The basic measurement of a president’s popularity we are all used to examining is the job approval rating. By that yardstick, Barack Obama has hit a very rough patch of late; last week he registered his first sub-40% rating in the daily Gallup tracking poll of presidential job approval.
But as Reid Wilson points out in an important National Journal article, an equally important index is the president’s personal favorability, separated from specific questions of job performance. And so far, Obama has done much better on that scale:

Polling consistently shows that the majority of Americans view Obama favorably, even while they increasingly disagree with his job performance. There is a nuance to voter sentiment, pollsters say, one that provides Obama with a path to reelection. But the disconnect between the two numbers, if it ever shrinks, could also become a leading indicator that the president’s chances for a second term are headed south.

Wilson cites Bill Clinton as a president whose relatively high personal favorability ratings during his first term showed a resilience that was eventually reflected in job approval ratings and then re-election:

[I]n 1994, Clinton’s approval rating dropped to a low of 38 percent, as measured by the Pew Research Center. Clinton endured a period, from March 1994 to October 1995, during which his approval rating hit 50 percent only once. And yet, during that same period, his favorability rating stayed strong, starting around 58 percent and ending, after only a single dip below the 50 percent mark, at 56 percent in January 1996. Beginning with that January poll, Clinton’s approval rating rebounded; by November, when he asked voters for a second term, his job-approval rate stood at 57 percent.

But during his second term, George W. Bush provided an example of a president whose poor job performance assessments eroded his personal favorability, and once that happened, he never really recovered:

A July 2005 Pew survey showed 51 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of the president. By late October, that number had sunk to 46 percent, then stayed in the high 30s for most of the rest of his term. Voters had had enough; Bush’s job-approval rating led the way down, and once the favorable ratings followed, there was no way to recover politically.

