This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Until just last week, things were looking up for Republicans, with Obama’s approval ratings sinking and the GOP nomination process settling down to a choice between two potentially formidable candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. But after the demolition derby of “P5”–the series of candidate events in Orlando including a candidates’ debate, a state straw poll, and several speaking opportunities–fear and panic have gripped elite GOP circles. Indeed, what’s been revealed is that the two front-runners are locked in an increasingly savage competition that exposes both of their vulnerabilities. Perry, the red-hot bullet in many recent polls, stumbled his way through Orlando and left in considerable disarray. The long-awaited Florida straw poll turned into a rout for former pizza magnate Herman Cain. And time is truly running out for any last-minute establishment savior to enter the race, while the possibility most mentioned, Chris Christie–who left the door to a late run open just a bit after his Ronald Reagan Library speech this week–has his own baggage to handle, including heterodox positions and his own recent assessment that he is not ready to serve as president.
These current events leave GOP elites in quite a bind: Do they hope Perry recovers his debating mojo in the next candidate forum, on October 11 in New Hampshire, and resumes his earlier march through Iowa and South Carolina to the nomination? Or should they instead conclude that Romney was right in gambling that conservative activists would eventually tire of complaining about the Massachusetts health plan or his increasingly distant record of flip-flops on abortion and gay rights? In either case, they’ve got to decide fast, as a protracted fight will surely hurt the eventual nominee down the road while diverting attention and resources from the cause of defeating Barack Obama.
The Perry-Romney decision is a tough call for Republicans, to be sure. Misgivings about Romney are deep-seated, and transcend any particular issue. Elites will not soon forget his disastrous Iowa loss in 2008 to the lightly-regarded, underfunded Mike Huckabee, or the suspicion that Romney’s Mormon faith will act as a permanent millstone on his ability to attract conservative evangelical voters. And it’s hard to overcome the nagging conviction that today’s GOP base is not in the mood to nominate anyone who is considered moderate, or who evokes anything other than horror and post-election Canadian travel plans among Democrats. Michele Bachmann perhaps captured this conservative zeitgeist best during the Orlando debate, when she described Obama as a sure loser and suggested Republicans could go ideologically hog wild without fear of any consequences.
But elite reactions to Perry’s Sunshine State meltdown were authentically shrill. Most significant, perhaps, was that of RedState’s Erick Erickson, who provided the venue for the Texan’s carnivorous presidential announcement speech in August:

Rick Perry stands on the precipice. He is about to fall off … . [A]nother performance like last night could push him off the edge of support among people who want an anti-Romney alternative, but who really want to beat Barack Obama even more.

And Michelle Malkin, another conservative opinion-leader who could never be described as a Romney-loving squish, observed: “Perry said he’s in favor of making English the official language of the U.S. Perhaps he should concentrate on mastering it before the next debate.”
What most fed the harsh judgments of Perry in Florida is that he stumbled at moments when he should have been thoroughly scripted and rehearsed: his incoherent effort to blast Romney as a flip-flopper, and his halting, defensive efforts to defend himself on Social Security and immigration. On this last subject, he managed to make his terrible positioning worse by suggesting that critics of the Texas DREAM Act were heartless, if not bigoted–the kind of talk considered offensively slanderous in Tea Party circles. If he’s this bad on the predictable stuff, what would happen to him in a debate with Barack Obama? Elites are prone to worry about this kind of thing. They also might well worry about whether the powerful Perry campaign organization, led by the supposed strategic genius Dave Carney, is in fact built on feet of clay. After hyping the Florida Straw Poll for weeks as a major milestone of the 2012 race, Perry skipped town before the final speeches and was absolutely demolished by Herman Cain. When you are outworked by a candidate who was earlier written off for the languorous pace of his appearances in Iowa, your campaign is no juggernaut.
To be sure, while there are reasons for GOP elites to worry about both of the front-runners, there is also no guarantee that either will self-destruct. CNN’s first national poll, taken after the week of Florida events, shows relatively little movement other than a mini-surge for debate stars Cain and Gingrich and serious declines in support for Bachmann and Paul. And before long, the “invisible primary” dominated by elites will give way to the actual caucuses and primaries where voters–albeit activist-dominated base voters–begin to take over. But until a clear consensus emerges, insiders will be forced to watch in horror as Team Romney derides Perry as unelectable, and as Team Perry attacks Romney as an “Obama-Lite” RINO, with both sides hemorrhaging money and Democrats taking careful notes.

