This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the exception of paid ads, national conventions provide the most controlled environment for messaging any party or campaign can possibly enjoy. Not a word goes into the party platform or onto the podium teleprompters without approval from the nominee’s staff. There are always obligatory speakers, but their order, the time they are allowed, and the topics they are permitted to discuss are entirely at the whim of the managers, just like the music, the staging, and the little message cards distributed to surrogates and delegates instructing them on how to speak with the press.
As a veteran script-and-speech staffer at six Democratic conventions, I figured this GOP gathering would exceed even the usual “daddy party” discipline, given the general ruthlessness of the Romney campaign, and the ardor with which everyone involved (including the conservative activists who were definitively propitiated by the selection of their leader, Paul Ryan, for the vice presidential nomination) wanted victory. And the mission ought to have been clear: communicating a likeable new image for the party with its presidential nominee. Yet looking back at the three nights of the 2012 Republican National Convention, it’s not easy to deduce what exactly how the GOP’s plan was.
Night One presented a party hell-bent on giving the people leaders with the balance, perspective and guts to make the “tough choices” the Obama administration has allegedly avoided or flubbed.
Night Two shifted gears decisively, as Ryan, Mr. Tough Choices himself, depicted the ticket as a safe haven for Americans–especially older, middle-class Americans–afraid of Barack Obama’s radicalism and unwholesome intentions towards the government benefits they rely upon.
And Night Three was a hash, with the first image broadcast television viewers saw and heard being an octogenarian actor blowing off his script, implying obscenities, and debating an invisible Barack Obama, even as he suggested all politicians were essentially worthless in a hall stuffed with politicians. Memories of that confusing distraction were hardly dispelled by a Romney acceptance speech that mostly alternated between soothing “humanizing” bromides and suddenly-shouted stock campaign lines–but never quite settled on a coherent theme or rationale for his candidacy beyond the tired assertion that Obama didn’t deserve a second term.
And thus a party that seemed to have made a clear if risky decision to accept the challenge of a “choice election” once the Romney-Ryan ticket was formed, taking its chances that it could sell a positive agenda alongside a strong ideological attack on the incumbent, concluded its convention by posing as a safe, sane alternative to an administration that had lost its “referendum.”
The only clear common theme across the three nights of major speeches was a remarkable absence of policy proposals, other than Romney’s hackneyed five-point “jobs plan” that is actually a collection of goals along with an education voucher initiative that’s drawn zero attention. The budget legislation drafted by the vice presidential nominee, a specific if often dubiously credible “plan” to which the entire Republican Party has lashed itself like Odysseus in the Land of the Sirens, was barely mentioned by its author, much less by anyone else. Aside from its stated devotion to Medicare and antipathy to ObamaCare, it was not easy to deduce for the unsophisticated swing voter what these people actually wanted to do. Yes, they made it clear they didn’t like unions or foreigners or welfare, and really, really liked small business owners, but beyond that, what did they offer other than a ballot line for people already convinced Obama had failed? That’s hard to say, and again, it’s not the sort of hazy impression national political conventions are supposed to leave.
It wasn’t all a waste of time, of course. The fact that Ryan delivered the convention’s best speech will give further pause to Democrats who might have been under the impression that his very name was a political albatross, and also served as a reminder that all the love and hate he has inspired among insiders and activists is completely unknown to the kind of voters who will decide this election. The constant repetition of various poll-tested attack lines on Obama–particularly the sensationally mendacious but demonstrably effective claims that he’s brought back unconditional welfare and cut Medicare benefits to shower additional benefits on the undeserving poor–had tangible value. The various efforts to “humanize” Mitt Romney probably turned some heads. And after the Todd Akin fiasco, it was a real accomplishment to get through a convention where probably half the delegates care far more about social issues than about the economy with words like “abortion” and “gay marriage” (not to mention, astonishingly, “Tea Party”) being all but left unsaid from the podium.
It’s less clear that other convention preoccupations did much good. The relentless attention paid to speaker diversity (an old GOP habit by now) would have been more influential had viewers been offered any encouragement to minorities other than the theoretical opportunity to own businesses and exult in their freedom from receiving any help from their own government. The byzantine struggle with Ron Paul’s legions was waged ruthlessly enough to give them fresh grievances for future mischief, but not successfully enough to keep them off-camera or out of the platform. And as a convention veteran, I have to say that the production values of this event were not impressive (at least until the final balloon-drop!), and a lot of the speechwriting was mediocre (at least for non-Super-Prime-Time speakers).
