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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: July 2011

Silver: Conservative Domination of GOP Verified by Data

Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times affirms the meme that the GOP is pretty much ensnared by its more conservative faction. While this conclusion is no big shocker to most political observers, Silver’s data-driven analysis, as presented in his chart “Ideological Distribution of People Voting Republican for U.S. House,” is impressive and instructive:

The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group. That group, of course, is conservatives. It isn’t a bad thing to be in favor with conservatives: by some definitions they make up about 40 percent of voters. But the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer nonconservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.
The chart, culled from exit poll data, shows the ideological disposition of those people who voted Republican for the House of Representatives in the elections of 1984 through 2010. Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

Silver notes the pivotal role of disproportionate conservative turnout in last year’s midterms, and the unfortunate consequences for Dems:

This was fortunate for Republicans, because they lost moderate voters to Democrats by 13 percentage points (and liberals by 82 percentage points). Had the ideological composition of the electorate been the same in 2010 as in 2008 or 2006, the Republicans and Democrats would have split the popular vote for the House about evenly — but as it was, Republicans won the popular vote for the House by about 7 percentage points and gained 63 seats.
Many of the G.O.P. victories last year were extremely close. I calculate that, had the national popular vote been divided evenly, Democrats would have lost just 27 seats instead of 63. Put differently, the majority of Republican gains last year were probably due to changes in relative turnout rather than people changing their minds about which party’s approach they preferred.

Addressing “the enthusiasm gap within the Republican party,” Silver cites a Pew Research poll conducted a few days before the election which indicated that,

Among conservatives who are either registered as Republicans or who lean toward the Republican party, about 3 out of 4 were likely to have voted in 2010, the Pew data indicated. The fraction of likely voters was even higher among those who called themselves “very conservative:” 79 percent.
By contrast, only about half of moderate or liberal Republicans were likely voters, according to Pew’s model. That is about the same as the figure for Democrats generally: — about half of them were likely voters, with little difference among conservative, moderate and liberal Democrats.
So the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010.

Silver cites data indicating that “Republicans are still fairly unpopular,” but adds,

…As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.
Presidential elections are different: they tend to have a more equivocal turnout. The G.O.P. can turn out its base but it has not converted many other voters to its cause, and President Obama’s approval ratings remain passable although not good. The Republicans will need all their voters to turn out — including their moderates — to be an even-money bet to defeat him.

Silver believes that, if Romney is nominated, he would have a clear shot at turning out the GOP moderates, while Bachmann could alienate enough of them to give Obama victory.
At his TPM Editors blog, Josh Marshall applauds Silver’s analysis of conservative domination of the GOP, but adds that it shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook for their failure to take advantage of it:

When I castigate the Democrats for not having a clear message or President Obama for not having an “outside game” in the debt fight, readers will often write in to say that I’m ignoring the fact that the modern GOP is a coherent and highly ideological party while the Democrats simply are not. So Republicans are inherently more able to function as a unified force with a unified message than the Dems. In fact, these folks will argue, it’s not even right to talk about “the Dems” because that buys into the illusion that they’re a party like the GOP as opposed to a coalition of constituencies.
For my money, I don’t find this a sufficient explanation. I do think the Dems are consistently guilty of what amounts to a political failure — the failure to devise and push a consistent message and play on the weaknesses of their foes. I’ve made these points so often that there’s no need (and probably appetite) for me to restate them here. However, it is important to note these structural realities that create a genuine tilt in the playing field of our politics, one that makes it easier for 35% to 40% of the electorate to dominate the country by having virtually total control over one of the two parties.

“Still,” Marshall concludes, “…Politics matters. And on that count the Dems continue to be captive and captured by a weakness it is in their collective power — and for a president to a great degree individual power — to change.”