Every Democratic political junkie ought to take the time to watch a replay of Chris Christie’s speech at the Ronald Reagan Library last night. It was a serviceable speech, which didn’t offend any conservative ideological pieties and stopped just short of giving Republican members of Congress part of the blame for the country’s problems.
But the interesting thing was less the speech than the ensuing Q&A, in which Christie got to show off his wit (a rare commodity in a GOP currently dominated by Mitt Romney and Rick Perry), and the audience got to show off its desperation for a new presidential candidate.
Just watching, you could sense the entire room holding its breath as a questioner practically got down on her knees to beg Christie to run for president. She didn’t quite come out and say the current field is composed of bozos who couldn’t beat Obama, but that was the clear implication. If there is an “electability caucus” in the GOP, it was heavily represented at the Reagan library last night.
Contrived or not, the question and its supplicatory tone put Christie in the enviable position of responding that it would be “egomaniacal” of him not to think about the wants and needs of people like the questioner. Should he now choose to repudiate a year’s worth of denials and jump into the race, he can be expected to claim that turning his back on so many supplicants would have been arrogant, and that aspiring to become the most powerful person in the world is an act of humility! Pretty amazing, eh?
If he does run, Christie is going to have some real issues with past positions offensive to conservatives, as noted by Mike Tomasky today. He’d have to get a campaign together in record time, particularly since Florida Republicans appear poised to push the start date for the formal nominating process up until the very beginning of 2012, if not earlier. Candidates already in the field will go to unholy lengths to keep Christie from crashing the party. And you can expect a lot of people from New Jersey to come forward with less than flattering information about life under a Christie administration.
In some ways, Christie’s appeal is very similar to that of Rudy Giuiliani’s at the beginning of the 2008 cycle–except that Rudy got into the race at the very beginning, and was much better know nationally. And you saw how that turned out.
More than likely, Christie won’t run, and will use this moment of national attention to keep himself on the “mentioned” list for every appointed position within the power of a Republican president for years to come. But the apparent panic which is leading a lot of big-shot Republican donors and pols to come beg him to run is a phenomenon that is interesting in itself.

It’s rapidly become part of the CW that the president, alarmed by deteriorating support from the Democratic “base,” began a “tilt to the left” in his September 8 “jobs speech.” According to this assumption, he will presumably “tilt back to the center” at some point in order to wage an effective general election campaign.
If, however, Obama has been engaged in some “tilt to the left,” it sure hasn’t been noticed by the voting public.
According to the latest big national poll, from CNN, the president’s “renominate” number among self-identified Democrats is at 72%. A month ago, before the “jobs speech” and its “tilt to the left,” it was at–72%.
Gallup’s weekly tracking poll has the president’s job approval rating staying pretty steady in the low 40s over the last month. During the last full week before the “jobs speech,” it was at 81% among self-identified “liberal Democrats.” This last week the same group gave him a 76% approval rating. Among liberals generally, his approval rating dropped from 71% to 67%. During the same period, his job approval rating among self-identified conservatives went up four points; among conservative Democrats it was up three points.
Now none of these shifts was large enough to signify a lot, but they sure aren’t consistent with pundit claims that Obama conspicuously changed his tune in a “left” direction. Moreover, his standing in the Democratic “base” before the jobs speech was hardly alarming enough to justify a major shift in the first place.
All this reinforces my original feeling that what the president is actually up to strategically is simply a pivot towards his general election strategy of creating contrasts between his “reasonable” and jobs-focused policies and the ideological bender that the GOP has been indulging for much of the last three years. Arguably he is undertaking the pivot too late, and/or with insufficient force, but it does not appear he is just making a leftward feint before settling back in to many months of happy-talk bipartisanship. Barring some unlikely major change of strategy by Republicans, and with the exception of possible emergencies, I suspect we’ll keep hearing more of the rhetoric of “contrast” from the White House as we move towards the general election.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the war of words over Barack Obama’s presidency, one important asset for conservatives has been the ability to identify at least a few self-styled “centrists” to periodically support the standard Republican claim that Obama is a dangerous leftist who is recklessly expanding the federal government beyond any past precedent or reasonable expectation. Unsurprisingly, after the president’s recent jobs speech and his deficit reduction proposal, we are at a moment when conservatives are eagerly harvesting expressions of “centrist” dismay to complement claims that Obama has lurched dangerously to the left by promoting new fiscal stimulus measures and reviving demands for a partial rollback of Bush-era tax cuts for the very wealthy.
