As might be expected The Washington Post is leading the print rags with insightful opinion writing concerning Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally, a poorly-disguised attempt to exploit the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in service to the wingnut agenda. On Wednesday, King’s son, Martin Luther King III had a widely-read op-ed and today, the Post’s Eugene Robinson leads with “Even Beck Can’t Mar King’s Legacy,” which offers some astute observations, including:

…Glenn Beck has every right to hold his absurdly titled “Restoring Honor” rally on Saturday…But the rest of us have every right to call the event what it is: an exercise in self-aggrandizement on a Napoleonic scale. I half-expect Beck to appear before the crowd in a bicorn hat, with one hand tucked into the front of his jacket.
That Beck is staging his all-about-me event at the very spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech — and on the 47th anniversary of that historic address — is obviously intended to be a provocation. There’s no need to feel provoked, however; the appropriate response is to ignore him. No puffed-up blabbermouth could ever diminish the importance of the 1963 March on Washington or the impact of King’s unforgettable words.

Robinson goes on to expose Beck’s distortion that the Civil Rights Movement was about equal justice, as opposed to “social justice,” and adds,

…Beck’s version of history is flat-out wrong. The full name of the event at which King spoke 47 years ago was the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Among its organizers was labor leader A. Philip Randolph, the founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and a vice president of the AFL-CIO, who gave a speech describing the injustice of “a society in which 6 million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.”
…From the beginning, King’s activism and leadership were aimed at securing not just equal justice but equal opportunity as well. When he was assassinated in 1968, King was in the midst of a Poor People’s Campaign aimed at bettering the economic condition of all underprivileged Americans, regardless of race.

Robinson notes that the rally is likely to draw some racists, along with some people with legitimate discontents, whose “concerns deserve to be heard. Instead, their anxieties are exploited by hucksters who see fear and anger as marketing tools.”
No doubt the Republicans are hoping the Beck rally will provide more fodder for their Democrat-bashing. Not too worry, as Robinson concludes,

Saturday night, when the event is done, the Lincoln Memorial will still be the place where King gave one of the most memorable speeches of the 20th century. People who came to the rally in search of answers will still be looking. And Glenn Beck will still be a legend in his own mind.

Beck’s ego-trip may end up fattening his bank account. But it’s not likely to do much to return the keys to the guys who drove the economy into the ditch.

I somehow missed noticing until today that Glenn Beck is holding some sort of monster Tea Party event in Washington this weekend, on the anniversay and the specific site of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech back in 1963. Sarah Palin will be there too.
Beck claims he didn’t intend any parallelism with Dr. King:

Beck said in a recent broadcast that he did not intentionally choose the “I Have a Dream” anniversary for his rally – but that he believes the coincidence is “divine providence.”
“Whites don’t own Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “Blacks don’t own Martin Luther King. Those are American icons, American ideas, and we should just talk about character, and that’s really what this event is about. It’s about honoring character.”

So the man was too ignorant to know he was planning a major event on the exact date and the exact location of King’s defining event, but now that he knows about it, well, he’s happy to co-opt MLK into his bizarre take on American politics as well.
Get ready for some truly outrageous profanation, folks. Beck has clearly lost any sense of proportion or perspective about himself.

As I’ve noted on occasion lately, one of the under-discussed contributors to voter cynicism is the practice of primary candidates calling each other lying scum-suckers one minute and then, the moment the polls close, embracing like old friends.
This does not seem to be happening in Florida right now, according to an AP story:

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum has ceded the Republican gubernatorial nomination to Rick Scott. But it’s going to take more than that for Scott to win McCollum’s support in the November election.
McCollum on Thursday wouldn’t even rule out an endorsement of Democrat Alex Sink.
McCollum said they have policy disagreements, but he wouldn’t rule out endorsing either of those two, or even Bud Chiles — an independent son of former Gov. Lawton Chiles….
McCollum said he still has misgivings about Scott’s past. While Scott was CEO, the hospital company Columbia/HCA perpetrated one of the largest Medicare frauds in U.S. history. Scott left with a rich severance package, while the company repaid the government a record $1.7 billion.