Bowers: Dems Have Cash Edge in WI Recall

From Daily Kos, Chris Bowers reports that labor unions and small donors have given Democratic challengers a significant edge in fundraising in six campaigns to recall Republican state senators who supported eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public workers:

…Democrats have an edge in cash on hand in four of the six campaigns. It’s pretty unusual for challengers to lead incumbents in cash on hand, much less for the majority of challengers to lead, so this is a very strong showing for the Democratic candidates.
What’s particularly impressive is how the Democratic candidates built this advantage. According to a press release from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the average donation to the six candidates ranged from a low of $19.27 for Nancy Nusbaum (who faces Republican Robert Cowles), to a high of $37.14 for Sandy Pasch (who is up against Republican Alberta Darling). Without Pasch, the highest average donation to a Democratic candidate was $23.99 to Jennifer Shilling. Overall, the six Democrats raised $1,556,000 from about 70,000 donors who gave an average of roughly $22.

Bowers quotes from Tom Tolan’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on the unions contribution to recall fund-raising:

political action committee formed by a coalition of unions active in state recall races says it has raised more than $4 million in the past six weeks, and has $2 million on hand to help Democrats.
…In a filing prepared for the state Government Accountability Board, We Are Wisconsin listed more than $3 million in donations from the national AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. The group also received contributions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars – both cash and in-kind – from units of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union; and the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Bowers reports that “We Are Wisconsin volunteers have knocked on over 100,000 doors across the state” and more than 100,000 donors “have given to the recall effort in some fashion” and adds,

…It is particularly heartwarming that in the Wisconsin recall elections, the Democratic spearhead is being forged almost entirely by small donors, volunteers on the ground, and unions. Given that this remains, by far, the fight in 2011 with the most potential to build progressive power, perhaps it had to unfold this way or else the fight would not have happened at all.

As Bowers concludes, “We do not fight an infinitely powerful opponent. We really can win if we stick together and push back hard. So far, in Wisconsin we’re doing just that.”


The GOP Feedback Loop

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the civics-book perspective on the American political system, presidential elections help make government work. They allow nominees to set a national agenda for the two major parties that transcend the regional differences and messy constituency-tending that so often occurs in Congress. And they pull the parties towards the political center, where swing voters live and bipartisanship thrives. This is made even more likely by occasions where you happen to have two candidates–say, an incumbent president and a challenger who is either a consensus nominee or a party leader in Congress–with a stake in successful governance and an eye trained on the general election. But the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest is showing the flip-side of that proposition: In a highly competitive primary field where most of the candidates are not in federal office, and all are campaigning avidly against “Washington,” they are not exerting pressure on the party and its representatives in Congress to move towards “the center,” and, in many cases, they are pushing in the opposite direction.
The preeminent example of this dangerous feedback loop between the GOP presidential candidates and Republicans in Washington is the ongoing stalemate over the budget and the debt limit. The maximalist conservative position on the issue, called the “cut, cap and balance” pledge, was originally staked out by the House Study Committee and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. Designed to create an air-tight formula against any compromise with Democrats on the debt limit, the pledge includes two different methods for permanently limiting federal spending to a drastically lower percentage of GDP than currently prevails, a California-style constitutional provision requiring a super-majority for any tax increases, and a demand for immediate spending cuts beyond anything ever seriously discussed in Congress. Despite the fact that the pledge originated with extremists in Congress, nearly all the presidential candidates rushed to attach their names to it. As it stands, no fewer than six of them, including supposed “moderate” Mitt Romney, have signed on. Other than Jon Huntsman, the only holdout is Michele Bachmann, who is trying to stake out a position to the right of “cut, cap and balance” by making repeal of ObamaCare a precondition for any debt limit increase or budget deal.
