The painful process of winnowing down a potentially gigantic Republican president field is now officially underway with two events, one yesterday and one tomorrow.
Yesterday Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush got together in Utah to discuss–well, we don’t know exactly what they discussed. But what apparently began as a courtesy call by Bush on the “titular head of the Republican Party” became something else after Romney abruptly put himself back into the Invisible Primary with aggressive moves towards a candidacy. They’re now practically stumbling over each other in the pursuit of donors and perhaps campaign staff. Perhaps they divided them up yesterday; perhaps they just agreed neither of them would make any moves that would wind up representing a murder-suicide for the Establishment wing of the GOP. We’ll have to wait and see.
Tomorrow’s event is public (though it will undoubtedly be accompanied by private meetings and much kissing-of-the-ring of its primary host): the Iowa Freedom Summit being co-hosted by the famous nativist and all-around right-wing bully-boy Rep. Steve King in conjunction with the public-spirited folks at Citizens United. This is the first major “cattle call” of the 2016 cycle, where proto-candidates will give sequential speeches, mixed in with local and national conservative celebrities. The would-be presidents include John Bolton, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker. Also there will be Jim DeMint, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and Iowa’s new conservative heartthrob, Joni Ernst. Bush and Romney won’t be there because of “scheduling conflicts,” which might have been their Utah meet. Rand Paul won’t be there because he doesn’t do cattle calls (other than actual debates). Others (Pence, Kasich, Graham, Rubio) probably haven’t done enough to be counted as being serious about running. I have no idea why Bobby Jindal isn’t going to be there, other than it conflicting with his “trade mission” to Europe wherein he’s insulting Muslims.
In any event, aside from the speakers the event will include a large crowd of conservative activists and a horde of media folk. Both will be watching for several “stories:” (a) 2008 Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee vs. 2012 winner Rick Santorum for Christian Right leadership; (b) Chris Christie dealing with a rare hostile audience; (c) Rick Perry trying to show his “new” slick persona; (d) Glenn Beck faction favorite Ben Carson with his first real spotlight speaking appearance; (e) Scott Walker trying to dispel the “Next Pawlenty” image by showing some fire; and (f) seeing who will do the most to pander publicly to King’s POV on immigration. There’s even a remote possibility someone will try to do a “Sister Souljah” gesture towards King and/or Iowa conservatives, though a tropical hurricane hitting Des Moines may be more likely.
But in any event, by Monday someone will have moved up or down–or maybe out–in the 2016 contest.

I certainly agree with E.J.. Dionne’s contention that the president is discarding most of his lingering illusions about Republicans. But just as importantly, he’s learning to play them like a violin on occasions. I assessed his ability to flummox Republicans in the State of the Union Address over at TPM Cafe yesterday.

Republicans were very much bystanders last night. Obama did not allude to the midterm elections nor acknowledge the GOP takeover of the Senate. He did not treat Republican attacks on his use of executive authority as some sort of clash of the titans, and briskly bundled most of his veto threats into a single paragraph. His specific economic policy proposals (packaged as “middle class economics”) were exceedingly well-tested and very popular, and because Republicans oppose them all, he left them sitting on their hands.
And he managed to diminish recent GOP complaints and demands, dismissing the Keystone XL pipeline as just another infrastructure project, mocking the Cuba policies he is discarding as archaic, and describing his immigration actions as the exasperated expedient of a president tired of Republican divisions. Obama also probably wrong-footed Republicans by giving so little time to the tax proposals that got so much attention in the last few days. There was no hard-edged “populist” appeal to denounce as “class warfare” or “income redistribution.”

Sen. Joni Ernst’s official “response” to the SOTU Address wasn’t quite as disastrous as, say, Bobby Jindal’s in 2009. But it was empty and mostly focused on her autobiography, and it played right into Obama’s efforts to suggest that the GOP had nothing to “sell” on the economy beyond a controversial pipeline project (a big chunk of Ernst’s speech was about the Keystone XL).

What the evening indicated is that the GOP that came out of the November midterms so full of confidence and ready to put Barack Obama in his place continues to be off-balance and divided when it’s not simply opposing whatever the president proposes. And as the 2016 Republican presidential nominating process heats up–beginning just a few days from now with Rep. Steve King’s candidate vetting exercise in Des Moines, the so-called Iowa Freedom Summit–the vague pieties of King’s junior U.S. Senator tonight just won’t cut it.

Today the big news is that House Republicans have managed to screw up a one-car funeral by adding provisions to a long-awaited federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy that would limit the rape exception. This produced a revolt among House Republican woman and the handful of remaining “moderates” and forced the leadership to yank the bill–intended as a treat for visiting antichoice protesters in Washington for the annual March for Life–and substitute a less base-satisfying reconfirmation of the ban on federal funding for abortions.
No, the 114th Congress is not off to a real good start for the GOP.

Republicans have announced they will hold their 2016 National Convention from July 18-21 next year. This decision both reflects and creates some significant strategic considerations for both parties, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

It’ll be the earliest national convention since the Democratic confab that nominated Bill Clinton in 1992, and the earliest Republican convention since you-know-who’s nomination in Detroit in 1980 (don’t imagine we won’t hear a lot about that!).
In announcing the dates, RNC chairman Reince Priebus seemed to suggest the main rationale for the relatively early convention was “access to crucial general election funds.” It’s not clear if he was talking about public matching funds that are only made available once a nominee has been chosen; that seems a bit anachronistic, since both major-party nominees rejected public funding in 2012 and there’s no particular reason to think they’ll accept them along with spending limits this time around. He could, alternatively, be talking about access to privately-raised hard money that are subject to separate primary and general-election contribution limits. Either way, in this post-Citizens United era, it sounds like a blast from 1996.
When it first arose the idea of an early GOP convention seemed linked to a push by the RNC to compress the entire nominating process. Indeed, the talk then was of a June convention, in conjunction with wrapping up the primaries in April or early May. But here’s why June didn’t work out, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

[T]he Republican National Committee’s selection of Cleveland last July came days before NBA star LeBron James announced that he was returning home to Ohio.
James’ Cavaliers play their games at Quicken Loans Arena, which will be the main site for convention programming. His return increased the probability of Cleveland playoff basketball into June — a prospect that made the arena’s pre-convention availability to Republican planners and Secret Service uncertain.