You can sort of understand McCollum’s feelings. He’s spent most of his adult life toiling in the party vineyards, finally earning a gubernatorial shot this year. And then it was all ruined by Scott and his bottomless checking account. So why should Bill McCollum care about party unity right now? What good has it done him lately?
It’s possible, of course, that McCollum’s got some campaign debts that he’d like Scott to pay off, and won’t move a muscle on behalf of the ticket until such time as his vanquisher opens up his wallet. Or maybe Rick Scott’s about to find out that all’s not forgiven from his savage campaign against McCollum, and that in politics, as in life generally, money can buy you almost anything but love.

So Washington is abuzz today with curiosity about Joe Miller, the obscure and underfunded former judge who appears (subject to a possible reversal in absentee ballots) to have driven Lisa Murkowski out of the U.S. Senate in Tuesday’s primary in Alaska. Was his candidacy purely a vehicle for the vengeful manueverings of Sarah Palin, or just a bargain investment for the Tea Party Express (which spent over a half million dollars helping him with attacks on Murkowski)? Were the results the product of strange turnout patterns affected crucially by an anti-abortion ballot initiative?
Perhaps, but in any event, it’s worth taking a moment to assess Miller’s platform:

He wants to eliminate the Department of Education, believes the government shouldn’t pay for unemployment insurance and says of climate change on his campaign site that it “may not even exist.” Among the more mainstream GOP positions he’s taken: Miller would cut welfare; eliminate health care for the poor by scrapping Medicaid; and the Anchorage Daily News reported that he has has called for sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security with a goal of phasing them out entirely in favor of total privatization….
Miller is backed by the Family Research Council and opposes abortion even in the cases of rape and incest, a view far to the right of the mainstream of the GOP.

I dunno about this last assertion; I’d say absolute abortion bans are pretty much de rigour in Republican circles these days, judging by the enormous grief that Georgia Republican gubernatorial candidate Karen Handel got for supporting rape-and-incest exceptions.
But in any event, I’d say the abolition of Medicaid and the total privatization of Medicare and Social Security qualify as positions that remain controversial in much of the GOP, though a lot less than was the case quite recently, when George W. Bush’s SocSec partial privatization proposal sent Republicans running for the hills.
At what point, though, do such positions stop be treated as outliers? When five Republican Senators espouse them? Ten? Twenty? How about four-out-of-five conservative commentators?
We certainly don’t know whether Joe Miller is going to be a United States Senator; he doesn’t have the Republican nomination fully in hand yet, and he could definitely lose in November, even in Alaska, particularly if Murkowski finds some way to get on the ballot as a third-party candidate and split the GOP vote. But it’s getting to the point where being a policy wingnut is not a very lonely occupation in today’s Republican Party, or any sort of bar to winning primaries.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
John McCain had a very good primary election night on Tuesday, crushing the once-feared right-wing challenger J.D. Hayworth by a ­­­­24 percent margin. And there’s not much secret to how he did it: In addition to benefiting from Hayworth’s own self-inflicted wounds, McCain dominated by turning away from some of his signature commitments from the past. Politico’s David Catanese nicely summed it up in a piece on the “heavy price” paid by McCain to win re-nomination this year:

Once the sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy–a stance that hurt him with conservatives–McCain moved in a different direction this year. He switched his emphasis this summer to border security, embraced Arizona’s controversial hard-line immigration law and, in an ad, called on the federal government to “complete the danged fence”–three years after dismissing the notion of a border fence in a Vanity Fair article titled “Prisoner of Conscience.”
Four years ago, McCain also told students he supported repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bans gays from serving openly in the military. But in May, the former war hero and Navy prisoner of war promised to filibuster any bill including that change that landed on the Senate floor.
He sidestepped the climate change debate this year despite once being a Senate leader on the issue and he’s even distanced himself from the term that once seemed central to his political brand–his “maverick” trademark.
Hayworth, the primary election opponent McCain has spent a small fortune pummeling as inept, corrupt and even stupid, has seized on the apparent contradictions.
“Mr. campaign finance reform … the guy who used to lecture us about the evils of money … thinks he’s going to buy off Arizona,” Hayworth told POLITICO. “Maybe it’ll work. Hey, they spent $20 million.”

