This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In a famously flawed Republican presidential field, Newt Gingrich somehow manages to combine all his rivals’ shortcomings. Like Herman Cain, he seems more interested in selling books than in running for president. Like Mitt Romney, he struggles to connect with real people. Like Rick Perry, he has offended conservatives with a major policy heresy. Like Michele Bachmann, he often comes across as a theocratic crank. Like Ron Paul, he is a pedant who doesn’t know when to go away. Like Rick Santorum, he is a has-been who would disappear if not for televised debates. And on top of everything, the former Speaker is one of the country’s best known politicians at a time when politicians are barely more credible than bankers, and he has enough personal baggage to sink a battleship.
Yet Gingrich’s strange campaign is undergoing something of a slow renaissance in recent weeks. So completely written off that nobody has much bothered to criticize him, Gingrich has silently ascended into the double-digit range in a number of national and early-state polls, running ahead of Rick Perry in the most recent national surveys from Fox, CBS/NYT, Rasmussen, and PPP. He’s raised enough money to keep the creditors at bay and once again hire staff in Iowa and New Hampshire. Moreover, the immediate causes of his campaign’s implosion back in the spring–his dismissal of Paul Ryan’s budget as too radical, and his decision to take a Mediterranean cruise with his wife instead of trudging across Iowa–have all but been lost in the static of the intervening months. But what explains Newt’s revival in the hearts of conservatives?
It’s tempting to say that Gingrich has survived and even thrived primarily as a function of the other candidates’ shortcomings. How hard is it, after all, to come across as a figure of great experience and gravitas in this company? Indeed, one of the remarkable aspects of the current GOP field has been its inability to coalesce into a firm hierarchy of candidates in which someone like Newt can be consigned completely to the dustbin of discarded ambitions. The dramatic rise and fall of Pawlenty, Bachmann, and Perry has made this one of the more turbulent invisible primaries in recent memory. Just a month ago Herman Cain was in no better position than Rick Santorum is today. At a time when the front-runner (Romney) seems to have hit some invisible ceiling of support and his supposed main challenger (Perry) strides into the race as a swaggering colossus and then almost immediately takes a nose dive in most polls, it’s nearly impossible to draw a firm line between viable and unviable candidates.
But this judgment probably underrates Newt’s shrewd exploitation of his circumstances. As one recent report on his “comeback” attests, Gingrich has been deliberately parsimonious in his media appearances and press releases, as well as his personal campaigning, in order to maintain the image of being a statesman instead of just another news-cycle-focused, vote-grubbing pol. And in the Republican debates, he has pursued the consistent, crowd-pleasing strategy of confining his criticism to Obama and to the debate moderators (as symbols, even when they work for Fox News, of the hated, biased “liberal media”). It’s an excellent formula for avoiding the candidate crossfire while inducing admiring comments from conservative pundits who view the panelists Newt pounds with a mixture of disdain and envy. Said conservative blogger Ed Morrissey:

Newt Gingrich may have a spot on the debate stage long after he runs out of gas otherwise if he keeps attacking the media rather than the frontrunners.

Moreover, Gingrich has some enduring characteristics that keep him relevant within his own party. His posturing as an eminence grise in the GOP should not obscure the fact that he remains a hardened conservative ideological warrior in a party currently gripped by a conservative ideological fervor. He’s the candidate who routinely describes the opposition party as “the secular socialist machine”; who made the ludicrous phantom menace of Sharia law an early signature theme; who revived the “death panels” smear about Obamacare during the last candidate debate. Much as they mistrust him as a corrupted and co-opted Beltway figure, hard-core conservatives also revere Gingrich as someone who in his day hunted the hated RINO as avidly as they do now, and whose election as Speaker represented the conquest of the GOP by the conservative movement and the conquest of Washington (however temporarily) by the GOP.
