Yesterday I talked about the more-or-less official beginnng of the 2012 presidential cycle, which will formally get under way in Iowa on February 6, 2012 (if not earlier due to scheduling changes). Interestingly enough, one of Iowa’s better-known political writers, former state GOP political director Craig Robinson, at his The Iowa Republican site, has already gone to the trouble of ranking ten likely candidates in term of their current strength in his state. He refuses to rank Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin on the questionable ground that their refusal to appear at this week’s CPAC conference in Washington indicates they are not planning to run for president. We’ll see about that!
But the candidates Robinson does rank do not necessarily come out in the order you might expect. He has Newt Gingrich topping the list, thanks to his many, many years of speaking in Iowa and his grasp of the full range of issues. His second-place candidate is none other than Michelle Bachmann, thanks to her friendship with Iowa congressman Steve King, her close ties to the religious right, and her fundraising prowess.
Robinson has this to say about Tim Pawlenty, who has probably done the most to create a campaign infrastructure in Iowa:

Some believe that Pawlenty is Mitt Romney without the flip-flops and the albatross known as Romneycare. Pawlenty’s problem is that he’s probably going to be a lot of people’s second choice. For that to benefit him, he needs to see some big-name candidates drop out because, obviously, if people’s first choice is still on the ballot, that’s who they will be voting for.

He ranks Mitt Romney fourth on grounds that his frequent hints of less than full commitment to participation in the Iowa Caucuses will make it very difficult for him to attract and keep local support. That’s no problem for fifth ranking Rick Santorum, who is already spending lots of time in Iowa, and is well positioned to attract hard-core social conservative support if Huckabee and Palin don’t run.
Interestingly, Robinson ranks national pundit heartthrobs Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels and John Thune seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, ahead only of talk-show host Herman Cain.
I have no idea if Craig Robinson’s take is accurate, and he may have his own axes to grind. But to tell the truth, I’d trust his opinion on Iowa more than that of DC speculators who haven’t had shoes ruined by the muck of the Iowa State Fair.

I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.
As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.
But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:
First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.
Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.
Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.
Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.
And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

So it’s officially no longer too early to speculate about the 2012 presidential election cycle, or wonder about the late-to-develop Republican field. Why? Because the Iowa Caucuses are currently scheduled to take place on February 6, 2012, less than a year from now. It’s always possible, of course, that the date could be moved up, as occurred in 2008, if some states again defy national party rules and try to threaten the privileged status of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the four states authorized to hold nominating contests prior to March 1.
You may have noticed that the red-hot blogospheric talk of just a couple of months ago about a left-bent primary challenge to Barack Obama has almost entirely subsided, as some of us suggested it would.
But why have no Republican candidates formally announced candidacies, or even (with the exception of obscure talk show host Herman Cain) set up exploratory committees?
One of the best of the Beltway Insider pundits, the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, offers an explanation today, based on conversations with alleged GOP movers-and-shakers. I have to say, two factors he cites aren’t really factors at all: the need to raise lots of money (which has little to do with when a candidate begins building an organization in places like Iowa where money is far from the most important issue) and the poor historical track record of early announcers (a double-loaded statistic if ever there was one: strong front-runners, who often tend to win, have no reason to declare candidacies early, but there’s not a strong front-runner this time around).
Cillizza’s other two explanations are more interesting. One is the theory that internet-based fundraising and organizational tools have condensed the amount of time necessary to mount an effective presidential campaign. That may be true, but the fact remains that the pioneer in using these tools, Barack Obama, announced his exploratory committee, and was assumed to be a full-fledged candidate, in January of 2007. Is Haley Barbour (the Great White Hope of GOP insiders at the moment) really going to be a social media sensation later this year? Doesn’t seem likely.
The final factor cited by Cillizza is the overriding shadow of Sarah Palin:

The former Alaska governor is a prime mover in the contest; she acts and everyone else reacts. If she is in the race, it fundamentally alters the winning calculus for everyone from a front-running Romney to a lesser-known candidate such as former senator Rick Santorum. If Palin is out of the race, the contest is even more wide open – a no-go decision could expand the field as more ambitious pols see more of a path to the nomination.

Interesting, isn’t it? The political figure whose national approval ratings have been sinking like a stone, who has been losing to Barack Obama in general election trial heat polls in states like South Carolina, remains the decisive force in shaping the 2012 field. This could not be good sign for the GOP, regardless of what St. Joan of the Tundra decides to do.

