This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the first major 2012 Republican presidential candidates’ debate over with, and the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll less than two months away, the window for additional candidates to emerge and strengthen a shallow field is rapidly narrowing. But there’s still one proto-candidate, due to announce a decision by the end of the month, who’s piquing the interest of many a Republican: the ever-colorful, if somewhat erratic, governor of Texas, Rick Perry.
On paper, Perry’s got a lot of plus-marks for a Republican Party that currently values three qualities that are difficult to combine: extensive executive experience, an economic success story to tell, and anti-Washington Tea Party cred. He’s also gives good (if not terribly substantive) speeches, loves to campaign, and has access to deep pockets via his Texas background and his Republican Governors’ Association rolodex. And as an ally of the hard-core Christian Right, he would become immediately viable in Iowa, as well as having a step up in South Carolina.
Moreover, Perry’s peculiar credentials make him a problematic rival for virtually everyone already in the field. Texas’ strong economy (whether or not he had much to do with it) gives him economic and fiscal talking points easily rivaling Romney’s. He’s as popular in both Tea Party and Christian Right circles as Bachmann or Cain. And he would immediately double the number of electable-true-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney in the race, which isn’t good news for the other one, Tim Pawlenty.
So what’s not to like? In short, every one of the enigmatic governor’s supposed strengths turns out to be yoked to a big, potentially damaging weakness.
To begin, Texas’ economy may have done well during most of his ten-year-plus tenure as governor, but it’s done so at the price of very low levels of public services, high rates of poverty, and a long line of sweetheart corporate deals, not all of them successful, between Perry and some of his friends and allies, which could prove to be an opposition researcher’s playground. (His pet plan for a privately operated mega-highway through the state, the Trans-Texas Corridor, which has never reached fruition, is a good example). Moreover, his budgetary record has also depended on some questionable accounting measures (e.g., temporarily delayed payments to schools) and a willingness to rely on the federal government he purports to loath (stimulus dollars played a big role in propping up the most recent Texas budget).
Second, while Perry has become a Tea Party favorite, he has done so in part by making inflammatory statements that may trouble even a healthy number of Republican primary voters, the most famous of which was his suggestion that secession might be on the table for Texas. In addition, he’s also made threats to withdraw the state from the Medicaid program–with only the vaguest suggestion of how or whether poor families would receive medical treatment–and even sought the power to opt Texas out of Social Security, a rather egregious stomping on the third rail of politics.
And finally, Perry is close to the Christian Right, but the fact of the matter is that he hasn’t chosen the most seemly of allies in that camp. As a follow-on to his famous “Pray for Rain” rally in April, he’s now planning an evangelical hoedown in August, called “The Response,” that features a sort of who’s who of radical theocrats, including John Hagee, the Christian Zionist leader whose support John McCain felt constrained to repudiate in 2008 after Hagee called Adolf Hitler an agent of God’s plans to return the Jews to their biblical homeland. The expressed purpose of the upcoming event is to seek divine intervention to fix America, apparently via the propitiation of an angry God by the abandonment of such abominations as legalized abortion, same-sex relationships, and church-state separation. If the Texas governor is by then running for president, it won’t be much of a mystery who might be called upon by the assembled divines to restore righteousness in Washington: Perry himself, once again in the right place at the right time.
On top of it all, persistent doubts about Perry’s competence (and in some quarters, honesty) have made him less than a political powerhouse in his home state of Texas, even as the state’s powerful Republican trend in the last decade, along with an energy-industry-boom, have given him enormous advantages. In 2006, for instance, he only won 39 percent of the general election vote in a peculiar, four-way gubernatorial race (with one independent candidate, the comedic musician and novelist Kinky Friedman, probably taking most of his double-digit-percentage vote from Perry’s Democratic opponent). In 2010, meanwhile, he won by solid margins against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and his general election opponent, Houston Mayor Bill White–but this was right at the peak of the Tea Party uprising, which Perry very successfully exploited, and the fact remains that he was vulnerable enough to draw these legitimate challenges in the first place. His relationship with Texas Republicans, moreover, has always been somewhat shaky, as evidenced by the revolt of GOP legislators against a business tax plan Perry pushed through a few years ago, and his rumored frosty relations with his great benefactors, the Bush family. And even his friends in the social conservative wing of the Texas GOP were appalled by his 2007 proposal to require that every sixth-grade girl in Texas be vaccinated for the HPV virus.