The GOP has found more than a few willing exemplars. David Brooks, that pillar of reasonable moderation who last made news deploring the radicalism of today’s conservative movement, has now returned to the GOP fold, anguished as he is that Obama has abandoned the “centrist Clinton approach” in favor of a Ted Kennedy-style liberalism. Nicely reinforcing this meme, Clinton family pollster and strategist Mark Penn has set off shock waves in the commentariat in accusing Obama of un-Clintonian “class warfare” by virtue of his championship of upper-income tax rates close to those that prevailed during the actual Clinton administration (which both Obama and Hillary Clinton pledged to restore in 2008). Mainstream journalist Ken Walsh of U.S. News closed the desired feedback loop by citing Penn, oil-and-gas industry serf Mary Landrieu, and her desperate red-state colleague Ben Nelson as representing a “centrist Democrat” revolt against Obama’s lurch to the left. It’s pretty meager evidence, to be sure, but it’s all bankable intellectual capital for a Republican Party trying to disguise its own militant conservative ideological trend as a modest reaction to Democratic overreach.
But the ongoing conservative effort to “seize the political center”–not by occupying it with any centrist policy positions or willingness to compromise, but simply by asserting that Obama is the true radical–is being complicated by a parallel development: the insistence of hard-core Tea Party conservatives that the GOP object to every progressive policy initiative since the early days of the New Deal.
From the very beginning of the Obama presidency, there has been a barely acknowledged tension between these two conservative approaches to defining the enemy. According to one narrative, the fine, honorable old Democratic Party has been captured by quasi-Marxist America-haters led by the bicoastal misfits Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank, and the Saul Alinskly/ William Ayers disciple in the White House. Certainly, this sort of argument has a fine pedigree in conservative circles, dating back at least to Ronald Reagan, who often described himself as a New Deal Democrat whose party left him behind when it lurched to the far left. And this funhouse mirror view of a Democratic Party gone suddenly and terribly wrong is made especially vivid any time a Clintonista like Mark Penn can be recruited to make the case that Obama is something new and frightening in American politics.
But the competing Tea Party/”constitutional conservative” view is that Obama is no better or worse than the socialist scoundrels who preceded him, and that the GOP must offer not just some return to the policies of a few years ago or even a few decades ago, but to a prelapsarian golden age when “job creators” walked tall and free and Washington minded its own, very limited business.
This more radical conservative vision has been embraced at one time or another by three of the four remaining viable Republican candidates for president–Perry, Bachmann, and Paul. It offers the White House a big, fat target in its frantic efforts to make this a comparative campaign rather than a referendum on the status quo. But aside from helping the incumbent define his challengers in an invidious way, it also affects the GOP’s ability to define Obama as a departure from familiar political norms. How many centrist validators like David Brooks will Rick Perry be able to attract if he can’t bring himself to repudiate the clear view expressed in Fed Up! that the abominations of the Obama administration are just another step down the road to serfdom first plotted by FDR? How many Clintonistas like Penn and Doug Schoen or Fox Democrats like Pat Caddell will be able to bring themselves to stop attacking today’s Democratic Party as an aberration from its proud past, and start attacking their own heritage and their own former bosses? Can Ed Koch, one of the heroes of the Republican victory in the recent special congressional election in New York, really keep asking the children of the New Deal to “send Obama a message” if it means saying Hoover was right and FDR was wrong? How, in short, how can Republicans seize the center if they treat the last 75 years of bipartisan policies as a monstrous perversion of American ideals?
Conservatives had better enjoy this period of supreme strategic flexibility, when they can simultaneously benefit from expressions of centrist dismay over Obama’s supposed hyper-liberalism while firing up the base with lurid fantasies of a return to the nineteenth century. For the sake of message discipline, they will eventually need to choose a clear and consistent image of Obama, and of themselves, and a presidential candidate who can convincingly convey both.