McCain’s defenders would probably argue that he’s never been anything other than a “Goldwater conservative,” as he likes to call himself, and on some issues, that may be true. But there is no way to deny that the John McCain who gave the conservative movement a near-death experience in 2000 and then trod a genuine maverick path until at least 2004 is virtually unrecognizable in the senior senator from Arizona today.
Still, Catanese is off the mark in attributing this devolution to McCain’s battle against Hayworth. McCain has been moving rightward pretty steadily since at least the moment he decided to run for president again in the 2008 cycle. And in this metamorphosis, he has accurately reflected trends in his party.
Many observers, particularly liberals, have been shocked by the dramatic rightward march of the GOP since November 2008, with all its thundering against Barack Obama’s “socialism” and its outstretched hand to the virulently anti-government Tea Party movement (which is largely composed of faithful Republican voters). It’s not often, after all, that a political party reacts to two consecutive electoral calamities by moving further away from the political center.
Yet this shouldn’t be a surprise. Well before 2008, it had become a deeply entrenched habit among “movement conservatives” to explain any Republican electoral failure as a result of the party’s insufficiently rigorous featly to conservative ideology. And this is exactly how they interpreted the decline of George W. Bush and the congressional GOP after his 2004 re-election. At both the elite and rank-and-file level, conservatives quickly decided that Bush and Rove and DeLay had betrayed them. Consider this report from the Washington Post in early 2006:

Disaffection over spending and immigration have caused conservatives to take flight from President Bush and the Republican Congress at a rapid pace in recent weeks, sending Bush’s approval ratings to record lows and presenting a new threat to the GOP’s 12-year reign on Capitol Hill, according to White House officials, lawmakers and new polling data.
Bush and Congress have suffered a decline in support from almost every part of the conservative coalition over the past year, a trend that has accelerated with alarming implications for Bush’s governing strategy.
The Gallup polling organization recorded a 13-percentage-point drop in Republican support for Bush in the past couple of weeks. These usually reliable voters are telling pollsters and lawmakers they are fed up with what they see as out-of-control spending by Washington and, more generally, an abandonment of core conservative principles….
“The problem in my mind, and the only way to explain the very significant erosion is just a disgust with what appears to be a complete abandonment of limited government,” said former Republican congressman Pat Toomey, who runs the conservative Club for Growth. Toomey said commitment to smaller government has been the unifying idea for most elements of the GOP coalition since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. “Republicans have finally had enough,” he said, a sentiment echoed by several other conservative activists and lawmakers.