So it’s entirely appropriate that in this field of dubious characters, shooting stars, and falling meteors, Gingrich has carved out a solid place for himself and will doubtless continue to strut his stuff in the 14 remaining televised candidate debates, not to mention his latest vanity project: a “Lincoln-Douglas style” one-on-one tilt with Herman Cain in Texas. And while it would still take a miracle or some apocalyptic development for him to win the nomination, there’s no denying that Newt has survived the earlier disasters of his campaign, just as his spokesman Rick Tyler predicted in a press release for the ages back in the dark and stormy nights of May:

A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.

Thirty-eight years after his first, failed run for Congress, the ever-talkative former history professor isn’t going anywhere–and against all odds, a new generation of Republicans is eating it up.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
By any conventional standard, Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy should be a bad memory by now. From roughly mid-September to mid-October, he had about as bad a month as a candidate could have. He was consistently hesitant, defensive, and inarticulate in a series of high-profile candidate debates. But more importantly, he gave deep offense to conservatives by continuing to support a Texas program providing in-state college tuition rates for the children of illegal immigrants. His timing was terrible, too: Perry’s slide began soon after his announcement but not long before actual voting begins–i.e., when the Republican rank-and-file in early states begin to focus on the candidate field and form strong impressions. Perry’s decline, of course, can be charted in the national polls, which show him free-falling from a strong frontrunner position to single digits in just over the span of a month.
But Perry may still yet emerge as the Viable Conservative Alternative to Mitt Romney. He might have failed his first audition for that role with the conservative wing of the GOP, but he still has an eminently viable path to recovery, one that he already appears to be employing with zeal: moving even further to the right.
It’s possible to talk about a Perry comeback for three simple reasons. First, he has lots of money, which can cover a multitude of political sins. Second, the presumptive, albeit uninspiring, frontrunner, Mitt Romney, is not about to run away with the race because, to put it bluntly, hard-core conservative voters don’t like or trust him. And third, the other candidates are either damaged goods (Gingrich), classic marginal figures (Bachmann, Santorum and Paul) or Herman Cain, who seems to be trying pretty hard to vindicate predictions that he is a flash-in-the-pan. So Perry will get another look from Republicans. The question is whether he will do a better job this time around at convincing true believers of his unshakable conservative convictions.
His main priority, therefore, has been to ensure that conservatives have something substantive to associate him with other than his terrible positioning on immigration. After initially focusing on his support for massive and unrestrained energy development, which is the closest thing to a short-range “jobs program” today’s conservatives can support, Perry has now laid out a tax-and-spending plan that efficiently pushes an awful lot of right-wing buttons. His “flat tax” proposal is a fraud in that its key features are optional, but for that very reason it is nicely designed to avoid the kind of criticism attracted by Cain’s steadily unraveling 9-9-9 plan. The spending side of Perry’s package, meanwhile–which is heavily focused on the idea of permanently shrinking the federal government via a balanced budget constitutional amendment–is draconian enough to satisfy even the most extreme fiscal conservative. A BBA with spending restrictions also happens to be the pet idea of South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, a key national leader of movement conservatives whose home state could play a critical role in the 2012 nominating process.
Aside from dishing out tasty policy treats to the Right, Perry’s effort to seduce movement conservative support is also clearly going to depend on harsh, overtly ideological attacks on Romney. What better way to show you are the Viable Conservative Alternative to Mitt than to identify yourself with the very criticisms of Romney that make “the base” so restive in the first place? Perry’s campaign has already made a habit of regularly referring to Romney as “Obama Lite.” You can expect a lot more of that in the immediate future, particularly if Romney keeps committing heresies like his decision on Tuesday to stay neutral on Ohio’s red-hot referendum on the labor-bashing Senate Bill 5. And there are even signs that Perry will try to play the ideological commissar against other candidates like Herman Cain, as he did in his contemptuous drive-by reference to the pizza man’s abortion rhetoric as “liberal” during last weekend’s Faith and Freedom Coalition banquet in Iowa. It’s even possible that Perry’s eyebrow-raising gestures towards birtherism in a recent interview were part of a deliberate strategy to position him as far to the right of the rest of the field as possible.