One of the unfortunate habits of political journalists is the tendency to seize on unexamined if intuitively plausible explanations for otherwise puzzling developments. This seems to be happening with respect to a new Suffolk poll of the New Hampshire Republican presidential primary contest, which shows left-for-dead Jon Huntsman ahead of national front-runner Rick Perry (though both are far behind Mitt Romney) by a 10-8 margin.
That is indeed interesting. There are a number of possible explanations. One is that Huntsman has focused his entire campaign on NH, while Perry has barely been there and didn’t even announce until last month. Another is that Mitt Romney has focused disproportionately on NH for many months and is better-liked by self-identified conservatives there than in many states, undercutting some of Perry’s natural base. Another is that New Hampshire conservatives are less likely to be Protestant evangelicals than in many places, again reducing Perry’s natural appeal. Still another is that this poll is just an outlier (it’s a poll of just 400 voters by an outfit with an uneven rep for accuracy; a Magellan Strategies poll of NH in mid-August put Perry at 18% and Huntsman at 3%).
But you are already hearing more about another explanation that sounds sorta kinda plausible: people in the Granite State just don’t like southerners. Here’s how it’s put by Yahoo’s Rachel Rose Hartman:

Historically, Southern politicians have not fared well in the state, especially when pitted against a local favorite from New England. Bill Clinton, for example, lost the Democratic primary in New Hampshire in 1992 to Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts.

This alleged geographical prejudice was sometimes advanced to explain why John Edwards didn’t do well in NH in either 2004 or 2008, or why John McCain beat front-runner George W. Bush there in 2000.
Problem is: a more thorough examination of the NH primary’s history shows southerners actually doing pretty damn well.
Among Democrats, there have been twelve seriously contested NH primaries since the event first emerged as significant in 1952. Southerners have won half of them. And in two others, no southerners ran serious campaigns in NH.
Sure, Clinton lost to local fave Paul Tsongas in 1992, as Hartman notes. But Clinton was not an incumbent; had just been hit with the Gennifer Flowers and “draft” scandals; and had a strategy based on a quick comeback in Georgia after a likely loss in NH. The real “loser” in NH in 1992 was Bob Kerrey, whose campaign collapsed after a bad showing there, but no one is suggesting people in New Hampshire are prejudiced against midwesterners, are they? And then there is the rather significant counter-example of 1980, when Jimmy Carter trounced the ultimate regional favorite, Ted Kennedy.
So is this anti-southern prejudice centered among Republicans, despite Hartman’s reference to Clinton and Tsongas? Hard to say. There have only been nine competitive Republican NH primaries, and candidates hailing from a former Confederate state ran competitive campaigns in only six of them, winning two (Bush 41 in 1988 and 1992). If it is to be objected that Poppy was really a regional favorite because the Bushes are from CT, then we are down to just three NH primaries where southerners ran and lost, and none of the losers (Howard Baker in 1980, Lamar Alexander in 1992 and Mike Huckabee in 2008) were national front-runners.
The bottom line is that there’s actually very little evidence that a drawl is some sort of deal-killer in NH, and the abundance of alternative reasons for a southern candidate being relatively weak there means that the geographical rationalization really ought not to be cited at all, unless we are making very long lists of possible factors. Okay?

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When Rick Perry lays down his head on Saturday night, he’s going to be one tired Texan. By then, the consensus GOP front-runner will have endured a 48-hour gauntlet of events in Orlando, Florida, including a televised presidential candidates’ debate, an ideological beauty contest sponsored by the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), and a state party straw poll. Moreover, all this is occurring in a state that will hold a crucially timed 2012 primary, is considered a must-win for Republicans in the general election, and has demographic characteristics that could pose a real challenge to Perry. Indeed, while the Texan is currently leading in the most recent Florida polls, he’s got a number of potential weaknesses in the state that he must successfully address if he hopes to win one of the most important contests in a competitive nomination battle.
