With Rick Perry’s sudden surge in the polls, all sorts of scenarios are unfolding in the Republican presidential nominating contest.
Perry looks almost certain to take on Michele Bachmann in a serious way in Iowa. That contingency creates a major new temptation for Mitt Romney to jump into a serious campaign for the First-in-the-Nation Caucuses. If he does, he could theoretically watch Perry and Bachmann split the hard-core right-wing vote, and slip through to a victory that could produce an early knockout blow to the field, a la Kerry 2004. And if he doesn’t, he runs the risk of a Perry win that could position the Texan to pull off an upset in New Hampshire and then deliver his own knockout blow in South Carolina.
But all these scenarios could get weird if the caucus-primary calendar gets weird. And that’s entirely possible.
At the moment, Florida’s poised to hold its primary on January 31, 2012, which would almost automatically push the current early states back into early-to-mid January 2012. But as the reigning expert on these matters, Josh Putnam of Frontloading HQ, notes, Florida is legally authorized to schedule its primary as early as January 3–the first Thursday of January–which because of the holidays could push the Iowa Caucuses all the way back to December 5, 2011. We probably won’t know for sure until October 1, which is Florida’s state law deadline for setting a primary date.
This creates a pretty scary strategic scenario for Perry, and even more so for Romney. Preparing for the contingency of a December 5 Caucus–just three-and-a-half months from now–would force Perry to get a move on to catch up with Michelle Bachmann’s and Ron Paul’s organizational head starts in Iowa, and would also force Romney to fish or cut bait on a serious Iowa campaign. The closer we get to October 1 without a resolution on the caucus-and-primary calendar, the more candidates have to assume it’s all going down crazy early. So the worlds of time, space and strategy are rapidly colliding.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Fifteen years ago this week, President Bill Clinton gave his controversial signature to landmark welfare reform legislation. The anniversary has not gotten a lot of attention, even though the program created to replace “welfare as we know it” in 1996 is up for reauthorization by September 30. A few conservatives have rehearsed their revisionist histories of the 1996 law, according to which Clinton was forced to sign a bill he had vetoed twice (which ignores the rather profound differences in the three measures). A few liberals have either revived their original objections to the law, or have simply noted that an approach to public assistance that worked in the go-go economy of the late 1990s has not worked so well more recently, in part because the jobs that were the linchpin of the new system have all but evaporated, and in part because neither the federal government nor most of the states have kept the funding promises they made fifteen years ago.
But whatever you thought of the law in 1996, or of its performance since then, the biggest surprise has been the rapid erosion, especially during the last few years, of the hopes shared by liberals and conservatives alike that firmly connecting public assistance to a requirement to work would detoxify the social and racial poisons that had grown up around the old system. At first, that actually seemed to happen; the “welfare wedge politics” so common from the 1960s to the 1990s largely abated in the aftermath of the legislation. But now, even as the “working poor” (the bipartisan heroes of welfare reform) are bearing much of the brunt of the Great Recession, they have become the objects of a new and intense wave of conservative hostility that treats them as parasites just like the “welfare queens” of yore.
When Rick Perry paused, mid-tirade against taxes, in his presidential announcement speech to deplore the number of Americans who pay no federal income taxes (a theme also common in the rhetoric of his rival Michele Bachmann), he was implicitly attacking the Earned Income Tax Credit, which offsets (and, for some, exceeds) federal income tax (but not, of course, payroll or other tax) liability for people of limited income. It was a telling moment, as an expanded EITC, Ronald Reagan’s favorite social policy instrument, was central to the design of the 1996 welfare reform law for the simple reason that it helped “make work pay,” in the parlance of that time, providing a smooth transition from welfare to work. The very instrument once championed by conservatives as a way to put welfare recipients back to work was now officially under attack.
Neither the unimaginative Perry nor the shrill Bachmann pioneered this assault on work-based welfare reform, of course. It splashed onto the national scene in a campaign ad by John McCain in October of 2008, which attacked Barack Obama’s proposal for an increase in the EITC as “welfare for people who don’t pay taxes.” The ad marked a significant departure because McCain himself had once joined his 2000 rival George W. Bush in rebuking House Republican leader Tom DeLay for seeking to delay EITC payments as part of a budget proposal.
Today, however, in an environment where Perry is hedging his bets on whether Social Security is, indeed, the first big step on the road to serfdom, it’s perhaps not remarkable that he and other conservatives would suddenly decide that yesterday’s great Republican initiative to help the working poor is now not only fiscally unaffordable but morally objectionable. The transformation is widely observable across the conservative landscape, with Republican fiscal proposals in the states and in Washington going after a host of other key support systems for the working poor with a vengeance: state-level EITCs, job training programs, unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid, you name it. It’s also no coincidence that, in the agitation against the Affordable Care Act, many conservatives deliberately stoked resentment towards alleged redistribution of federal largesse from virtuous Medicare beneficiaries to the uninsured, who are, by definition, working individuals and families who don’t qualify for Medicaid for one reason or another.
Underlying this assault, there seems to be a current of genuine anger at the working families who no longer receive “welfare as we knew it,” but remain beneficiaries of some form of redistribution, even if it’s only progressive tax rates. You can debate back and forth endlessly about whether there is a racial element in this hostility, as there definitely was in the old “welfare wedge” politics. The iron-clad conviction of many conservatives that race-conscious federal housing policies caused the housing and financial meltdowns is not an encouraging sign, in any case. But it is clear that the social peace so many anticipated in 1996–after it had been established that no one receiving public assistance could be accused of refusing to work–has now been broken. Work is no longer enough, it seems, to avoid the moral taint of being a “welfare bum.” And the cruelest irony of all is that, for so many, the work’s not available anyway.