Perry’s rebirth as a right-wing crusader will also require that his image be efficiently conveyed to voters via paid media and organization. It’s no accident, therefore, that Perry’s comeback effort has been accompanied by a shakeup of the Texas-based campaign staff that let him drift into a series of high-profile debates ill-prepared to deal with the most obvious attack-lines. While Bush veteran Joe Allbaugh will apparently take over the reins of the campaign from Perry’s old hand David Carney, the other new hires–pollster Tony Fabrizio and media consultants Nelson Warfield and Curt Anderson–are more interesting, since they represent what Chris Cillizza calls “the strategic core” of the expensive, negative, ideologically savage, and ultimately successful 2010 campaign of Florida Governor Rick Scott. With Perry beginning to run TV ads in Iowa just this week, it probably won’t be long before his campaign (or the Super PAC supporting it) starts flooding the airwaves with attacks on Romney and possibly Cain, as well as a constant portrayal of the Texan as the Tea Party ideologue his original backers expected him to be.
Of course, the “rebooted” Perry campaign is still a long shot. Romney could decide to jump into the Iowa contest with both feet and try to score a quick knockout over a divided conservative field. Cain’s lofty poll numbers might yet convince him to take his own campaign more seriously, avoid unforced errors like his abortion gaffe, and above all start spending more time in the early states. Even if everything breaks his way, bouncing back from the single digits after a disastrous run in the spotlight won’t be easy. But Perry will get another brief callback for the job of saving the GOP from Romney. If nothing else, he won’t go down this time without trying to take everyone else down with him.

This item is cross-posted from Salon.
According to the chattering classes, 2012 was supposed to be the election year when the “culture wars” of recent decades faded into unimportant skirmishes, as candidates and voters alike focused exclusively on economic and fiscal issues. But at least one culture war issue, immigration, has already shaken up the Republican presidential contest and is key to Barack Obama’s success in winning the Hispanic votes he desperately needs to get reelected. With Congress missing in action, it is the battle over punitive new state immigration laws, in the legislatures and in the courts, that keeps this issue in the national spotlight.
The enduring potency of the immigration issue has been apparent since Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 in April of 2010. The measure signaled the intention of conservatives at the state and local levels to protest what they considered lax federal enforcement of immigration laws by inducting regular police officers into the unaccustomed role of harassing, detecting and arresting people without citizenship documents. Though portions of the law were immediately struck down by lower federal courts, the measure became a litmus test issue in 2010 congressional and gubernatorial contests around the country, particularly among Republicans.
Copycat legislation was introduced in a host of states, with Utah, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina and Alabama enacting harsher laws and experiencing mixed results in court challenges. Alabama’s 2011 law, which goes well beyond the Arizona template by seeking to use school officials to identify “illegals,” has attracted national attention by spurring an exodus of undocumented people from the state and damaging the state’s agriculture industry as unharvested crops rot in the fields (as is also occurring in Georgia).
Until the federal courts sort out the various lawsuits and begin to define a permissible state role in the enforcement of federal immigration laws, the furor will mainly serve to keep pressure on Republican politicians to display their “toughness” on the issue. It will also draw fresh attention to the collapse of Bush-era efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented people already in the country.
In the crossfire of this controversy are Hispanic Americans, who are alternating between fearful rejection of Republican anti-immigrant rhetoric and deep frustration at the failure of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party to promote comprehensive reform.
The firestorm set off by Arizona showed that the grass-roots conservative rejection of prior Republican support for a “path to citizenship” — known simply and bitterly as “amnesty” on the right — associated with both George W. Bush and Arizona’s own John McCain, has if anything intensified despite the recession, the drop-off in the number of illegals entering the country and stepped-up federal enforcement measures.