Whether Perry gets through this week’s ordeal in good or bad shape, it’s something he has to do given Florida’s potentially crucial role in 2012. After a number of feints in the direction of total primary calendar-screwing anarchy, Florida Republicans seem happy to maintain their state’s fifth-place position in the nominating process, just after South Carolina. (A bipartisan but Republican-dominated commission set up by the state legislature is poised to make a decision just in time to comply with the RNC’s October 1 deadline for setting the calendar, with February 21 being the state’s most likely date.) With Romney currently favored in Nevada and New Hampshire and Perry in Iowa and South Carolina, this means Florida could again become–as it was in 2008, when McCain’s victory over Mitt Romney in the state all but sealed the deal–the truly decisive contest.
As for the general election stakes, it’s worth remembering that the last Republican who won the White House while losing Florida (with the usual double asterisk for 2000) was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, when the Sunshine State was part of the Solid South and cast six electoral votes, a bounty Coolidge offset by carrying Maine. In 2012, Florida will award 29 electoral votes, the same as New York. The “electability” argument among Republicans is a lot more intense, and less theoretical, in the Sunshine State than in most early primary states.
When it comes to determining which GOP candidate holds a natural advantage in the state, Florida’s unusual demographics make it a mixed bag. North Florida, and particularly the Panhandle with its “Redneck Riviera” and military bases, is culturally Southern, and a natural base for Perry. Central Florida, especially the vote-rich “I-4 corridor” running from Orlando to the Tampa Bay area, meanwhile, might give Romney an edge. There you can find a comfortable mix of Midwestern retirees, young suburban families, and Democratic-leaning non-Cuban Hispanics. South Florida, finally, is famously diverse: Its Cuban-American population is likely the largest Republican-leaning Hispanic voting bloc in the country; it has growing South American, Central American, and Haitian populations; and it also retains a large number of politically active white retirees, mostly from the Northeast. Like Republican primary voters almost everywhere, however, Florida’s are leaning in a notably conservative direction. This came across loud and clear in 2010, when self-styled Tea Partier-moneybags Rick Scott beat establishment fixture Bill McCollum in the gubernatorial primary, and centrist Governor Charlie Crist was run right out of the GOP by now-Senator Marco Rubio.
This shift bodes well for Perry, who has recently moved ahead of Romney in primary polling of Florida Republicans and enjoys support from several key legislative leaders, as well as thinly veiled backing from Governor Scott. But a recent survey of “Republican insiders” in the state by the St. Petersburg Times showed a plurality expecting Romney to win the primary, and an overwhelming two-thirds rating him as a stronger general-election candidate than anyone else in the field. Moreover, even polls showing Perry doing well among Florida Republicans raise questions about his possible glass jaw on Social Security and Medicare, which in turn affects perceptions of his general-election viability in the state. The Insider Advantage survey released last week that put Perry ahead of Romney by a 29-20 margin among likely primary voters also showed Romney leading the Texan handily among seniors, who represented about a third of respondents but could end up turning out in larger numbers in the primary.
Thursday’s debate will provide Romney with yet another opportunity to expose Perry’s weakness among this demographic. Mitt (with possible assists from other candidates, especially the increasingly desperate Michele Bachmann) will have an ideal opportunity to fan fears about Perry’s dangerous rhetoric on the New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs on which Florida seniors–a big chunk of both primary and general election voters–heavily depend.
The direction of Florida’s Republican Hispanic vote in 2012, meanwhile, is hard to predict. You’d think Perry’s experience with Hispanic voters in Texas, and his relatively moderate positions on immigration, would help him in the state. But Cuban-Americans (who made up nearly two-thirds of Hispanic voters in the 2008 Florida presidential primary) are not notably sympathetic to undocumented immigrants from Mexico, while Puerto Ricans, who represent the second-largest Hispanic bloc in the state, are U.S. citizens by birth. Instead, Cuban-Americans are especially focused on national security, which probably had more to do with McCain’s strong performance among them in the 2008 primary than anything he said on immigration. It wouldn’t be surprising to see Romney challenge Perry from the right on national security in Florida this very week.
Indeed, Friday’s gathering of conservative tribes, sponsored by CPAC, whose annual conference in Washington early this year pretty much kicked off the invisible primary of pre-voting events, could prove a perfect venue for further attacks against Perry from the right. This will be the occasion for fiery rhetoric and the taking of pledges, and likely efforts by candidates other than Perry and Romney to accuse the front-runners of insufficient fidelity to the cause.