Conservatives are about to launch their full-court press on budget cuts. But their problem is, the cuts they want are the diametrical opposites of the cuts the public supports, — and vice versa. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…Their proposed cuts leave the military largely untouched while taking a meat axe to nonmilitary discretionary spending–that is, spending on areas such as education, energy, the environment, and poverty. As usual, conservative priorities are backward when compared to public opinion.
In a fascinating new survey the Program for Public Consultation conducted, respondents were asked to make their own cuts (or increases) to a projected discretionary budget for the year 2015 with a $625 billion deficit. The top three areas for cuts were defense ($109 billion average cut), intelligence agencies ($13 billion), and Iraq/Afghanistan ($13 billion)–the very areas conservatives are going light on.

As for the budget items the conservatives want to eviscerate,

On the other hand, the public wanted to see spending increases in a number of other areas. The top four areas for increases are exactly the kinds of programs conservatives are ready to cut deeply in their current antispending frenzy: job training ($5 billion average increase), higher education ($5 billion), renewable energy ($3 billion), and elementary and secondary education ($3 billion).

It looks like Democrats who hold the line on social spending while cutting the military budget will be on solid ground with their constituents, while conservatives who stand for the reverse will have some explaining to do.

This post by Democratic strategist and TDS advisory board member and contributor Mike Lux, author of The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be, is cross-posted from The HuffPo.
The progressive movement is at a challenging but fascinating time in our country’s history. Even when the Democrats had a newly-elected president who ran on a platform of big change, 60 votes in the Senate, a big margin of control in the House and the most progressive Speaker in history, we still had trouble getting big changes passed. We accomplished some important things, but not nearly as much or as progressively as we had hoped. Now, with a Republican House, only 53 Democratic senators, and a president who has signaled he wants to move more to the center, progressives have even less power than before.
There’s one other factor that even this old-school, lefty populist needs to acknowledge at this moment in our political history: While most voters remain very angry at Wall Street, health insurance companies, big businesses that keep outsourcing jobs, and other corporate special interests, they also are very angry with a government that seems pretty dysfunctional. Swing voters in particular are generally tired of traditional political arguments, and just want political leaders who are going to be very pragmatic about actually delivering jobs and other tangible economic benefits. In this environment, progressives should not shy away from making populist arguments, but need to temper that populism with a pragmatic message about helping small businesses and manufacturers create more jobs.