If there was any doubt that comprehensive immigration reform had joined other elements of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” on the dustbin of political history, it should have been laid to rest by the recent experience of one-time GOP presidential front-runner Rick Perry of Texas. Perry’s support for what was once a non-controversial program that enabled undocumented immigrant children graduating from Texas high schools to obtain in-state tuition rates at public colleges destroyed much of his base of support among conservative voters. The fact that Perry’s attempt at a comeback began with a harsh attack on Mitt Romney’s alleged employment of undocumented workers in a landscaping project at his own home shows the Texan’s tardy understanding that the immigration issue was his most important albatross.
This passion play over immigration on the right is occurring in a larger context where Republican efforts to deny Barack Obama reelection may well depend on the size and direction of the Hispanic vote. According to exit polls, Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, and a record turnout among Hispanics lifted them to 9 percent of the electorate. As is usually the case, the Hispanic share of the midterm electorate dropped significantly, to 6.9 percent in 2010, with the Democratic share dropping to 60 percent. A return to something approaching 2008 levels in both turnout and support levels could be crucial to Obama’s prospects in 2012.
But early measures of Hispanic enthusiasm for voting in 2012 are down significantly. Obama’s job approval rating among Hispanics (according to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll) is at an anemic 49 percent, not much above Obama’s overall rating of 42 percent Certainly the intensity of support for Obama has declined along with the approval ratings. A recent Latino Decisions survey showed the percentage of Hispanics “strongly approving” of Obama dropping from 41 to 28 percent just between June and August of this year.
With the unemployment rate for Hispanics standing about 2 percentage points above the level for the population at large (with home foreclosure rates a lot higher), some of the unhappiness simply represents the same economic factors that have drained Obama’s support in all elements of the electorate. But aside from the administration’s failure to revive comprehensive immigration reform legislation, its policy of stepped-up enforcement — nearly 400,000 undocumented immigrants were deported in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 — has drawn fire from Hispanic political activists.

Read more…

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When the entire candidate field opened fire on Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax proposal in Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Las Vegas, you could almost hear the sound of hundreds of exhaled breaths in elite GOP circles. Cain’s improbable rise in national and early-state polls would now end, they probably figured, as GOP voters discovered the pizza man’s signature policy proposal wasn’t terribly well thought out. But it’s likely that Cain could have overcome the criticisms surrounding his tax proposal. What he will struggle to live down, on the other hand, are his recent comments on abortion.
The mounting criticisms of Cain’s 9-9-9 plan were troublesome, but far from fatal for the candidate. To begin, it’s unclear whether rank-and-file conservatives attracted to Cain in the first place will accept second-hand analysis from the “liberal” Tax Policy Center against the authority of Herman’s own web page and his humble Ohio economic advisors. Moreover, tax plans can be endlessly fiddled with, as Cain showed yesterday in his Detroit speech laying out a complicated “opportunity zone” exception to 9-9-9, which will address claims that it is highly regressive. And the heat that’s now on Cain for promoting a controversial set of tax reforms could soon be transferred to Rick Perry, who will unveil his own “flat tax” proposal next week.
But debate over Cain’s vulnerability on 9-9-9 might not matter as much now, because the candidate has subsequently committed an unforced error of much greater magnitude–and on an issue where tolerance of heresy in the GOP ranks has shrunk to the disappearing point: abortion. At a time when the veto power of the Right-to-Life movement over national Republican tickets has become plain as day (just ask John McCain, whose top two vice-presidential choices had to be dropped in favor of Sarah Palin), Cain somehow managed to flub answers to simple, familiar questions on abortion policy in an interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan.
It was surprising enough that Cain seemed to back rape and incest exceptions to a hypothetical abortion ban, since he said he didn’t as recently as two days ago (indeed, his hard-core anti-choice position was fundamental to his one prior candidacy, his unsuccessful 2004 Senate bid in Georgia against a rare pro-choice Republican, Johnny Isakson). But of far greater concern to the Right-to-Life lobby is the logic of Cain’s rambling answer, which seems to concede that abortion is generally a matter for families, not government, to decide. The highly influential proprietor of The Iowa Republican, Craig Robinson, made this clear in a post that opened up on Cain with both barrels:

Basically, Cain’s position as a candidate is that of pro-abortion activists. The government has no right to tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her body. The difference is that a pro-life individual believes that child inside the womb is a life with inherent rights and that the mother should not be allowed to infringe it’s right to life [sic].
