In all the brouhaha over the president’s remarks at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, the intra-Christian dynamic was sometimes lost. I tried to explain this at TPMCafe:

[B]eyond the context of Christian-Islamic rivalry and comparative assessments of religious violence, Obama was also quietly but forcefully continuing an intra-Christian argument over clarity of God’s Will and whether those who assert they know it in detail are exhibiting faithful obedience or arrogant self-righteousness. There’s no question where the president stands on the question:

I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt–not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

For Obama, as for many liberal Protestants, the “fear of God” connotes not only tolerance of other believers (and nonbelievers), but separation of church and state, which he treats as a practical application of the Golden Rule. And that, more than the specific challenge of how to speak about Islamic terrorists, enrages many conservative Christians, both “traditionalist” Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Consider this reaction from conservative blogger, radio talk host and Fox News “personality” Erick Erickson, who is also taking classes at a conservative Calvinist seminary:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is. He took his first step in doing so yesterday in a speech reeking with contempt for faith in general and Christianity in particular…
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Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6) Christ himself is truth. When we possess Christ, we possess truth. The President is a moral relativist. It was clear in his whole speech…. To suggest that everyone can have some version of God and some version of truth is worldly babbling, not Christianity.

In this respect Obama is, consciously or unconsciously, standing in for liberal Americans–or to some extent, though the overlap is not total, “mainline” Protestants or “modern” Catholics–who do not subscribe to biblical inerrancy, spiritual exclusivity, or the sense that Christians are a besieged or even persecuted community marked by conservative cultural commitments that separate them from a wicked world. Such Christians are quite a large group, even though they are often ignored by secular observers who buy the idea that the only “authentic” Christians (or “Christian music,” or “Christian films”) are conservative. More than 26 million belong to the “mainline” Protestant denominations, and more than 60 percent of American Catholics favor some or a great deal of adjustment to tradition in accordance with “modern needs” (57 percent oppose church teachings on same-sex marriage, to cite one example of the “moral relativism” that involves). And after decades of hearing that liberal Christianity is dying, there’s actually fresh evidence that among millennials the much-discussed trend towards unbelief disguises an even sharper trend towards “moderate” positions among the majority that are believers.

It’s important for both believers and non-believers in the progressive camp to fight the effort to claim Christianity for conservatism, so long as the United States continues to be the most religiously inclined advanced industrial nation in the world. In that respect, even those progressives who are annoyed by Barack Obama’s tendency to lend legitimacy to those who deny the legitimacy of his own faith owe him some support on this point.

We all remember when Mitt Romney outsmarted himself in 2012 by calling his approach to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as “self-deportation”–a strategy of making life so miserable for the undocumented, via all kinds of petty harassment and denial of hope, that they’d find their way across the border without the messy expedients of police dogs, cattle prods or boxcars.
It worked pretty well for Mitt in the GOP nomination contest, but was a significant part of the reason he lost the Latino vote by 44 points in November and also burnished his reputation for being an unfeeling plutocrat.
If possible, Republicans may make “self-deportation” seem pretty humane by the end of the current presidential cycle. But in the mean time, the term isn’t a bad description of where they are going in their famously new attention to income inequality, as I noted this week at Washington Monthly:

If you read Brian Beutler’s review of Jeb Bush’s “big speech” at the Detroit Economic Club tomorrow, it’s obvious the former Florida’s governor’s idea of squaring conservative orthodoxy with a “right to rise” agenda for social mobility is to double or triple down on the idea that government assistance programs trap people in non-working dependence.

As metaphors for social insurance go, “spider web” sounds disgusting, but beats Paul Ryan’s idyllic “hammock” in that it at least treats beneficiaries as unwitting victims, rather than coddled malingerers. Ultimately, though, they amount to the same critique: When the government intervenes to support the poor and working classes, it captures them and saps them of ambition.