But these were trifles compared to the central problems with deciding on and delivering a crisp and compelling message. I’m hardly unbiased, and perhaps we’ll soon see a post-convention “bounce” that will prove there was highly nuanced magic going on, even if the True Believers in the hall often seemed bored and restive and more interested in “USA!” chants than the call-and-response from the podium. For now, the GOP seems to be a party that is attempting in too many conflicting ways to disguise what it actually wants to do with political power. Democrats, if they are smart, will find ways to exploit that next week.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
For the third consecutive time, Republicans are planning to feature an aggrieved Democrat (or ex-Democrat) at their national Convention to personalize claims that the latest Democratic presidential nominee has abandoned the true legacy of his party and left moderate-to-conservative donkeys no option but to vote for the GOP.
As it happens, I know the most recent trio of apostates pretty well. 2004’s Zell Miller, who was enlisted to savage John Kerry’s national security credentials, was my boss in Georgia back in the early 1990s. And I worked with Joe Lieberman (2008’s cross-endorser) and Artur Davis (the latest model) when both men were active in the now-defunct Democratic Leadership Council, where I was policy director for a good while. So what if anything do they have in common? Is there a template for party-switchers?
If there is, it might well be a combination of these three men’s qualities. Miller is the full convert, who changed his positions on a host of issues to reflect conservative ideology even before endorsing George W. Bush (and subsequently, a long line of other Republican candidates in Georgia and elsewhere). Miller is also, as anyone who knows him will agree, one of the least neutral people in American politics, a true Appalachian character in the mold of Andrew Johnson who is capable of rolling around in an eye-gouging fight in one ditch and then the other with equal passion.
Lieberman, like his predecessor the neocon “Reagan Democrat” Jeane Kilpatrick (the star of the 1984 Republican Convention) is someone who strayed far outside the boundaries of his party on one set of issues–national security. After being denied renomination to the Senate as a Democrat in 2006, he had few qualms about endorsing his old friend and comrade-in-arms John McCain, even though McCain had by 2008 been forced to renounce most of the domestic policy projects on which he and Lieberman had worked together. In effect, Lieberman was endorsing the man who was briefly discussed as a cross-party running-mate for John Kerry–and getting revenge on his many Democratic enemies.
Davis is a different matter. A very early supporter and personal friend of Barack Obama, and once (despite a pro-business and socially conservative record that discomfited some national Democrats) a passionate advocate of universal health coverage and stronger federal support for public education, Davis set his sites on the audacious goal of becoming governor of Alabama (as he told me years earlier, just after giving an inspiring speech on how conservatives were starving the public schools and the economic opportunities of his very poor majority-black district). Having done so, he systematically began adjusting his ideology to the views of his state’s conservative general electorate, to the point of becoming a national spokesman against the Affordable Care Act and a voice of open contempt towards Alabama’s embattled pro-Democratic interest groups, presumably believing his race and the radicalism of Alabama’s GOP would maintain his base of support.
His extreme “triangulation” didn’t work, and he was absolutely trounced in the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial primary by an underfunded white candidate who swept Davis’ own majority-black congressional district. Practically from the moment of his concession speech, he left his party and his state behind, and soon surfaced as a columnist for National Review and then a transplanted Virginian expressing interest in a future congressional race as a Republican. The one-time champion of better-funded public education recently emerged as a vocal defender of Gov. Bobby Jindal’s radical Christian-Right-based school voucher program in Louisiana.
Davis has none of Miller’s fire, and little of Lieberman’s desire to maintain an independent position outside both parties. His current posture has all the trappings of a professional “reboot,” and his invitation to go to Tampa and shiv his old friend the President of the United States must look to him like a heaven-sent opportunity to become a national celebrity and leapfrog the many prospective congressional candidates in his new digs who never had a “D” next to their names on any ballot.
I say this not to accuse Artur Davis of insincerity. He took on a nearly impossible task in running for governor in the most pro-Republican year in the state’s history, and he did have the decency to get out of Alabama before switching parties, lest he give aid and comfort to the neo-confederates who dominate the GOP in the Heart of Dixie. But his claim that it’s Obama, not himself, who changed since 2008 is disingenuous, and he will obviously be used by his new friends to provide cover for the Romney/Ryan ticket’s heavily race-inflected attacks on the president on the entirely phony grounds that he’s gutting welfare work requirements and “raiding” Medicare to redistribute tax dollars to poor and minority people–you know, Artur Davis’ former constituents.