All in all, you have to wonder why Texans, including hard-core conservatives, seem less impressed than people in other states with the prospect of a Perry presidential run. Some appear to be stunned at the very idea, treating him as a sort of Chauncey Gardiner figure who has stumbled, through remarkable luck, into the national spotlight. But Perry’s ultimate stroke of luck could be in appearing on the scene at a time when the Republican Party considers the power of its ideology, not the brains or accomplishments of its leaders, its trump card in 2012.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I’ve spent the past week in Israel listening to as many voices as I could. Based on what I’ve heard, a rough summary of the situation is this: Benjamin Netanyahu offers no viable alternative to the status quo, and the opposition offers no viable alternative to Netanyahu. Until Mahmoud Abbas recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, the prime minister says, serious talks are impossible. And besides, negotiating with a coalition that includes Hamas is unthinkable. For their part, the Palestinians are insisting that serious talks can’t begin until the Israelis endorse the “1967 borders with agreed-on swaps” principle that President Obama articulated last month. Meanwhile, the once-dominant Labor Party is all but defunct, and Kadima is riven by debates over such momentous matters as their leader Tsipi Livni’s alleged mismanagement of party funds. While Netanyahu is hardly a giant, he bestrides the Israeli political scene like a colossus. The near-certain consequence of these realities is continuing stagnation.
The skeptics, of course, love to object that “the status quo is unsustainable.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered that phrase over the past 44 years, I could retire tomorrow. The majority of Israelis actually seem comfortable to the point of complacency with today’s de facto truce and limited Palestinian autonomy. The Palestinians are anything but comfortable, of course, but what can they do? If they choose to take their case to the United Nations General Assembly this fall, they’ll get a symbolic vote of support that changes nothing on the ground. To be sure, non-violent demonstrations could mobilize sympathizers around the world while further isolating Israel. But the Israelis are working quickly to deploy more effective crowd control weapons and tactics and to create a more seamless allocation of responsibilities between the IDF and the police. Unless they drop the ball, they should be able to avert a repetition of the army’s heavy-handed and needlessly lethal response to recent breaches of the line of demarcation between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan.
Many retired generals and former intelligence officials, for their part, regard Netanyahu as a reckless adventurer guided more by dogma and short-term political calculations than by a sober analysis of long-term national interests. They may well be right. But Netanyahu clearly thinks of himself as a principled visionary with time on his side. In a recent interview, he referred to the decades it took for the conflict over Northern Ireland to yield to fruitful negotiations. He’s waiting for the Palestinian equivalent of Sinn Fein’s abandonment of armed struggle and willingness to accept a divided Ireland. The Palestinians believe they’ve made that transition without getting much in return; Netanyahu disagrees. Some worried Israelis think that it’s stupid to antagonize the government of the United States; Netanyahu thinks that his current strategy will enable him to dominate American as well as Israeli politics. And there matters stand.
I wish I had more confidence that the United States can make things better. But our influence in the region is at a very low ebb, and even supporters of the Obama administration concede that its efforts to date have been counterproductive. Each time the administration enunciates more “even-handed” policies, the Palestinians adopt them as preconditions for renewed talks while the Israelis dig in their heels. I would have thought that the art of diplomacy is not to say what you think to be true, but rather to use all instruments of national power, including verbal evasion, to get the parties themselves to act in accordance with that truth. Speeches can be tools of diplomacy; they are not substitutes for it. The administration is running out of time–may already have run out of time–to get it right.