So which dynamic is more relevant to Obama’s situation today? It’s hard to say for sure. Pollsters do not measure personal favorability as often as job performance. As you can see from PollingReport, the last national surveys testing Obama’s general favorability were in June, when he came in at 50% or more in polls taken by McClatchey-Marist and AP-GfK. That, however, was after Obama’s job approval rating temporarily shot up in the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, so perhaps it’s more relevant that polls in April and May from ABC, NBC and Fox also showed a majority smiling upon Obama personally.
As Wilson notes, the very latest measurement of favorability (though done in slightly different terms from the standard polls) is GQRR/Democracy Corps’ early August survey showing “warm” feelings towards Obama holding up despite a plunge in favorable feelings towards both Democrats and (especially) Republicans in Congress.
This data point indicates that Obama’s efforts to benefit in a bad economic and political context from comparisons to the opposition are still alive and well. And 2012 general election horse-race polling, showing Obama still typically running ahead of all named Republican presidential candidates despite flagging job approval ratings, point in the same direction. It’s worth noting that Bill Clinton’s personal popularity in his first term also benefited by comparison to an unpopular Republican Party and Republican politicians.
So it’s likely Obama still has a personal favorability cushion that could sustain him through tough sledding going into 2012. But it’s a thin cushion that could use some bolstering via improved real-life conditions and/or demonstrations of presidential leadership.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The sub-headline in Stephen Hayes’ latest Weekly Standard post trumpeting the possible emergence of a Paul Ryan presidential campaign lists some big political names who are encouraging the idea: “Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, John Boehner, Jim Jordan, and Bill Bennett encourage Ryan to run for president.” Hayes missed a few more big names who might well be equally excited about a Ryan run: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.
Indeed, Democrats (especially those in Congress) have been plotting for months to make Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, and particularly its radical treatment of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the centerpiece of their 2012 campaign. After all, the proposal drew the support of nearly every Republican in Congress, despite abundant public opinion research (and at least one special election) showing the potential for a strong public backlash against its specific provisions. A Ryan candidacy, in other words, would rigidly align the GOP with its least popular ideas at the very moment that all Democrats, from the president to the lowliest House candidate, are desperate to make this a “comparative” election instead of a temperature reading on life in the Obama era. So why would prominent Republicans be interested in making Democrats so very happy?
One explanation is that Paul Ryan may be simply too emblematic of contemporary Republican thinking to be resisted by his own party. As TNR’s Jonathan Chait (one of the few progressive commentators who have consistently predicted Ryan would run) put it, “He is adored by party activists and elites in equal measure and is the embodiment of the party consensus.” Aside from the laurels he has won by putting together a budget proposal that reflects the long-frustrated conservative goal of demolishing the New Deal/Great Society safety net once and for all, Ryan is also beloved of neoconservatives struggling to rebuff resurgent neo-isolationism in the GOP, and he is a faithful ally of social conservatives as well. And what libertarian can’t help but feel good about a congressman who reportedly has made Atlas Shrugged required reading for his staff?
Another theory, meanwhile, holds that Ryan represents an itch that simply hasn’t been scratched by the current GOP field: the desire for a simon-pure fiscal conservative who doesn’t simply thunder against big government or domestic spending, but actually seems to have more than a clue about how, mechanically and strategically, to go about slaying the beast. The people who were very excited and then very disappointed about Mitch Daniels’ stillborn presidential candidacy seem to be the same people pushing Ryan to run.
But my hunch is that the main motivation behind the growing Ryan boom in elite circles is that Republicans have more or less decided they cannot lose the presidential race in 2012 unless their candidate has big personal flaws or comes off as legitimately crazy. As a result, they are beginning to assess the field in terms of capacity to serve as president rather than mere electability. And they don’t like what they see. Tim Pawlenty would have been fine, but he’s gone. Mitt Romney would be fine, as well, but he may struggle to win the nomination, leaving the field (unless someone like Ryan enters) to less-fine candidates like Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. To be sure, the Texas governor supposedly entered the field as a man acceptable to the GOP Establishment as well as the Tea Party and the Christian Right. But his opening act–an announcement speech that was essentially one long feral roar aimed at Obama, liberals, and tax-evading poor people, followed by an egregious exercise of that hardy populist perennial, Fed-bashing–was surely unsettling to elites trying to imagine this caveman-in-a-necktie in the Oval Office.
This we-can’t-lose, so-let’s-win-right point of view was most clearly expressed the other day by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat:

Romney and Perry will be competing to face possibly the weakest incumbent since Jimmy Carter, with the world in turmoil and the economy adrift. Six months ago, it still seemed as if Republican primary voters might be choosing a sacrificial lamb to run against Barack Obama. Now it looks as if they might be choosing the next president.
This should inspire Republicans to return, yet again, to the question that has dogged their party’s field all year. Is this really the best we can do?

Douthat chose to cast his field-expanding vote for Chris Christie, but more to the point, his comparison of Obama to Carter is a meme that has been steadily spreading like kudzu through the conservative chattering classes for months, and has been given added impetus by the first Gallup tracking poll showing the president’s job approval rating dipping below 40 percent.
The bottom line is that growing Republican optimism about 2012 is leading GOP elites to think seriously about candidates like Ryan, whose popularity among grassroots rank-and-file Republicans makes his nomination at least a realistic, if still a long-shot, scenario. But the same calculation could lead to a general election campaign that gives pessimistic Democrats a seriously renewed hope for victory.

One of the reasons that Rick Perry’s already considered a Big Dog in the Republican presidential field is that it is widely assumed he would be a strong general election candidate who also pleases a very demanding GOP “base” (you know, sort of like a certain other Texas governor back in 2000).
Nate Silver takes a closer look at the evidence about Perry’s electibility, and comes away a bit skeptical.
He notes Perry’s poor performance in general election trial heats against Barack Obama, but suggests that could be just a matter of relatively low national name recognition. He then looks at Perry’s electoral record in Texas, and isn’t that impressed:

Over all, Mr. Perry has won his three elected terms with an average victory margin of 13 percentage points. That’s certainly not a disaster, but it lags the 19-point margin for other Texas Republicans running in those years. In the most recent two elections, Mr. Perry was losing quite a few voters who were voting for Republican for almost every other office.

