Many years ago, when the late Howard Cosell was ubiquitous in American sports journalism, I used to shout at his image on the television a lot (particularly during the brief period when he was unwisely deployed to do broadcasts of baseball, a sport he did not understand or even like). “Oh, shut up, Howard!” I’d often say in response to one of his pomposities or non sequiturs.
I’m beginning to feel the same way every time Karl Rove shows up in print or on the tube. Put aside, if you can, partisan feelings about the man, who pioneered so many of the conservative tactics that have had a baleful effect on the political system during his entire career. He also ought to be a pariah to Republicans, particularly now that they’ve decided his signature swing-vote-baiting policy initiatives–comprehensive immigration reform, No Child Left Behind, and the Medicare Rx Drug program–were actually satanic, and the reason Republicans lost the 2006 and 2008 elections.
Instead, he’s everywhere, spinning madly. The latest travesty is a Wall Street Journal column entitled: “Why Obama Is Likely To Lose in 2012.” The title isn’t the problem, but the “evidence” this supposed wizard of American politics offers in its defense is cheesy in the extreme. There’s a whole section where Rove asserts, without a spot of proof, that Obama’s in big trouble with Jewish voters (part, of course, of the GOP effort to paint Obama as some sort of Hamas-lover), and then races off into speculation about the potential impact in Florida. And then there’s this passage:

Mr. Obama’s standing has declined among other, larger groups. Gallup reported his job approval rating Tuesday at 45%, down from 67% at his inaugural. Among the groups showing a larger-than-average decline since 2009 are whites (down 25 points); older voters (down 24); independents and college graduates (both down 23), those with a high-school education or less, men, and Southerners (all down 22); women (down 21 points); married couples and those making $2,000-$4,000 a month (down 20). This all points to severe trouble in suburbs and midsized cities in states likes Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada.
There’s more. Approval among younger voters has dropped 22 points, and it’s dropped 20 points among Latinos. Even African-American voters are less excited about Mr. Obama than they were–and than he needs them to be.

All sounds pretty scary, right? Unless you notice that Rove is comparing the president’s current approval ratings to those he enjoyed at his inaugural, that universal honeymoon moment which is absolutely meaningless in terms of any president’s reelection. Lord knows there’s enough negative data out there to cast doubt on Obama’s re-election prospects; why does Rove feel the need to grossly exaggerate it?
Ah, but Rove’s shamelessness is limitless, viz. this incredibly hypocritical piece of pious nonsense:

Finally, Mr. Obama has made a strategic blunder. While he needs to raise money and organize, he decided to be a candidate this year rather than president. He has thus unnecessarily abandoned one of incumbency’s great strengths, which is the opportunity to govern and distance himself from partisan politics until next spring. Instead, Team Obama has attacked potential GOP opponents and slandered Republican proposals with abandon. This is not what the public is looking for from the former apostle of hope and change.

