One of the things both progressives and MSM types consistently get wrong is the tendency to dismiss, ignore, or underestimate the Christian Right as a factor in Republican politics. We can expect this bad habit to reemerge in connection with the 2016 presidential contest, which is already being billed as an Establishment Versus Tea Party battle where “social issues” won’t be prominent. But you can make the argument, as I did at TPMCafe this week, that the emerging GOP presidential field has more systemic links to the Christian Right than we’ve ever seen:

At least four frequently-mentioned GOP presidential proto-candidates have deep and intimate Christian Right ties. There’s former Gov. Mike Huckabee, of course, a Southern Baptist minister whose 2008 campaign almost entirely relied on conservative evangelical voters. His successor as the winner of the Iowa Caucuses, Rick Santorum, is a Catholic traditionalist who also appealed on moral and grounds to conservative evangelicals, and on occasion hinted that mainline Protestantism had been captured by Satan. Texas Gov. Rick Perry has long enjoyed close relationships with crypto-dominionists and radical self-styled Christian Zionists. And fellow Texan Sen. Ted Cruz frequently deploys as his warm-up act his father Rafael Cruz, a fiery conservative evangelical minister who believes Christians must “take back society” from “the progressives” who are responsible for “the blood of 57 million babies…crying out to God, just like the blood of Abel cried out to God.” Christian Right activists would have every reason to treat all four of these gentlemen as beyond the need for vetting, so thoroughly have they incorporated the requisite world view.
But there are other candidates who can be expected to compete with these claims of Christian warriorhood. Gov. Bobby Jindal has beaten the “religious freedom” drum more loudly than just about any other public figure in the debate surrounding the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby case, and his controversial school voucher program in Louisiana seems designed to shovel public money towards religious schools with a minimum of oversight. Gov. Mike Pence has been one of several proto-candidates cozying up to David Lane, a Christian Right impresario who is especially active in organizing clerical audiences for would-be presidents in Iowa. Gov. Scott Walker is a conservative evangelical who often speaks of carrying out his anti-union, pro-corporate agenda on instructions from the Almighty. Sen. Marco Rubio is (like Jindal) another traditionalist Catholic who likes to attend conservative evangelical churches, and has gone out of his way to embrace not only the Christian Right’s issue agenda but its more fundamental denial of church-state separation.
Rand Paul and his father have a longstanding connection to the openly theocratic U.S. Constitutional Party, and are especially close to Christian home-schoolers. Ben Carson was recently the keynote speaker at a fundraising event for The Family Leader, Iowa’s premier Christian Right group; he’s notorious for embracing comparisons of America to Nazi Germany, a particularly strong habit among antichoice activists. And even Establishment favorite Jeb Bush, lest we forget, was the politician who touched off the Terri Schiavo hysteria in 2003 by intervening in a family’s end-of-life decisions.
It is entirely possible that Christian Right activists will fatally split among different candidates, just as they did in 2008 and 2012 (George W. Bush was the last to unite the various tribes of conservative Christian political warriors, in 2000 and 2004). Corresponding splits among “Establishment” candidates, or the successful launching of a “crossover” candidacy (which Bush, Pence, Rubio or Walker might be able to pull off), could make that possibility matter less.
But there’s little risk of a sworn enemy of the Christian Right winning the nomination. Every “mentioned” GOP candidate for 2016 favors making abortions illegal again, and if there are any who dissent from the latter-day conservative litmus-test position defining “religious freedom” as justifying defiance of anti-discrimination laws, they have been very quiet about it.

Maybe some day we’ll learn not to issue premature obituaries for the Christian Right. This would be a very good time to stop.

With the president’s partial normalization of relations with Cuba this week, followed by yet another explosion of fury from Republicans (other than the outlier, Rand Paul), it’s becoming obvious the original plans of congressional Republicans to showcase their positive, agenda-setting side once total control of Congress came into their grasp is looking mighty shaky. I talked about this yesterday at the Washington Monthly:

At the end of a post reciting the big moves “our bored, exhausted, disengaged president” has taken since the midterm elections, Kevin Drum makes an important point about what that means for next year:

All of these things are worthwhile in their own right, of course, but there’s a political angle to all of them as well: they seriously mess with Republican heads. GOP leaders had plans for January, but now they may or may not be able to do much about them. Instead, they’re going to have to deal with enraged tea partiers insisting that they spend time trying to repeal Obama’s actions. They can’t, of course, but they have to show that they’re trying. So there’s a good chance that they’ll spend their first few months in semi-chaos, responding to Obama’s provocations instead of working on their own agenda.