What I’d add to Nate’s analysis is that Perry’s popularity–or the lack thereof–is germane not just to a measurement of Perry’s political skills, but to his message as a presidential candidate. After all, what makes him attractive to Republican elites is that he can supposedly claim a job-creation record so powerful that it has made Texas the exception to the rule in Obama’s America–a virtual free-market Eden where people are flocking in search of the opportunity they are denied in places that have terrible things like unions, environmental regulations, and publicly-sponsored health care coverage.
If any of that is true, why is Rick Perry consistently less popular than your average Texas Republican? It’s a very good question.

It is not unusual for politicians who don’t get a lot of headline-style media attention to whine about it–if only to get attention! But the complaints about Ron Paul’s alleged mistreatment by the news media have gone beyond the candidate himself, and beyond the ranks of his intensely loyal supporters, to observers with all sorts of grievances about the media and the political system.
The immediate cause of action was Ron Paul’s failure to be properly feted for his very close second-place finish in the Iowa GOP Straw Poll on August 13. Instead, the actual winner, Michele Bachmann, and someone who was announcing his candidacy halfway across the country, Rick Perry, got all the attention. And that’s because–you can then fill in the blank with your favorite beef, from superficial and small-minded horse-race coverage of campaigns, to a Very Big Conspiracy aimed at thwarting unconventional politicians.
Paul himself and his loyalists seem to be going for the latter explanation, suggesting he is too big a threat to the “Establishment” to receive fair media coverage.
Roger Simon of Politico seems to consider Paul’s meager press clippings as mainly the product of skewed and incompetent political reporting.
Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald offered a greatest-hits screed on the subject earlier this week, arguing that the disrespecting of Paul reflects both idiotic political campaign coverage and a conscious effort to marginalize anyone who challenges the status quo on Glenn’s own personal priorities, civil liberties and anti-militarism.
Greenwald’s Salon colleague Steve Kornacki pushed back against this meme pretty effectively, pointing out that Paul’s strong if not-quite-enough performance in Ames didn’t tell us anything about his candidacy that we didn’t already know: the man and his supporters are very good at packing rooms where unrepresentative straw polls are held.
But I’d go a bit further than Kornacki and defend political media shirking of Paul on broader grounds: they are covering the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest, and Paul has something very close to a zero chance of winning it. I’d say he had a zero chance if not for the fact that his party has moved decisively in his direction on fiscal and monetary policy since the last time he ran. But this time around, Paul has chosen (as was made very evident in last Thursday’s Fox News/Washingon Examiner candidates’ debate) to make his foreign policy and national security views front-and-center. And today’s GOP, elites and votes alike, are not about to nominate a man who passionately defends Iran’s right to obtain nuclear weapons. Indeed, if the media were actually giving Paul the kind of attention he and his supporters demand, extended discussion of his riff during the debate about America’s perfidious involvement in the coup to depose leftist Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1950s would have more than likely destroyed his appeal to Republicans outside libertarian circles.
The real clincher in this argument involves a simple thought-experiment: suppose Ron Paul was devoting his resources not to a doomed candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, but to a serious third-party bid. If that were the case, you’d better believe he’d be getting a lot more media attention, for the simple reason that his views are attractive to a small but significant minority of voters in both major parties, and outside them. In a hypothetical close 2012 general election, his kind of candidacy backed up with his established name-identification and some serious money could have all sorts of powerful and unpredictable effects on the outcome. He’d be Nader 2000 on steroids, with genuine trans-partisan appeal. He still wouldn’t have a prayer of being elected president, but he’d be taken seriously all right.
Perhaps Paul and the Paulists will move in that direction once his Republican gig predictably crashes and burns. But until such time as that happens, the whining about his lack of media love is unmerited. Nobody made him choose to compete in the presidential nominating contest of a party whose leaders and followers alike strongly favor precisely the kind of truculent foreign policy and pro-military culture that Paul attacks in the most corrosive manner possible. But he did it anyway, and political reporters can be excused for failing to hype his relative success in yet another straw poll as an epochal event.