Hah! Can’t imagine the business of nominating The Next President of the United States would trump the NBA playoffs!
In any event, the early speculation has been that Democrats will go the other way and once again hold their convention in late August or early September, creating a large hiatus (filled partially by the Olympics) and also giving Ds a chance to stage-manage a “bounce.” They could even emulate the Republican gambit in 2008 of announcing the nominee’s running-mate well before the convention–say, the day after the GOP confab–to step on any GOP “bounce.” Either way, they’ll have plenty of time to think about it.

I’ve always thought forming the party ticket much earlier than the conventions is a good idea, both for strategic purposes and to avoid what happened to the GOP in 2008.

One of the meta-messaging challenges of our age is to defend the idea that key government programs do indeed represent “public investments” that produce tangible outcomes worth measuring–for good or for ill. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

Conservatives have for years mocked the use of the term “investment” for public expenditures, arguing that it’s just a cosmetic code word for “spending,” and an effort to borrow on the respectability of entirely non-germane business practices. But to the extent that public spending is explicitly aimed at producing non-immediate payoffs, it is ridiculous not to view–and then to measure–the future return on “investment.”
So even as Republicans perpetually seek to deride, devolve, or demolish Medicaid as ineffective welfare for those people, along comes a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluating the long-term impact of covering children under Medicaid. And as reported by The Upshot‘s Margot Sanger-Katz, the results are impressive even if you limit the “payback” to measurable contributions to the beneficiaries’ earning power and subsequent tax payments:

The study used newly available tax records measured over decades to examine the effects of providing Medicaid insurance to children. Instead of looking at the program’s immediate impact on those children and their families, it followed them once they became adults and began paying federal taxes.
People who had been eligible for Medicaid as children, as a group, earned higher wages and paid higher federal taxes than their peers who were not eligible for the federal-state health insurance program. And the more years they were eligible for the program, the larger the difference in earnings.
“If we examine kids that were eligible for different amounts of Medicaid over the course of their childhood, we see that the ones that were eligible for more Medicaid ended up paying more taxes through income and payroll taxes later in life,” said Amanda Kowalski, an assistant professor of economics at Yale and one of the study’s authors.
The results mean that the government’s investment in the children’s health care may not have cost as much as budget analysts expected. The study, by a team that included economists from the Treasury Department, was able to calculate a return on investment in the form of tax revenue.
The return wasn’t high enough to pay the government back for its investment in health insurance by the time the children reached age 28, when the researchers stopped tracking the subjects. By that age, the Treasury had earned back about 14 cents for every dollar that the federal and state governments had spent on insurance. But it did suggest that, if the subjects’ wages continued to follow typical trajectories as they aged, the federal government would earn back about what it spent on its half of the program by the time the children reached 60 — about 56 cents on the dollar, calculated using a formula that took into account the time value of money.

These calculations do not, of course, include the ROI of healthier, happier lives.
Paul Krugman looks at this study and relates it to the Republican drive for “dynamic scoring” of tax measures in Congress–which means including estimates of the economic activity they believe tax cuts will produce along with their positive affect on revenues.

While Krugman is right to suggest the “dynamic scoring” fight provides a good opportunity to counter-punch with the “public investment” argument, that argument is important to progressives on its own. Instead of accepting the false premise of an irrepressible conflict between government as inherently good and government as inherently bad, Democrats should be prepared to argue that key investments are indeed effective by any honest accounting, and are irreplaceable by the invisible hand of markets or any other substitutes.

We’re all accustomed to the reality that demographic changes are occurring that all in all are friendly to the prospects of the Democratic Party, at least as they have been manifested in recent elections. There’s plenty of argument over how fast these changes are occurring; whether they are at least partially reversible; and the wisdom or folly of relying on them. But they’re real.
Now the Center for American Progress is first out of the box with a study of how demographic changes could affect the 2016 elections. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

The write-up from CAP’s Patrick Oakford notes that two scenarios were analyzed: what would happen in 2016 if the party preferences of 2012 are projected four years down the line, and what would happen if the party preferences of 2004 are assumed to reassert themselves. This second scenario reflects the theory–understandably popular among Republicans–that not having Barack Obama on the ballot would cause the Democratic vote share to relapse to pre-Obama “normal” levels.
Obviously the first scenario would produce a larger Democratic victory than in 2012, with North Carolina rejoining the blue state ranks. I find the second scenario more interesting:

In some states, such as Florida, restoring party preferences to their 2004 levels would enable the GOP to narrowly win back states they lost in 2012 but had won in previous elections. However, in order to win back other key states that the GOP won in 2004, such as Ohio and Nevada, the GOP would need to exceed the share of support it received from voters of color in 2004.

This last observation is interesting insofar as George W. Bush won an impressive 16% of the African-American vote in Ohio in 2004. Does anyone see that performance being exceeded in 2016? I sure don’t.

Overall, the numbers suggest Democrats have a bit of a margin of error in battleground states even if percentages of minority voters drop a bit. But the turnout needs to stay up, and the whole proposition would look a lot stronger if Democrats cut into Bush04 levels among older and whiter voters.