Read more…

In this phony-war phase of the 2012 presidential cycle, when all things are theoretically possible, ’tis the season for crackpot theories on how the Republican nomination process can become something different from the unedifying spectacle that is likely to unfold. The venerable David Broder has put in his bid with a column suggesting that GOP governors could conspire to run as favorite sons in their various primaries in order to kill off the ostensible front-runners and produce a dark horse nominee. It’s not entirely clear who the beneficiary of this conspiracy would be, though Broder mentions Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty as possibilities.
Now you have to understand that David Broder has conducted a career-long love affair with governors, and has always looked to the GOP governors as a corrective to the ideological zaniness of their party as a whole. But still, the “favorite-son” scenario is beyond far-fetched, and as both Jonathan Bernstein and Josh Putnam have observed, it seems to reflect nostalgia for the days before voters were given a guaranteed role in the nomination process–sort of like the enthusiasm in some Democratic circles in 2008 for a “brokered convention.”
And that’s the very specific reason Broder’s scenario ain’t happening: Republicans voters would have to go along with it, and there’s no particular reason to think they would spurn the importunings of actual candidates in order to promote some backroom deal. Consider the governor who (as Broder notes) would have to put the conspiracy in motion, Iowa’s Terry Branstad. You think Iowa’s conservative activists, who aren’t crazy about Branstad to begin with, would support an effort by him to neuter their hard-earned right to help pick an actual presidential nominee? Ask Democrat Tom Vilsack how well the “favorite-son” thing worked out for him in 2008, when he was actually making a serious run for president.
If Republican governors want to have a collective impact on the presidential nomination they could all get together and endorse someone, much as they did in 2000 when governors were part of the massive establishment infrastructure for George W. Bush. But there’s the rub: there is no such consensus, which is one reason why the 2012 Republican field is such a mess.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
TO: GENE SPERLING
FROM: BILL GALSTON
SUBJ: INFRASTRUCTURE
It feels like a lifetime ago that you and I shared a windowless broomcloset in the West Wing. I assume your digs are more spacious and better illuminated now. In any event, congratulations on returning to a position you occupied with such distinction in the Clinton administration.
The purpose of this memo is to inform you–in case you don’t already know–that hell has frozen over: Late last week, Tom Donohue and Rich Trumka issued a joint statement applauding the president’s call for increased infrastructure investment and urging both Democrats and Republicans to support it. If there was ever a cause whose time has come, this is it. It has to be done big, and it has to be done right–big because it’s not just another program, but a paradigm change; right because it won’t work if it sinks into the morass of the congressional appropriations process, out-of-date formula allocations, and logrolling project selections. Let me explain–briefly, because I know how busy you are right now.
Despite short-term gains, the consumer-driven model of growth on which we’ve relied for decades has hit a wall. We need to shift from spending to saving, from consumption to production, and from deficit-financed imports to aggressive export promotion. We need to invest in the basic building blocks of productivity. And we need to focus on generating good jobs that can’t be exported.
Infrastructure investment can contribute to all these objectives, and the need is great. Because we’ve neglected our infrastructure for more than three decades, the best estimates suggest that we face an accumulated gap–between what we should have invested and what we actually did–of more than $2 trillion. Anyone who has traveled outside the United States in recent years knows that we no longer have a world-class infrastructure. And time-wasting, productivity-sapping bottlenecks are building up, especially in transportation.
During his 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Obama advanced an innovative idea to deal with this situation: a national infrastructure bank, which would mobilize private money to finance large, worthy, long-term infrastructure projects that are capable of turning a profit in the free market. In his 2011 State of the Union, President Obama reopened this issue without specifically mentioning the bank. Now is the time to flesh it out and hit it hard.
By this I mean two things. First, get beyond what Hollywood calls the elevator speech, and send Congress a framework for actual legislation. Bills introduced in both the House and Senate within the past few years could serve as a useful baseline. And there are lots of outside experts who would be willing to help out if needed.
Second, specifically include the infrastructure bank in the president’s forthcoming FY2012 budget proposal. You know as well as anyone that if it’s not in the budget, it’s not real. (Remember welfare reform in President Clinton’s first budget proposal?)
Of course, seed money for the bank is going to cost something. And given the rising pressure for fiscal restraint, you’re not in a position to significantly increase spending in order to stand it up. So consider redirecting the necessary amounts from existing infrastructure projects, which neither leverage private capital nor endure the rigors of a market test. As you do, make it clear that the bank would be a public-private partnership, not a government-run enterprise, and would enjoy neither explicit nor implicit public guarantees. If investors aren’t willing to assume market risks, the projects in question shouldn’t be funded: period, full stop.
A final thought. Programmatic changes are sand castles on the beach, easily washed away when the tide changes. All the heavy lifting you did in the 1990s to turn deficits into surpluses went for naught as soon as a new administration took power. As FDR understood, institutional innovations fortify long-term policies against short-term political shifts–and all of the investments President Obama has already made in the economy could easily be defunded. An infrastructure bank, however, would institutionalize the development of public goods in a way that simply passing a budget cannot. And it would be large first step toward the reformed governance that President Obama has so forcefully advocated.

The Sunday centennial of Ronald Reagan’s birthday will be an occasion for MSM paeans to our 40th President. The hagiographic tributes will probably be lead by his former speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, who set the stage with her 2002 memoir, “When Character Was King,” the gold standard for unbridled Reagan-worship. A fact-focused distillation of the contrarian view follows:

1. Time magazine reports that documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that, as President of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan and first wife, Actress Jane Wyman, “provided federal agents with the names of actors they believed were Communist sympathizers.” Yes, “believed.”
2. A former supporter of FDR and the New Deal, Reagan began dissing “big government” after taking a lucrative job as spokesman for General Electric.
3. Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Running for Governor in 1966, he reportedly said, “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” Be surprised if this is noted on Meet the Press this Sunday.
4. Reagan appointed Justice William Rhenquist to be Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, despite testimony that Rhenquist not only advocated segregationist views, but had personally participated in “ballot security” campaigns to prevent African Americans from voting in 1962 and 64.
5. In 1976 Reagan complained about a “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy a T-bone. He had also made frequent disparaging mention of a “welfare queen” driving her cadillac.
6. In 1980 he launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town most famous for being the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. Reagan seized the opportunity to declare “I believe in states rights” in his speech. It’s hard to see him as anything but a divisive figure in terms of race relations. And then there was that yucky Bitburg cemetery tribute to Nazi soldier “victims.”
7. Reagan became the chief mouthpiece in the effort to defeat the initiative that became Medicare, warning listeners in a recording he made for radio, that if they didn’t write to their congressional representatives to prevent it “we will awake to find that we have so­cialism. And if you don’t do this, and if I don’t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” As President, he did a flip-flop, and protected Medicare.
8. Unemployment averaged 7.5 percent during Reagan’s presidency, according to BLS statistics.
9. Despite President Reagan’s vocal support for tax cuts, he signed bills providing tax hikes in every year from 1981-87, with most of the burden falling on the middle class, reportedly doubling the tax for those earning less than $40K per year..
10. Reagan’s two terms produced an uptick in federal income tax receipts (1980-89), from $308.7 billion to $549 billion.
11. No President ever dissed government spending more than did Reagan. Yet, federal Federal spending grew by 7.1 percent annually during the Reagan Administration, according to budget statistics. Reagan often portrayed himself as the soul of fiscal responsibility. But Under Reagan the national debt nearly tripled, from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion.
12. The Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration provided covert arms sales to Iran to fund military aid to Nicaragua’s Contras to overthrow a democratically-elected government in violation of U.S. law, resulted in 14 indictments among Reagan staff members, and 11 convictions.

The most treasured of Reagan myths is that he single-handedly ended the Cold War, staring down the evil empire like Gary Cooper in ‘High Noon.’ Scant mention is made of the fact that he was given a huge, pivotal gift in the person of his adversary, Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the saner leaders of the 20th century. Most presidents would have done what Reagan did, which was keep military spending high until the Soviets caved. Crediting Reagan with ‘courageous’ leadership here is a bit of a stretch.
I’m sure President Reagan had his good points, and we can be assured that they will be repeated ad nauseum on Sunday. He was certainly an excellent orator and highly effective in implementing the conservative agenda in many respects. And he did achieve major progress in nuclear arms control. But it will be surprising if hard-headed critiques of his presidency will get a fair hearing, which is important given the centrality of the Reagan myth in Republican propaganda.
In his WaPo wrap-up review of three documentaries about the Reagan years, Hank Stuever acknowledges that the ’80s did produce a lot of grand rock and pop music. However, his selection of the emblematic song for the Reagan era, “Seasons in the Sun,” which was popular during Reagan’s tenure as California Governor and concludes one of the documentaries, brings a queasy chill. I envision a bunch of Bohemian Grovesters in drag or lederhosen or whatever they don at those gatherings, remembering the Reagan era, swaying tankards and warbling “We had joy, we had fun. We had seasons in the sun.” And I’m awfully glad it’s no longer morning in America.

In today’s Washington Post, Amy Gardner reported, with apparent surprise, a phenomenon that, frankly, anybody who was really paying attention already understood: in Iowa, cradle and graveyard of presidential aspirations, the Tea Party Movement, and conservative activism generally, is heavily dominated by religious folk deeply interested in those cultural issues Republicans are said to have put aside.
That’s undoubtedly true, but Gardner’s claim that this “sets Iowa apart” is not so clearly true. It’s impossible to miss the dominance of cultural issues in Iowa, given (a) the astonishing 2008 Caucus win by Mike Huckabee, who had nothing else going for him, and (b) the state of semi-hysteria bred among Iowa conservatives by the 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. That decision, which for obscure Iowa constitutional reasons cannot be overturned until after 2012 at the earliest, led to the successful recall of several Supreme Court justicies in 2010.
But the interplay of cultural and non-cultural issues among Tea Party types which Gardner documents in Iowa is common, if less visible, in other parts of the country. Consider her observation about Iowa social conservative warhorse Bob Vander Plaats:

In the wood-paneled back room of a pizza joint in Winterset last week, about 30 miles west of Des Moines, Vander Plaats invoked the unmistakable language of the tea party. He said that politicians will lose if they “overreach their constitutional authority.” He said Iowans want a pro-family president who also takes the right positions on states’ rights, the Constitution and the separation of powers.

