With the second Democratic presidential debate on tap for tomorrow night, there were two very good observations today at the New Republic for how the candidates might make the proceedings more relevant and urgent. I offered commentary at Washington Monthly:

The first [TNR piece], by Suzy Khimm, involves the actual choices a Democratic president would face given the extremely high likelihood that Republicans will hang onto the House and perhaps the Senate. That will heavily be influenced by the appetite and aptitude of said president for taking executive actions, especially in immigration and criminal justice policy. Khimm notes that some especially difficult decisions will have to be made in the latter area, since (a) bipartisan legislative action is a lively if not easy prospect, and (b) Democrats are not completely united about what to do at the federal level on, say, marijuana legalization. And then there’s this problem:

Some on the left…disagree, fearing that going too big on executive action could come back to haunt Democrats over the long haul. As University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner has argued in the New Republic, Obama’s turn to executive action on immigration could end up empowering future Republican presidents to push for non-enforcement of many other laws and regulations–and there are plenty, including environmental regulations and labor protections, that Republicans would love to get their hands on.

Meanwhile, Brian Beutler looks at the same partisan landscape and deduces quite logically that the possibility of a Republican trifecta should make electability–specifically HRC’s electability–a much bigger issue in the Democratic contest than it has been up until now.

Sanders earned a lot of good will in the first debate by absolving Clinton of Republican attacks on her handling of State Department email. O’Malley has been consistently critical of Clinton not for being unelectable, but, if anything, for thinking too calculatingly about staying electable. “History celebrates profiles in courage, not profiles in convenience,” O’Malley said when Clinton endorsed a right to same-sex marriage earlier this year.
That’s the wrong approach for a serious candidate in the political climate Democrats face. If either Sanders or O’Malley can mount a convincing argument that Clinton–despite a vast name-recognition advantage, and unique appeal to female voters–isn’t the most electable Democrat, they are doing both themselves and their party a disservice by not airing it.

In other words, the enormous constraints facing a Democratic president that Khimm outlines make the implicit arguments of Sanders and O’Malley that HRC is not ideologically trustworthy could be a bit beside the point–especially if you adjudge Clinton as more willing or able to pursue executive action.
Beutler does not tell us how Clinton’s rivals can make electability a concern without being perceived as piling onto Republican attacks on her that (a) have no credibility among Democrats but (b) seem to be affecting indie perceptions of her. Indeed, he views this as a challenge so difficult–especially given Democratic fears of sexism in any left-bent criticism of HRC–that it might well push Sanders and O’Malley into conceding early if they cannot solve it. We’ll have to see if either rival to Clinton can begin to thread that needle in the next debate.

If fears of a Republican trifecta–and hence the urgency of electability–subside, then things will be looking up for Democrats sho nuff.

Democrats disappointed about the Kentucky elections have another off-cycle contest just ahead that is creating some unlikely optimism: the “jungle primary” runoff for governor in Louisiana. I wrote about the contest at Washington Monthly this week:

Looking at the polls (there are now three of them) showing Democrat John Bel Edwards with a double-digit lead over U.S. Sen. David Vitter in the November 21 Louisiana gubernatorial runoff, you’d figure Republicans would be focused on a unity effort to bring Vitter’s defeated GOP rivals into the tent. If so, the effort suffered a blow this morning, when Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne endorsed Edwards in the runoff. Kevin Litten of the Times-Pic has some background:

Although Dardenne originally indicated he wouldn’t offer an endorsement in the general election, the source said his thinking on the subject evolved over time. Dardenne and Edwards had been talking since election day (Oct. 24), when Dardenne and Republican candidate Scott Angelle were defeated by Edwards and U.S. Sen. David Vitter.
“He went from ‘No I won’t’ to ‘I would if…’ to ‘I might have to,’ to ‘Let’s do this now,'” the source said.
Both Dardenne and Angelle, were the subject of withering political attacks during the primary launched by U.S. Sen. David Vitter’s campaign and the super PACS supporting him. Angelle struck back hard, and Dardenne complained bitterly about the ads during the last two weeks of the campaign during debates before running an ad criticizing Vitter in the last days of the campaign.

Dardenne finished fourth in the primary with 15% of the vote.
Vitter countered with an endorsement from former Gov. Mike Foster, who left office in 2004. You’d normally figure a big target of any Republican unity campaign would be the sitting two-term Republican governor of the state. But according to the Baton Rouge Advocate, Bobby Jindal is in “not in a hurry” to endorse a successor:

Both candidates remaining in the governor’s race — Democrat John Bel Edwards and Republican David Vitter — have repeatedly criticized Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal on the campaign trail.
And it appears Jindal isn’t eager to pick which of the two he would prefer succeeds him in the Governor’s Office.
The National Review caught up with Jindal in Boulder, Colorado, on Wednesday and asked whom he prefers.
Jindal has frequently butted heads with both men.
“We haven’t made that decision yet,” Jindal, who is running for president, demurred when asked if he planned to endorse in the race, NRO reports. “That doesn’t mean we won’t. But we haven’t made that decision yet.”
It’s no secret that Jindal and Vitter have an icy relationship. And as chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Edwards has been one of Jindal’s most vocal opponents at the State Capitol.