With all due deference to the valuable truism that polls far in advance of elections must be taken with a shaker of salt, Gallup’s new presidential general election trial heat is fascinating in terms of what it says about the current lay of the land.
From one perspective, it’s a bit surprising that Barack Obama, who just hit an all-time low (38%) in Gallup’s own daily tracking poll of presidential job approval, is still running essentially even with the Republican candidate usually considered most “electable,” Mitt Romney (Obama actually trails Romney 48-46 among RVs, but that’s a functional tie).
From another perspective, it’s even more surprising that Romney’s not really doing much better than his GOP rivals. Rick Perry’s even with Obama at 47-47. Okay, the Texan is the shiny new penny of the presidential field, and most voters haven’t had the opportunity to read Fed Up and discover what Perry really thinks–or at least authorized his ghostwriter to say he thinks nine months ago–about Social Security, federal aid to schools, and a variety of other topics. In a separate Gallup survey of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning indies, Perry is now trouncing Romney and generally walking tall.
But it’s less predictable that Ron Paul–Ron Paul!–is running just two points behind Obama (47-45), with Michele Bachmann–Michele Bachmann!–just four points behind the incumbent (48-44).
There are a couple of major takeaways from this survey beyond the fact that most Americans don’t know a whole lot about the specific views of very zany people like Paul and Bachmann, and dodgy demagogues like Perry. For Team Obama, it’s another indicator, if one is needed, that a campaign focusing heavily on comparisons with the policy course offered by the eventual Republican nominee is essential. (Presidential policies that reinforce this contrast or even, if possible, improve the economic conditions making his re-election so difficult in the first place, would obviously be even better, but that’s a subject for another day).
For Republicans, and particularly for the conservative activists who dominate the early states, this sort of finding will create a powerful temptation to believe they can do any damn thing they please in the nominating process, because Election ’12 will invariably become a referendum on the incumbent that will lift their favorite, whoever it is, to the White House. In other words, if they persist, everybody’s-even poll findings could eliminate “electability” as a major factor in the GOP nominating contest.
For Democrats, that’s scary, if you do think a Republican is destined to win, or maybe promising, if you think persuadable voters will pay at least some attention to the actual views of the candidate facing Obama in November of 2012.

I would normally not annoy readers with yet another smackdown of yet another bout of vague talk about Democrats denying Barack Obama renomination in 2012. But the vague talker in this case is an Iowa State University poli sci professor who blogs for the Des Moines Register, has an East Coast megaphone via WNYC, and is reporting that New Hampshire Democrats are begging their ancient rivals the Iowans to launch an effort to draft another candidate, perhaps Hillary Clinton. And all this intel from Steffen Schmidt has been picked up by the influential aggregator RealClearPolitics.
Where to begin? According to Schmidt, New Hampshirites are telling Iowans to create a “write-in candidacy” in the Caucuses for Hillary Clinton. As I am sure the professor understands, you do not really have “write-in” candidates in the Iowa Caucuses. People show up, separate themselves by candidate affinity groups, and recombine once threshold levels are applied to candidates who are deemed viable for the next level in the delegate selection process. There is no secret ballot, and in fact, no real ballot (just raised hands), so it’s the least hospitable environment imaginable for a “write-in” candidate, or really for any development that is not methodically organized by an actual candidate.
Of equal importance, Hillary Clinton has emphatically showed zero interest in running (despite the vast internet chum being tossed onto the waters by PUMAs and conservatives) and even if she was, she’s far from being a suitable vehicle for left-bent critics of Obama.
And finally (sorry for the redundancy there, but it’s apparently essential), there remains no significant evidence of the kind of grassroots Democratic revolt against Obama that would be an absolute minimum threshold qualification for a credible challenge to his renomination.
According to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll on presidential job approval, Obama is stuck at an all-time low of 40%. But he’s at 79% among self-identified Democrats and 82% among self-identified liberal Democrats. He’s also back up to 88% among African-Americans, who may not matter much in Iowa or New Hampshire, but sure would be crucial later on to any left-bent challenge to Obama.
I know there are a significant number of readers of this site who would love to see a primary challenge to Obama, but in reality, folks, at present there is no candidate and no actual, voting constituency for such an unusual revolt.
As for Dr. Schmidt’s strange, expert certainty, based on conversations over drinks, that New Hampshire and Iowa Democrats are getting ready to dump Obama, I just have to say the analysis is worth the thought he seems to have put into it. And I’d note that Schmidt’s last big pronouncement back in May was that he it was a lead-pipe certainty Sarah Palin was running for president. If and when that transpires, maybe it would be time to take a second look at his predictions of an Iowa-New Hampshire collaboration to replace Barack Obama with Hillary Clinton.