Cain will likely clarify his position, but how many times and on how many different subjects will he be allowed to ask for a “do-over” before he loses trust and credibility with voters?

Robinson’s piece–entitled “Do We Really Know Who Herman Cain Is?”–is quite certainly ricocheting around Iowa political circles. And Cain, whose front-runner status in Iowa is already vulnerable to his lack of organization and personal attention to the state, could not have picked a worse subject on which to stumble. The Iowa GOP is a place where right-to-lifers walk tall, and where “social issues” have not lost any of their old punch. Rick Santorum, who has already attacked Cain for his gaffe, is undoubtedly seeing this as a God-given opening to poach on Cain’s intensely conservative voter base, as will Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and the man whom so many Cain voters were supporting a month ago, Rick Perry.
Pro-lifers in Iowa and around the country will quickly be reminded that Cain joined the already-suspect Mitt Romney and the presumed RINO Jon Huntsman as the only candidates who refused to sign the Susan B. Anthony List’s “Pro-Life Presidential Leadership Pledge,” which promises all-out war on abortion supporters and providers, earlier this year. And like Robinson, agents of Cain’s rivals will use this incident to raise basic questions about the Tea Party favorite’s ideological reliability on other issues, including taxes. Cain is lucky that this weekend’s Des Moines banquet for Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition will involve candidate speeches rather than a full-on debate, though he may well draw fire over abortion from his rivals anyway.
Herman is a smooth operator with the soul of a born salesman, but this time his silver tongue may have undone him. Tax plans can be written or unwritten. For people who think legalized abortion represents an ongoing American Holocaust, however, the correct position is always the same, and any wrinkle or nuance that complicates “No!” is just going to get the candidate in deep trouble.
UPDATE: Cain did indeed “clarify” his position on abortion, and did indeed put himself back in the “illegal with no exceptions” camp that is the only safe territory for conservatives. But in seeking to rationalize his prior remarks, Cain also seemed to be saying his talk about the “choice” families faced with respect to specific abortions referred to the “choice” to break the law. Politico‘s headline on the clarification was apt: “Herman Cain keeps digging on abortion answer.” He got through the Faith and Freedom Coalition appearance without incident (but also without his usual boffo reception), but the residual damage might be best reflected by this comment on his gyrations from Iowa social conservative poohbah Bob Vander Plaats: “That sounds just like John Kerry in 2004.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the many baleful assessments of the 2012 Republican presidential field, the running joke for months has been “somebody has to win.” Indeed, that seems to be the main reason so many pundits are confident that Mitt Romney, a candidate the party’s rank-and-file conservative stalwarts clearly don’t like and don’t want to nominate, will ultimately win the prize. But Romney’s noncommittal stance in Iowa, coupled with poll-leader Herman Cain’s lack of campaign infrastructure or regularity of visits, means the state that is set to vote first on January 3 presents a tantalizing opportunity for a dark horse or a supposed has-been to swoop in and shake up the race. And Iowa’s unique caucus dynamic–which rewards candidate loyalty and ideological purity, but doesn’t require a lot of money to compete–only makes the stage that much more inviting for Perry, Bachmann, or even Santorum to make a last-minute surge.