What began as a fringe pledge, in other words, was soon elevated to Republican orthodoxy by the embrace it received from GOP presidential candidates competing to claim the “true conservative” mantle. In this way, Republican ultras in Congress are successfully using the presidential field to increase pressure on their own leadership to abandon negotiations with the White House and congressional Democrats. And with the Iowa Caucuses dominated by hard-core conservatives, and Senator DeMint standing astride next year’s all-important South Carolina presidential primary, it’s no surprise the strategy is working.
This upward ratcheting of pressure is also illustrated by yet another “pledge” recently demanded of presidential candidates by the upstart anti-abortion group, the Susan B. Anthony List. Breathtaking in its scope, the SBA pledge involves a commitment to appoint only certified “pro-life” figures to specific federal cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, support for sweeping bans on federal funding for any entity or contractor involved in entirely legal abortion services, and an agreement to promote and sign a federal version of the “fetal pain” bills, which ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in defiance of past Supreme Court decisions, that are currently being enacted in several states. Confronted by the pledge, all but two presidential candidates–Mitt Romney and Herman Cain–promptly signed it, and the holdouts hastened to express their firm support for the complete abolition of abortion rights. The Republican line on abortion had once again shifted even further right, if possible, from where it had been before.
Finally, the GOP candidates’ reluctant embrace of Paul Ryan’s radical proposals to end Medicare as we know it has ensured that the contours of Ryan’s unpopular plan will continue to hold sway over the Republican Party going into 2012. Initially, the candidates cast a wary eye towards Ryan’s plan, even as nearly all House Republicans (and later Senate Republicans) voted for it. While praising the Wisconsin representative and making vague noises about their own determination to control entitlement spending, the candidates preserved their right to issue their own proposals in good time. But then Newt Gingrich spoiled the game by openly criticizing Ryan’s treatment of Medicare as “right-wing social engineering” that hadn’t a chance at public support, and in the ensuing furor the stampede began. One by one, Republican candidates, including a chastened Gingrich, lined up in support of Ryan’s entire budget, thereby making a virtual abolition of Medicare a party-wide stance that Republicans now cannot possibly hope to live down. (Indeed, the desire to obtain bipartisan cover for radical changes to Medicare is probably the only factor other than Wall Street pressure that is keeping alive congressional Republican interest in a budget deal with Obama).
It’s an open question whether Republican candidates are concerned about, or even aware of, the risks they are running by colluding in their party’s ideological bender, both in terms of their chances in the general election and in seeking to serve as president if elected. Mitt Romney, who is in the anomalous position of being transformed from the true conservative champion of 2008 to today’s moderate establishment candidate, even as he has become tangibly more conservative on the issues, probably understands it. But most conservatives appear convinced that 2012 will be a referendum on Barack Obama and the general direction of the country–one that Republicans can’t lose as long as their base turns out. And in the meantime, the complicity of the GOP presidential candidates in right-wing efforts to “stiffen the spine” of Republican officeholders against the temptations of bipartisan governance is contributing to genuine risks for the country.


TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira: Public Wants Action on Housing

It seems to have escaped MSM attention, but congressional dithering about the depressed housing market and the home foreclosure epidemic could be a sleeper issue with voters. As TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira observes in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages:

…In a new CBS/New York Times poll, 53 percent say the federal government should be helping people who are having trouble paying their mortgages compared to 40 percent who disagree.
And a solid plurality (45 percent) say the government should be doing more to help the housing market improve compared to just 16 percent who think the government should be doing less and 30 percent who believe the government is currently doing the right amount.

As Teixeira concludes, “The sorry state of the housing market may be off the current congressional agenda. But it remains very much alive among the many who feel its effects everyday.”


What Do Conservatives Really Want? And Does It Really Matter?

At TNR today, Jonathan Chait asks an important and very basic question: in doing things like supporting radical cuts in federal transportation spending, are Republicans actually expressing their vision of what the federal government should or shouldn’t do?

Do they think we’re overinvested in infrastructure? That if we reduce government involvement, the private sector will step in? Or that the economic benefits of maintaining our physical infrastructure — or, more realistically, falling behind at a slower pace — are simply smaller than the economic benefits of keeping taxes low?

There is, I suspect, no one answer. Some conservatives have very radical ideas about legitimate areas of, or levels for, federal involvement in this or domestic function. Others don’t. But particularly when the president is a Democrat, and they don’t have genuine control of Congress, they feel no particular compunction to vote in a way that reflects any honest plan for the country. Domestic spending is too high, so votes to cut it, however nonsensical when it comes to an coherent view of federal responsibility, are always the right thing to do.
The same pattern is even more apparent on issues like health care. Do Republicans all share the view that health care isn’t enumerated as a federal responsibility in the Constitution and therefore any federal health care program is illegitimate? No, and the ones who do are unlikely to talk about it in public. Do all the others reject the idea that universal access to health care is a worthy and legitimate public goal? That’s harder to say, though it was certainly fashionable pretty recently for Republicans to claim they had plans to achieve something like universal coverage, even if the details made the claim highly questionable.
But what all Republicans can agree on is that Democratic efforts to achieve universal health coverage, even if they are based on plans embraced by Republicans in the not-too-distant past, are terrible and need to be repealed immediately. As noted in my previous post, Republicans seem to feel little if any responsibility to outline what they’d do the day after ObamaCare is discarded.
Finally, there’s the Big Bertha of domestic policy disputes, the demand by conservatives for radical changes to Medicare, Medicaid and (more muted, at the moment at least) Social Security. Again, some conservatives clearly think the whole New Deal/Great Society legacy was fundamentally misbegotten and unconstitutional. Others (viz. Mitch Daniels) won’t say that, but will say these programs are inappropriate and unaffordable going forward. And still others claim that initiatives to radically reduce “entitlement” benefits (via a Medicaid block grant, Medicare vouchers, or Social Security privatization) are the only way to “save” these programs. Still, conservatives are more than willing to come together in support of proposals like Paul Ryan’s budget that get them part of the way or all the way towards their ultimate objectives.
So the question remains: does it really matter what conservatives really want in the way of ideal policies? Yes and no. Where conservatives are, as in the case of politicians like Michele Bachmann and Jim DeMint, among others, demonstrably in the grip of radical ideologies that are designed to produce a country characterized by theocracy, contempt for people in need, unfettered corporate power, and rampant militarism, then of course, progressives should make that clear. And where conservatives are demonstrably dishonest about their intentions, as with many “right-to-life” activists who weep crocodile tears for the “victims” of late-term abortions in the service of an agenda aimed at a total repeal of reproductive rights, including the use of many forms of contraception–progressives should expose the charade early and often. It’s also important to reveal what’s happening when Republican pols, whether or not they believe much of anything at all, choose to embrace the policies (or accept the litmus tests) of radicals strictly in order to achieve political power.
Beyond that, it’s probably a waste of time to worry too much about what conservatives actually want. It’s better to focus on showing what their polices would actually produce in real-world consequences. That’s bad enough.


GOP Disarray On “Repeal and Replace”

There’s a useful article by Jennifer Haberkorn up at Politico today about the sudden demise of congressional activity on the GOP’s supposed top priority of “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act. And while there’s a lot of talk about the Democratic Senate representing an absolute bar to action on this topic, it’s also clear Republicans aren’t exactly united on either the “repeal” or “replace” agenda, as Michele Bachmann’s BFF Steve King makes plain:

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), one of the House’s most ardent supporters of repealing or defunding the law at all costs, says it has become more difficult to get the attention of House leaders.
“I can’t get any traction,” he said of his effort to repeal or defund the law. “You can’t create something in this Congress unless leadership approves it.”
He questioned whether Republican leaders are willing to repeal the whole law if it means also repealing some of its popular provisions.
“There’s a little bit of an undercurrent that I pick up among well-positioned people in this Congress who think there could be some redeeming qualities of Obamacare,” pointing to statements Republican leadership have made in support of a handful of the law’s policies, such as banning insurers from denying patients because of preexisting conditions or allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance through age 26.

This “undercurrent” is more obvious in the reluctance of Republicans to embrace any sort of coherent plan for dealing with the health care system generally. Yes, most of them support an agenda with common features, including medical malpractice “reform,” interstate sales of insurance policies, replacement of the deduction for employer-sponsored health care with an individual tax credit, and high-risk “pools” for the uninsured, all accompanied by some strategy for privatizing Medicare and dumping Medicaid on the states. But few Republicans want to come to grips with a clear commitment on federal, or indeed public, responsibility for affordable health care. That’s probably because the ascendant forces in the conservative movement frankly think of health care as a consumer service like any other, which the government has no real business (and the federal government has no constitutional authority) to be involved in.
So it’s tough to get intra-Republican agreement on a “replacement” system, and that in turn makes “repeal” a tough sell politically, and would so even if Republicans had the votes to pull it off.
And it’s easier, of course, to be all things to all voters, posing simultaneously as the defenders of the status quo on issues like Medicare benefits and physicians’ prerogatives, even as they plan radical steps to decimate Medicare and go back to a 1950s model of health care as primarily an individual responsibility to be paid for out-of-pocket, without insurance at all.
Democrats have a continuing responsibility to smoke them out on all these contradictions.