In a Daily Beast piece provocatively entitled “The Black War Over Obama” that focuses on criticisms of the president by Cornel West and Tavis Smiley, Allison Samuels has this to say:

Never mind the slings and arrows of Tea Partiers. The most politically problematic criticism of Obama these days is coming from his base. And there’s no question that there is a deep reservoir of frustration, confusion, and even rage among many in the African-American community for West to tap into. With unemployment hovering near 17 percent for African-Americans (the national average rate is 9 percent) and 11 percent of black homeowners facing imminent foreclosure, African-Americans have ample reason for anxiety about the coming budget cuts that Obama reluctantly signed into law this month. The Congressional Black Caucus chairman called the recent debt deal “a sugar-coated satan sandwich” that will do little to help communities already struggling.

Samuels is obviously correct about the economic distress of African-Americans (which is almost equally true of Hispanic-Americans). But the idea that African-Americans are abandoning Obama in droves, or represent his biggest political problem, is just not accurate, except in the very limited sense that in a razor-close election any vote lost could be crucial (and by that measurement, of course, losing the small handful of conservative Republicans that might otherwise vote for Obama could be crucial as well).
According to the latest Gallup weekly tracking poll of presidential job approval, which shows Obama dropping to 40% overall, his rating among African-Americans is at 81%. That his lowest Gallup showing among African-Americans since becoming president. It does not, however, translate necessarily into lost votes, given the rightward tilt of the GOP during the last few years, and the likelihood of a highly polarizing 2012 general election in which an exceptionally angry and vengeful conservative Republican base is going to make personal demonization of the first African-American president a 24-7 phenomenon.
This does not mean it would be wise for Team Obama to take African-American voters for granted, much less insist on policies that make their lives even more miserable. But it’s simply not true to say that Obama needs to worry about Cornel West’s increasingly sharp attacks on his presidency more than he needs to worry about any other category of unhappy Americans. Anything he can do to improve the job situation will help the most recession-affected communities the most. And anything he can do to draw attention to the radicalism of the GOP’s prescriptions for America will help him most politically with the minority voters whose wants and needs are so often viewed by today’s conservatives as irrelevant or destructive to the country’s true values and destiny.

The most interesting moment in an otherwise unremarkably cliche-ridden announcement speech by Rick Perry on Saturday was this brief passage:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more.

Any doubt in your mind who “we” are in this quote?
It’s all the more interesting because this tangent was nestled into a speech otherwise devoted to the proposition that low taxes are the keys to the economic kingdom.
Steve Benen explains the apparent conundrum:

This is an increasingly popular argument in right-wing circles — Michele Bachmann, one of Perry’s presidential rivals, has pushed the same line — thought it’s entirely counter-intuitive. The argument isn’t even subtle: far-right Republicans are annoyed that many Americans don’t make enough money to be eligible to pay income taxes, so they believe it’s important to get more of these lower- and middle-income Americans paying more to the government.
In case anyone’s forgotten, the relevant details matters here: millions of Americans may be exempt from income taxes, but they still pay sales taxes, state taxes, local taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare/Medicaid taxes, and in many instances, property taxes.
It’s not as if these folks are getting away with something — the existing tax structure leaves them out of the income tax system because they don’t make enough money to qualify.

