in the Bush supplementals regularly. Democrats voting against war funding in the past weren’t voting to defund the troops, either, but were trying to influence the overall war strategy in Iraq.
If I had to guess, it’s the nature of the “non-germane amendment” this time around that is proving to be catnip to GOPers. It involves money for the International Monetary Fund to help countries hurt even worse than we are by the financial meltdown. And so, before you can say “Frank Luntz,” they’ve come up with a term for the IMF money that looks like polling dynamite: “foreign bank bailout.”
It’s not often that you get to demonize a piece of legislation using a combination of three very unpopular words. That’s probably at least one more than they could resist.

In the continuing argument over ideology and violent extremism in America, conservatives are making some very odd assertions. Check out this statement by conservative San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders:

I reject the idea that James W. von Brunn, the alleged Holocaust museum gunman and known white supremacist and anti-Semite, is right wing — as well as the implication that racism and conservatism somehow are connected. The KKK is not welcome at any conservative event I’ve ever attended.

Look at what is going on here – the term “right-wing” and “conservative” are being treated as interchangeable and both terms are being counterposed to “white supremacists” and “anti-Semites” – who are no longer part of “right-wing” ideology. In effect, not only the term “conservative” but also the term “right-wing” is being rescued from any associations with racism and anti-Semitism.
And it’s not just Saunders. There’s actually a whole cottage industry over in the right blogosphere arguing this same notion – that white supremacy is not really a part of any known and recognized “right-wing” ideology. Instead, it is in some utterly unique category all its own or is actually a left-wing idea (please don’t ask for details on this second notion. It goes something along the lines of “racist=Hitler=vegetarian=feminist=Hillary Clinton=liberal”)
But, wait a minute. Wasn’t the whole heroic start of the Bill Buckley/National Review initiative designed to “rescue” true, Burkean conservatism from the nutty and disreputable “right-wingers” of the 50s– the John Birchers, southern racists, anti-Semites, anti-fluoridation paranoiacs and so on? Wasn’t this clean break with the racist, anti-Semitic “right-wing extremists” central to the entire ethos of the new breed of Goldwater-Reagan- conservatives who then rose to the leadership of the Republican Party?

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There’s an old joke about a narcissist being someone who goes to a football game and thinks the team is talking about them in the huddle. There’s a dangerous element of that attitude in some U.S. reactions to unfolding events in Iran.
Already the chattering classes are falling into the habit of handicapping the twists and turns of the Iranian election crisis in terms of a “win” or “loss” for President Obama (viz, Martin Peretz’s post on Saturday entitled: “Ahmadinejad: 1; Obama: 0”). While international events do often affect the standing of the chief executive of the world’s most powerful nation, it’s a really bad idea to begin thinking that the rest of the world calibrates every action in reaction to U.S. policies. Believe it or not, foreigners have their own fish to fry.
Today Matt Yglesias tries to make this simple point in reacting to some hysterical tweeting by the man who might well have been in charge of the United States right now, John McCain (“If we are steadfast eventually the Iranian people will prevail,” said the Arizona senator’s thumbs):

That’s right. Whether or not the Iranian people prevail depends on how steadfast we are. How steadfast we are in what? In wishing them well? In tweeting mean things about the Iranian security services? Of course what Americans do isn’t totally irrelevant, but it’s unquestionably a peripheral factor in this drama. Iran is a country populated by Iranians, and their fate is primarily in their own hands.

Some of what Yglesias calls “neocon egomania on Iran” is coming, of course, from people who have favored military action against Iran for years, and who will treat every development in Tehran as reflecting the degree to which America or Israel is or isn’t conveying a credible threat of force. Worse yet, others think of Iran as part of an undifferentiated “Islamofascism” that is bent primarily on the destruction of The West, and believe Iranian repression should be viewed as a mocking reaction to Barack Obama’s “appeasement” of Islam in his Cairo speech. Check out this characteristic take from the Washington Times‘ Wes Pruden:

If Iranian voters had thrown Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the street, the American president would have assumed that he was the One who did it, and the American press would have led the hosannas for the messiah from the south side of Chicago.Just a few more speeches, a few more respectful bows toward Mecca, and all the rough places would be made smooth and plain. But now even Mr. Obama must wake up and smell the tear gas.

Lest it be objected that Pruden is a marginal, extremist figure, his argument was pretty much the same one made Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” by Mitt Romney, the early frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination:

The comments by the president last week, that there was a robust debate going on in Iran, was obviously entirely wrong-headed. What has occurred is the election is a fraud, the results are inaccurate, and you’re seeing a brutal repression of the people as they protest. … It’s very clear that the president’s policies of going around the world and apologizing for America aren’t working. … Look, just sweet talk and criticizing America is not going to enhance freedom in the world.