It’s bad enough that Rove has completely and with malice aforethought mischaracterized the partisan dynamics of Washington at present–one in which the president continues to chase Republicans around the Capitol in search of someone with whom to negotiate in a pack of pols who constantly describe him as an incompetent socialist knave. But it’s particularly rich coming from the man who turned the policy apparatus of the Bush administration into an all-politics, all-the-time exercise, as so perfectly captured by former White House staffer John DiUilio is his 2003 description of the Rove-dominated team as “the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
Please, Karl, spare us the moralizing, or just shut up.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
As Mitt Romney gradually expands his lead in national polls of Republicans, and his would-be “true conservative” rivals struggle to emerge from the Lilliputian pack, there’s a growing consensus that GOP voters are more concerned about picking an electable nominee than in maintaining the conservative purity of their party. This belief nicely coincides with the abiding faith of Beltway pundits that the ideological bender represented by the Tea Party movement is coming to an end as the Great Big Adults of the Daddy Party reassert control. But while there is, in fact, plenty of evidence to suggest that “electability” is a significant factor in the calculations of the GOP rank-and-file, the implication that Republicans are becoming more pragmatic in their choice of candidates remains a big–and exceedingly unlikely–stretch.
The driving force behind the media’s new obsession with electability is a series of recent polls on the subject. A June 13 Gallup survey showed 50 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favoring “a candidate with the best chance of beating Barack Obama, but who does not agree with you on almost all of the issues you care about,” while 46 percent favored “a candidate who agrees with you on almost all of the issues you care about but does not have the best chance of beating Barack Obama.” A June 16 poll by PPP showed an even larger “pro-electability” margin: If forced to choose between “a candidate with conservative positions on every issue” and “one with the best chance of defeating Barack Obama,” the latter proposition led the former by a margin of 56 to 31. But it’s important to keep in mind that, back in January, a CNN poll with wording closer to Gallup’s showed a 68-29 margin for the “electable” candidate. The CNN poll indicates that while “electability” is clearly a factor, it’s not at all clear that it’s a growing concern among Republicans.
Indeed, despite elite GOP concerns that Barack Obama will be a very difficult candidate to defeat, there is a more prominent conservative narrative being promulgated about Obama’s immense unpopularity–one that has the effect of making his defeat appear exceedingly easy. The steady drumbeat of conservative media claims that Obama is a disastrous president–half Jimmy Carter, half Herbert Hoover–whose policies were decisively repudiated by the American people in 2010 has created a steady undertow of belief that virtually any credible GOP nominee could beat him. Rank-and-file Republicans, for example, are less inclined than elites to assume no candidate other than Romney (or perhaps Huntsman) is electable. A recent Daily Caller poll of Republicans on the question of which candidate best fit this profile placed Romney first at 30 percent, but showed non-candidate Chris Christie second at 15 percent, Herman Cain at 12 percent, and Sarah Palin–almost universally considered unelectable in elite opinion–at 10 percent. In other words, while voters might claim to care about electability, there’s no guarantee that they are anywhere near agreement about what the term means and to whom it could conceivably be applied.
In addition, it’s by no means clear that voters’ stated opinions about the candidates’ electability have any real translatable value to their popularity in the early primaries. Romney’s electability numbers are well below those registered by Rudy Giuliani, for instance, at this point in the 2008 cycle: Nearly half of Republicans considered him the most electable candidate in July of 2007. Giuliani’s support, of course, collapsed once voting got underway, even though Republicans were far more pessimistic about their odds of winning in 2008.
But however you choose to interpret the impact of the electability issue for Mitt Romney, the broader argument that the rightward lurch of the GOP since 2008 is a mirage or a tactic, soon to be abandoned for the sake of pragmatism or swing-voter opinion, is extremely dubious. In the wake of the 2008 debacle, to an astonishingly overwhelming degree, Republicans concluded that a more rigorous conservative message and a highly confrontational attitude towards Democrats were not only essential to the demands of their principles, but represented the only path to electoral victory. This has, of course, been a staple of movement-conservative belief ever since Phyllis Schlafly published A Choice Not an Echo back in 1964, but it has rarely secured the kind of apparent vindication among Republicans as it did in 2010. To the extent that conservatives worry about electability going into 2012, they are as likely to fear a nominee who is too moderate to one who is too conservative.
The best example of the enduring nature of the GOP’s rightward trajectory is, ironically, Mitt Romney himself. He ran as the true conservative alternative to Rudy Giuliani and John McCain in 2008, and is running as the establishment pragmatist candidate today. But in every significant respect, he’s much more conservative now than he was then. He certainly didn’t feel the need to explain away his Massachusetts health plan in 2008, and also would have never suggested a federal debt default might be necessary if draconian cuts in federal domestic spending were not enacted. It’s a sign of the times that the more conservative Romney 2.0 is having to defend his ideological bona fides.
To be sure, in a field composed almost entirely of conservative ideologues with little daylight between their beliefs, Republicans will compare candidates based on general election poll performance against Barack Obama, as well as perceptions of whether this or that candidate is insufficiently “presidential” (the rap against Tim Pawlenty) or “prepared to serve” (the rap against Cain and Palin). Depending on their alternatives when the voting gets underway, GOP primary voters could decide to give Romney a mulligan on his past health care reform heresy, since he’s sturdily conservative on every other issue and is now promoting a federal health care plan that is solidly right-wing. Or they could support Tim Pawlenty’s apparent gambit to depict himself as the most electable candidate who is willing to check every conceivable conservative ideological box.
But that’s very different from the idea that Republicans are looking for the most moderate, rational figure. The one candidate who seems to be marketing that old model of establishment Republicanism, Jon Huntsman, is likely about to find out very painfully that his party is not going to accept a presidential nominee, however electable, who is reluctant to call himself a “conservative” or attack his former boss in the Oval Office. So while Republicans might want to beat Barack Obama in the worst way, don’t expect them to believe they have to choose electability over ideology. In today’s GOP, that sort of thinking will earn you the dreaded label of RINO.

