If you enjoy insider-y accounts of turmoil in a presidential campaign–and what political junkie doesn’t?–you definitely need to read the long Jonathan Martin piece at Politico on the increasingly public implosion of Huntsman ’12. Based on campaign sources (most notably former eminence grise and Huntsman family friend David Fischer, who went on the record), Martin has written a tale of a campaign that seems to have become a rolling ball of madness. There’s vicious infighting, logistical incompetence, frequent staff departures, money problems, F-bombs being dropped regularly in business meetings, and the candidate’s family frequently wondering what’s wrong. One story involves Fischer getting into a nasty dispute with the central figure in the drama, the famous on-again, off-again McCain strategist John Weaver, over Fischer’s report that the campaign had just hired a staffer who “had a reputation for preying on young female volunteers.”
You can check your schadenfreude tolerance levels and read the whole piece yourself. But what I found most interesting is that having helped Martin expose all this juicy material to the world, David Fischer himself wants to make it clear that wasn’t really his chief beef with Weaver:

[I]f the story gets told, I want the story to be, because Weaver’s history in past campaigns is when they don’t work out, for whatever reason, he attacks the candidate. And in this case, I am hoping that people at least focus on, well, what went wrong here? The strategy went wrong. The strategy didn’t work. At least to this day it hasn’t worked.

Bingo. Whatever else is going on inside the Huntsman campaign, it’s Weaver’s strategy–first laid out even before the future candidate made the unwise decision to become part of the Obama administration as ambassador to China–that was the fundamental problem. In what appeared to be, from a distance anyway, something of an effort to relive his salad days as the architect of McCain’s brief breakthrough in the 2000 presidential race, Weaver insisted that Huntsman run as a mavericky moderate hostile to the ideological bender his party is currently on, in hopes of appealing to independents who get to vote in Republican primaries in states like New Hampshire. This is how Weaver had Huntsman talking even before he left the U.S. for Beijing (as shown in Zvika Krieger’s fine 2009 profile), and nothing changed when the former governor returned and Weaver presented him with a prefab campaign and message.
Even in 2009, it was pretty obvious the GOP was going in a direction that made Huntsman’s “move to the center” rap positively suicidal. This year it has quickly made him a non-factor in the presidential race, surviving basically on the fumes of the candidate’s popularity among the Beltway pundit crowd that likes to imagine that a genial Mandarin-speaking business tycoon is just what the doctor ordered, even though virtually everything the man says and does is anathema to the activists who will determine his fate. In the wake of this latest furor, Huntsman has sought to minimize the damage and has restated his confidence in Weaver. But if as appears certain Huntsman continues to go nowhere fast in his pursuit of the presidency, Weaver’s disservice to him is a lot more basic than whatever sins he might have committed in running off campaign staff or wasting time waging internal battles: He sold Huntsman a strategic bill of goods from the get-go, and as Fischer says, it ain’t working.
It’s ironic that this simple reality may be buried in all the lip-smacking over “turmoil in the Huntsman campaign,” with Fisher supplying the ammunition. Strategy really does matter, sometimes a lot more than its execution.

There’s been a lot of puzzled commentary on polls taken after the debt limit deal showing that Americans were not, by and large, all that grateful for the avoidance of a debt default calamity. But National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein looks at the numbers and sees the possibility of something that’s never really happened in American political history: a full-on bipartisan rejection of incumbents from both parties.

In a CNN/ORC poll conducted on Monday and released on Tuesday, just 14 percent of those surveyed said they approved of the way Congress is handling its job, while 84 percent disapproved. That was not only the lowest level of approval, and the highest level of disapproval, that the CNN poll has recorded — the gap between the approval and disapproval numbers were as wide as Gallup has recorded in any of its polls measuring congressional performance dating back to 1974. The public verdict on Congress today is more negative than it was just before the election landslides that switched control of Congress in 1994, 2006, and 2010: Gallup surveys in the fall of those years put congressional approval between 21 percent and 26 percent….
Among independents, Congress’ approval rating in the new CNN poll stood at just 11 percent. That’s significantly worse even than the results in an October 2006 CNN survey conducted shortly before the wave that swept Democrats to control of both chambers that year: at that point 26 percent of independents approved of the performance of the Republican-controlled Congress.