The biggest reason why Iowa remains an open ballgame is that the two candidates currently dominating the polls, in Iowa and nationally, haven’t really committed to competing in the state. In Mitt Romney’s case, that is very deliberate; having arguably blown the nomination in 2008 by diverting resources from New Hampshire and raising expectations in Iowa that were dashed by Mike Huckabee’s upset win, he’s obviously not eager to risk the same mistake twice. So Romney’s mainly lying back in the weeds, though he remains first or second in every Iowa poll, and is returning to the state this week for the first time since May. In Herman Cain’s case, on the other hand, his lack of organization and light schedule in Iowa have simply served as exhibit A for the argument that he’s not a serious candidate for the presidency. His activity in Iowa over the next couple of weeks will therefore be watched closely by the chattering classes with an eye to his basic viability. But unless Romney or Cain change their tactics and dive headfirst into the state, Iowans–who are extremely self-conscious about their role in the presidential nominating process–will likely not keep telling pollsters they favor the two men who are spurning their affections.
Another factor that indicates anything can happen in Iowa is the accelerated schedule, which ensures that all the candidate jousting for position will occur on a very short track. The early caucus date immediately after the holidays will reduce the attention normally paid to the campaign and greatly inhibit the ability of candidates to “go negative.” With caucuses being held, literally, on the first day most working Iowans return to the grind after an extended vacation, turnout could also be affected despite the intense interest Republicans everywhere are exhibiting in this particular presidential race. And low turnout could spell better chances for a dark-horse candidate.
Finally, because Iowa is a caucus, not a primary, it means that voters will be more ideologically driven than in primary states. Iowa GOP caucuses do not, however, involve the byzantine procedures of viability thresholds, vote-trading, and multiple divisions into preference groups that make Democratic caucuses in the state such an ordeal; people show up, vote for a presidential candidate, and then sample the pot-luck snacks. In other words, organization matters a lot, but it doesn’t have to be as extensive, expensive, or strategically adept as the finely-honed instruments deployed by Obama, Edwards, and Clinton in Iowa in 2008. Just ask Mike Huckabee, who won the GOP caucuses four years ago with a budget that would have barely lasted a week in the Democratic contest.
At this moment, then, other candidates can realistically imagine themselves launching an audacious Iowa campaign that shakes up the race. Bachmann, who won the August Iowa GOP Straw Poll, remains an obvious contender. She’s a sentimental and ideological favorite of many Iowa activists, and a close friend and ally of influential Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King, who is expected to make an influential endorsement before long. Rick Perry, despite his profound crash in the polls, will now have the opportunity to spend some of his vast budget, test-drive the shiny new Iowa organization he mainly inherited from Tim Pawlenty, and show off his allegedly superior retail political skills. And even Rick Santorum has a shot. With more appearances in the state than any other candidate, he has long competed with Bachmann for the favor of hardcore, single-issue social conservatives, who are perhaps more formidable in Iowa than in any other early state. Moreover, his persistence, reflected in the symbolic gesture of pledging to campaign in all 99 counties, is the sort of monomaniacal Iowa-centric behavior activists there like to reward.
With just over ten weeks until voting begins, Iowa’s hardcore conservatives have yet to settle on an ultimate champion. This might very well tempt Romney to abandon his sensible strategy of focusing on New Hampshire and Nevada and instead try for an early sweep by beating divided competition in the caucuses. One thing, at least, is certain: The current state of irresolution, for both anti-Romney conservatives and for Romney himself, won’t last much longer. So you can expect some real turbulence in Iowa during the next few weeks, as Romney and Cain make their decisions about the state’s importance and their rivals try to get attention before the shiny distractions of the holidays take hold. After all, somebody has to win.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The shape of the 2012 Republican presidential contest has now assumed a strange, shadowy form. The original front-runner, Mitt Romney, is the front-runner again, and is rapidly consolidating elite acknowledgment as the probable nominee. But his levels of actual support among GOP voters and conservative activists seem to have barely budged. Rick Perry, the political Leviathan who threatened to put the whole contest away just a month ago, is in deep trouble, bleeding support everywhere and alienating his Tea Party base with a toxic position on immigration. And Herman Cain, with little money and even less organization, has captured much of Perry’s hard-core conservative support with upbeat, crowd-pleasing oratory, a popular tax proposal, and the sheer incongruity of his candidacy. The key question, therefore, is this: Is conservative antipathy to Mitt Romney sufficient to fuel a Perry comeback, or make Cain a serious candidate for the presidency rather than the best-seller list? And if either anti-Romney effort remains feasible, which one will movement conservatives and their leaders choose?