What much of this is about is actually the Earned Income Tax Credit, the provision in the tax code once much beloved of Republicans (including the sainted Ronald Reagan), and considered central to the Republican-backed welfare reform legislation of 1996, that enables the working poor to reduce or eliminate their income tax liability. It says a lot about the movement of the right of the GOP of late that when Tom DeLay proposed delaying EITC payments back in 1999 in order to help pay for an upper-income tax cut, he was repudiated by both of the front-runner Republican presidential candidates of that cycle, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Now some conservatives confine themselves to attacking not the EITC itself, but its refundable nature: the ability of families whose EITC exceeds its income tax liability to get a check from the IRS (capped, however, by the amount paid in federal payroll taxes). In the common parlance of the Right (ironically echoed by John McCain during the desperate moments of his 2008 presidential campaign when he ran ads attacking Obama’s proposal to increase EITC payments) this refundable feature is “welfare” (albeit “welfare” inherently linked to a work requirement since earned income is necessary to generate it). Indeed, if and when Congress gets around to “tax reform” discussions, you can be certain that conservatives will go after the refundable EITC as a “loophole” that needs to be eliminated along with corporate subsidies.
But Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann don’t seem to be making this sort of distinction; they are talking–in moral terms, no less–about the “injustice” of poor people not paying income taxes in the first place. It’s a faithful echo of the reverse class warfare rhetoric of Rick Santelli’s rant, which launched the Tea Party Movement back in 2009, aimed at the shiftless poor people who had no business trying to own homes and caused the housing and financial crises instead of staying in their place.
At a time when income inequality in this country is reaching previously unimagined levels, and corporate profits are setting records, it’s worth noting that some conservatives are still angry at the less fortunate for their unreasonable demands–to the point they are even tempted to abandon their sacred pledge to never, ever raise taxes on anybody. It’s a part of the seamy underside of today’s politics that bears watching.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Like much of his career, Rick Perry’s entry into the presidential campaign was exceptionally well-timed. Announcing the very day that his main rival for the “electable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney” mantle, Tim Pawlenty, was driven from the race by a poor third-place showing at the Iowa Straw Poll, the Texan has a lot of open political space to occupy. As a result, some political observers are already depicting the nomination battle as a one-on-one Romney versus Perry battle, aligning Republican presidential politics along the Boston/Austin axis that has so much resonance in Democratic history. That’s not surprising: Many media (and Republican) elites have long held Bachmann in low regard as a noisy zealot; others are eager to brush aside the cultural and fiscal fanaticism she is thought to represent and get on with a GOP presidential contest centered on the economic issues assumed to be the incumbent’s Achilles heel. But it’s a long way to the next big event of the presidential cycle–the actual Iowa Caucuses, currently scheduled for February–and, barring some self-destructive gaffe or an unlikely plunge to Pawlentyland in the polls, Bachmann is not going away anytime soon.
Following an initial love-fest, Rick Perry is about to undergo the kind of heightened scrutiny that’s already afflicting Bachmann. The centerpiece of his campaign message, the Texas Economic Miracle, is already coming into question in the media, and will be challenged, however indirectly, by his GOP rivals. Eventually, someone will draw attention to the fact that if Perry’s low-tax, low-services, corporate-subsidizing policies really were an economic cure-all, similar conditions should have made states like Alabama and Mississippi world-beating dynamos years ago. He will also have to answer for past actions that have annoyed conservatives mightily, from his long-time advocacy of a state-level version of the DREAM Act, to his 2007 demand for inoculation of every female teenager with a vaccine against the HPV virus, to his 2008 championship of Rudy Giuliani’s presidential bid, as well as his very recent flip-flops on gay marriage and abortion.
Bachmann, meanwhile, is no Ron Paul. She has none of the heresies to “movement conservative” orthodoxies that Perry has committed. Nor is she simply a close and valued friend to the Christian Right and the Tea Party movement like Perry is: She is “one of us,” to an extraordinary extent. And, as she has so often told Iowans, she is a native of that state. No matter how well past southern-fried candidates with Christian Right backing have done in the Caucuses, if everything else is equal, Iowa conservatives would prefer their champion being someone who understands how to dig a car out of a snow drift and how to follow a hockey game.
Unless Perry decides to concede Iowa to Bachmann (an unlikely scenario), he will have to play some serious catch-up in the state, paying tribute in time-consuming personal attention and consumption of potluck dinners that Iowans demand of every candidate seeking their affection. In that hothouse environment, the risk of gaffes is very high, and it’s too late for Perry to keep expectations low. And if Perry does not set Iowa afire, there’s a good chance that his competition with Bachmann for social conservative activist support will create an opening for Romney to come into the state in search of a knockout blow against the entire field.
Looking beyond the Caucuses, the road ahead looks more daunting for Rick Perry than the hype surrounding his entry might suggest, while the overall state of the race continues to be perilous for Republicans hoping for an early consensus that would provide an extended opportunity for the GOP nominee to unite the party and focus on Barack Obama. Until Perry’s popularity in Iowa can be verified by polls of likely Caucus-goers, the most plausible scenario is a Bachmann win in the Caucuses, followed by Romney victories in Nevada and New Hampshire, and then a Perry breakthrough in South Carolina.
This scenario would take the GOP into uncharted territory, since there’s never been a presidential nominating contest where the first three big states were won by three different candidates, all of them with some level of national support and all of them demonstrably strong fundraisers. It’s the sort of situation where relatively small developments–a gaffe, a strong or poor debate performance, a monomaniacal series of attacks from minor candidates, a failure to meet media expectations–could become very big deals. But barring some major development, an extended nominating contest seems likely; it could have happened in 2008 had John McCain not eked out back-to-back wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and this year the schedule after the early states is significantly more spread out.
To be sure, it’s possible that the Perry hype is justified, and he’ll surge ahead of Bachmann in Iowa and get his one-on-one with Romney. He remains the best-positioned of the three serious contenders as a potential “unity” candidate for a vengeful, conservative-trending party smelling victory and wanting to hide its cultural and fiscal extremism behind a plausible economic success story. But it won’t be a cakewalk, if only because Perry’s not the only candidate feeling a calling to run and win this race.

