This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
When I last wrote about the schedule of Republican presidential nominating contests back in April, there were two dynamics that appeared to be shaping the calendar: first, the usual “frontloading” temptation of states to run to the front of the line in order to have an impact on the results, which both national parties have been fighting in recent years with less than brilliant success; and second, a more unusual “backloading” phenomenon, where other states were delaying primaries or caucuses for their own reasons, often the money savings associated with holding the contests in conjunction with regular nominating events for down-ballot offices. Since then, it looks like both phenomena have only intensified, with numerous implications for the GOP field. And because the two trends pull in opposite directions, they indicate that the Republican nominating contest will likely play out in one of two remarkably divergent ways: either as a quick victory or as an extended slugfest.
In an interesting joint effort, both national parties have sought in this election cycle to bring order to the calendar by maintaining the privilege of four early states–Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and South Carolina–while pushing them to hold their contests no earlier than February. Other states, meanwhile, are being ordered to hold back until at least March or, barring that, suffer penalties (for Republicans, this means the loss of half of a “rogue” state’s delegates). As was the case in 2008, Florida is first on the list of potential scofflaw states; its primary is currently scheduled for January 31, 2012, which, if it stays that way, could influence the First Four states to move their contests up to the beginning of the year or even December of 2011. But in contrast with 2008, where Michigan was Florida’s only partner is defying the calendar, four other states–Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, and Missouri–have positioned themselves to follow the Sunshine State into unsanctioned early contests, with Arizona and Georgia bestowing a single official (Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp) the power to set the exact date.
At the same time, “backloading” pressures are likely to lead several especially large states–e.g. California, New York, and Texas–into later contests. As an added incentive to budgetary concerns, the national GOP has decreed that only those states holding contests after April 1 will have the option of awarding delegates on a winner-take-all basis, traditionally the main difference between Republican and Democratic primary rules. The end result, as recently explained by election calendar guru Josh Putnam to The New York Times‘ Jeff Zeleny, is the destruction of that hardy perennial of state calendar machinations, Super Tuesday, which will shrink from 24 states participating during the last cycle to only about 10 in next year’s contest.
If both these trends play out, it could significantly increase the probability of either a quick victory or an extended slugfest, much like the Democratic contest of 2008. In that fight, Barack Obama came within a few thousand votes in New Hampshire of putting Hillary Clinton’s campaign on life support on January 8, but ultimately had to wait nearly six months (until June 4, to be exact) to claim the nomination.
As for which outcome will come to pass, the conventional wisdom this cycle is that an early knockout is unlikely. At the moment, if you were to take bets among the handicappers of pre-election speculation, the favorite in Iowa is Michele Bachmann; in Nevada and New Hampshire, it’s Mitt Romney; and in South Carolina, it’s probably Rick Perry (if he runs, and it’s looking increasingly like he will). But all three of these candidates are also theoretically capable of an early run of the table. Bachmann, for her part, has been moving up on Romney in New Hampshire polls, and has an ideological profile well-suited for South Carolina. And if Perry competes in Iowa and splits the social conservative vote with Bachmann (and Tim Pawlenty and Herman Cain, if they are still around), Romney will be tempted to contest Iowa–where he continues to do well in the polls–and with his strength in Nevada and New Hampshire, could pull off a trifecta of victories in the first three contests. Finally, Perry’s one-two punch of appeal to social and economic conservatives could make him quickly competitive everywhere, as his recent double-digit standing in national and some state polls even prior to an announcement indicates.
Add in the wild card of several other contests immediately after South Carolina–particularly a Georgia/Florida combo–and one candidate could put the whole thing away pretty quickly. Romney could play well in Florida, while both Perry and Bachmann might have an advantage in deep-red southern states and in low-turnout Caucus states like Colorado. The “clustering” of early primaries where candidates can get fresh bursts of momentum without the massive effort associated with a Super Tuesday-type national event could be crucial in 2012.
If that doesn’t happen, though, the backloading of the calendar after the early flurry portends an extended campaign where the same three candidates have an opportunity to stay alive. Yes, deep-pocketed candidates like Romney and Perry would have superior resources for this kind of extended national campaign (though Bachmann, unlike her 2008 counterpart, Mike Huckabee, is no slouch at fundraising, either). But the decimation of Super Tuesday means that no one will be in the position Obama enjoyed in 2008 of using superior resources to sweep a host of delegate-rich caucuses held on a single day–arguably the crucial factor in his eventual nomination. A candidate like Bachmann, meanwhile, who enjoys iconic status among both Tea Party and Christian Right activists, could, if the money is there, register strong second- or third-place finishes in a lot of states. After April 1, however, that strategy won’t serve her as well if some of those states will be choosing to award their entire delegate hauls to the winner.
The bottom line is that the emerging calendar could produce an early nominee, or could even lead to that rarest of phenomena: a multi-candidate contest that stretches into the late spring. It does not appear to advantage or disadvantage any one candidate, but instead presents a complex strategic challenge to the entire field. In the end, the winning campaign may not be the richest, or even the luckiest, but the smartest.