There was a temporary renewal of conservative support for Bush after the 2006 elections, mainly attributable to his decision to defy the electorate with a “surge” in Iraq (a policy heavily identified with John McCain, to his own benefit among conservatives). But in general, on the right, the belief only intensified that Bush had betrayed the cause by accepting and even advocating higher domestic spending. He had championed a larger federal role in education and health care (with his Medicare prescription drug benefit), while also engaging in a maddening effort to buy Hispanic votes with “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. All of these initiatives, of course, were part and parcel of Karl Rove’s efforts to build a Republican majority by placating the conservative base while strategically reaching out to key categories of swing voters. To conservatives, it looked like the swing-voter tail was wagging the conservative dog.
By the beginning of the 2008 cycle, the revolt was fully underway, a phenomenon disguised in part by the early prominence of well-known “moderates” Giuliani, Romney, and McCain in the presidential field. In reality, Giuliani was going nowhere; Romney had repositioned himself as the “true conservative” in the race; and McCain ultimately won through a perfect storm of his opponents’ mistakes and misfortunes. Still, McCain didn’t sound very “mavericky” during the primaries; he was already backing away from cap-and-trade, campaign finance reform, and comprehensive immigration reform, mainly emphasizing his championship of the Iraq “surge.”
It was during the general election, however, that the tension between McCain’s need for swing votes and ever-increasing pressure from conservatives to turn right reached its peak .In that context, his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate made perfect sense: She was “mavericky” all right–as it would soon be phrased–yet she was also not only acceptable, but downright exciting to hard-core conservatives, particularly the right-to-life movement that essentially scuttled McCain’s hopes of picking Joe Lieberman. Then, during the campaign, when you might have expected McCain to take his conservative votes for granted while lusting after moderate independents, he instead turned even more noticeably to the right, framing his message around Joe the Plumber, attacking Obama’s tax proposals as an attempt to “spread the wealth,” and even dabbling in the ACORN conspiracy theory of the housing meltdown that was popular on the right-wing talk show circuit. Even that wasn’t enough red meat for conservatives, who at one point started shouting at McCain at his own rallies, demanding more talk about Obama’s “radical” associations and socialistic policy proposals.
Indeed, in every important respect, these were the birth pangs of the Tea Party movement. That movement obtained a distinct identity in early 2009, but it was fundamentally a cadre of conservative activists who had been radicalized during the traumatic experience of the 2008 campaign and its unhappy result. To conservatives, of course, it was no mere coincidence that even as McCain and Palin were going down to defeat, the Bush administration and its congressional allies were executing one final betrayal of the cause by proposing and helping to enact TARP and other “bailouts.” This sealed the GOP ticket’s fate, but just as importantly, rid conservatives of any sense of responsibility, political or moral, for Bush’s sins. With the inauguration of Barack Obama, conservatives were also freed from any responsibility to govern the country, and soon embarked on a two-front war against the new “socialist” administration and the “RINOs” who enabled it.
In all these developments, John McCain has been a richly symbolic figure, not least in how he achieved last night’s victory over J.D. Hayworth. The standard-bearer of the GOP, who has been drifting rightward largely in synch with his party since at least 2008, decided to adopt wholesale the Tea Party rhetoric and issue positioning that has swept the Republican universe during the past year. McCain’s win may be described by some of the less thoughtful pundits as a victory of the GOP establishment over the Tea Party movement. But, in reality, it represents Republicans’ final surrender to conservative demands that date back for decades. In that respect, John McCain is not just the symbolic head of his party: He remains its leader in substance, having fully adopted the mores of a conservative movement that’s won its long cold war against what Barry Goldwater called “moderation in the pursuit of justice.”

It’s ludicrous to lump together Democratic and Republican primary voters from five states in four time zones and expect them to deliver some sort of “message,” but since that’s how lots of media folk tend to look at elections, let’s consider the “signals” sent last night.
In FL, in a mild upset, Rick Scott defeated Bill McCollum for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Scott, as you may recall, is the guy who decided to spend his golden parachute from the HCA-Columbia for-profit hospital chain becoming a right-wing anti-“ObamaCare” celebrity, and then governor of his adopted state. Between himself and his wife, he’s spent about $50 million on this race so far, and it was just enough to hand the ultimate Party Stalwart McCollum his third loss in a major statewide race. McCollum did take some serious bark off Scott’s hide, particularly in terms of reminding Floridians of the gigantic Medicare fraud fines paid by HCA-Columbia, which will save Democrat Alex Sink a great deal of time and money during the general election.
Meanwhile, Scott’s doppelganger, billionaire Democratic Senate candidate Jeff Greene, did not fare so well, losing to congressman Kendrick Meek by a 57-31 margin.
The other major upset, or at least potential upset, is way out in Alaska, where former judge Joe Miller, who benefitted from a late push by Sarah Palin, may be in the process of running Lisa Murkowsi right out of the Senate. Miller’s up by three percentage points with a lot of absentee ballots left, so we may not know who has won the nomination for a couple of weeks. It appears Miller got a lot of help from the presence on the ballot of an anti-abortion initiative, which attracted a bit turnout from social conservatives, who’ve never much cared for the pro-choice Murkowski.
In non-upset news from Arizona, John McCain had little problem beating J.D. Hayworth, certainly not after he repudiated much of his own “maverick” legacy during the primary campaign. Another “Establishment” figure, Ben Quayle, survived the embarassment of association with an off-color internet site where he used to post using the name of a porn star from Boogie Nights, and won the GOP nomination for Congress in Arizona’s 3d congressional district.
In Oklahoma, a church camp counseler demolished the Club for Growth’s candidate in a Republican congressional runoff after the latter tried to paint the former as soft on Muslims.
And in my favorite primary up in Vermont, as Democrats gear up for a “unity rally” at Noon today, it’s still not clear whether Peter Shumlin or Doug Racine is the party’s gubernatorial nominee; with 17 precincts still unreported, Shumlin has a lead of just over 200 votes. For those of us who applauded the unusually civil tone of this highly competitive five-way primary, it was good to know that turnout greatly exceeded expectations. Knavery in politics is not invariably rewarded, nor is virtue always punished. It just seems that way sometimes.