It’s interesting that Democrats don’t seem to feel the same need to recruit a high-profile apostate from the GOP ranks every four years. But whether it’s giving Zell Miller a chance to vent his perpetually swollen spleen, or offering Joe Lieberman the consolation prize of a convention speech after party conservative vetoed him as a running-mate for McCain, or giving Artur Davis a new political lease on life after he fell between two stools in Alabama–Republicans always keep the door open to anyone who can reinforce their deeply discredited reputation as a “centrist” party that’s a reasonable choice for disgruntled Democrats. If Bill Clinton were willing to play the role assigned to him in Romney attack ads as the champion of a “New Democrat” tradition Obama has abandoned, they’d give the Big Dog a Convention role as well. But that obviously ain’t happening, so they’ll take what they can get.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
DES MOINES – “It’s a historic day,” Rep. Steve King of Iowa announced yesterday from the podium of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit 2012, a major gathering of social conservatives in a suburban Des Moines megachurch that drew a host of national political celebrities. King wasn’t talking about the event, or even the prospect of ejecting Barack Obama from the White House, but of the choice of his friend and colleague Paul Ryan to become Mitt Romney’s running-mate. The first mention of Ryan’s name elicted raucus applause from the crowd–which included the last two Iowa Caucus winners, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, along with one-time 2012 front-runner Rick Perry–that even exceeded that for the first reference to Chick-fil-A, the sandwich purveyor now famous among the Christian Right for its “biblical” values.
Mitt Romney, by contrast, was barely mentioned during the portion of the conference I attended; the presidential candidate’s primary significance on this day was his V.P. selection. Overall, the sense I got from the crowd was not so much the incandescent excitement that greeted the selection of Sarah Palin (a maximum celebrity in the anti-choice movement long before John McCain’s decision to make her his running-mate) among similar people in 2008, but of a quiet satisfaction that the election cycle was headed in the right direction. There was zero doubt that social conservatives are now mobilizing to support the GOP in November as never before.
This wasn’t always a given. Indeed, achieving a state of quiet satisfaction among the turbulent, ever-demanding ranks of movement conservatives may have been the most important goal motivating Mitt Romney’s surprise selection of Ryan. In a very real sense, the primaries did not end for Romney when he clinched the presidential nomination months ago, and might not have ended even with his formal crowning in Tampa on August 30. The conservative commentariat has constantly peppered Romney and his team with criticism, mainly encouraging a more sharply defined, ideological, “substantive” campaign. In some cases that criticism may have reflected sincere strategic advice for the GOP nominee. But it’s hard to avoid the more obvious conclusion that serious conservatives simply didn’t trust Mitt Romney, and were planning on continuing to insist on a serial reestablishment of Romney’s bona fides, up to and indeed far beyond November 6.
By giving the greatest gift within his immediate power, the vice-presidential nomination, to the conservative movement’s very favorite politician, Romney has finally ended the primaries, and may now hope to have achieved his own liberation from friendly fire and the politically counter-productive need to respond whenever ideological commissars crack the whip. In effect, the Romney campaign could be saying to the Right: “Here you go! Now STFU!”
At this early date it isn’t clear if this definitive propitiation of the angry spirits of the Cause will work, or will outweigh the risks involved in elevating someone as controversial as Ryan. Perhaps the calculation is that while activists thrill with delight or horror at Ryan’s name, the actual electorate knows little about him, and the Romney/Ryan ticket can now run a campaign of its choosing, leaving the significance of this “historic day” to the activist elites and ultimately to the historians.
In any event, whether the selection of Ryan reflects Romney’s final surrender to the leaders of the conservative movement, or a crafty effort to buy them off and shut them up with the fool’s gold of symbolic power, it does represent a bit of late vindication for the Right, which seemed to have so thoroughly botched its own efforts to consummate its conquest of the GOP by controlling the 2012 presidential nomination. There was certainly no sense of lost opportunity among the attendees of the FAMiLY Leadership Summit, even in the remarks of the men who once were hailed as the candidates who might finally turn the ever-faithless GOP into a fine instrument of God’s Will and the invisible hand of unregulated markets.