How the Boycott Dumped Beck

Mark Engler has a revealing post up at Dissent, “Boycott Power and the Fall of Glenn Beck,” which ought to open up a new era of political activism for those who are looking for ways around tiresome political gridlock. As Engler explains Beck’s demise as King of wingnut TV:

One can find a variety of explanations for his departure. Observers invariably note Beck’s declining ratings. (According to the New Republic, his viewership fell “from an average of 2.9 million in January 2010 to 1.8 million in January 2011.”) Some also cite political reasons for him and Fox splitting ways. Hendrik Hertzberg speculated at the New Yorker that Beck was bad for morale at the network because he became an embarrassment for those on staff who consider themselves “news professionals.” More recently, Leslie Savan argued at the Nation that Beck was expendable because “he’s served his purpose for Fox and its subsidiary, the Republican Party.” Once the backlash against Obama was well underway and more respectable faces of extreme conservatism were in power–folks like Paul Ryan and Scott Walker–Beck was no longer needed.
These things may have been part of the story. But, if we’re handing out credit, I think we need to take time to recognize the innovative and relentless boycott that set out to strip Glenn Beck of his sponsors. The boycott was amazingly effective at doing just that–ultimately convincing several hundred corporations (including major names such as Wal-Mart, GEICO, and Procter & Gamble) to agree not to advertise on his show.
The online advocacy group ColorOfChange.org first launched the boycott in August 2009, after Beck stated that President Obama was a racist with a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” Following this, the activists did a great job of documenting the crazy and offensive things that Beck would say, and then presenting advertisers with the evidence. They got 285,000 people to sign a petition to Beck’s sponsors, and they used online tools to transmit people’s concerns to the targeted corporations. Advertisers, generally averse to controversy, left in droves.

Impressive, and it gets better. As Engler notes “ColorOfChange.org crunched some numbers and estimated that the boycott was costing Fox News more than $500,000 per week.” The boycott was shrewdly targeted, as Engler observes:

There are some lessons here about what makes a good boycott. The ColorOfChange.org drive wasn’t about getting the average American not to watch the show. It was different from the endless array of lefty boycotts that tell people not to shop at this store or buy that product, campaigns that–beyond those commandments–have no real plan for winning their demands or even for quantifying the impact they’ve made. The Beck boycott was far more strategic. Its organizers identified wary advertisers as their point of leverage, targeted specific corporations that were buying ads, and used the announcement of each new company that agreed to withdraw as a way to build momentum. By March 2011 the New York Daily News reported that “the number of advertisers currently boycotting Beck’s program is now closing in at 400.”

Engler notes that MSM explanations for Beck’s demise credit myriad factors and tended to diss the boycott. But Engler makes a strong case, and activists looking for new avenues to battle the right wing obstructionists should give his piece a read.
MLK once said advocates of social justice should do two things in every campaign: register voters and conduct boycotts. In recent years progressives have done some voter registration (not enough) but very little boycotting. Apparently the time is right to pick up the slack.


Brooks a Mine Canary?

In an earlier post today, J.P. Green noted that one of the Beltway’s most durable curse-on-both-houses “centrist” pundits, WaPo’s Richard Cohen, has gotten volubly fed up with today’s Republican Party. More remarkably, the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who has actually been something of a cheerleader for the GOP throughout his journalistic career, went around the bend today and denounced the negotiating posture of congressional Republicans on the debt limit as reflecting a party that “may no longer be a normal party.”

Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them that a default on the debt would have calamitous effects, far worse than raising tax revenues a bit. But the members of this movement refuse to believe it….
If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.
And they will be right.