It’s another big primary day, with contests on tap in Arizona, Florida, Vermont, Alaska and Oklahoma (a runoff). You can read my pithy analysis of all these primaries over at FiveThirtyEight.
Here, though, I’d like to mention an extraordinary contrast in the tones exhibited in two primaries: the Democratic gubernatorial race in Vermont, and the Republican gubernatorial and Democratic Senate primaries in Florida.
The tilt in Vermont has many of the ingredients that often create nasty-fests. It’s very close, with all five candidates being viable, and most handicappers suggesting a four-way dead heat. There are some notable differences in the candidates, though they mostly agree on the issues of the day. Activists in Vermont’s famous Progressive Party (which to the delight of Democrats, has decided against running its own gubernatorial candidate this year) seem attracted to state senate president pro tem Peter Shumlin and former Lt. Gov. Doug Racine. Secretary of State Deb Markowitz and state senator Susan Bartlett have long been considered “centrists.” Though he’s been in public office, former Google exec Matt Dunne could have probably played the “outsider” pretty hard.
But this has been, best as I can tell, an exceptionally civil primary, with lots of debates, lots of substance, and lots of concern for party unity going forward.
Compare that to what’s been going on down in Florida, where both major parties have been torn apart by self-funders and the reaction to them. Rick Scott, a recent transplant to the state, parachuted into the Republican governor’s race not long before qualifying ended and began beating his chest as a self-proclaimed conservative outsider aligned with the Tea Party movement, and soon broke every spending record in Florida history. Poor old Bill McCollum, who’s trudged along in the party harness for decades, losing two Senate races but finally winning statewide as Attorney General in 2006, didn’t know what hit him. But even when it looked like Scott had left McCollum for dead, the Attorney General’s backers (which included former governor Jeb Bush and virtually the entire state party establishment) plotted a comback, and soon McCollum and the 527’s associated with him savagely went after Scott on his former company’s massive Medicare fraud fines. As McCollum climbed back into contention (he now leads in several late polls), both candidates’ negatives soared, and what originally looked like a Republican cakewalk in November’s now a dead heat.
But unfortuntately, the dynamics of the Scott-McCollum race have largely been replicated in the Democratic Senate primary between congressman Kendrick Meek and billionaire investor Jeff Greene. Like Scott, Greene barged into the Senate race very late with an open checkbook, and in an ad blitz that’s ultimately cost $23 million, Greene moved quickly into the lead. As noted in an earlier post here, Meek was spared much of the demolition work on Greene, thanks to media reports of Greene’s loosey-goosey lifestyle, complete with jaunts around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea with BFF Mike Tyson, and at least one apparently accidental jaunt to off-limits Cuba. Greene has fought back with charges that Meek and his mother, former congresswoman Carrie Meek, are, basically, crooks, but it hasn’t worked other than to lower the tone of the contest even more.
People who oppose campaign finance reform should take a long look at what’s happened in Florida this year and explain why it’s essential to the First Amendment to let wealthy people with virtually no connection to a constituency come in and turn elections into chainwaw massacres. But money-equals-speech fans aren”t the only culprits. Many political professionals love nothing more than to find a clueless self-funder who will write lavish checks while either deferring to the pros or flaming out quickly. Jeff Greene’s first chief strategist was the legendary Joe Trippi; his eventual replacement was Tad Devine, who was John Kerry’s general election campaign manager in 2004. It’s likely both men did enough research to realize that their candidate’s background doomed him to destruction, but in the meantime, the livin’ was easy; too bad the floundering Greene had to throw mud at Kendrick Meek as he sank in the polls.
All party primaries can’t be as civil as Vermont’s, but Lord-a-mercy, must so many of them be like Florida’s? Maybe so, as long as money talks so loud, and mud’s the only way to get the free media attention money can’t buy.