Since control of Congress is divided, the kind of “anti-incumbent backlash” that those citing widespread unhappiness with the status quo often predict would have to hit both parties, with voters, moreover, splitting tickets between presidential and congressional candidates. In reality, though, as Brownstein acknowledges, ticket-splitting isn’t remotely as common a practice as it used to be, and a big percentage of self-identified “independents” really aren’t.
But if “wrong track” sentiment is unlikely to hit both parties equally, it certainly can have that effect over time in an unstable electorate and political system, as Browstein notes:

[E]nduring shifts in political advantage have punctuated most of American political history: Democrats in 1800, 1828, and 1932, and Republicans in 1860 and 1896 each engineered decisive shifts in voter allegiance that allowed them to hold both the White House and Congress for most of the next generation. But since 1968, neither side has managed such a breakthrough or built such an abiding connection with voters. Over the past four decades, the result has been to make divided control of Congress and the White House much more common than at any previous point in American history. Lately, that instability has been compounded by more rapid turnover in control of the House and Senate.

Considering the changes in the composition of Congress since the day before the 2006 elections, that’s an understatement.

As you have probably noticed, stock markets have been sliding pretty steadily from the very moment it became apparent that Congress was going to enact a debt limit agreement to avoid a default and an immediate downgrading of the federal government’s credit rating.
No, the markets weren’t reacting to the deal; it’s more like they didn’t care, or had assumed it all along. What they cared about was precisely what we were told was irrelevant to the debt limit deal: weak consumer demand and slow economic growth.
Strangely enough, the financial sector seems to be buying into the idea that the United States Congress might react to the threat (or reality) of a double-dip recession by, you know, doing something about it. This is from a Bloomberg report:

Speculation of new stimulus is increasing after U.S. data this week showed manufacturing grew at the weakest pace in two years, spending unexpectedly fell and the services industries grew at the slowest pace since February 2010.

Dave Weigel’s comment on that “speculation” is spot-on:

At some point, investors are going to have to start paying attention to how Congress actually works. It’s more likely to declare National John Wayne Gacy Appreciation Day on August 5 than it is to pass more stimulus.

That’s true. If the economy tanks again, we’ll hear calls for really draconian spending cuts. I mean, nothing could help the economy more than a couple million layoffs of public sector workers, right? All those wages could be useful to job-creators.
The grand irony is that “the markets” seem to be the last redoubt of Keynsian economics

In the wake of the debt limit deal, a lot of attention now is being focused on the “super-committee,” or whatever you want to call it, of six Democrats and six Republicans that is supposed to come up with a vast deficit reduction package in order to avoid automatic cuts in (mostly) discretionary spending.
Steve Benen notes that a group of six conservative Senators have sent a leader to the GOP leadership demanding that the deliberations of the “super-committee” be held in public and televised. And he wonders about that:

I find this terribly odd. Do these Republican senators not realize the GOP members of the committee will be pushing a wildly unpopular agenda?
We don’t know who’ll serve on this panel, but we can guess with confidence what its members will say. Republicans will argue for deep cuts to Medicare and Social Security, will fight tooth and nail to protect tax breaks for the wealthy and the oil industry. Democrats will largely be doing the opposite.
You don’t have to be a polling expert to know the Democratic approach will enjoy vastly more public support.
If these six GOP senators seriously believe their party would benefit from a more transparent process, they clearly need to get out more.