One of the most destructive tendencies of contemporary conservatism has been its determination to conflate recognition of the limits of American power with “weakness” or “appeasement.” With that comes a strong tendency to overrate the global impact of every word uttered in Washington, to the point that we Americans are expected to sacrifice our own freedom of action and self-interest in submission to our awful responsibilities as a world power.
The delusions associated with narcissism should be rejected if and when Iran’s crisis subsides, and we get around to considering what happens next in U.S.-Iranian relations. To quote Yglesias again:

[Whatever] the outcome of Iran’s domestic political struggles, the fundamental strategic calculus remains the same. Airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities will not accomplish the goal of maintaining a verifiably non-nuclear Iranian military, and an agreement on nuclear issues between the U.S. and Iran would still serve the interests of both countries. Under the circumstances, no matter what the outcome, pursuit of such an arrangement should continue to be a priority.

Recogning that basic reality will be easier if conservatives would stop talking as though Iranians are backward children whose every act is dictated by their reaction to “rewards” and “punishments” meted out by the United States.
UPDATE: John Judis of TNR has published a very good post about the cautious approach to a situation like Iran’s that a “prudent idealism” would suggest.

As a total political history junkie, I love strolling down memory lanes for precedents that might offer insights as to how contemporary political developments might unfold. But for that very reason, one of my pet peeves is the use of half-baked or outdated “lessons of political history” that get cited in the chattering classes as though they came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets.
Over at fivethirtyeight.com a couple weeks ago, I challenged one of the most settled “lessons of political history,” that the party controlling the White House might as well forget about winning the governorships of New Jersey or Virginia. And yesterday I took on a much-cited “rule” in my home state of Georgia suggesting that former governors can’t win “comebacks.”
I’m always on the lookout for such “lessons of political history” to examine, so any readers with some examples, either national in nature or from your own neck of the woods, please feel free to post them as a comment.

As part of the endless efforts of conservatives to treat the last two election debacles as aberrations in a “center-right nation” (or as somehow-conservative reactions to that godless freespending liberal George W. Bush), you can expect some reaction to the latest Gallup survey of the ideological self-identifications of Americans. It shows a slight uptick in “conservative” self-identification during 2009, up to 40% from 37% last year. But it’s basically the same findings almost always found in recent decades when voters are offered the three choices of “conservative,” “liberal” and “moderate.” Self-identified “conservatives” have been bumping around 40% since 1992, with “liberals” around 20% and “moderates” holding the balance. Moreover, Gallup confirms the very old news that Republicans are heavily conservative (73% “conservative,” 24% “moderate” and 3% “liberal”), while Democrats are more ideologically diverse (40% “moderate,” 38% “liberal” and 22% “conservative”).
There’s no real evidence here that anything’s changed since November of 2008.
And as always, the C-M-L choice doesn’t seem to tell us as much as more nuanced measurements of ideology. The big recent Center for American Progress study released in March, State of Political Ideology, 2009, added “libertarian” and “progressive” to the usual menu of self-identification options, and after pushing leaners, found that 47% of Americans think of themselves as progressive or liberal, while 48% self-identify as conservative or libertarian. The CAP survey also found that when you probe deeper in terms of more specific statements of values and beliefs, there’s a reasonably solid progressive majority when it comes to most matters of international and domestic policy. The conservative “brand” may still be relatively strong, but it doesn’t always translate into issue positions, much less voting behavior.
Virtually everyone agrees that the long-stable C-M-L findings disguise generational trends that are worth watching closely. The new Gallup survey finds that “liberals” outnumber “conservatives” by a 31%-30% margin among voters under 30. And a May analysis by CAP on “millennials” shows 44% self-identifying as progressive or liberal, and just 28% as conservative or libertarian.
None of this, of course, will deter “center-right nation” fans from claiming the latest Gallup survey as evidence that Americans were misled during the last two election cycles, or were offered insufficiently stark ideological choices, or were simply tired of George W. Bush and will return to the Republican Party almost automatically in 2010 or 2012. This argument is essential to the conservative project of keeping the GOP firmly on the Right, or driving it even further Right. When you are a hammer, everything–and certainly every poll–looks like a nail.