Talk about “overreaching their constitutional authority” is not, in fact, the “unmistakable language of the tea party movement.” Long before conservative activists put on wigs and beat drums, it was the language of the Christian Right, whose obsession with overturning Roe v. Wade, and with opposing church-state separation, constantly fed constitutional originalism. Similarly, the importation into the constitutional design of the Declaration of Independence, which is semi-universal in Tea Party circles, originated with the Christian Right, which used the Declaration to smuggle God into the Constitution, along with a notion of natural rights that supported, in their own minds at least, the rights of “the unborn” and the prerogatives of the traditional family.
More generally, it’s hard to identify Christian Right pols who haven’t strongly identified themselves with the Tea Party Movement (two of its best-known leaders, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, are highly illustrative of this fact), and hard to find Tea Party spokesmen who favor any policies that would in any way discomfit the Christian Right. Where they aren’t the same people, they are certainly strong allies, and essentially two sides of the same radicalized conservative coin with the same apocalyptic vision of a righteous nation led hellwards by evil progressives. Iowa is not an outlier in this respect, but perhaps just a place where the political context makes it easier to see.

Given the fairly large disconnect between talk about budget deficits in Washington, and the general unwillingness of pols to talk about specific programs they will cut (even the draconian House Republican Study Committee plan is full of TBD vagueness), budget gimmickery is a constant temptation. And it’s sad to see one prominent Democrat, Sen. Claire MacCaskill of MO, sign onto the mother of all gimmicks, the Commitment to American Prosperity Act of 2011, along with a group of Republicans led by Bob Corker of TN.
The problems with this “CAP Act” begins with the fatuous title, which reflects the current Republican line that government spending is somehow the only obstacle to a booming economy. Beyond that, the bill is one of those which is crazy if serious, and deeply cynical if it’s not.
The craziness comes from the central idea that total federal spending needs to be immediately and inflexibly limited to a fixed percentage of GDP that’s lower than the levels of the Reagan administration. As a long analysis from Paul Van de Water of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, this sort of “cap” is not only arbitrary, but does not reflect the aging of the U.S. population (which inevitably increases retirement costs), the recent spike in health care costs, or the automatic increase in government spending that occurs during a recession, and, well, the basic need in a democracy for representative institutions to make decisions on taxes and spending. Reaching the target proposed in this bill would involve reducing federal spending–all of it–by about 20% as compared to current levels. So much for Washington having any ability to deal with any challenges to the country, domestic or international. The negative impact on the economy would be vast and immediate.
But the cynicism comes from the mechanism by which the CAP Act would achieve its crazy goals: “sequestrations” of spending conducted by the Office of Management and Budget and enforced by an executive order of the president. The “sequestration” gimmick was first devised in the 1980s-era Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, described by one of its sponsors as “a bad idea whose time has come.” The “idea,” so to speak, is to respond to the inability or uwillingness of Congress to identify specific program cuts by administratively cutting every single program by the same percentage. The only difference is that the CAP Act, unlike Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, would include mandatory spending–basically Social Security and Medicare–in the sequestrations. So under this system, one fine day, without a single vote being taken in Congress, Social Security beneficiaries would see reductions in their checks necessary to achieve some arbitrary level of annualized savings; doctors would see their Medicare reimbursements docked; Medicare beneficiaries would see their premiums jump.
Now the CAP Act isn’t going to be enacted any time soon, if only because Republicans will not seriously contemplate exposing the Pentagon to across-the-board cuts. But this sort of gesture is not benign, particularly for Democrats. Aside from very literally establishing federal spending reductions as the overriding national priority, more important than the economy, fundamental fairness, and every public responsibility imaginable, Democratic sponsorship of such measures offers Republicans a specific concession they very badly want, and that President Obama denied them in the State of the Union Address: bipartisan cover to go after Social Security and Medicare, which they fear to do on their own because it would provoke the certain wrath of their increasingly elderly electoral base. Already, conservative opinion-leaders are touting MacCaskill’s sponsorship of the CAP Act as representing a potential sea-change in the prospects for draconian spending cuts.
Democrats, even–perhaps especially–those who are in politically vulnerable territory, should not be making life easier for conservatives who have contempt for the very ideas of a social safety net and of public investment, and who refuse to let their supposed commitment to fiscal discipline extend to support for progressive taxation or the elimination of special-interest tax benefits. The Donkey Party, after all, didn’t create the current fiscal mess, and presided over the last achievement of a balanced federal budget before George W. Bush took office and demanded a “rebate” for high-income taxpayers and corporations. Moving to the right of Republicans on federal spending will just undermine the few responsible leaders in the GOP, and spur a mindless race to the bottom that obliterates all thoughtful efforts to bring long-term spending and revenues into better balance.