This is really something, coming from Brooks, who often soars above the partisan fray like an eagle, but then eventually finds his way back to the tactical positions of the GOP like a homing pigeon. Now he’s basically saying the inmates have taken over the asylum, and predictably, he’s getting pounded by the conservative commentariat for his pains.
Brooks could be the proverbial mine canary in terms of MSM perceptions of who is and who isn’t being “reasonable” in Washington right now. That won’t directly affect the actual struggle for power, but it would be nice for a change to see that the ability of the Right to shift the “center” simply by escalating its demands is not infinite.


Is the GOP Bound for ‘Political Jonestown’?

Once upon a time the Republican Party included a few widely-respected leaders who valued reason and flexibility — names like Eisenhower, Javitz, Weicker and a few others come to mind. Hell, Nixon was a paragon of sanity compared to some of the loons running the GOP asylum now. if this sounds overstated, read Richard Cohen’s Sunday WaPo column “A Grand Old Cult,” in which he explains:

To become a Republican, one has to take a pledge. It is not enough to support the party or mouth banalities about Ronald Reagan; one has to promise not to give the government another nickel. This is called the “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” issued by Americans for Tax Reform, an organization headed by the chirpy Grover Norquist. He once labeled the argument that an estate tax would affect only the very rich “the morality of the Holocaust.” Anyone can see how singling out the filthy rich and the immensely powerful and asking them to ante up is pretty much the same as Auschwitz and that sort of thing.
…Almost all the GOP’s presidential candidates have taken this oath, swearing before God and Grover Norquist to cease thinking on their own, never to exercise independent judgment and, if necessary, to destroy the credit of the United States, raise the cost of borrowing and put the government deeper into the hole.

Cohen notes the role of revisionist history and denial in the Republicans’ increasingly unhinged worldview:

…The hallmark of a cult is to replace reason with feverish belief. This the GOP has done when it comes to the government’s ability to stimulate the economy. History proves this works — it’s how the Great Depression ended — but Republicans will not acknowledge it.
The Depression in fact deepened in 1937 when Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to balance the budget and was ended entirely by World War II, which, besides being a noble cause, was also a huge stimulus program. Here, though, is Sen. Richard Shelby mouthing GOP dogma: Stimulus programs “did not bring us out of the Depression,” he recently told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour, but “the war did.” In other words, a really huge stimulus program hugely worked. Might not a more modest one succeed modestly? Shelby ought to follow his own logic.

‘Logic’ may not be the best word to describe GOP thinking in the second decade of the 21st century. Cohen notes a similar pattern of denial with respect to Republican policies on abortion and global warning, and adds,

…Independent thinkers, stop right here! If you believe in global warming, revenue enhancement, stimulus programs, the occasional need for abortion or even the fabulist theories of the late Charles Darwin, then either stay home — or lie.
This intellectual rigidity has produced a GOP presidential field that’s a virtual political Jonestown. The Grand Old Party, so named when it really did evoke America, has so narrowed its base that it has become a political cult. It is a redoubt of certainty over reason and in itself significantly responsible for the government deficit that matters most: leadership. That we can’t borrow from China.

The problem for Democrats is that, when Republicans become irrational proponents of discredited ideas and failed polices, there is not much incentive for Dems to up their game. Dems are not being challenged to respond to good arguments so much as tantrums by intellectually-constipated ideologues. The public gets cheated out of an enlightening debate and everybody loses.
What puzzles is why all of the Republicans have guzzled the Koolaid. Why hasn’t it dawned on the party’s brighter bulbs, perhaps Senator Lugar or, maybe Scott Brown or Huntsman that “Hmm, I could really separate myself from the pack of idjits by taking things to a more rational level”? All indications are that the public would like to see a little more flexibility from Republicans.
There may well come a point when the Republicans’ impressive party discipline starts to look like pointless obstructionism to swing voters. The public can see that, so far only one party is compromising. If sanity prevails, the Republicans’ unspoken meme that “we’re 100 percent right, and they’re 100 percent wrong, so we won’t give an inch” can’t play much longer without diminishing returns.