Purveyors of the Heartland Hegemony of Iowa can breathe easier now. The state GOP Straw Poll in Ames was not made irrelevant via a victory by Ron Paul, who cannot be nominated thanks to his foreign policy views (his fringe economic and fiscal doctrines, alas, have become almost entirely acceptable in today’s GOP). The event succeeded in elevating a candidate, Michele Bachmann, to the top tier, and “winnowed the field” by disposing of the one-time smart money favorite for the nomination, Tim Pawlenty. And even the new candidate who skipped Ames and vaulted to the top tier even before his Saturday announcement, Rick Perry, bent his knee to Iowa by racing there the next day, and promising to spend plenty of time catching up in his consumption of potluck dinners.
Yes, aside from Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Herman Cain and Jon Huntsman and Newt Gingrich will hang around the campaign trail as formal candidates though not serious contenders, helping keep rightward pressure on the field just in case anyone starts thinking about the general electorate a bit early. But barring some highly irrational last-minute bid by Sarah Palin, the GOP field is down to three candidates. And with no “bankable” events between now and the actual Iowa Caucuses (currently scheduled for February, but quite likely to slip back to early January if not earlier), it’s likely to stay that way, with the polls and fundraising numbers offering the only grounds for objective comparison.
You can expect a big, big boom for Perry over the next few weeks, accompanied by the sort of scrutiny his long record of erratic and sometimes outrageous statements and positions invites. Some political observers are already predicting he will brush aside Bachmann to create a one-on-one battle with Mitt Romney, mainly on grounds that he will be able to contrast his record as governor with her brief career in congressional bloviating in a way that T-Paw tried but failed to do.
Many Republicans and chattering-class denizens seem mesmerized by Texas’ alleged sensational economic success story under Perry (which Paul Krugman nicely punctured in a column yesterday). Many southerners of a certain age will shake their heads in wonder that Perry’s version of the ancient race-to-the-bottom prescription for EZ economic growth in the region is being treated like a new, cool, “substantive” path ahead for the country. And many students of political communications will examine Perry’s stump speech closely to assess the earthy appeal of the man who Texan Paul Begala called “a good candidate if you thought George Bush was just a little too cerebral for you.”
If Perry attracts a quasi-unanimous rush of Christian Right and Tea Party endorsements, and starts badly beating Bachmann in polls of likely Iowa Caucus-goers, then maybe it will be time to call this essentially a two-candidate race. But until then, there are three viable candidates, two representing some of the more extreme forces in conservative ideology and another being pulled constantly in the same direction on pain of defeat.