If Romney/Ryan lose on November 6, it will not be for lack of conservative enthusiasm for the ticket. But it’s another matter entirely as to whether this enthusiasm will be contagious beyond the ranks of the already-persuaded.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
“Tough on Kids; Weak on Work.” That was Bill Clinton’s regular and emphatic judgment on the Republican attitude on welfare reform as he vetoed two congressional GOP bills before cutting the deal that became the landmark 1996 law.
This was no mere rhetoric. As a welfare policy wonk in the 1990s I can attest to the fact that Republican interest in welfare reform was focused on everything other than work: punishing illegitimacy, creating absolute time limits for eligibility, devolving responsibility for the indigent to the states, and saving money for the federal government. If work requirements helped meet these goals, Republicans were supportive, but it was hardly their main interest, particularly if it required “making work pay” for welfare recipients via support for the working poor.
That’s one of several reasons the new Mitt Romney campaign ad attacking Barack Obama for an alleged “gutting” of the 1996 law by “dropping work requirements” is so mendacious and hypocritical.
The most immediate outrage is that the ad’s central claim is, to use a technical term, a lie. The Obama administration has not changed the architecture of the 1996 welfare reform law at all. What it has done, as a response to repeated requests by governors from both parties for flexibility in administering the law–a demand Republicans, including Mitt Romney, have been making from practically the moment it was signed–is to say it was open to offering waivers that exclude states from precisely those regulations that inhibit rather than encourage placing welfare recipients in jobs.
The July 12 memo from HHS Office of Family Assistance Director Earl Johnson which announced the waiver policy is reasonably clear about what the agency will and will not consider:

HHS is encouraging states to consider new, more effective ways to meet the goals of TANF [Temporary Aid to Needy Families], particularly helping parents successfully prepare for, find, and retain employment. Therefore, HHS is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families….
HHS will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF.

Elsewhere in the memo–and in public statements by HHS officials–it’s made abundantly clear that the work focus and time limits for assistance that were imposed by the 1996 law will not and in their judgment cannot be waived.
So what about the Romney ad’s claim that “under Obama’s plan you wouldn’t have to work and you wouldn’t have to train for a job. They’d just send you your welfare check”? It represents a bundle of outright fabrications. There is no “Obama’s plan,” no abolition of work or training requirements, no return to a personal entitlement to assistance, and no unconditional assistance. The administration’s actual offer to the states of limited flexibility in the means of achieving the law’s unchanging goals is in no way a departure from past policies under either Democratic or Republican administrations. In fact, it explicitly tracks repeated Republican demands! In the early prehistory of welfare reform, Republicans tried to turn “welfare” into a block grant that states could have used pretty much whatever they wanted.
(Indeed, Bill Clinton vetoed one such Republican-passed law before signing the 1996 act in question. Generally, Romney’s campaign may have miscalculated somewhat by including in the new ad an image of Clinton signing the 1996 law. That has liberated the Big Dog himself to blast the ad’s assertions in scorching detail.)
Some may say campaign ads that distort and even lie about an opponent’s record or proposals are standard operating procedure these days. Is there any reason this ad should be taken more seriously?
The answer is yes. Aside from the fact that the ad is no mere feint, but is already in heavy rotation on the airwaves and is being echoed by Romney himself on the campaign trail, it makes unmistakably audible the main, recurring conservative “dog whistle” about Obama: He’s the unreconstructed old-school lefty who has unmoored his party from its Clinton Era centrist reforms and is determined to loot virtuous middle class taxpayers on behalf of shiftless poor and minority folk. Up until now, conservatives have engaged in the politically perilous tactic of demonizing the working poor: the “lucky duckies” who benefit from the refundable Earned Income Tax Credit; the wage-earners who don’t currently qualify for health insurance under Medicaid but would receive help under the Affordable Care Act; and lurking behind all these would-be “looters,” the struggling new homeowners whom conservatives so often blame for taking out mortgages they couldn’t afford and thus triggering the housing and financial crises.