In her ‘The Notion’ post, “Fight Tea Party Voters with Fresh Voters,” The Nation’s Laura Flanders has some good news for Democrats, who may be getting discouraged by downer opinion polls. Apparently the Justice Department’s decision to finally enforce the National Voter Registration Act is having a significant impact. Flanders explains:

In a handful of swing states where voting rights groups have sued and won in recent years, the result is impressive: hundreds of thousands of low-income people, two-thirds women, registering since 2008.
In Missouri, where John McCain beat Barack Obama by less than 4,000 votes, nearly a quarter-million voter registration applications have been filed by Missourians while applying for state public assistance benefits since August 2008. In Ohio, where George W. Bush beat John Kerry by nearly 119,000 votes in 2004, low-income Ohioans filed 100,000 voter applications in just the first six months of 2010.
Project Vote, Demos, The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the local civil rights groups who sued these states and won (forcing turnarounds at state public assistance agencies) have been waging a lonely fight to implement the National Voter Registration Act. The 1993 law requires a range of state agencies, not just motor vehicles, offer voter registration services.
That fight became a little less lonely in June, when, for the first time, the Justice Department announced it would start enforcing the NVRA’s voter registration mandate. This April, 40 million Americans applied for Food Stamps. If 10 percent of those people registered to vote – a smaller percentage than seen at Missouri public assistance agencies after settling its NVRA suit – the nation’s voter rolls would grow by several million…The numbers from Missouri and Ohio dwarf the size of the largest tea party rallies. Already, right-wingers fear these voters and NVRA compliance, commenting on websites that poor people should not vote for any number of ugly reasons…

Turnout and voter registration are not the same thing. But, if Democrats pay a little more attention to turning out these ‘fresh’ voters, it could insure that we retain control of the House and Senate. As Flanders concludes, “…Instead of obsessing about the tea partiers — give those newest voters some good reason to use that vote!.” Less nail-biting about unfavorable polls and putting more time, sweat and money into our midterm ground game will serve Dems well.

This item is a guest post from the National Security Network’s Executive Director, Heather Hurlburt, and its Director of Outreach, Ryan Keenan. The views expressed herein are their own.
The “Ground Zero mosque” debate of recent weeks has claimed several casualties: Muslim-Americans’ confidence in their homeland and its Constitution, Howard Dean’s credibility on the left, and, as Peter Beinart wrote, the U.S.’s ability to lay claim to intellectual generalship in a global “war of ideas.” But perhaps less-noticed was a body blow to the 2012 presidential hopes of Newt Gingrich.
Early on, he had signed up to headline a fear-mongering rally at the site of the proposed Cordoba House on September 11 with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, conservative media luminary Andrew Breitbart and far-right Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders. But an onslaught of opposition from all ends of the political spectrum led Gingrich to withdraw, leading his staff to deny he had ever intended to appear – though the announcement on Wilders’ website that the anniversary “will witness two eagles” suggests otherwise.
Make no mistake about it: This appearance was about the 2012 Republican presidential race, not the “Islamization of America.” In order to win the Republican nomination, Newt needs to get past religious conservatives’ reservations about his personal life. He must reel in Tea Partiers to whom his credentials make him part of the Establishment; gain the blessing of that same establishment; and court neoconservatives without scaring off independents.
For Newt in 2012 – and for far too many GOP candidates in 2010 – rhetoric about Shariah law, “Ground Zero mosques” and “Terror Babies” is a tempting “us”-vs.-“them” narrative that papers over an ugly little secret.
As much of the national narrative leading into November’s midterms has been division and disappointment among the Democratic base, on national security there are unnoticed but enormous policy and ideological differences within the Republican base. The nativism of the Tea Party movement and the neo-isolationism of Ron and Rand Paul directly contradict the priorities of mainstream Republicans and neoconservatives. Only with difficulty can conservatives embrace the Pauls, with their opposition to the Iraq invasion, skepticism on the Afghanistan war and waffling on issues of detainee treatment. As Ann Coulter said earlier this year at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “if Ron Paul supports it and it’s not about foreign policy, I’m for it.” [Emphasis added].
Tea Party-driven candidates add another layer of challenge. Dan Maes in Colorado thinks the UN is using bicycles to take over his state. Colorado Senate candidate Ken Buck brags about turning down Dick Cheney’s offer of a Pentagon job. Sharon Angle in Nevada spent six years in the American Independent Party, the Nevada branch of the Constitution Party (with whom a variety of other tea party-oriented Republicans have links). The foreign policy platform of the Constitution Party deserves quotation in full:

The only constitutional basis and purpose of foreign policy is to serve the interests of this nation. We should not be the world’s police-man. We pledge our only allegiance to the American Republic. We shout a resounding “NO!” to any one-world government or so-called New World Order. Not one whit of American autonomy may be surrendered to any international organization or cartel of nations. We oppose entangling foreign alliances. The United States [sic] should withdraw from the UN and NATO and bring home our overseas forces. We should review all existing treaties to determine which go beyond constitutional limits. Those that do should be rescinded.

These differences can be managed in an off-year election dominated by an endless trickle of bad economic news – if your opponents allow you to manage them. The strategy is simple: Limit discussion of Afghanistan (see for example the reaction to RNC Chairman Michael Steele, whose comments track public opinion as closely as any public official pronouncements of late). Pick some hardy perennials that get the base riled up – thus the GOP in-district playbook’s emphasis on missile defense, military spending, borders, terrorists and Iran. (The Obama administration and Democratic Congress have increased spending on all those things, in fact. But who’s counting?)
But to emerge in a crowded field to unseat the commander-in-chief two years from now, it’s tempting to try something a bit more daring: a new culture war. Gingrich’s soundbite — “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia” — gives religious and social conservatives the “Christians under attack” narrative we remember from fights over abortion, gay marriage and Teri Schiavo. This time, the “them” refers to Muslims, not liberals – at a moment when 46% of Republicans tell a Time pollster that Obama is a Muslim. For the Tea Partier, the message is slightly different. Although one would think freedom of religion would logically be appealing to people who brag about constitutionalism and limited government, spinning this as an outside “them” intruding on American soil “us” hits the nativist nerve of a movement with leaders like Mark Williams who think Muslims worship a “monkey god.”
Third, this line plays to the neoconservative obsession with power and the Middle East. It creates an image of American impotence with “them” (Muslims) intruding into American society and “us” not being able to build a church or synagogue in Saudi Arabia. And finally, the fact that it involves 9/11 and Ground Zero loops-in Independents.
There’s just one problem – as Gingrich’s precipitous retreat from the rally shows. The public’s position on this is far more nuanced, combining a discomfort with the unfamiliar with an awareness of the deep constitutional issues that the debate raises. In a recent Fox News poll, by a 53% to 41% margin, Independents believed it was “wrong” to build the mosque. But in the same poll, by a 69% to 29% advantage, Independents believed the group had the right to build the mosque. A CNN Opinion research poll of the nation at large shows similar numbers with a 70%-29 % margin opposing the construction but 64% supporting the developers’ right to build it. This week a spate of respected Republican, Independent and national security voices spoke out to warn that the debate harms our social cohesion, our Constitution and our national security.
Can a presidential candidate lie down with the animalistic motivations behind the current spate of hate-filled rhetoric, Koran burnings and disgraceful retreats from our Constitution without waking up with a potentially-fatal case of the fleas? It looks as if Gingrich has decided the answer is “no.” Others in his party might want to learn from his example – and Democrats as well as Republicans might want to think about what it means when one of our two major parties’ national security platform can be summed up as, “build missile defense, not mosques.”