For a fresh perspective on America’s unemployment problem, check out the Wall St. Journal’s post by Sara Murray, “Jobless Rate Lower or Flat in Most States” and accompanying rollover graphic widget. As Murray’s post explains,

Joblessness declined in nearly half of all U.S. states last month, the Labor Department said Friday.
Compared to a month earlier, unemployment fell in 24 states, rose in 13 and Washington, D.C. and was flat in another 13 states.
The unemployment rate has fallen significantly below the national average of 9.1% in May in 25 states. Rates were largely the same as the national average in 20 states and Washington, D.C. But five states — California, Florida, Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island — continued to suffer from double-digit unemployment…For the year, 43 states and Washington, D.C. have seen a drop in their unemployment rates. Just four experienced an increase in joblessness and three states had no change.

The post’s color-coded map provides a visual sense of the geography of American joblessness, and mouse hovering reveals the numbers — which states are suffering the highest rates (NV, CA, FL, MS, SC, MI and RI) and the one state that is doing exceptionally well — ND with 3.2 percent unemployment. Don’t everyone pack for North Dakota just yet, however. Apparently there is a serious housing shortage in the midst of the job-creating oil drilling boom. The map widget also includes back and forward arrow widget that gives a nice visual sense of the monthly trend line, which does suggest a slow recovery in many states.
The map does make you wonder if maybe the recovery could benefit from targeting specific states for job creation.

In a TDS Strategy Memo that got fairly wide attention last week I argued that “a very strong anti-Keynesian perspective on job creation is now widespread among American voters” and that therefore “simply repeating the traditional Democratic narrative — regardless of how frequently or emphatically — will not produce significant attitude change.”
In the process of being paraphrased and restated by other commentators, these two statements became transformed into two quite distinct assertions (a) that a “majority” of American voters no longer accept Keynesian measures and (b) as a result, Dems can no longer win their support for further action to create jobs.
Neither of these revised statements is correct. Let’s take them one at a time.
First, as far as how many Americans actually accept the explicitly anti-Keynesian view that cutting spending would really produce jobs, polling specialist Ruy Teixeira points to the following “forced choice” Washington Post poll as particularly revealing:

Do you think large cuts in federal spending would do more to create jobs or do more to cut jobs in this country?”
More to create jobs – 41%
More to cut jobs – 45%
Neither (vol.) -7%
Unsure — 7%

This is as close as one can come to an absolute, “gun to the head” forced-choice -the wording of the question doesn’t even offer the respondent a “neither” option — and even so 15 percent either said “neither” or that they just didn’t know. So, at the very best, only a minority of 40% of the American people really support the explicitly ideological anti-Keynesian position that cutting spending will create jobs.
On the other hand, however, the textbook Keynesian view that “cutting spending destroys jobs” also falls short of a majority. So, on this poll, Keynesians and anti-Keynesians seem roughly tied and neither has an absolute majority.
But look at what happens when respondents are given a third choice.

“If the government makes major cuts in federal spending this year in an effort to reduce the budget deficit, do you think these cuts will: [randomize] help the job situation/hurt the job situation, or not have much of an effect either way?”
Help – 18%
Hurt – 34%
Not have much of an effect either way — 41%

In this case the explicitly ideological anti-Keynesian view drops very dramatically to 18%. In contrast, a larger group of about a third of the sample takes a “Keynesian” view that spending cuts would hurt job creation while the remainder feels that spending cuts would “not have much of an effect either way”. The number of Americans who genuinely and passionately believe that massive spending cuts would really create millions of new jobs is therefore likely closer to the 20% figure in this poll than the 41% “forced choice” figure in the previous poll.
But what about those 41% in this second survey who say cuts would not have much of an effect either way?
A professor teaching a traditional Economics 101 course would say that people who think cutting spending during a deep recession would not have any effect at all are not only factually wrong but are also technically expressing an “anti-Keynesian” view. But many of the people choosing the “not much effect” option are not really making a serious macroeconomic forecast (i.e. “I predict that the net effect of major spending reductions on the unemployment rate will be zero”) but rather a view that is more accurately viewed as basically “skeptical” or “cynical” as opposed to ideologically anti-Keynesian.

Read more…

Molly Ball of Politico noticed something interesting about the 2012 Republican presidential field: most of them aren’t very popular in their original stomping grounds.

Romney’s not the only presidential hopeful whose home state popularity is lagging. Just about all of the GOP presidential candidates would have a hard time winning their own states if they ended up as the party nominee, which may factor into the thinking among many Republicans that the 2012 field is lackluster.
The phenomenon marks a departure from the campaign days of old when “favorite son” candidates could point to their home-state popularity as a crucial part of their sales pitch.
The 2012 field, by contrast, is largely made up of unfavorite sons.
Tim Pawlenty never received a majority of the vote in Minnesota in his two successful runs for governor. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann almost certainly couldn’t win the state — her high-water mark in her own GOP-friendly district was 53 percent, registered during the Republican landslide year of 2010.
In statewide polls conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, both had higher unfavorable ratings than favorable.
It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania, where voters drummed Rick Santorum out of the Senate by 18 percentage points–he was the rare incumbent to lose by a blowout margin. Newt Gingrich, who has yet to set foot in his campaign’s Georgia headquarters, would lose the state to President Barack Obama, according to one recent poll. Fellow Georgian Herman Cain ran once for statewide office and failed to make it out of a Senate primary. Sarah Palin, once an overwhelmingly popular governor of Alaska, saw her statewide approval decline after the 2008 presidential campaign, then crash after she left office in July 2009.