If you really believe people structure their lives around short-term money considerations, then anti-poverty programs, which by definition must phase down benefits as earned income increases, can easily look like traps, and conservative audiences who (a) don’t view the government benefits they receive as morally tainted, (b) resent having to pay taxes to support those people, and (c) bridle at any suggestion they might harbor prejudice, instinctively love this kind of “analysis,” implying as it does that abandonment is a sort of tough love. It’s kind of a general social-policy version of “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants: make live less tolerable for the poor, and they’ll get themselves out of poverty.

The crocodile tears for those damaged via humane treatment are pretty much the same.

What with Republicans all suddenly talking about wage stagnation and income inequality, it’s very important that Democrats understand how adept the opposition has become in adapting its eternal agenda to changing circumstances. I discussed this at some length at TPMCafe this week:

This is most obvious with economic and fiscal policy, where the conservative movement and the Republican Party have embraced a largely static agenda of deregulation, top-end personal and business tax cuts and sharp reductions in domestic spending, with periodic attacks on New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, with “devolution” as an instrument for “reform,” for well over thirty years…..There has been a “minority report” on taxes among conservatives favoring a consumption tax–the “Fair Tax” promoted by Mike Huckabee and many others being the most popular contemporary iteration–but the distributional thrust is the same or even more regressive. And there has also been persistent interest among social conservatives in “family-friendly” tax policies, usually a big boost in the child tax credit. But it’s pretty much a regular menu with the occasional refresh.
What’s fascinating, though, is how these policies are offered again and again as an agenda for all seasons and all circumstances–good times (like the late 1990s), bad times (like the last few years), budget surpluses (in 2001, when George W. Bush marketed his huge package of tax cuts as a “rebate”), budget deficits (the 1980s through the early 1990s, and again since 2009), and just about every climate in between the extremes.
Lately we’re getting a slightly remixed version of the same old, same old as the “answer” to wage stagnation and income equality–essential topics for a number of reasons, notably the growth and unemployment indices making it tougher to attack Obama for a slow or nonexistent recovery from the Great Recession. But if you listen closely, there’s not a whole lot we haven’t heard before, as Bloomberg Politics‘ Ben Brody noted recently:

In July, Representative Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee issued a draft anti-poverty plan lamenting that “far too many people are stuck on the lower rungs” of the economy and recommending a combination of reformed social safety nets, state flexibility in education, and decreased regulations. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, meanwhile, has gone even farther, declaring on his website that “the United States is beset by a crisis in inequality” and that “bigger government is not the solution to unequal opportunity–it’s the cause.”

Uh huh: You got your “entitlement reform,” your devolution, your deregulation, and your smaller government. And even more Republicans are eager to throw some tax preferences at the problem. That’s the standard formula from “Reformicon” intellectuals and the handful of Republican pols (notably Marco Rubio) listening to them . But it mostly revolves around the old social conservative indirect method of addressing economic problems by encouraging marriage and children.

So next time you hear of a Republican leader offering a proposal or batch of proposals to address a new national challenge, be sure to look first to see if the “solution” sounds familiar.

The possibility of another Mitt Romney run has generated a new round of speculation about the relevance of presidential candidates’ religious views, particularly since Mitt’s boosters say he will not hide that particular light under a bushel in 2016. But I’d say that in the Republican field, there are quite a few other candidates whose opinions on how their faith affects their politics could use some more scrutiny. I went down that perilous road today at the Washington Monthly:

[T]here are proto-candidates who say with some credibility that their religion has a big impact on their political views and/or their sense of mission, including Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich. Ben Carson, like Mitt Romney, belongs to a church most Americans would consider exotic, the Seventh Day Adventists, and he talks a lot about faith. Carly Fiorina doesn’t go to church a lot, but says she used to read a lot of St. Thomas Aquinas. John Bolton, a member of the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church, doesn’t much mention it. And I’d say it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton is a reasonably serious Methodist.
But then you have some other candidates who have more or less made it clear they view themselves (sincerely or not) as spiritual warriors who are in politics in no small part to vindicate a faith threatened by unbelievers and false believers. They would include Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. Scott Walker, a conservative evangelical who’s said on occasion that he’s on a divine mission, is a borderline case; we’ll see how he behaves among the very explicitly theocratic conservative clergy and laity of Iowa in the months just ahead. And then there’s Bobby Jindal, the self-described “evangelical Catholic” who seems to want to make his campaign a religious crusade, but doesn’t appear to know the words or the music to that particular hymn.
The point here is that the instinctive antipathy towards talking about the religion of political candidates goes from being a small to a big mistake when said candidates are explicitly making religious appeals, not just in the generic “God Bless America” sense but by telling certain kinds of believers they’d better get on board the bandwagon or they’ll wind up nailed to a cross, which is more or less what Mike Huckabee’s been saying lately. Personally, Mitt Romney’s religion is pretty far down my list of concerns.

As a matter of fact, it bugs me that some of the same candidates we are talking about here–Huckabee, Perry, Cruz and Jindal–have an especially close relationship with the Christian Right group the American Family Association, which today sought to disassociate itself from its longtime mouthpiece Bryan Fischer because his long history of racist and homophobic commentary was endangering an AFA-financed trip to Israel for a large number of RNC members. No, this is not a good time to declare discussion of presidential candidates’ religious opinions off-limits–unless they’re willing to stop invoking divine favor themselves.

As you probably know, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the star of the Iowa Freedom Summit in Iowa last weekend, the first “cattle call” of the 2016 Republican presidential contest. A lot of accounts focused on his speaking style, or his recitation of “accomplishments” in Wisconsin. But at TPMCafe I pointed to something else that was going on:

For my money, what most makes Scott Walker attractive to the kind of people who attended the Iowa Freedom Summit is his perceived electability: As he mentioned in his speech, and nearly every commenter duly repeated, he’s won three elections in four years in a state carried twice by Barack Obama and governed by a Democrat right before him. Yes, two of those elections were in relatively-low-turnout midterms, and his defeat of a recall effort in 2012 was a special election where he also benefited from the reluctance of some swing voters to remove a duly elected governor from office in the middle of a term. But it’s a better record of electability than other candidates can boast of, unless John Kasich or Rick Snyder run. (Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney won in competitive states, but not since 2002).
There’s a bonus, though, that may make Walker’s pitch especially seductive: He won over and over again in Wisconsin without compromising with conservatism’s enemies. Indeed, he behaved almost like a liberal caricature of a conservative villain. And it was deliberate. In 2013, after his recall victory, Walker published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering the novel theory that his aggressive conservatism gave him a leg up with swing voters:

Polls show that about 11% of the people in Wisconsin today support both me and the president. There are probably no two people in public life who are more philosophically opposite–yet more than one in 10 approve of us both.
To make a conservative comeback, Republicans need to win these Obama-Walker voters and their equivalents across the country. In the Wisconsin recall election, we mobilized conservative voters by standing up for conservative principles against enormous pressure. But we also persuaded at least some of President Obama’s supporters to support us, too…
The way Republicans can win those in the middle is not by abandoning their principles. To the contrary, the courage to stand on principle is what these voters respect. The way to win the center is to lead.
That’s why those arguing that conservatives have to “moderate” their views if they want to appeal to the country are so wrong.

This is catnip to conservatives. They’re being endlessly lectured by mainstream media pundits and political professionals in their own camp that they need to “compromise” with Democrats or “reach out” to new constituencies beyond their base if they are to win presidential elections. That’s almost exactly what Jeb Bush is saying in announcing he’s willing to take some hits in the primaries if it enables him to win a general election. But conservatives naturally resist this kind of tradeoff, which they believe they’ve been asked to make far too often with far too little payoff. Walker tells them they do not have to choose. They can win by confrontation, not compromise or outreach, and his three victories are the proof.

Keep that in mind next time you hear Walker’s rationale for candidacy is some sort of relatively moderate ideological positioning. He’s found a sweet spot where electability doesn’t mean “moving to the center.”