Well, I guess bipartisanship’s not dead in Louisiana. Not only do you have a former Republican candidate for governor endorsing a Democrat, but nobody much likes Bobby Jindal.

So whatever you think is happening to support levels for Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, there’s not much doubt Dr. Ben Carson is enjoying a significant boom in support. At TPMCafe today, I examined the varying sources of his support, and warned Democrats not to dismiss his campaign too readily:

The conventional wisdom is that Carson is beloved for being a genial, soft-spoken figure and a non-politician with a distinguished biography. That may be true, though this does not necessarily distinguish him from many thousands of his fellow Americans. An equally obvious factor is that he is African American, and Republicans frustrated with being accused of white identity politics if not outright racism love being able to support a black candidate who is as conservative as they are.
Less obvious — and finally being recognized by political reporters spending time in Iowa — is that Carson is a familiar, beloved figure to conservative evangelicals, who have been reading his books for years.
Another factor, and one that I emphasized in my own take here two months ago, is that Carson is a devoted believer in a number of surprisingly resonant right-wing conspiracy theories, which he articulates via dog whistles that excite fellow devotees (particularly fans of Glenn Beck, who shares much of Carson’s world-view) without alarming regular GOP voters or alerting the MSM.
As David Corn of Mother Jones has patiently explained, the real key for understanding Carson (like Beck) is via the works of Cold War-era John Birch Society member and prolific pseudo-historian W. Cleon Skousen, who stipulated that America was under siege from the secret domestic agents of global Marxism who masqueraded as liberals. Carson has also clearly bought into the idea that these crypto-commies are systematically applying the deceptive tactics of Saul Alinsky in order to destroy the country from within–a theme to which he alluded in the famous National Prayer Breakfast speech that launched his political career and in the first Republican presidential candidates’ debate.
It’s not clear how many Carson supporters hear the dog whistles and understand what his constant references to “political correctness” connote (it’s his all-purpose term for the efforts of America’s secret enemies to mock or silence cognoscenti like himself, Beck and Skousen), but added with his other advantages, it fills out his coalition with depth as well as breadth.
And that is why the broadly held assumption that Carson will, like 2012 candidate Herman Cain, quickly fade from contention as voting nears is worth rethinking. For one thing, Carson’s race is just one source of his appeal, so identifying him with the last black conservative to run for president is highly questionable.
Cain was not a revered figure before running in 2012, beyond those who listened when he sat in for an Atlanta-based radio host. He also was not exactly a non-politician, having run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate. But the most important reason to stop identifying Carson with Cain is simple: Cain’s loss of his once-high poll ratings were not caused by a voters getting tired with a “flavor of the month” or realizing his slim qualifications; he was brought down by a series of sexual allegations that escalated from multiple claims of sexual harassment to a long-term extramarital affair. Cain never admitted any wrong-doing, but he also never convincingly rebutted the allegations, and all the smoke convinced many observers there might be fire. He left the race on his own terms, but after losing most of his altitude.
There’s zero reason to think Carson has any such skeletons in his closet. The one thing we know about his background that is politically dangerous is his testimonial work for a subsequently fined nutritional supplement company. But unless it turns out he was paid a lot more than seems to be the case, he’s only in hot water if he cannot soon keep his story straight. Being a straight shooter is extremely important to his image.
He seems to have successfully back-pedaled on his one easy-to-understand policy heresy, a proposal to replace Medicare and Medicaid with heavily subsidized health savings accounts, which he now describes as an “option” for beneficiaries (that, too, is problematic, but not as much as his original “idea”).
So there remains what should actually disqualify Carson: his extremist, paranoid “world-view” which treats regular boring old center-left liberals as conscious and systematically deceitful would-be destroyers of this country bent on imposing a Marxist tyranny via “politically correct” suppression of free speech and confiscation of guns.
There’s unquestionably a constituency for this point of view, but we may never know whether it would outnumber the Republicans baffled or horrified by it until such time as one of his rivals or the heretofore clueless media start talking about it. If they don’t pretty soon, then one theory of the 2016 GOP nominating process could come true: conservatives want to rerun the 1964 elections, and they’ve finally found their Barry Goldwater.

This is simply not a good year to assume anything conventional from Republican voters.