It’s sometimes said that Republicans think they can’t lose in 2012, particularly if the economy doesn’t significantly improve between now and November of next year. Looking at the shelf-value of their presidential field, they’d better hope that is true.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a post up at his blog, “Why the Republican War on Workers’ Rights Undermines the American Economy,” which does a good job of pinpointing a critical missing element in the economic recovery effort. Lamenting the passing of the era Reich dubs “The Great Prosperity,” the three decades after WW II when “wages rose in tandem with productivity” and “Americans could afford to buy what they produced,” he holds up the example of Europe’s healthiest economy:

…If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.
Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).
What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.
How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.
That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.
Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.
The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Reich credits strong labor unions as a leading cause of both Germany’s economic health and ‘The Great Prosperity’ era in the U.S. noting “In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.” Reich adds:

With the decline of unions has come the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. The middle class’s purchasing power has depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral. But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.
…The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

Reich is well-aware of the enormous difficulties of meeting this challenge, particularly the “Republican War on Workers,” which includes eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public workers and “open shop” initiatives to prevent unions from collecting dues, along with attacking the National Labor Relations Board.
Clearly, Reich is not talking about a quick fix in time for next year’s elections. Rather, this is a long haul struggle that will require sustained commitment from both unions and progressives. There are critical reforms, like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which could help strengthen unions. But it these reforms will require restoring strong Democratic majorities in congress.
The outpouring of protests against public worker union busting in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana offer the hope that the public is waking up to the dangers of weakening unions further. Organized labor’s embrace of new organizing tactics, such as those being used to recruit Wal-mart workers into a union-like organization called “OUR Walmart” may open up new directions for union growth.
The image of unions is in need of a make-over, since anti-labor propaganda has been relentless and it looks like its going to get worse. Senator Rand Paul has apparently been appointed the new poster-boy for union bashing. In response, the labor movement could use a major Ken Burns-style prime-time documentary series showing how much unions have done to help American families have a better quality of life. Unions have also got to do a better job of tooting their own horn, not just in the shops they hope to organize, but throughout American society.
Like every Democrat, I’m hoping economic recovery will soon kick in strong enough to do some good for Dems in ’12. But if we want to create a sound foundation for a more enduring recovery benefiting American workers — call it “The Great Prosperity 2.0,” Democrats will have to focus more on supporting unions.

August is looking to be a hot month for politically-tinged mega-events. There is, of course, the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll on August 13, which is likely to winnow the Republican presidential field and perhaps produce the long-awaited “conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.”
But there’s big fun elsewhere. Glenn Beck is planning a sequel to last year’s “Restoring Honor” event–not in DC, but in Jerusalem, on August 24. It’s dubbed “Restoring Courage,” and best as I can tell, its aim is to oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There will apparently be rock bands and other pyrotechnics, and as many Israeli and American politicians as Beck can rope in to the event. There have been conflicting reports about which American pols are likely to show up, but so far, it looks like Beck can probably count on Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Joe Lieberman if no one else.
A bit closer to home, and earlier in the month (August 6), in Austin, Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, who may be an announced candidate for president by then, is hosting a mega-rally of right-wing religious figures called “The Response”. It’s a follow-on to Perry’s famous “pray for rain” event in April, but with much, much bigger ambitions for divine intervention in American affairs. And it’s attracting practically every well-known theocrat in the country.
Here’s the indispensable Sarah Posner on the nature of “The Response”:

I’ve reported on, and experienced, the very type of rally Perry is planning…. They are indeed intended to convert new followers to Christ. But they really are about something much, much more: purging America of non-believers, LGBT people, and perceived political enemies, depicted as satanic…..
So while Rick Perry is out to pander for votes, he’s pandering to people who believe in signs and wonders and spiritual warfare; who care nothing for policy or respecting other people’s faith beliefs; who disdain other people’s reproductive choices and gender identities; and who believe that God is calling them to engage in a bloodless (although apocalyptic) battle with political enemies. If Perry runs for president, it won’t be for the United States of America. It will be for a new Zion whose followers believe God will smite their enemies and declare a new Kingdom on earth, and in America, one that is ruled by their singular version of Jesus Christ.