Like a lot of political observers, I watched last night’s Fox News/Washington Examiner candidates’ debate mainly with an eye to its impact on the Republican presidential nominating contest (and even more specifically, tomorrow’s Iowa State GOP Straw Poll). By that standard, it made sense to focus on Ron Paul’s outlier views on foreign policy, the dynamics of the Pawlenty/Bachmann tussle, Mitt Romney’s continued ability to avoid conservative flak, and even Rick Santorum’s effort to lift himself past Herman Cain into the hanging-on-by-a-fingernail tier of the field.
But it’s worth paying regular attention to how the entire field is positioning itself for a general election. And by that standard, here are some moments from last night that look different from a different point of view:
1) Tim Pawlenty got good reviews for his little joke about offering to cook dinner or mow the lawn for anyone who could “find” the president’s plans for “reforming” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That’s quite a knee-slapper for conservative activists. But significant majorities of the electorate at large don’t want these programs to be “reformed” in any respect other than making their benefits more, not less, adequate (which is obviously not what any Republican in the country is talking about).
2) The candidates jockeyed for the anti-choice vote, with Santorum and Pawlenty supporting a ban on abortions even in the case of rape and incest, and Bachmann going so far as to defend a vote for a tax increase in the Minnesota legislature because it was bundled with an anti-abortion measure. Every time Republican candidates talk about this subject, it reinforces the reality that every one of them wants to eliminate the right to choose in all but a tiny percentage of situations.
3) Similarly, Mitt Romney solidified his conservative credentials by defending a federal constitutional ban on same-sex marriages. Nobody on the stage (even the heretic Jon Huntsman, who favors civil unions) was willing to say same-sex marriage is not a problem requiring some sort of immediate action. This is a position where public opinion is moving very rapidly in the opposite direction from the GOP.
4) Michele Bachmann responded to a question about her past statements of wifely “submission” to her husband with some serious prevarication about the meaning of the word “submit.” She probably won’t get away with brushing it off in the future. But more importantly, this whole line of discussion sounds like crazy-talk to the majority of Americans who do not subscribe to strict conservative evangelical views.
And most of all:
5) The defining moment of the debate was when every single candidate raised a hand in opposition to a hypothetical deficit reduction deal composed of a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. As Ezra Klein pointed out today, this is a position virtually guaranteed to thwart the GOP’s own deficit reduction goals of securing “entitlement reform” and avoiding large defense cuts. It’s also wildly at variance with public opinion favoring bipartisan compromise and a “balanced” approach that includes tax as well as spending measures.
I’m sure I’ve missed some other moments in the debate that illustrated how far afield this field has traveled from mainstream public opinion in its hunger and thirst for “base” support. This dynamic is likely to become even more intense as actual ballots begin to be cast in the nominating process.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Thursday night’s Fox News/Washington Examiner GOP candidate debate featured more combative exchanges between conservative journalists and candidates than we’d seen thus far, and some fireworks between the contenders themselves. The debate-point winner was probably Newt Gingrich, who bashed his media tormenters effectively and was generally smooth and fluid, and the strategic winner was probably Mitt Romney, who had some good moments and again escaped any serious damage from his rivals. But in terms of the immediate impact on Saturday’s Iowa Straw Poll, it’s a bit harder to tell, since neither of the debate “winners” are competing in Ames.
Indeed, though we won’t know until Saturday night’s balloting closes at 7 pm CDT how it all turns out, much of the results have probably already been predetermined by the number of voters who have received pre-paid tickets ($30 a pop) from campaigns that have reason to think they’ll “vote right,” having decided to drive to Ames or hop a ride on a campaign van or bus, and can therefore be trusted to stay committed–or as the cynical might put it, “bought”–until their ballot is cast and their finger is dipped in indelible ink.