There’s a general assumption in the air in Washington that the two-year budget deal and the advent of Paul Ryan as Speaker means we can all stop worrying about conservative-generated chaos in Congress until after next year’s elections. That could be premature, as I discussed today at Washington Monthly:

For all the “cleaning the barn” talk about the two-year “budget deal” that cleared the Senate in the wee hours this morning, it does not actually resolve all the troublesome spending issues or eliminate the possibility of conservative mischief. As David Dayen notes at the Prospect, while the deal set overall spending levels, is does not obviate the need for actual appropriations bills.

That means we’re not finished with opportunities for hostage-taking, as conservatives can still hijack the budget process to earn long-sought victories. Attached to all of the existing appropriations bills are riders unrelated to the budget, affecting everything from social to environmental to financial regulatory policy.
In September, Public Citizen and hundreds of other organizations outlined just a sample of those riders. For example, the appropriations bills on offer would cancel all federal funding for Planned Parenthood. They would prevent enforcement of a proposed Labor Department regulation to mandate investment advisers to operate in their clients’ best interest. They would cancel the Federal Communication Commission’s net neutrality rules. They would stop environmental regulations on clean water, endangered species, and air-quality standards for ozone, and block an Occupational Safety and Health Administration rule on toxic silica dust in the workplace. They would exempt flavored cigarettes currently on the market from regulation. They would halt the Securities and Exchange Commission from completing rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose political spending. They would block rules limiting the hours long-haul truckers can spend on the road without rest. And they would change hundreds of other rules, regulations, and funding priorities….
The White House, in its statement on the budget deal, said that it would work with Congress “to enact responsible, full-year FY 2016 appropriations–without ideological riders–based on this agreement.” But there is nothing in the deal that prevents Congress from sending appropriations with these riders and daring the president to veto them. Everybody, therefore, has the same choices in front of them that existed before John Boehner announced his resignation.

Well, not all the same choices are available, since the use of the debt limit to extort policy changes is indeed off the table. But David’s right: the specter of a government shutdown over conservative demands to “defund” Planned Parenthood hasn’t been defused, and if as expected there’s another omnibus appropriations bill covering multiple federal agencies it will represent quite the hostage for such demands.
You can make the argument that the dynamics which made the budget deal possible–you know, the bipartisan desire to get to the elections without fresh crises in Congress–will inevitably prevent a big collision over appropriations, much less a shutdown. But keep in mind the only way out of an impasse will be the same Hastert-Rule-violating coalition of House Democrats and a minority of Republicans, and one of the prices Paul Ryan paid for that spanking new gavel he wields was a pledge to take the Hastert Rule more seriously.

Anyone assuming the furies lashing conservatives towards a strategy of maximum confrontation have been quelled may be mistaking a tactical quiet-before-the-storm for genuinely good weather.

For all the talk of “winners” and “losers” in the CNBC Republican presidential candidates’ debate last night, there was one near no-show: the big two-year bipartisan budget deal that passed the House a few hours before the debate began. I discussed this anomaly at TPMCafe:

Wednesday the most important economic/fiscal policy development of the entire presidential cycle occurred in Washington: The GOP-controlled House approved a two-year budget deal that takes away every conservative point of leverage until after the elections. It confirmed for the rank-and-file conservative “base” every suspicion about the gutless and treacherous Republican Establishment.
Yet in a GOP presidential debate Wednesday evening, the budget deal barely came up. Instead, for a variety of reasons, the candidates mostly took turns attacking the big dumb abstraction of Big Government as the cause of every conceivable problem, with Hillary Clinton and the feckless CNBC debate moderators getting beaten up nearly as much as Washington.
Perhaps it is telling that the budget deal was only emphasized by Rand Paul, a desperate candidate who had already announced he was going to filibuster the deal in the Senate when it comes up for a vote Thursday. Ted Cruz mentioned it, too, but only because it fits seamlessly into his usual rap. And John Kasich denounced it in passing but only to contrast it with his own alleged fiscal accomplishments way, way back in the day. Presumably the issue didn’t “work” for anyone else, and perhaps they were relieved to retreat to the minutiae of their tax plans and the vaguest and broadest suggestions that any federal involvement in any area of domestic government is to be opposed.

Maybe the candidates were just too deep into debate prep this week to notice the ground had shifted in Washington. I just don’t know.

Suffice it to say that the biggest winner of the entire day and night was Paul Ryan, whose two-faced response to a budget deal designed to make life easy for him received a tepid rebuke from Paul but nothing more. Unless there’s a real surprise in the Senate, it appears the GOP, including its presidential candidates, is ready to find some alternative to debt limit defaults and government shutdowns in order to smite its foes. Hearing them all sound like they want to go back to the governing philosophy of the Coolidge administration made me wonder if the biggest threat of all is that they might win next November.