The Hidden Meaning Behind Michele Bachmann’s “Constitutional Conservatism”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Michele Bachmann really wants you to know she’s a “constitutional conservative.” The term is featured prominently on her web ads. She mentioned it three times in her announcement speech. It’s in the first sentence of her official bio. But what exactly does it mean? While the term can signify different things to different people, it turns out it’s especially important to Bachmann. As a candidate who doesn’t want to get confined to a social conservative ghetto in an election year that is revolving around fiscal and economic issues–and as someone with a well-earned reputation for extremism–her strong “constitutional conservative” stance indicates, but only to those who are trained to listen, a decidedly radical agenda that is at least as congenial to rabid social conservatives as it is to property-rights absolutists or anti-tax zealots. In short, it enables her to run as a middle-of-the-road conservative who just wants to get rid of ObamaCare and balance the budget, even as she lets the initiated know she has other, more ambitious, plans for the country.
Despite the growing ubiquity of the “constitutional conservative” identifier in the Tea Party movement and the right-wing blogosphere, there’s no authorized definition of the term and some who proudly wear the label doubtless disagree about its meaning. Adam J. White of the Weekly Standard attributes its recent emergence to an influential 2009 essay in the Wall Street Journal by the Hoover Institution’s Peter Berkowitz. The Berkowitz formulation did indeed focus on the need for Republicans to return to first principles, with “the constitutional order” providing the key optic. But he also called “moderation” in the pursuit of liberty an essential constitutional concept, which is not a term one would normally associate with Michele Bachmann or Constitution-brandishing Tea Party activists.
Among this crowd, it more commonly connotes an allegiance to a set of fixed–eternally fixed, for the more religiously inclined–ideas of how government should operate in every field. Constitutional conservatives want to distinguish themselves from the more tradition-bound type of conservatives who adapt to changing social and economic needs and, for that matter, to the perceived wants and needs of the populace. They rarely come right out and denounce democracy, of course, but it’s clear they think their liberties are endangered by people who, say, would like government-guaranteed access to affordable health care.
Conservative polemicist and radio host Mark Levin offered an exceptionally clear explanation of the connection between this kind of affinity for the Constitution as the sum of political wisdom and a degree of hostility to democracy:

[F]or the Founding Fathers, individual liberty was not possible without private property rights. For the Founding Fathers, the only legitimate government was not only one that was instituted with the consent of the people, but one that would preserve and protect the individual’s right to property. Jefferson talked about it, talked about ‘tyranny of the legislature.’ So the consent of the governed is only part of it.

Levin’s words are an appropriate reminder that constitutional conservatives think of America as a sort of ruined paradise, bestowed a perfect form of government by its wise Founders but gradually imperiled by the looting impulses of voters and politicians. In their backwards-looking vision, constitutional conservatives like to talk about the inalienable rights conferred by the Founders–not specifically in the Constitution, as a matter of fact, but in the Declaration of Independence, which is frequently and intentionally conflated with the Constitution as the part of the Founders’ design. It’s from the Declaration, for instance, that today’s conservatives derive their belief that “natural rights” (often interpreted to include quasi-absolute property rights or the prerogatives of the traditional family), as well as the “rights of the unborn,” were fundamental to the American political experiment and made immutable by their divine origin.
This Restorationist character of constitutional conservatism was nicely captured by The Economist‘s pseudonymous American reporter w.w. in a commentary on Bachmann’s Iowa launch event:

[I]f one bothers to really think about it, constitutional conservativism, as construed by Ms Bachmann and her boosters, might be better labeled “constitutional restorationism”, which I think more clearly conveys the idea of a return to the system of government laid out in the constitution, interpreted as the authors intended. But this idea, if taken really seriously, is staggeringly radical.

No kidding. But that’s where the dog whistle aspect of calling yourself a constitutional conservative comes into play. The obvious utility of the label is that it hints at a far more radical agenda than meets the untrained eye, all the while elevating the proud bearer above the factional disputes of the conservative movement’s economic and cultural factions.