Before the Thursday night debate, virtually every observer expected the top three finishers in Ames to be, in some order, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, and Ron Paul. All three of them have distinct strengths and weaknesses.
Bachmann has the buzz, the momentum, and at least a decent angle (if not a corner) on the highly motivated and pre-organized conservative evangelicals who gave the cash-strapped Mike Huckabee an improbable second-place finish in Ames in 2007, and a caucus victory in 2008. Her main weakness is in organization (she reportedly has only four field staffers in the state), compounded by a relatively late start and the Washington responsibilities that have made her largely a weekend warrior in Iowa. Bachmann’s straw poll campaign has been largely confined to central Iowa, and has largely consisted of paid media and robocalls (though there’s some buzz that her supporters are doing well in self-organizing through social media).
T-Paw, for his part, has a world-class statewide Iowa organization, full of straw poll and caucus veterans, who have been preparing for this weekend for many months. Free from day-job responsibilities, he’s spent more days in the state than anyone other than Rick Santorum (who moved his family here a few weeks ago). In Iowa, as elsewhere, he is acceptable to every party faction, and is especially warm-and-cozy with the state’s powerful anti-abortion movement, which views his wife, a former Minnesota judge, as a staunch ally. But his problem in Iowa, as it is nationally, is that he just doesn’t seem to enthuse voters. His “Results, Not Rhetoric” slogan may offer a sly dig at his fellow-Minnesotan, while pointing to his governing record in Minnesota, but it seems ill-fitted to a campaign cycle where Republicans want fire from every podium.
Paul, finally, is sort of the Goldilocks candidate of the field: He’s got a good organization–not as good as Pawlenty’s, but far better than he had in 2007–and he’s certainly got intensely loyal supporters famed for their willingness to show up at straw polls–though not as many as Bachmann might command if she could reach and turn out conservative evangelicals en masse. So it’s hardly surprising some handicappers think he could well sneak past the favorites and pull off a win.
As for how the debate might have shaken up the calculus among the three contenders, Tim Pawlenty got off some good prefab lines at the expense of Barack Obama (and, to some extent, Romney), but his attacks on his main straw poll rival, Michelle Bachmann, were shrill and complicated, and the general impression is that Bachmann–who otherwise did not dazzle as she did in the last big debate in New Hampshire–got the better of their exchanges.
The biggest question is how much damage Ron Paul did to himself, right when he seemed to be breaking into a more mainstream Republican electorate, with his fiery remarks on foreign policy. The visual image of Mitt Romney, standing next to Paul and looking at him like a lab specimen as he defended Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear program, was striking. The loud hooting and cheering of Paul’s supporters in response to his most controversial (to conservatives) statements reinforced the idea that his is not a candidacy that’s ready, by any stretch, for the GOP primetime.
One thing that is relatively clear are the expectations against which each candidate will have to compete. Paul, of course, could care less about expectations; he will campaign to the bitter end no matter what, and even a victory in Ames will not gain him credibility as a potential nominee. Both Bachmann and Pawlenty, however, need a first-place finish: Bachmann in order to maintain her momentum and establish herself, once and for all, as a top-tier candidate, and T-Paw, more likely than not, in order to convince donors to keep his campaign afloat. And both are under the long shadow of Perry, who could quickly displace both Bachmann as the favorite of Tea Party and Christian Right activists, and Pawlenty as the electable-conservative-alternative-to-Romney. Ames, for all its nonsense, will likely begin the inevitable process of culling the wheat from the chaff.