Steve’s right, but I think he is missing the real motive for this “transparency” demand. Conservatives are always paranoid about Republican leaders selling them out behind closed doors. They want the cameras there not for the benefit of public education or even propaganda, but simply so that they can keep tabs on their negotiators. If that also makes Americans more aware of how extreme some of their ideas are, so be it.
Looking at the big picture, it’s increasingly obvious that a lot of conservatives figure they’re going to win or lose next year not based on anything in particular they say and do, but because of factors like the economy that are essentially beyond their control (not that the policies they are forcing on the country are helping things). So the key goal is to keep iron control of their party so as to maximize their power if the GOP does win the White House and the Senate and holds on to the House.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the passage of the debt limit increase package this week, many political activists and observers have undoubtedly heaved a sigh of relief and either headed off on vacation or refocused their attention on the “normal” business of American politics. Certainly the Republican candidates and campaigns have to be happy to dispose of the daily pressure of monitoring and commenting (or, in the case of Mitt Romney, avoiding comments) on the “debt crisis,” without getting crossways with the hyper-conservative activists that will dominate the early stages of the nominating contest, or saying anything that could fatally compromise them in a general election.
But they’d all better get used to it. The big debt limit vote in Congress, it is increasingly obvious, is just an appetizer for the divisive, voter-alienating struggles it has built into the schedule at key points during the 2012 presidential campaign, making an eventual GOP presidential nominee’s efforts to “pivot to the center” an athletic feat, at best. And as Tea Party activists and other conservatives have made clear in their reactions to the deal just signed, their efforts to force everyone in the GOP to join in future hostage-taking exercises aimed at middle-class entitlements and other targets beloved of voters have just begun.
Indeed, this week’s agreement didn’t really kick the can that far down the road. In September, after the field has finally filled out and been winnowed in Ames, congressional conservatives will be engaged in a savage fight to cut domestic appropriations–complete, no doubt, with government shutdown threats–below the levels spelled out in the debt limit deal. Another provision of the deal requires that when the current “temporary” debt limit is reached, probably around the end of September, the president must request another increase in the limit, which will lead to a “disapproval” vote in Congress and, if it passes, a presidential veto and a veto override vote (all just Kabuki theater, but a noisy and divisive exercise nonetheless). Soon after that, an even bigger battle over the “debt committee” recommendations, and the fallback automatic spending cuts that will be triggered in their stead, will break out, culminating in December when the candidates competing in the early primary states will be in a full-on teeth-grinding frenzy for votes. Both these fights will inevitably involve trade-offs–between entitlement cuts, defense spending cuts, and tax increases–that divide the GOP and the country, and they will force candidates to choose again and again between the views of Tea Party activists–including early primary-state Big Dogs like Jim DeMint–and the general public.
And that hardly ends the gauntlet of fiscal litmus tests. As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn explained yesterday, the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the next anticipated deadline for yet another debt increase, will coincide at the end of 2012, casting a long shadow over the presidential campaign. Budget guru Stan Collender has summed it up: “[I]t’s absolutely certain Congress and the president, the House and Senate, and Democrats and Republicans will all be fighting constantly over the budget during the next 18 months.”
This rocky road ahead raises a very fundamental question about the long-range strategy of the Republican presidential nominee. It is often asserted that presidential candidates “play to the base” during contested primary contests and then “pivot to the center” once they are playing on the expanded field of a general election. This desideratum is more important these days for Republicans than for Democrats, since the GOP is without a doubt the more ideological of the two major parties (consider the relative power of Blue Dogs and the hunted-to-extinction RINOs, or the eagerness of Republicans to call themselves “conservatives” or even “true conservatives,” as contrasted with the resistance of many Democrats to labels such as “liberal” or even “progressive”).
The “pivot to the center” is a lot easier said than done. It was certainly a major problem for John McCain in 2008, who had to repudiate much of his “maverick” record during the primaries and then struggled to recapture it, with conservatives thwarting his desire for a pro-choice running-mate and disrupting his general election rallies with complaints that he wasn’t talking constantly about ACORN and Jeremiah Wright.
How much harder might the “pivot to the center” be for the 2012 GOP nominee, who will head up a party convinced its recommitment to conservative principles and its partisan militancy won the 2010 midterm elections and now has Democrats on the run? Moreover, in a year where the last cycle’s “true conservative” candidate Mitt Romney has moved significantly to the right but is now considered dangerously moderate, the distance such a “pivot” would have to span appears daunting, if not downright impossible.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama (barring some truly shocking turn of events) will not only have the luxury of avoiding a base-tending primary challenge, but will have pursued what amounts to a general election strategy for the entire span of his presidency. From all appearances, Team Obama has long concluded its ace-in-the-hole for 2012 will be its ability to frighten both persuadable swing voters and unhappy progressives with the specter of what an extremist Republican government might do. Conservatives in Congress and in the early primary states are certainly doing everything they can to help Democrats paint devil horns on their eventual nominee.