If Perry is a candidate by then, it sure looks like “The Response” could position him to decisively outflank his rivals–perhaps even Michele Bachmann–among the hard-core conservative evangelical faithful. I guess they’ll first have to forgive him for endorsing that sodomite-loving, adulterous baby-killer-enabler Rudy Giuliani for president in 2008, but repentance is always welcomed by these folk.

Now that Rep. Michele Bachmann is in the spotlight as a strong performer in Monday’s Republican presidential candidate debate, it’s very helpful to know more about what makes the Minnesota conservative firebrand tick. Right on cue, Michelle Goldberg, an authority on the “Christian nationalist” movement, has written an important backgrounder on Bachmann’s career and ideology for the Daily Beast.
Goldberg makes it crystal clear that Bachmann’s not just some Republican pol who happens to be active in Christian Right causes. She’s the expositor of an ideology that views politics as an arena for the imposition of godly rule as intepreted by a radical strain of conservative evangelicalism. And it comes out in strange but understandable ways, if you have the decoder ring:

On Monday, Bachmann didn’t talk a lot about her religion. She didn’t have to–she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama’s Libya policy, for example, she said, “We are the head and not the tail.” The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail.” As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it’s often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.

To those who wouldn’t normally look to Deuteronomy for guidance on U.S. policy towards Libya, this sort of approach seems bizarre. But once you are inside the crusading worldview of people like Bachmann, it all makes sense.

After carefully watching and writing about last night’s first 2012 GOP presidential candidates’ debate, I woke up this morning and was surprised to hear a lot of talk, much of it from left-of-center observers, suggesting the candidates had shown all sorts of surprising maturity and moderation. This take by Jacob Weisburg of Slate is representative:

The GOP presidential field, while hardly dominated by political giants, appears far less outlandish than one might have predicted. At the first Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday night, the seven candidates competed not for evangelical or libertarian favor, but for the status of someone plausible to compete with the president for swing voters.
Here are some of the things that did not happen in the debate. No one called Obama a socialist. No one gave ambiguous encouragement to the “birther” faction. While all of the candidates oppose gay marriage, no one bashed homosexuals. With the exception of the marginal former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, no one directly endorsed the Ryan Plan. Two months ago, every Republican in the House backed this plan; now, no one wants to talk about it.