As some of you may have noticed, I’m doing some writing for Salon this week and next (unlike some of their regulars, I don’t take summer vacations), and quickly found myself in a somewhat testy but illuminating exchange with the ever-estimable Glenn Greenwald. My initial piece, a meditation on the divide between elite and rank-and-file progressive attitudes towards the president, and how that played into Obama’s apparent re-election strategy, clearly set Glenn’s teeth on edge. His response made some categorical claims about the empirical evidence of a rank-and-file progressive revolt against Obama, argued that White House indifference to the Left’s disgruntlement with the president is politically dangerous, and in general lamented the tendency of D.C. pundits and Obama apologists to mock progressives and minimize their concerns. He made it pretty clear he included me in that much-despised-by-progressives group.
You can read my response to Greenwald here, and I won’t recapitulate it other than to say I found his empirical arguments for a progressive voter revolt against Obama unpersuasive (and certainly less persuasive than the slam-dunk case he claimed to be so clear that only “willful blindness” could miss it), and his innuendos about my intentions unfair.
If you do not want to wade through all this verbiage, Elias Isquith has a good analysis of the exchange at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen site.
I’d just offer two additional thoughts about the exchange. I objected to Glenn’s suggestion that I was joining the Obama camp and “D.C. pundits” in laughing at progressive critics of the White House for two reasons: (1) it’s not true, and more importantly, (2) progressives need to be able to have discussions of both empirical data and political strategy without impugning each other’s motives. This latter point, as a matter of fact, is one of the foundational principles for this site. Sure, we all have our own opinions and agendas. Yes, it’s human nature to associate someone making a particular argument with others making similar arguments. And often it helpfully simplifies discussions to typecast our “opponents.” But it’s a tendency that we all ought to resist, particularly amongst those who share the same basic values and allegiances, and especially when we are talking directly to each other.
In addition, in the lengthy comment thread to my first Salon piece, a lot of folks strenuously objected to my characterization of progressives outspokenly angry with Obama as “progressive elites” or “liberal elites.” I can certainly understand that objection, insofar as “elite” has a negative connotation and most of the people objecting can’t be described as opinion-leaders beyond their immediate circles. But the whole departure point of my essay was to contrast the exceptionally vociferous and increasingly dominant criticism of Obama among actual progressive opinion-leaders–i.e., “elites”–with the relatively robust levels of support the president continues to enjoy in the actual progressive Democratic voter “base.” Sure, anyone reading progressive blogs with comment threads is aware that there are progressive voters who are very angry with Obama. But empirically speaking, there aren’t enough of them to register strongly in measurements of public opinion. Perhaps it would have been better to posit between “elites” and “rank-and-file” a third group of progressives–say, “activists”–who may through their own political efforts exert an influence beyond their numbers. It’s very difficult, however, to be precise about that, and it doesn’t obviate the point that the “progressive revolt” against Obama has not, so far, spread very far into the electorate.
In any event, this will hardly be the last time this subject is discussed here or elsewhere, and I can only hope such discussions produce more light than heat.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are two warring insider narratives in Washington right now over what Republicans really want in the negotiations over the debt limit. One is that the content of any deal is less important than how it is framed politically. The other is that the GOP is just driving a really hard bargain in order to gain maximal policy concessions. But there’s a third and largely overlooked phenomenon that’s gumming up the works of any possible deal: the growing number of conservatives who genuinely believe that they (and the country) would be better off without one.
Under the first narrative proffered by insiders, any debt ceiling deal that could be interpreted as making Barack Obama’s re-election more likely is intolerable. This is supposedly the rationale for Mitch McConnell’s proposal last week, which backed off earlier Republican demands for spending cuts and instead created a series of pre-election hurdles intended to make the president look bad. The second narrative, on the other hand, is that the GOP’s hard-line opposition to a compromise on the debt limit is largely tactical. The deliberate and cynical deployment of hard-core Tea Party activists is simply intended to increase the leverage of GOP negotiators by creating the appearance their hands are tied. This tactic will work, many predict, because of either the (take your pick) sense of responsibility or gutlessness of the White House and congressional Democratic leaders.
Both these theories, however, imply that the GOP will accept the best deal they can get at the last possible moment. That means there’s no reason to take seriously the large and growing number of conservatives inside and beyond Washington who are shouting ‘No Deal At All.’ It’s the latest version of the ancient Beltway Establishment belief that Republicans are a party led by adults, whose noisy, bad children will, in the end, bite their lips and shuffle off to their rooms at bedtime as commanded. That may yet turn out to be true, if only because the injunction of Republican elders to conservative activists to behave on the debt limit will be backed up by the paymasters of Wall Street. But I wouldn’t be so sure.
To begin, a large number of conservative activists and Republican pols have been lashing themselves to the mast of intransigence on the debt ceiling issue like Odysseus sailing into the land of the Sirens. They include those who have convinced themselves that a failure to raise the debt limit will not actually produce a default on debts, as well as those who read the polls and decided there was no advantage to be gained in defying both the Tea Party Movement and long-standing public opposition to any and all debt limit increases. But they also include the nine presidential candidates (ten if Rick Perry runs), 12 Senators, 39 House members, five governors, and 183 conservative organizations that have signed the Cut, Cap, and Balance Pledge opposing any debt limit increase if it is not accompanied by all three prongs of that politically impossible proposal. The chief engineer of this pledge, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, is an extraordinarily powerful figure these days, both in Washington and on the 2012 campaign trail, thanks to his home state’s pivotal position in the GOP presidential primary.
Moreover, the power of the “just say no” faction extends beyond the ranks of actual Pledge signatories to all those Republican officeholders who do not wish to expose themselves to Tea Party wrath or primary challenges. This faction’s ultimate position was well articulated yesterday by RedState proprietor and ideological commissar Erick Erickson:

In the past 48 hours I have had call after call after call from members of the United States Congress. They’ve read what I’ve written. They agree. But they feel the hour is short and the end is nigh.
So some are calling looking for alternatives. Some are calling looking for energy. Many are calling looking for absolution.
And so I address them and put it here so you can see my advice.
I can give no absolution for what you may be about to do. I can offer no alternatives. …
You went to Washington to change Washington. You went to Washington because you said it was broken and you worried about the future for your children and grandchildren.
And now, at the moment of crisis you are worried and second guessing yourself and looking for alternatives, ways out, and most of all a clear conscience. Cut, Cap, and Balance is the only plan that can save our credit rating and our financial integrity. I can offer you nothing else, nor should you waver from fighting for it alone.

The first thing of note is Erickson’s framing of his edict as a sort of papal bull. In the heat of negotiations, the debt limit issue has been elevated among conservative activists to the level of religious frenzy and absolutism. The second notable feature is Erickson’s implicit dismissal of the economic consequences of a debt default as more acceptable than any deal short of the no-deal Cut, Cap, and Balance ultimatum.
Indeed, lurking just beneath the surface of much of the conservative hard line on the debt limit is an ironclad conviction that all sorts of economic havoc, including a much deeper recession, might be preferable to the continuation of twentieth-century “welfare state” policies. And even conservative elites are buying into that proposition. Longtime deficit hawk Robert Samuelson of the Washington Post has articulated the point of view that we are at an epochal turning point in which sacrificing such quaint values as equality and full employment may be sadly essential. “The old order, constructed by most democracies after World War II, rested on three pillars. One was the welfare state,” he writes in his column. But in the current era, he notes, “Ideas and institutions that, on the whole, served well since World War II are under a cloud.”
The idea that today’s conservatives will ultimately abandon their revolutionary goals at the drop of a hat–or a signal from Wall Street or their congressional leadership–mistakes their sense of world-historical importance for mere self-importance. They may well feel a moral obligation, in other words, to screw up America’s economy for the foreseeable future. It could, they believe, be worse: Americans could continue to harbor the terrible illusion that FDR, not Herbert Hoover, was right.

As we all wait around to see if Republicans will go along with a debt limit solution that doesn’t involve total surrender by Democrats in time to avoid all sorts of financial and economic chaos, it’s worth watching what the ideological commissars of conservatism are telling their folk. RedState’s Erick Erickson has a remarkably strident take on what he’s saying to GOP officeholders. Gaze in awe:

In the past 48 hours I have had call after call after call from members of the United States Congress. They’ve read what I’ve written. They agree. But they feel the hour is short and the end is nigh.
So some are calling looking for alternatives. Some are calling looking for energy. Many are calling looking for absolution.
And so I address them and put it here so you can see my advice.
I can give no absolution for what you may be about to do. I can offer no alternatives….
You went to Washington to change Washington. You went to Washington because you said it was broken and you worried about the future for your children and grandchildren.
And now, at the moment of crisis you are worried and second guessing yourself and looking for alternatives, ways out, and most of all a clear conscience. Cut, Cap, and Balance is the only plan that can save our credit rating and our financial integrity. I can offer you nothing else, nor should you waver from fighting for it alone. You should, however tired you may be of hearing me say it, hold the line.
But what you think will give you a clear conscience — the alternative you seek — is what has been done before. You punt. You kick the can down the road. You take the chimera and convince yourself it is real and you have done good.
A generation before you, men and women went to Washington saying they were going to turn the tide, stop the out of control spending, and stop the growth of Washington into our lives. They were going to do it for their children and grandchildren.
Now you sit where they sat. Now you do what they did….
In 1856, Abraham Lincoln said that the reason this country was great was because in this country unlike any other “every man can make himself.” When you cut your deal and clear you conscience, the American Republic is not going to die, but the ability of men to make themselves will.
Here and now, this fight — this is the last best hope to turn back. The choice is yours. There is no absolution.

I don’t know what’s more remarkable about Erick’s rant: the identification of conservative fiscal priorities with the pre-Civil-War moral posture of Abraham Lincoln, or the framing of his post as a denial of “absolution” for Republican pols considering the wicked path of avoiding a financial and economic meltdown.
I fear Erick’s papal bull on the debt limit increase is not really that much of an inflation of the influence of conservative activists on the GOP. Many Republican members of Congress are terrified to do what they are being told to do by Wall Street, their own leadership, and public opinion polls. For that reason alone, the rest of us should not be that confident they will do the obviously right thing. What’s a mere financial and economic collapse as compared to the opportunity to promote the Tea Party’s demands for a U-turn in every step of social progress achieved since the 1930s?

One of the reasons the GOP’s drive to cap (either via statute or a constitutional amendment) federal spending at 18% of GDP is even more radical than it sounds is that it’s a mite strange to insist the federal government dramatically shrink on the very brink of the retirement of the baby boom generation, which will represent a momentous if temporary boost in government’s obligations under current policies.
At National Journal, Ron Brownstein notes that the last time federal spending was at 18% of GDP was in 1966, which also happens to be the year Medicare was inaugurated. Now federal expenditures targeted to retirees are guaranteed to swell without an abrupt abandonment of the entire New Deal/Great Society safety net:

Two factors above all are swelling those programs. One is the unbroken rise in per capita health care spending as medical technology advances. The other is the growing elderly population. When Medicare began in 1966, it served about 19 million seniors. Today, the program serves nearly 48 million. Its trustees project that by 2035 that number will approach 86 million.
Against that overwhelming demographic pressure, mandating that federal spending return to its 1966 level is like ordering the tide to reverse its course. Although many Republicans want to cap federal spending at 18 percent of the economy, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid alone will consume about 15 percent of the nation’s total economic output by 2035. And under other scenarios that CBO has explored, even that figure might be optimistic.
That prospect points toward two large conclusions. One is that it’s unrealistic to limit federal spending to levels last seen when the elderly represented only about half as large a share of the population as they will in the decades ahead. Given the demographic demands, future federal spending will almost certainly require more than 21 percent of the economy–although likely less than the swollen 25 percent level reached after 2009’s stimulus program. A corollary is that sooner or later, the demands of providing for an aging society without gutting everything else that government does will require Washington to raise more revenue.

To hear Republicans tell it, Democrats in Washington are on some sort of ideological bender aimed at massively expanding the federal government; all GOPers are doing is putting on the brakes. (Actually, the more honest conservatives admit they are trying to return to the size and role of government as it existed long, long ago, perhaps as long ago as the 1920s, but they are the exception).
The reality is that (a) current policies produce higher federal spending in the short term because bad economic times automatically propel millions of people into eligibility for federal benefits; and (b) they produce higher federal spending over the long run because health care costs (private as well as public) remain out of control, and because the population is both growing and aging. You can make the argument that we just can’t afford the kind of society we enjoyed in past decades, but it’s long past time that conservatives stop pretending they are just bravely defending the status quo against crazy liberal efforts to turn America into Sweden.

As the two parties in Washington reach a critical point in the negotiations and maneuvering over the debt limit and an impending default, there are wildly varying claims being made about public opinion on the subject. At HuffPost Pollster, Mark Blumenthal sorts through the claims and provides some clarity on a very murky subject:

First, the debt ceiling issue is inherently complex and remote. Fewer than a third of Americans say they are closely following the debate. A Pew Research Center/Washington Post survey in early July found just 18 percent of Americans saying they understood “very well” what would happen if the government does not raise the debt ceiling, and a subsequent Pew Research poll found more than half (52 percent) saying they find the debt limit issue hard to understand.