To revisit one of the issues I discussed in an exchange with Glenn Greenwald at Salon last week, there’s a new Gallup weekly presidential approval tracking poll out, and it’s another interesting data point on the question of whether the White House strategy of ignoring progressive advice to appeal to independent voters is significantly hurting him with the former group or helping him with the latter.
So far, the answer seems to be: no and no. For July 25-31, Gallup shows the president’s approval rating dropping to 42%, a new low for his entire presidency. But among self-identified liberals, his approval rating ticked up last week to 72%, pretty much where it’s been all year (the same characterization is true of his 78% approval rating among Democrats). Meanwhile, among self-identified independents, the approval number dropped to an all-time low of 37%, and among “pure independents” (i.e., those not objectively leaning towards either party) to an abysmal 28%, matching his all-time low.
Maybe as the debt limit deal sinks in, these numbers will change. But for the moment, whatever opinion-leaders in either camp say or think, rank-and-file progressives are sticking with Obama and indies are spurning his overtures. Go figure.

The drama underway in Washington over the tentative “deal” to increase the debt limit just one day before the deadline announced by the Treasury Department is gripping enough, with white-knuckle votes in both chambers on tap. But the “debate” is also taking place in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Austin, and other places where actual or potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates happen to be this week.
Prior to the “deal,” every 2012er other than going-nowhere Jon Hunstman (and including likely candidate Rick Perry) had signed onto the “cut, cap and balance pledge” that foreswore support for any debt limit increase that was not accompanied by the rather exacting measures in the pledge (big immediate spending cuts, a cap on domestic spending linked to a fixed percentage of GDP, and a balanced budget amendment including both percentage-of-GDP limit and a supermajority requirement for tax increases by Congress). During the end-game negotiations in Congress, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Tim Pawlenty, Herman Cain and Rick Perry all periodically warned Republicans not to vote for a deal that violated that pledge. Bachmann and T-Paw specifically attacked John Boehner’s proposal that passed the House over the weekend.
Now that the “deal” is out there, Bachmann and Paul have already announced they will vote against it; Romney announced today that he was opposed to it; and Pawlenty and Perry have made hostile noises without, so far, taking a definitive position (since Cain has systematically opposed debt limit increases on principle, his position can be stipulated as pre-established).
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether the presidentials will have any impact at all on how Republicans vote in Congress. But it’s pretty clear their interests are aligned with those senators and representatives whose votes are largely dictated by the fear of being “primaried.” And more generally, it’s interesting that supposedly mainstream Establishment figures like Mitt Romney are being herded in the direction of irresponsible extremism set by Bachmann and Paul, who, until very recently, were considered noisy but inconsequential fringe figures in the House Republican Caucus.
Meanwhile, the candidate beloved of the Beltway Establishment who himself has become little more than a “fringe figure” in the GOP, former Gov. Huntsman, is now dismissing Bachmann’s influence as the result of her physical appearance. As Josh Marshall put it: “The new and brass-knucklier Jon Huntsman suggests Michele Bachmann gets so much press because she’s hot.”

So there is finally a “deal” to increase the public debt limit, agreed to, at least, by the president, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner (Nancy Pelosi is assumed to be selling it to unhappy House Democrats behind the scenes). There is no guarantee it will be approved by the House, where both progressive Democrats and Tea Party Republicans would like to vote “no” for very different reasons. The pressure to approve it, though, was underscored by the positive response to news of a “deal” by financial markets, first overseas and then on Wall Street. Defeat of a deal now, on the eve of the supposed August 2 deadline, and at the hands of House Members with diametrically opposed reasons for killing it, would probably produce a pretty bad, interest-rate-boosting, 401(k)-melting, reaction, and leave no obvious course open (assuming the president continues to categorically reject the “14th Amendment option”).
Signatories to the deal are unsurprisingly spinning it their own way, but Ezra Klein’s assessment seems pretty sensible:

[Here is] the truth of this deal, and perhaps of Washington in this age: it’s all about lowest-common denominator lawmaking. There are no taxes. No entitlement cuts. No stimulus. No infrastructure. Less in actual, specific deficit reduction than there was in the Simpson-Bowles, Ryan, or Obama plans, and even than there was in the Biden/Cantor or Obama/Boehner talks. The two sides didn’t concede more in order to get more. They conceded almost nothing in order to get a trigger and a process, not to mention avoid a financial catastrophe.
There’s reason to be skeptical that a trigger and a process will do much to change these basic dynamics. We’ve now attempted to get a deficit-reducing grand bargain by yoking it to both a near-shutdown and a near-default, not to mention a series of negotiations, commissions, and senatorial gangs. None of it has been enough. And that’s because bipartisan commissions and terrible consequences have not been enough to convince Republicans to agree to revenues, and revenues are fundamental to large deficit-reduction compromise.

Aside from this “trigger and a process,” the deal includes pretty much the same immediate domestic discretionary spending cuts (half from domestic programs, half from “security spending”) negotiated by Biden and McConnell weeks ago, that were assumed to be baked into any agreement. The main last-minute wrinkles, which the White House is treating as significant wins, are that defense spending joins non-defense discretionary spending in the new “hostage room” of the automatic cuts that would be triggered by the failure to reach a second deficit reduction agreement by December, while Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits (as opposed to provider reimbursements) would be exempted from such automatic cuts. Lingering in the background, of course, is the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of 2012, which will keep revenues on the table in broader budget discussions even if they are not part of the current deal itself.
I think it’s safe to say that progressive hostility to this deal (which is pervasive, and varies mainly only in temperature) is more about the process that led up to it than the specific details worked out at the final minute. Some think the president fatally erred by even getting into a discussion of deficit reduction ( way back when he appointed the Simpson-Bowles Commission) so long as the economy was struggling. Many think he should have negotiated a debt limit increase as part of the deal at the end of last year that temporarily extended the Bush tax cuts. Still others think he should have threatened from the very beginning to use the “14th amendment option” if Republicans didn’t agree to a “balanced approach” (e.g, one including new revenues) to long-term deficit reduction. If you read what is likely to be the most influential progressive condemnation of Obama, Paul Krugman’s column today, it’s notable that virtually every false step he excoriates happened weeks or months ago, not during the end-game.
Some progressives obviously still believe, and will put votes behind the proposition in the House, that the potential consequences of a debt default are exaggerated, or in any event cannot justify the sort of damage an all-cuts, no-taxes deficit reduction agreement will inflict on the economy (via virtually certain big cuts in “investment” programs that most affect growth, and additional, perhaps massive, reductions in federal employment levels) and on diverse beneficiaries of federal programs, from K-12 school children to people who prefer to drink safe water and breathe clean air.
Any way you look at it, the aftermath of this depressing series of events will require some pretty serious rethinking of Democratic strategy, tactics and messaging for 2012. If the deal is defeated in the House, all bets are off and we’ll just have to see what happens both economically and politically. If it is approved, we’ll be looking at a Democratic Party that is not much in the mood to celebrate any theoretical improvement in the president’s approval ratings or 2012 prospects, and is forced to reconsider how it talks about its plans for a federal government that will be operating under new constraints beyond anything conservatives were proposing as recently as last year’s election campaigns.

Last week Rick Perry, said by all to be on the very brink of a presidential campaign, surprised most observers by not only shrugging off New York’s decision to legalize gay marriage, but suggesting people in other states ought to mind their own damn business:

Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me. That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.