In other words, the candidates did not howl at the moon, and did not go out of the way to associate themselves with a dangerously specific and unpopular Medicare proposal.
They did, however, with the exception of Herman Cain’s brief endorsement of food safety inspections, uniformly reject any positive government role in domestic affairs, and more specifically, any legitimate government role in the economy, other than keeping money tight and getting rid of its own regulations. If anyone thought government could do anything at all to help the unemployed other than give more tax dollars and power to the people who had laid them off and/or foreclosed on their mortgages, they kept it to themselves. They engaged in an orgy of angry union-bashing that was entirely unlike anything that’s ever happened in a debate among people running for president. And the sort of reticence Weisberg perceived on cultural issues basically meant that candidates who favor criminalization of abortion and re-stigmatization of gay people say they won’t make it a major campaign issue. And why should they? They all agree on these extremist positions.
And that’s an important thing to keep in mind: When the political center of a party, or a country, is in the process of shifting, there’s a lot of noise and conflict. When it settles in its new place, however, it gets very quiet. To a very great extent, that’s what has happened in the GOP. It is not a sign of “sanity” or “moderation;” simply one of consensus.
I also think a lot of the “how nice they are” assessments of the field after the debate reflect little more than the belief that Mitt Romney did really well and may actually get the nomination. That makes non-hardcore-conservatives feel better, if only because they tend to assume Romney’s own hardcore conservatism is fake.
All the talk about Mitt dodging a bullet could be a mite premature. Yes, Tim Pawlenty passed up a chance to hit Romney at his weakest point, “ObamneyCare.” Politico was so stunned by this turn of events they devoted their top story this morning to endless quotes from pundits and campaign strategists savaging poor T-Paw for cowardice or stupidity. But it’s a long way to the 2012 convention, and the assumption that last night’s scenario will be repeated in future campaign developments is entirely unwarranted. Perhaps Pawlenty thought other candidates would “go negative” in the debate before he had to. Or perhaps he figures he’d better become the “conservative alternative to Romney” before he has to worry about actually beating him. Who knows?
But the bottom line is that the GOP did not suddenly transform itself overnight. The drive to the right in the GOP has been underway for more than four decades. If it seems to have stopped, that’s probably becomes it has arrived at its destination.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The first big GOP candidate debate of the 2012 presidential cycle was from a conventional perspective unexciting. Nobody hit a home run, and nobody made a major gaffe. From a tactical point of view, the most astounding moment was Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to stand behind his “ObamneyCare” sound bite about health reform delivered over Fox News this weekend. T-Paw disingenuously argued the term was simply his gloss on the president’s description of the similarities between the Affordable Care Act and Romney’s Massachusetts health plan–a decision which essentially took the issue off the table for the rest of the debate (if not the rest of the campaign). And whenever RomneyCare is off the table, Mitt Romney has to be judged the winner.
But from a broader perspective, the overriding message of this debate is how thoroughly the conservative movement has conquered the GOP on domestic policy. Like myna birds, the candidates emphatically agreed the economy is the main issue, that radically reducing the power of government to do good or ill is the only thing a president can do to help the economy, and that there is scarcely a problem where the federal government can make a single positive contribution to national life, other than by deploying National Guard troops to the border.
The main differences between the candidates on domestic issues strictly revolved around the precise strategy–mechanical and political–for destroying any vestige of a positive government role in the economy. When former restauranteur Herman Cain was corned by moderator John King into admitting the federal government ought to continue food safety inspections, the candidate rapidly changed the subject into areas where government is doing a terrible job that it ought to abandon. But Cain won the biggest audience reaction of the entire night with his fiery support for state right-to-work laws, including a prospective decision by New Hampshire to join the South in that anti-union policy; Pawlenty tried to trump him by supporting a national right-to-work law.
On the politically sensitive issue of Medicare, Gingrich repeated his critique of Paul Ryan’s voucher proposal on political grounds, a lot more effectively than he did in his disastrous Meet the Press appearance a few weeks ago, and Pawlenty reserved the right to propose his own radical approach to Medicare. Not a soul challenged the idea that Medicare as we know it had to die, sooner rather than later, as rapidly as political markets would accept.
And on the tax front, no one took up King on his open invitation for someone to disagree with Pawlenty’s claim that tax cuts and total deregulation of the private sector could produce never-before-experienced rates of economic growth. Any doubt on this subject, it seems, smacked of dark, decadent Europeanism.
Moreover, none of the candidate gave a single hint of support for the idea that the risk of a fresh financial disaster might trump the demands for radical spending cuts in negotiations with Democrats over the debt limit.
So if the Republican candidates lined right up in favor of the most radically conservative economic positions since Barry Goldwater, did they distinguish themselves elsewhere? Not a lot. Bachmann, who needs no additional credibility among social conservative ultras, said she wouldn’t spend time as president intervening in state debates over same-sex marriage. Cain, who recently endorsed the idea that Planned Parenthood was pursuing a genocidal policy towards African-Americans, also had sufficient Christian Right street cred to say he wouldn’t make restoration of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell a big priority. Nobody was even vaguely pro-choice or pro-marriage-equality; it was all about tactics for achieving Christian Right goals. It said a lot about the horizons of conservative opinion these days that no one defended church-state separation, and Mitt Romney came across like Thomas Jefferson by demurring in response to the suggestions of Cain and Gingrich that American Muslims posed a risk of subjecting America to Sharia law (crowd-pleasers, by the way).
There was a faint glimmer of potential diversity on foreign policy and national defense, aside from Ron Paul’s predictable heresies: Bachmann attacked the Libyan engagement categorically, and Romney hinted that the Afghanistan war might need to be liquidated.
Insta-reaction to the debate suggested that Romney and Bachmann were the big winners; Romney because no one laid a glove on him, and Bachmann because she fit right into the mainstream of the debate, managing to seem engaging and reasonable. For those who know Bachmann well, that should be a bit scary.
But it’s also fitting. This debate was the most homogeneous discussion among presidential candidates I can remember, the more remarkable because all the candidates were many degrees to the right of where Republican candidates were in 2008 or 2000. For the first and probably last time in this cycle, I yearned for the presence of Rudy Giuliani, who at least would have created a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Throughout the debate, King tried to supply light moments by asking candidates boxers-or-briefs type questions that were unrelated to politics. The closest thing to a decisive answer was Gingrich’s emphatic endorsement of American Idol over Dancing With the Stars. This Republican presidential debate was like an Idol contest where everyone sings the same song, over and over.