Even among those who feel they have a grip on the whole interlocking set of topics, different survey wordings elicit very different emotions:

Americans don’t like the sound of debt or deficits. So when a pollster asks, as the Fox News poll did this week, whether Congress should pass an “up or down vote on raising the nation’s debt limit,” 60 percent say they would vote against while only 35 percent would vote in favor.
But Americans also don’t like the idea of default and bankruptcy. So when a pollster explains, as an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll question did this week, that an increase is necessary for the U.S. Treasury “to avoid going into bankruptcy and defaulting on its obligations,” more favor raising the debt limit (38 percent) than not (31 percent).
Perhaps more important, the anxiety about rising debt is strongly related to worries about government overspending. So when pollsters ask about proposals to increase the debt ceiling that also include cuts in government spending — as on this week’s CNN poll — they find majority support.
Of course, huge majorities also oppose cuts on spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as the new CNN poll reaffirms. So if a deal achieves significant spending reductions that include cuts in those popular programs, some future polling question may well show majority opposition to that deal.

So is public opinion on the debit limit and a possible debt default just a meaningless hash that politicians should ignore–or fee confident they can manipulate? Not exactly.

[F]or all the contradiction, the polls of the last week or so have produced some consistent findings:
* Every poll released this week that asked found Americans prefer a deal featuring a mix of tax hikes and spending cuts to a deal featuring just spending cuts.
* Most of the surveys find strong sentiment in favor of compromise, especially among Democrats and independents.
* The surveys all show Americans expressing significantly more confidence and trust in President Obama’s handling of the issue than of either the Republican or Democratic leadership in Congress.
* The polls that have tracked identically-worded questions about raising the debt ceiling, such as CBS News, NBC/Wall Street Journal, Pew Research Center and YouGov/Polimetrix, have all shown sentiment rising in favor of increasing the limit.

This is probably why congressional Democrats are increasingly encouraging their leadership to toughen their stance at a time when they are beginning to hold a stronger, if hardly steady, hand in public opinion.

At the New Yorker, George Packer offers a vivid reminder that unemployment rates significantly understate the number of people struggling to survive in this economy, and requiring a bit of help from their government, if it deigns to offer it:

In the midst of the debt crisis in Washington, D.C., Danny Hartzell backed a Budget rental truck up to a no-frills apartment building that is on a strip of motels and pawnshops in Tampa, Florida. He had been laid off by a packaging plant during the financial crisis of 2008, had run through his unemployment benefits, and had then taken a part-time job stocking shelves at Target in the middle of the night, for $8.50 an hour. His daughter had developed bone cancer, and he was desperate to make money, but his hours soon dwindled to four or five a week. In April, Hartzell was terminated. His last biweekly paycheck was for a hundred and forty dollars, after taxes. “It’s kind of like I’ve fallen into that non-climbable-out-of rut,” he said. “If you can’t climb out, why not move?”
On the afternoon of July 1st, Hartzell was loading the family’s possessions into the rental truck–and brushing off the roaches that had infested the apartment, so that the bugs wouldn’t make the move, too–when a letter arrived from the State of Florida. Four days earlier, Governor Rick Scott, a Republican backed by the Tea Party, had signed a law making it harder for Floridians to collect jobless benefits, and the letter informed Hartzell that he was ineligible for new benefits after losing his job at Target. “I guess it’s just all water under the bridge at this point anyway, being that we’re going to stake a new claim,” Hartzell told his fifteen-year-old son. “Right, Brent?” Then the Hartzells drove ten hours north, to rural Georgia, where no job or house awaited them–only an old friend Hartzell had reconnected with on Facebook, and the hope of a fresh start.
On the day the family moved, there were officially 14.1 million unemployed Americans, or 9.2 per cent of the workforce. Hartzell himself probably isn’t counted in these statistics. In recent years, he has fallen into the more nebulous categories of the part-time employed, the long-term unemployed, and the “marginally attached”–the no-longer-looking unemployed. Economists report that the broader, and more accurate, unemployment rate is 16.2 per cent. Three years after the economic meltdown, nearly one in six Americans are out of work.

This tale of tragedy is totally aside from the number of Americans who have jobs but whose employers are using the leverage supplied by the economy to keep their wages and benefits low, and their mouths shut. It’s a perfect environment for the bullying of middle-class working Americans, in the workplace and in state legislatures and in Congress. We are a long, long way from anything resembling what used to be called “The American Dream,” and you don’t have to be a big believer in class warfare to note that all the abstract arguments for austerity and limited government are on behalf of people who have for many years cruised through hard times doing very well, without much thought for their fellow-countrymen in this nation conservatives claim to adore.