After a few days of squawking from Christian Right leaders, Perry decided to execute a full flip-flop in a venue most likely to be understood as a capitulation to his theocratic friends: a radio interview by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. Get a load of this exchange after Perkins questioned Perry’s earlier statement:

GOV. PERRY: Let me just, I probably needed to add a few words after “that’s fine with me” its fine with me that the state is using their sovereign right to decide an issue. Obviously gay marriage is not fine with me, my stance had not changed. I believe marriage is a union between one man and one woman….
TONY PERKINS: But when you look at what’s happening on marriage, the real fear is that states like New York will change the definition of marriage for Texas. At that point the states rights argument is lost….
GOV. PERRY: Right and that is the reason that the federal marriage amendment is being offered, it’s that small group of activist judges, and frankly a small handful, if you will, of states, and liberal special interests groups that intend on a redefinition of, if you will, marriage on the nation, for all of us, which I adamantly oppose.
Indeed to not pass the federal marriage amendment would impinge on Texas, and other states not to have marriage forced upon us by these activist judges and special interest groups….
TONY PERKINS: Governor, we are about out of time but I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I think I hear what you are saying. The support given what’s happening across the nation, the fear of the courts, the administration’s failure to defend the defense of marriage act.
The only and thin line of protection for those states that have defined marriage, that have been historically been defined between a man and a woman. The support of a marriage amendment is a pro-state’s rights position, because it will defend the rights of states to define marriage as it has been.
GOV. PERRY: Yes sir, and I have long supported the appointment of judges who respect the constitution and the passage of a federal marriage amendment. That amendment defines marriage between one man and one woman, and it protects the states from being told otherwise.

Pretty amazing, eh? You need a constitutional amendment to protect Texas’ right to tell New York it’s wrong on same-sex marriage, or something like that. Perkins’ assertion that “a marriage amendment is a pro-state’s rights position, because it will defend the rights of states to define marriage as it has been,” perfectly illustrates the instrumental attitude the Christian Right has towards the supposedly revered U.S. Constitution. They’ll toss it aside in a New York Minute if it gets in the way of achieving their objectives.
It’s kind of funny, if grotesque, to watch Perry anxiously negotiate his way through the humiliation and illogic of this blatant flip-flop under Perkins’ guidance. But it’s yet another reminder that those who think the Christian Right’s power in the Republican Party is a thing of the past really just aren’t paying much attention.

There’s a lot going on this morning, what with stocks sliding in the wake of last night’s debt limit fiasco in the House and a bad GDP report, and people in Washington finally beginning to realize that yes, the Tea Party folk are perfectly willing and able to deliberately wreck the U.S. economy if they don’t get their way.
But because it didn’t get that much attention, and yet it represents a microcosm of the strange new territory Americans politics seems to have entered, I want to mention a small but telling incident from yesterday.
At 4:03 p.m., Sarah Palin did a Facebook post that didn’t explicitly tell Republican House members how to vote on the Boehner plan, but did pretty clearly threaten primary challenges to those who forgot the mandate they supposedly had to turn Washington upside down. It also strikes the classic Palin note of self-identification with right-wing activists in “flyover country” against “elitists.”

I respectfully ask these GOP Freshman to re-read this letter and remember us “little people” who believed in them, donated to their campaigns, spent hours tirelessly volunteering for them, and trusted them with our votes. This new wave of public servants may recall that they were sent to D.C. for such a time as this….
P.S.–Everyone I talk to still believes in contested primaries.

A prediction: If the withdrawal of the Boehner plan last night due to insufficient Republican support turns out to be a big moment in this fiscal melodrama, the Palin Facebook post will get a lot of the credit or blame, depending on your point of view.
If I’m right about that, Palin will have proven once again that for all her manifest flaws, nobody quite knows how to play the media–both the “lamestream” and the conservative ideological variety–quite like St. Joan of the Tundra. I mean, really: the Republican House Study Committee and Jim DeMint managed to badger all but one presidential candidate plus 183 conservative organizations into signing the “cut, cap, and balance” pledge that swore signatories to exhibit unwavering hostility to any debt limit increase plan other than their own. Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty have been careening around Iowa the last week shrieking at Congress to vote down the Boehner plan. Sarah Palin, meanwhile, waited to the very last hour and simply did a Facebook post, yet it’s her intervention that will probably be remembered.
You have to admire Palin’s economy of effort.
UPDATE: Dave Weigel has a good metaphor for Palin’s involvement in the debt limit vote:

Her Facebook note was familiar to anyone who’s put out a call for friends to help him move, and watches one of the friends show up at the last minute to lift one box then dig into the pizza you’ve provided.