Finally, the Saturday Florida GOP straw poll (portentously called “P5” by the state party to indicate the number of times it has been held) lost most of its drama when both Romney and Bachmann announced they would not contest it. It’s also not the kind of straw poll that Ron Paul can win by packing the room with college students; participants were selected by local party committees around the state during the spring and summer. So Perry is expected to win easily, and has everything to lose from a poorer-than-expected performance against minor candidates and the two rivals who won’t even be there.
All in all, in other words, Florida is up for grabs. You can expect to hear buzz about possible endorsements that could change the playing field, particularly by former Governor Jeb Bush, whose clan by all accounts is not fond of Rick Perry, and by Senator Marco Rubio, who, as a likely vice-presidential choice of any nominee, has no obvious interest in endorsing anybody. But for now, this week’s extended audition in Florida could have a significant impact, particularly if someone stumbles in the Fox-Google debate, gets crucified for an act of ideological heresy at CPAC, or underperforms at “P5.” If that someone is Rick Perry, his rise as the suddenly dominant front-runner in the nomination contest could be rudely interrupted.

You knew this would happen the moment the president’s job speech and his deficit reduction proposal were interpreted as a “move to the left” aimed at “energizing the base:” MSM and conservative jabberers would have to come up with some “Democratic centrists” who were offended by the “move.”
And like clockwork, Mark Penn popped up with a HuffPo column that is careening around the chattering classes, accusing Obama of waging “class warfare” by proposing upper-crust tax rates closer to those that prevailed before Bush’s 2001 tax cuts.
Watch in awe as U.S. News‘ Ken Walsh turns Penn’s isolated protest and scattered Senate objections into a major factional fight:

Some centrists such as Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana are firmly opposed to higher taxes on energy companies, which provide jobs and an economic foundation for her state. Other centrist Democrats such as Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska oppose any tax increases.
In sum, moderate Democrats argue that Obama is departing too far from the political center and this move to the left will hurt him and other members of his party in 2012.
A leading advocate of that centrist position is pollster and Democratic strategist Mark Penn, who was a senior adviser to President Bill Clinton in his 1996 re-election campaign and to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008. In an essay for the Huffington Post, Penn argues that, “Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path toward reelection. He should be working as a president, not a candidate. He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it. He should be holding down taxes, rather than raising them. He should be mastering the global economy, not running away from it. And most of all, he should be bringing the country together rather than dividing it through class warfare.”

Lord a-mercy, Ken. Mary Landrieu is from Louisiana, and is going to defend the bottom line of the oil and gas industries as a matter of constituent services as much as ideology. It has nothing to do with being a “centrist,” and does not represent the views of anyone else who is not equally beholden to fossil-fuel energy interests. Aside from being perpetually to the right of virtually every other Democrat in the Senate, Ben Nelson is a highly endangered incumbent up for re-election in a deeply red state; of course he’s going to object to anything and everything Obama says and does.
As for Penn, anyone taking his opinion to account as representing anyone other than himself and his corporate clients needs to remember that the position on taxes that now supposedly makes the president anathema to “centrists” is not only the same one that Obama consistently promoted during the 2008 campaign, but the same one promoted by Penn’s boss Hillary Clinton. Obama hasn’t shifted at all; Mark Penn has.
It seems reasonably clear, moreover, that Obama’s much-ballyhooed “shift to the left” is really little more than a change in strategy–or arguably, a pivot anticipated by his strategy all along–to reflect the fact that he’s gotten all the mileage he’s ever going to get from promoting bipartisanship in the face of obdurate Republican opposition, and it’s time to draw lines in anticipation of 2012. People supposedly representing the “left” and the “center” in the Democratic Party have often disagreed violently on Obama’s strategy, but it’s doubtful they do at this particular moment.
Barack Obama himself probably represents the views of Democratic “centrists” about as much as any politician presently does. And from what I regularly read and hear, if there are “Democratic centrist” dissenters from Obama’s general direction, they are more rather than less likely to think he remains too accommodating to conservative opinion on taxes and a variety of other issues.