During the last week, it’s become apparent that the Perry crash and Cain surge aren’t just a matter of some national polling phenomenon that is irrelevant to the actual task of winning early primary and caucus states. Two new polls of likely Iowa caucus-goers show Perry losing more than half his earlier support and sinking to fourth place, even as Cain leaps into first or second place with numbers similar to those sported by Perry at the peak of his own surge. Worse yet for Perry, one of those polls shows Iowa Republicans displaying not just a sense of being underwhelmed by the Texan, but active disdain (an approval/disapproval ratio of 38/41, as compared to 51/36 for Romney and 63/17 for Cain), most likely a product of ongoing anger over his violation of the newly established conservative litmus test requiring maximum hostility to illegal immigration.
What makes these numbers hard to interpret is the importance in Iowa of the money and organization needed to get supporters to endure a long, cold, winter evening of caucusing. Perry’s got money and organization to burn; Herman Cain has neither at the moment, but as the current favorite of Tea Party supporters in Iowa and elsewhere, he does have enthusiasm, which was enough to propel Mike Huckabee past Mitt Romney in Iowa during the last cycle. The positioning of the field in Iowa will be crucially affected by whether or not Romney takes the bait and decides to go for broke there, aiming for the kind of early knockout blow John Kerry achieved among Democrats in 2004. And local endorsements could matter, too. Senator Chuck Grassley has indicated he will probably choose a candidate quite soon, as could Governor Terry Branstad, Representative Steve King, an iconic right-winger and close friend of Bachmann who also happens to be Congress’ noisiest nativist (which should make Rick Perry nervous), and social-conservative kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization.
Looking beyond Iowa, and given the likelihood that Romney will easily win both the Nevada caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the Perry-Cain rivalry, if it persists, will have a new dimension when the campaign moves to the South. Perry was presumed to be the dominant favorite in that region the moment he announced, but it’s also where Cain has some semblance of an organization to supplement the probable support of local Tea Party groups. A new American Research Group poll of South Carolina shows the national patterns taking hold in Dixie as well, with Cain edging Romney 26 percent to 25 percent, and Perry back at 15 percent (given ARG’s uneven reputation for accuracy, that finding should be taken with a grain of salt). The Palmetto State is another early primary venue where bigfoot endorsements could matter, particularly one by Senator Jim DeMint, whose national clout could theoretically make Cain viable, give back Perry his movement-conservative street cred, or signal the acceptance of Romney by a reluctant Right.
Indeed, DeMint’s decision mirrors the choices currently facing movement conservatives in this contest. Having moved the entire party decisively in their direction since 2008, they do not, as it turns out, have an ideal vehicle for living out their dream of making 2012 a successful “re-do” of the 1964 election, which gave them a true champion determined to roll back the New Deal and short-circuit the Great Society–but not a president. There are certainly a lot of signs that conservatives are increasingly confident they can beat Barack Obama no matter who they nominate, so Romney’s supposed superior “electability” doesn’t resolve their dilemma. And for people with a long series of grievances about broken Republican promises, the supremely untrustworthy Mitt would have to be a last resort. Cain is more their kind of candidate, and his improbable nomination would be a monumental and gratifying act of defiance aimed at political and media elites. But it’s by no means obvious Cain can clear the Palin Line of showing the minimum self-discipline, seriousness, and relevant experience that even movement conservatives respect. Perry, too, for all his own experience and fundraising prowess, has richly earned as much skepticism as Cain about his staying power, and is in danger of looking as untrustworthy to serious conservatives as Mitt when it comes to the issues.
The so-called Republican Establishment has largely made its choice of Romney, but for all their money and media influence, they can no longer impose a nominee on a united conservative movement. So between now and January, it’s gut-check time for the right, and we’ll soon know whether its leaders attempt to rig the game or just throw up their hands and let the rank-and-file roll the dice.