As you probably know by now, if not from personal experience then from news reports or emails, a relatively large (but not, it appears so far, particularly destructive) earthquake struck the East Coast today, forcing the evacuation of many buildings in DC in particular.
The epicenter was in Louisa County, Virginia, a largely rural area northwest of Richmond and due east of Charlottesville. It’s the site of a nuclear plant, where power was lost (though without, apparently, any consequences), which will bring back all sorts of creepy memories of what happened in Japan. Louisa County is also in the congressional district of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who is currently in Israel.
As it happens, I lived in Louisa County (and am very familiar with the North Anna nuclear plant) a while back, and now live in California near the San Andreas Fault. Who would have thought I was moving to relative seismic safety? Let’s hope the aftershocks are not serious. The population concentrations in areas affected by this event are enormous. If they get through this with no more than a few moments of puzzlement and fear, and stories to tell each other for the next few days, that will be a blessing.

Of all the dumb manufactured “threats” that have circulated via email and talk radio in recent years, one of the dumbest has been the repeated claim that evil bureaucrats or evil socialist politicians were on the very brink of suppressing conservative religious or secular opinions via a hoary regulation called the “Fairness Doctrine.”
For the uninitiated, the Fairness Doctrine is a relic of the 1950s and 1960s–a period when broadcast television and radio dominated American media to an extraordinary degree. The idea was that broadcasters had an obligation to present diverse points of view in their editorial expressions, meaning that in fairly egregious cases of imbalance, free time had to be offered to contrary opinions. It was never much enforced, but was bitterly resented, as you might imagine, by station owners and networks.
The Fairness Doctrine was formally repudiated by the Federal Communications Commission in 1987. The occasional politician–usually a Democrat–has talked about bringing it back, generally to rattle the cages of the talk radio industry with its complete domination by conservatives. There has been no serious threat to do so, however. And the lion’s share of the hysteria over the Fairness Doctrine has been since Barack Obama’s election, even though he made it abundantly clear during the 2008 campaign and afterwards that he opposed restoration of the Doctrine. Kevin Drum has helpfully offered up the results of a google image search of the subject, which harvested a large number of conservative cartoons inveighing against the totalitarian designs of godless liberals to use the Doctrine to suppress poor Rush and poor Sean Hannity and poor Glenn Beck, brave and helpless souls that they are. Anyone with an email account and conservative friends (or conservative friends of friends) has probably gotten alarmist messages on this same subject, many of them emanating from religious conservatives claiming the Doctrine is about to be used to ban Christian broadcasting altogether.
Yesterday the FCC expunged every vestige of the Fairness Doctrine from its regulations. Will this finally tamp down the conspiracy theories about the ongoing assault on the rights of conservatives to express their opinions? Probably not.

So the great Paul-Ryan-for-President boomlet has ended where it began, at the Weekly Standard, which today had to admit their preferred candidate has ruled it out definitively. Too bad.
In all probability, this won’t stop the occasional pleas or rumors. After all, Chris Christie keeps getting mentioned as a late candidate, even though he’s repeatedly planted land mines on the path to any 2012 candidacy by saying he’s not prepared to serve as president. You will also, until the very day someone else nails down the nomination, continue to hear the distant thunder of an alleged 2012 run by another pol who has said “no” a hundred times, Jeb Bush (even though he’s now only about the third most powerful Republican politician in Florida, and continues to bear the dynastic name of the president from whose legacy the GOP has been frantically trying to disassociate itself for at least the last five years).
Since the shadowy “GOP establishment” forces who keep lofting up these flaccid trial balloons are presumably not panting for Sarah Palin to leap into the race, they are about out of helium, and really need to focus on the presidential field they actually have.