In The Hill today, Aaron Blake has a story about an important but little-discussed phenomenon that’s shaping the landscape for U.S. House campaigns in 2010: candidate calculations about the impact of redistricting after 2010:

As they enter a key decision-making phase of the 2010 election cycle, the chance that they will encounter a very different map in 2012 could serve as both a deterrent and motivation to go for it.
For some, 2010 might be their last best hope to win a given district before it is shored up by redistricting, while others might want to wait for the post-redistricting election, when the grass could be greener thanks to a friendly reapportionment process.

The go-for-broke temptation that Blake mentions refers to the strong tendency of legislatures to protect congressional incumbents, sometimes including those from the opposite party (often voters from the same party of a strong incumbent are “packed” into his or her district to make neighboring districts friendlier to the other party). Incubment-protection is a particularly strong impulse in those many situations where neither party completely controls redistricting.
But sometimes circumstances cut in the opposite direction:

Since redistricting often aims to shore up incumbents, it’s rare that it leads to better takeover opportunities. But that could be the case with members like Reps. Dennis Moore (D-Kan.), Peter King (R-N.Y.) or any number of vulnerable Illinois Republicans.
King and Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who are weighing Senate runs, could actually be encouraged to run for statewide office because of the upcoming changes to their tenuous districts, which are likely to be handled by Democrats.

All in all, the wait-and-see tendency is naturally strong, since incumbents tend to settle into their districts between redistricting cycles. Moreover, among challengers, no one wants to risk an entire career to win a House seat and then see the district become unwinnable after just one term. Here’s Blake’s bottom line for 2010:

Overall, history shows that the number of quality challengers who emerge to run for Congress declines as redistricting maps become more entrenched, with the final election before redistricting – 2010, in this case – having the fewest quality challengers.
Vanderbilt political science professor Marc Hetherington, who has also studied redistricting’s effect on candidates, said the upcoming election cycle could be something of an exception, given the number of Republican seats that have flipped Democratic the last two elections.

It’s worth remembering that state legislatures are also redistricting themselves even as they draw congressional district lines. And that can have strange and interesting impllications, as Blake explains:

In perhaps the weirdest redistricting conundrum in the country, state Sen. Darrel Aubertine is a Democratic favorite to run in the upcoming special election for Army Secretary-designate Rep. John McHugh’s (R) upstate seat. But Aubertine could be risking his party’s control over redistricting by giving up his state Senate seat to run for Congress.
The Democratic majority in the Empire State’s upper chamber was always tenuous, but Monday’s coup by 30 Republicans and two Democrats put everything in focus. The 30 remaining Democrats will be fighting hard to regain their majority status and, provided Democrats retain the governor’s mansion, control congressional redistricting.
Aubertine’s district is one of the most difficult they hold. So, in effect, he could actually help his party win more congressional seats by staying in the state Senate.

As is often the case with redistricting cycles, candidate calculations going into 2010 may well involve many games of three-dimensional chess around the country. That complicates the national picture significantly.

Most Democrats understand the downside of winning elections and then being held accountable for conditions in the country they did not produce. Consider the endless talk about the federal budget deficits in the Obama administration’s first budget. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times explained yesterday, Obama inherited most of the red ink from Bush policies and from the recession (indeed, as Jonathan Chait argues, Leonhardt may have actually underestimated that inheritance). But it’s considered poor form for Democrats to keep “blaming Bush,” doncha know.
One often underestimated benefit of holding the White House, though, is the extraordinary power and visibility of the Bully Pulpit. And that factor is nicely illustrated by a new Gallup survey that shows Americans clearly think of Barack Obama as the leader of the Democratic Party, while having little idea whom to treat as the leader of the opposition.
Worse yet, the three people most often cited by Gallup respondents in an open-ended question about the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today” are Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich; 29% named one of these three gents (as did 29% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats). These are precisely the three “spokesmen” most Democrats would wish on the GOP. But that may overstate their prominence: a remarkable 46% of Republicans and GOP-leaners in the poll either couldn’t name a party leader or asserted there wasn’t one.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is considered the main Democratic spokesman by two-thirds of Democrats and 58% of Americans generally. The latter number is as low as it is because fully 20% of Republicans (but only 6% of Democrats) named Nancy Pelosi as the main Democratic voice, reflecting the obsession of conservative media with the House Speaker.
This situation obviously helps the president serve as a messenger and agenda-setter for the Democratic Party. But it also helps explain the hyper-partisan and ideologically rigid atmosphere among would-be Republican “spokesmen,” who are competing for attention by focusing on the hard-core conservative base. It’s enough to drive a party crazy.