This item is cross-posted from Salon.
After fierce but inconclusive battles in Wisconsin, the great labor struggle of 2011 is now centered in that ultimate swing state of Ohio. A richly funded national right-wing effort to break the economic and political power of the labor movement in its Midwestern heartland is now facing a ballot test in a Nov. 8 referendum to affirm or overturn a union-busting law, known as Senate Bill 5.
As in Wisconsin and other states, conservatives in Ohio have focused their fire on public-sector unions, which are easy to identify with unpopular levels of government spending and taxation. But just as there is little doubt the assault on public-sector unions this year is part of a broader effort to weaken collective bargaining rights and undermine labor’s political strength, efforts to repeal Senate Bill 5 will depend on the solidarity of private-sector union members who are not directly affected by the legislation, but can see the handwriting on the wall.
The heart of Senate Bill 5, as enacted by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by GOP Gov. John Kasich, is a set of provisions limiting collective bargaining by public employees to wage and hour issues. Strikes by public employees (who constitute nearly half the state’s unionized workforce) would be banned, as they already are for police and fire department employees. Pensions and benefits, and a variety of ancillary issues affecting conditions of employment, such as class sizes for teachers, would be permanently off the table.
Of equal importance is a provision banning “fair-share” assessments from non-union members who benefit from union collective bargaining efforts, a step that would seriously damage incentives to join public-sector unions. This is perhaps the most obvious feature of Senate Bill 5 that might set a precedent for future attacks on private sector unions in Ohio and on unions in other states. Nationally, the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is pushing state right-to-work laws banning “union shops.” Some, including, so far, at least two Republican presidential candidates, are even promoting a national right-to-work law.
Proponents of SB 5 are trying mightily to claim the legislation is mainly about “runaway” pensions and benefits, and often tout a provision requiring public employees to pay at least 10 percent of the cost of pensions and 15 percent of the cost of healthcare premiums. Unfortunately for this argument, many if not most public employees already contribute to pensions and benefits at this level or more. Just as important, public employee unions in Ohio and elsewhere have traditionally sacrificed wage increases to pension and benefit needs. Indeed, in 2008 alone, Ohio public-sector unions made $250 million in wage and benefit concessions to state and local governments.
The conservative talk about disparities between public and private-sector employees is a transparent ploy to drive a wedge between the two wings of the labor movement, while distracting attention from the more egregiously anti-union provisions of the SB 5. Polling has shown the benefit and pension issues are the only provisions of SB 5 that are reasonably popular.
These efforts certainly have not worked at the level of union or political-party leadership. The drive to repeal SB 5, spearheaded by a union-funded umbrella group called We Are Ohio, has conspicuously featured private-sector union leaders. This weekend, a Columbus-area phone-bank and door-to-door canvassing effort was personally led by Communications Workers of America president Larry Cohen, with strong participation from other private-sector unions ranging from the Steelworkers to the Plumbers & Pipefitters to the Food and Commercial Workers.
Mike Gillis of the Ohio AFL-CIO told me that building trades unions, who fear an effort to kill Project Labor Agreements ensuring union jobs for major public works projects, are also very active in the repeal campaign. A recent Quinnipiac poll showed Kasich’s approval ratings among voters in union households to be deeply “underwater” with 27 percent positive and 68 percent negative. And beyond the union ranks, the Ohio Democratic Party has been an unambiguous opponent of SB 5 from the beginning.
The apparent strategy of conservative anti-union activists to target public-sector employees as a less-popular “weak link” in the union ranks is based on questionable assumptions. Though there is little in the way of public polling on this subject, a February 2011 Pew survey showed public- and private-sector unions having almost identical favorable/unfavorable ratings from the public at large. The poll found 48 percent have favorable view of private-sector unions with 37 percent negative. For public section unions, the figures were 48 percent favorable, 40 percent unfavorable.

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