In analyzing the actual and potential Republican presidential field for 2012, Nate Silver has frequently deployed a chart that plots candidates along axes dividing them by ideology and by perceptions of their relationship to the GOP Establishment. Thus, in his latest installment, he suggests there is more “room” for additional candidates in the “moderate/Establishment” quadrant dominated by Mitt Romney, than in, say, the “conservative/Insurgent” quadrant where Bachmann, Cain, and to a considerable extent Rick Perry are competing.
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein objects that Nate’s typology relies on broad characterizations of candidates at the expense of how specific and tangible GOP constituencies view them:

On the ideological side, it’s not clear how many important individuals and groups within the party are thinking in terms of left/right (or, I suppose, right/very right) rather than about specific policy areas of concern. That is, what really matters isn’t so much whether a candidate is too moderate, but whether the abortion people, the tax people, and so on find the candidate acceptable or not.
I’m also not convinced that an establishment/insurgent vocabulary really captures the relationship of the various groups within the GOP, or the appeal of the candidates. What exactly is an establishment-friendly or insurgent candidacy? If it’s just rhetoric, then we’re probably talking about appeal to larger electorates in next year’s primaries, but no candidate is going to get there without considerable support from organized groups within the party. If it’s appeal to particular groups, I don’t think the groups really exist on an establishment/insurgent spectrum. Indeed, if you’re talking about groups, it’s probably just better to think about groups, specifically and in general, without worrying about whether they are “establishment” or their ideological placement.

This is an interesting dispute, beyond the fact that it involves two of the best analysts of the contemporary political scene. The argument is obscured a bit by Jonathan’s distinct view of “the Establishment” as including right-wing issue-activist groups who are capable of exercising a veto over presidential candidates they don’t like.
I’m also skeptical of Nate’s ideological rating of candidates for a reason Jonathan does not articulate: it distracts attention from the unmistakable overall rightward shift of the GOP since 2008. After all, the “moderate/Establishment” candidate Romney has by any measurement moved to the right since his 2008 campaign as the “true conservative” alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, when he received no significant guff for his Massachusetts health care plan; embraced nothing so radical as the “cut-cap-balance” fiscal plan; was under no particular pressure to support the most extreme measures available to permanently outlaw abortion and gay marriage from sea to shining sea; and was defending his hawkishness on the old war with Iraq rather than agitating for a new war with Iran.
But on the other hand, perceptions within the GOP of the candidates, strange as they may seem to outsiders, really do matter. The main reason the GOP has moved to the right since 2008 is that a revisionist view of the recent history of that party has taken hold with a tremendous degree of unanimity. Lest we forget, George W. Bush won the 2000 Republican presidential nomination as the overwhelming favorite of “movement conservatives.” The congressional Republican leadership of the early Bush years, with Tom DeLay in the driver’s seat, was at the time considered the most conservative in history. Yes, there was some right-wing opposition to No Child Left Behind and the Medicare Rx Drug benefit and Bush’s rhetoric on immigration, and a bit more on overall domestic spending levels. But for the most part conservatives accepted such heresies as strategic measures engineered by Karl Rove to create a “conservative base-centered” long-term conservative majority in the electorate without significant ideological concessions. Stan Greenberg memorably referred to Rove’s novel approach as a “51% strategy” that represented the best conservatives could do given an inherently unpopular policy agenda.
At the time of the 2004 elections, Bush was being widely touted in serious conservative circles as a great world-historical figure. In early 2005, when he began his campaign for partial privatization of Social Security, estimation of W. on the right reached perhaps an all-time high.
Then Bush 43 and the congressional Republican Party committed the unforgivable sin of becoming very, very unpopular, and by 2008, conservatives were mainly absorbed with figuring out how to absolve themselves from any responsibility for that political disaster–a task that became even more urgent when the economic calamity of 2008 hit. And so, with remarkable speed, the idea spread that Bush and Cheney and DeLay and the whole push of ’em were never really conservatives to begin with. This historically unprecedented “move right and win” argument gained enormous impetus from the 2010 midterm election results, which leads us to where we are today.
I’m covering this familiar territory in order to make it clear that even though “movement conservatives” and their various issue and constituency groups have in most important respects become the GOP “Establishment,” their own mythology requires them to keep finding and demonizing “RINOs” and “sell-outs,” and presenting themselves as a party undergoing some sort of populist revolution. Moreover, in this new GOP there are newly powerful factions–the repeal-the-New Deal “constitutional conservatives” and quasi-dominionists in particular–who really are committed to driving their party in directions that would have been considered well outside even the “movement conservative” mainstream just a few years ago. Hence the strength and respectability of Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul, whom virtually no one took seriously in the recent past, and the broader popularity of extremist rhetoric throughout the GOP.
From the perspective of these intra-party dynamics, perceptions of ideology and Establishment-status like those Nate illustrates really do matter in the struggle for control of the party. And they are often wielded as weapons by the specific “Establishment” groups Jonathan accurately describes as major players in the nomination battle. To be sure, it’s a dangerous game that Republicans are playing, but to the extent they have bought their own spin about the rightward drift of the electorate, and/or think Barack Obama is doomed to defeat due to objective economic conditions, it’s one a lot of them are willing to play.