Americans tend to admire the working poor, so this tack tends to produce an ambivalent reaction beyond the GOP’s conservative base. But by shifting its focus to the old conservative target of non-working “welfare bums,” the Romney campaign is on safer ground, assuming, as you should, that they don’t care if the ad reopens the racial wounds and grievances that welfare reform appeared to partially lay to rest. A line from a memo released by Romney campaign policy director Lanhee Chan in defense of the ad makes its intended audience very plain, calling the imaginary new Obama welfare policy “a kick in the gut to the millions of hard-working middle-class taxpayers struggling in today’s economy, working more for less but always preferring self-sufficiency to a government handout.” It’s the ancient “welfare queen” meme designed to encourage the non-college educated white voters whose maximum support Romney needs to overcome its exceptional weakness among minority and more highly-educated voters to see in Obama all the old hobgoblins that drove them out of the Democratic coalition to begin with.
It may be a sign of Romney’s weakness that he and his team are now willing to openly play with such racial and cultural dynamite. Or maybe it was the idea all along.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
Anyone who’s lived in metropolitan Atlanta in recent decades (as I did until 1995) knows its infamously snarled highway traffic. But any Georgian also knows that it would be impossible to raise taxes to do something about it–at least since 2004, when Republicans achieved control of both the legislative and executive branches of state government for the first time since Reconstruction. Last week’s calamitous defeat of a sales-tax-for-transportation referendum in metro Atlanta and most of the state showed that when push comes to shove, Republican governing can’t survive the Republicans’ anti-governing message.
Shortly before he left office in 2011, Sonny Perdue–modern Georgia’s first GOP governor–set up a complex mechanism whereby voters would impose temporary higher sales taxes on themselves to pay for specific transportation projects, as agreed upon by local elected officials in twelve specially designated regions of the state. But he and other GOP leaders–including the current governer, Nathan Deal–and a business community desperate for a solution to the transportation crisis, did not anticipate that the Tea Party Movement they did so much to encourage would take so seriously its violent anti-government rhetoric, to the extent of fighting these TSPLOST (for Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax) referenda tooth and nail.
They know it now: In a vote held on Primary Day, July 31, TSPLOST went down hard in nine of the state’s twelve regions, including metro Atlanta (where it lost 63-37), despite an unopposed $8 million pro-TSPLOST ad campaign and official support from most Republican and Democratic party leaders.
There are plenty of micro-explanations for the outcome. The whole referendum was complex and unprecedented. Whatever TSPLOST supporters gained in credibility from identifying specific projects to be funded, it may have lost from NIMBY opposition to those same projects. Odd coalitions emerged: In metro Atlanta conservative suburbanites thought too much money was earmarked for public transit projects, while liberal urban voters thought it was not enough. (Both the Sierra Club and the NAACP opposed the referendum). Many voters from different parts of the political spectrum disliked increased sales taxes as a vehicle for transportation funding (Georgia has among the lowest gasoline taxes in the country).
But the overriding factor leading to this humiliation of the business community and the state GOP leadership was simple: Having spent years demonizing higher taxes and government spending, Georgia Republicans were in a poor position to ask for more of both for any purpose under the sun. And with about 62 percent of the total vote last Tuesday being cast in Republican primaries, that was enough to doom the referenda. The only three regions where TSPLOST (narrowly) won were in central and south Georgia areas (including those surrounding the minority-dominated mid-sized cities of Augusta and Columbus) far from the GOP heartland of North Georgia, where the referenda were trounced by two-to-one margins or more.
The loss of Republican voters for TSPLOST was made most evident by business-community ads running in the metro Atlanta media markets just prior to the vote that cited Ronald Reagan’s support for tax increases aimed at infrastructure investments. That’s ironic, given the la-la-la-can’t-hear-you resistance of conservatives to Reagan’s tax heresies, which were cited repeatedly by Democrats during the tax struggles in Washington of the last few years.
The Georgia experience matters nationally for a simple reason: Since 2008, the GOP and its business allies have energized its movement-conservative base (rechristened as the Tea Party Movement) to savagely fight for radically reduced public spending. Now, when increased public investments and the revenues necessary to pay for them are obviously essential to keep a state economy growing, Republicans can no longer dial back the rhetoric, or even count on Democratic voters to help bail them out.
If Republicans conquer Washington in November and Republican-controlled state governments derive the bitter harvest of radically reduced federal support for public services, it will be interesting to see if a “governing wing” of the GOP survives at all in state capitals around the country. And it will be equally interesting to see whether business interests are happy with obtaining better tax rates and less regulation in exchange for dysfunctional government from sea to shining sea.