And if there is some Penn-Landrieu-Nelson bloc in the Democratic Party, it could easily meet at one of Burson-Marsteller’s smaller conference rooms, with plenty of space at the table for interns and lunch.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
By the very nature of political journalism, the attention of those covering the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest tends to be focused on areas of disagreement between the candidates, as well as on the policy positions and messages they are eager to use against Barack Obama. But there are a host of other issues where the Republican candidates are in too much agreement to create a lot of controversy during debates or gin up excitement in the popular media. Areas of agreement, after all, rarely provoke shock or drive readership. But the fact that the Republican Party has reached such a stable consensus on such a great number of far-right positions is in many ways a more shocking phenomenon than the rare topic on which they disagree. Here are just a few areas of consensus on which the rightward lurch of the GOP during the last few years has become remarkably apparent:
1. Hard money. With the exception of Ron Paul’s serial campaigns and a failed 1988 effort by Jack Kemp, it’s been a very long time since Republican presidential candidates flirted with the gold standard or even talked about currency polices. Recent assaults by 2012 candidates on Ben Bernanke and demands for audits of the Fed reflect a consensus in favor of deflationary monetary policies and elimination of any Fed mission other than preventing inflation. When combined with unconditional GOP hostility to stimulative fiscal policies–another new development–this position all but guarantees that a 2012 Republican victory will help usher in a longer and deeper recession than would otherwise be the case.
2. Anti-unionism. While national Republican candidates have always perceived the labor movement as a partisan enemy, they haven’t generally championed overtly anti-labor legislation. Last Thursday, however, they all backed legislation to strip the National Labor Relations Board of its power to prevent plant relocations designed to retaliate against legally protected union activities (power the NLRB is exercising in the famous Boeing case involving presidential primary hotspot South Carolina). Meanwhile, at least two major candidates, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, have endorsed a national right-to-work law, and Romney and Perry have also encouraged states like New Hampshire to adopt right-to-work laws.
3. Radical anti-environmentalism. Until quite recently, Republicans running for president paid lip service to environmental protection as a legitimate national priority, typically differentiating themselves from Democrats by favoring less regulatory enforcement approaches and more careful assessment of economic costs and market mechanisms. The new mood in the GOP is perhaps best exemplified by Herman Cain’s proposal at the most recent presidential debate that

(apparently, energy industry or utility executives) should dominate a commission to review environmental regulations–an idea quickly endorsed by Rick Perry. In fact, this approach might represent the middle-of-the-road within the party, given the many calls by other Republicans (including presidential candidates Paul, Bachmann, and Gingrich) for the outright abolition of EPA.
4.Radical anti-abortion activism. Gone are the days when at least one major Republican candidate (e.g., Rudy Giuliani in 2008) could be counted on to appeal to pro-choice Republicans by expressing some reluctance to embrace an immediate abolition of abortion rights. Now the only real intramural controversy on abortion has mainly surrounded a sweeping pledge proffered to candidates by the Susan B. Anthony List–one that would bind their executive as well as judicial appointments, and require an effort to cut off federal funds to institutions only tangentially involved in abortions. Despite this fact, only Mitt Romney and Herman Cain have refused to sign. Both, however, have reiterated their support for the reversal of Roe v. Wade and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion forever (though Romney has said that’s not achievable at present).
5. No role for government in the economy. Most remarkably, the 2012 candidate field appears to agree that there is absolutely nothing the federal government can do to improve the economy–other than disabling itself as quickly as possible. Entirely missing are the kind of modest initiatives for job training, temporary income support, or fiscal relief for hard-pressed state and local governments that Republicans in the past have favored as a conservative alternative to big government counter-cyclical schemes. Also missing are any rhetorical gestures towards the public-sector role in fostering a good economic climate, whether through better schools, basic research, infrastructure projects, and other public investments (the very term has been demonized as synonymous with irresponsible spending).
Add all this up, and it’s apparent the Republican Party has become identified with a radically conservative world-view in which environmental regulations and collective bargaining by workers have strangled the economy; deregulation, federal spending cuts, and deflation of the currency are the only immediate remedies; and the path back to national righteousness will require restoration of the kinds of mores–including criminalization of abortion–that prevailed before things started going to hell in the 1960s. That Republicans hardly even argue about such things anymore makes the party’s transformation that much more striking–if less noticeable to the news media and the population at large.