Case in point: Congressional Republicans are now going to have to spend significant time and energy in a Cold War battle with Obama over Cuba policy–one that is likely to end in failure, and that appeals only to a sliver of the U.S. population.
After all the interminable stuff we heard in 2014 about the Great Big Adult Republicans getting control over the unruly Tea Folk, I think we’ll find that Boehner and McConnell aren’t going to easily restrain conservatives with so much chum in the water. The provocation to a feeding frenzy is just becoming way too overpowering.

It will be interesting to see if the “Republicans moving to the center” meme survives months of shrieking about immigration, Cuba, and whatever else the president plans to do as the new year begins.

Jeb Bush earned some extensive chatter from the political world by suddenly expressing an active interest in the race after months and years of Hamlet-like behavior, while also forming a leadership PAC to support allies and show the flag. He does have some assets along with the much-noted problem of recent friction with conservatives over his positions favoring Common Core education standards and some sort of legalization of undocumented immigrants. But at TPMCafe, I isolated what seems to be the problem he simply cannot solve:

Bush’s central problem is that in outside donor circles, he simply isn’t beloved in the way a fresher and more viscerally ideological candidate could be, and thus he needs a very strong “electability” argument to pull conservatives, however reluctantly, into his camp. And that’s the rub: despite his name ID, his resume, and his “centrist” positions on at least some subjects, this on-paper “winner” is not very popular with the general electorate. In two solid years of being pitted against Hillary Clinton in polls, Bush has not led a single one, and trails her in the latest RealClearPolitics average by over 9%. That’s a poorer margin than for Ryan (6%), Christie (7%), and Huckabee (8%), and about the same as for Paul. Ted Cruz is the only regularly polled putative GOP candidate running significantly worse than Bush against HRC (an RCP average gap of 13%), and that’s largely because he’s far less well-known.
Not having held a public office since 2006, it’s unclear what Bush can do to make himself significantly more popular with the general public in hopes of becoming seductively attractive to Republican caucus and primary voters who have a lot of other options. His signature issue used to be education, but his once-novel experiments with private school vouchers and teacher tenure “reform” are now old-hat and universally supported by Republicans. Moreover, education is a hot-button issue mostly to people angry about reform initiatives like Common Core. And there should be red flashing signs in Jeb’s camp about his business record, ranging from his involvement with Lehman Brothers and Barclays to his more recent dealings with Chinese investors. If Republicans want another Mitt Romney, the original is still available.
Can Jeb Bush buy his way to the standing he needs? His support from donors will obviously help if he runs, but as Rick Perry showed in 2012, the money can go pretty fast if it’s not propped up by positive events. And at the moment, the main way Bush can attract attention is by continuing to scold his once-fellow-conservatives for insufficient realism. Perhaps Bush will be able to elbow Christie and Rubio and even Romney out of the way and slip-slide through a demolition derby of conservatives the way John McCain did in 2008. But he could be on a trajectory to become this cycle’s Jon Huntsman, with a lot more money to run through. And just maybe he’s jollying his father and brother and various family retainers, and will not run when push comes to shove, leaving the dynasty in the hands of Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush, his son, who has had the good political sense to oppose Common Core.

Don’t bet the farm on Jeb Bush.

With yesterday’s split between the White House and Speaker Pelosi (and her Senate ally Elizabeth Warren) over the “Cromnibus” spending bill, we had the first really significant rift within the Democratic Party since the president formally became a lame duck and the 2016 presidential nomination contest–at present, but not necessarily for long, a cakewalk for Hillary Clinton–began. It clearly centered on the extent to which the Democratic Party needed to make its top priority protecting the Dodd-Frank financial reforms, and/or disassociating itself from Wall Street.
Now for some last-ditch opponents of the Dodd-Frank amendments contained in the Cromnibus, this is an ideological matter involving the financial sector as responsible for today’s economic problems or as an obstacle to progressive economic policy. For others it is a strategic issue involving perceptions of the Democratic Party or its positioning vis a vis a Republican Congress over the next four years. And there are Democrats on the other side of this particular barricade who variously have ideological or strategic reasons for feeling otherwise about the Dodd-Frank amendments specifically or anti-Wall Street “populism” generally.
But lest this dispute mestastasize into a “struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” I’d like to remind Democrats of a plea we made at some length here five years ago about the importance of sorting out and taking seriously ideological and strategic differences before the rhetorical fur flies:

[I]deology, however muddled, is part of what makes most politically active people tick. And if we don’t talk about it–and about differences in strategic thinking as well, which should be the subject of future discussions–then all we are left with to explain our differences on this issue or that is questions of character. And anyone paying attention must recognize there’s far too much of that going on. “Progressive pragmatists”–the camp with which I most often personally identify, as it happens–often treat “the Left” condescendingly as immature and impractical people who don’t understand how things get done. Meanwhile, people on “the Left” often treat “pragmatists” as either politically gutless or personally corrupt. This is what happens when you don’t take seriously other people’s ideological and strategic underpinnings; whatever you gain in ignoring or minimizing differences in perspective or point of view is lost in mutual respect.

It’s not a bad thing to think about before Democrats start calling each other “socialists” and “corporate whores.”

Angst over the Democratic Party’s relationship with “the South” (variously defined) is a traditional post-election preoccupation, and given Democratic losses in the region on November 4, it’s not surprising it’s started up again. At TPMCafe, I suggested that those who favor special appeals to white southerners or conversely demand a pox on the whole atavistic area chill and consider treating “the South” just like any other region. Here’s an excerpt:

As my use of quotations around “the South” suggests, this topic is plagued by definitional problems. When The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball, for example, calls soon-to-be-former Sen. Mary Landrieu “the last southern Democrat,” she is excluding two states of the former Confederacy (Florida and Virginia) that have Democratic U.S. Senators and were carried twice by Barack Obama; non-statewide Democratic elected officials like Tennessee’s Steven Cohen who don’t fit the moderate-to-conservative stereotype of southern white pols; and most importantly, the African-Americans who are hardly an incidental presence in “the South” by any definition.
If anything is dying in southern Democratic politics, it’s the idea that you can forge successful statewide majorities with white candidates who hang onto 30 to 40 percent of the white vote by positioning themselves as far to the right as possible–and then expecting 90 percent of African-Americans to get them across the finish line. The Blue Dog model has almost certainly run its course. And I’m not remotely as optimistic as some progressives (almost invariably non-southerners) who think “populism” is some sort of magical formula for getting southern white working class voters to stop thinking about God and Guns and start thinking about their paychecks. The southern “populist” tradition (heavily associated with racism) is even more anachronistic than the Blue Dog model.
There is some room for creating a backlash against corporate lackeys like Rick Perry and Nikki Haley, whose idea of “economic development” is to eagerly sacrifice the people of their states to every whim of “investors.” But “the South” is going to be more pro-business and anti-government than other parts of the country for the foreseeable future, if only because there’s no social democratic Golden Age memories to conjure up the way there are in the once-heavily-unionized rust belt. Right now staunch support for public education, proud and unconditional anti-racism, and a vision of the social safety set, taxes, and basic regulations as something other than an inconvenience to “job creators,” is probably “populist” enough.
For the national Democratic Party, there’s really no longer any reason to agonize over “the South” as some sort of existential challenge to Democrats’ ambitions or principles. Democrats can win presidential elections while losing the region; the last Democrat to rely on southern states as anything other than electoral college gravy was Jimmy Carter way back in 1976. Nor is the decline in ticket-splitting that doomed Mary Landrieu and Mark Pryor this year an exclusively Democratic problem, as one might be misled to think by the very unusual Senate landscape of 2014. We’ll be reminded in 2016 of how many Republican senators are representing “blue states.”
But in any event, it is clear there was nothing the national party might have done to reverse the results in Arkansas, Louisiana, Georgia or North Carolina this year. Just as importantly, unless you buy the dubious argument that the brief delay in the president’s executive action on immigration was purely a pander to “the South,” the national party did not really undertake any “concessions” to the South. So there’s no reason to swear off the South as an evil conservative seductress tempting Democrats to stray from the paths of righteousness.
Treating the South like the rest of the country makes the most sense for Democrats going forward. A return to presidential cycle turnout patterns should, in any close election, again make Florida, North Carolina and Virginia winnable for Democrats. The demographics of Georgia are making that state more “purple” every day, especially in presidential elections.

After noting some of the state-specific variations that too often get overlooked in discussions of “the South,” I conclude by asking Democrats for something southerners rarely request but could definitely use: less specific attention.

Seeing “the South” as a set of discrete political opportunities requiring skill, good candidate recruitment, the kind of ideological “flexibility” accorded to any other region, and resources calibrated to the risk and reward, is the best approach for Democrats. All the regional mythology should be treated as gone with the wind.