It doesn’t get much national attention, but the endless state budget crisis in California looks like a microcosm of what the national scene could soon resemble if the public is not presented with better information, real choices, and structural reforms in how decisions are made.
To make a very long story short, California’s decision-making process on fiscal issues is a real nightmare. Ballot initiatives have imposed a two-thirds requirement on legislative decisions at either the state or local level to raise revenues. Other initiatives have earmarked revenues for particular types of spending, and have created a vast shell-game where revenues and spending are traded back and forth between state and local jurisdictions. Republicans have long used the two-thirds requirement to keep greater revenues off the table. And the public seems to have no appetite for either specific revenue increases or spending cuts.
Believe it or not, it could be, and recently was, worse. Until Proposition 25 passed in 2010, even enacting a budget in California required a two-thirds vote. But given the two-thirds requirement on taxes, the practical effect of Prop 25 has simply been to offer the Democratically-controlled (but not by a two-thirds vote) legislature the choice of caving to Republican demands for spending-cut-only measures to balance the budget, or to resort to short-term fixes and accounting gimmicks.
The latter option is what the legislature has just chosen, frustrating Gov. Jerry Brown’s efforts to keep pressure on Republicans to agree to a referendum that would enable voters to approve a package of extensions of temporary taxes and fees established during the last mega-crisis. Brown promptly vetoed the budget, and then got an assist in his pressuring efforts from Democratic State Controller John Chiang, who issued a constitutionally dubious but popular order declaring the budget “unbalanced” and then suspending pay for legislators until they complied with the state’s balanced-budget law.
Meanwhile, public opinion polls show Californians would welcome Brown’s revenue referendum, but might very well vote against it. And moreover, polls consistently show majorities of Californians opposing spending cuts in virtually every area of state government other than corrections, where big majorities support cuts and oppose tax increases to pay the bills.
That’s ironic, since the U.S. Supreme Court (in a controversial 5-4 decision) recently ordered the state to take drastic actions to reduce prison overcrowding and supply better health care to inmates. You may recall that California was the original home to “three strikes” legislation and other mandatory sentencing measures, some imposed by ballot initiative.
So there is no apparent end in sight to the budget gridlock unless Brown and Chiang can force a handful of Republicans to risk their careers by voting for the revenue-extender referendum in defiance of party orthodoxy.
Californians may very well break the gridlock in 2012 by giving Democrats a two-thirds majority in both chambers of the legislature, as initial readings of its new nonpartisan “citizens redistricting” system indicate might well happen. But it’s a really bad way to run a state, feeding the very public cynicism that leads to ever-greater restrictions on the ability of elected officials to make decisions. And it’s certainly what we can expect nationally if current conservative demands for arbitrary restrictions on fiscal policymaking are enacted.

So in addition to the ancient no-tax-increase pledge administered to legions of Republicans by Grover Norquist, and the new anti-choice pledge being pushed by the Susan B. Anthony List, there’s yet another, more immediately significant pledge out there that would guarantee the debt limit confrontation on tap soon would go nuclear. It’s the “cut, cap, balance” pledge endorsed by a fairly wide array of conservative groups, and it goes like this:

I pledge to urge my Senators and Member of the House of Representatives to oppose any debt limit increase unless all three of the following conditions have been met:
Cut – Substantial cuts in spending that will reduce the deficit next year and thereafter.
Cap – Enforceable spending caps that will put federal spending on a path to a balanced budget.
Balance – Congressional passage of a Balancoed Budget Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — but only if it includes both a spending limitation and a super-majority for raising taxes, in addition to balancing revenues and expenses.

What’s interesting about this “pledge” is that action to reduce budget deficits is strictly subordinated to the most central task of permanently limiting government in a way that would virtually require destruction of the New Deal and Great Society legacy. The “enforceable spending caps,” as explained in a Wall Street Journal column penned by the leaders of three of the groups endorsing this “pledge,” don’t involve any sort of “freeze” or “slowdown,” but instead a absolute limitation based on a percentage of GDP that has only been achieved at the peak of big economic booms (e.g., the end of the Clinton administration) or prior to the enactment of the modern social safety net (the 1950s and 1960s). The version of the balanced budget amendment that represent the “balance” portion of the pledge would also include a GDP limit, along with a super-majority requirement for tax increases that makes it clear deficit reduction is not the object of this exercise.
All of this serves to demonstrate, if the thundering support of conservatives for the Ryan budget wasn’t sufficient evidence, that the primary objective of the conservative movement on the fiscal front is the destruction of safety net programs that are too popular to assault frontally. Combined with their invariable, unchanging agenda of still more high-end tax cuts, the drive for spending limitations linked to GDP is a formula for perpetual budget deficits to be perpetually used to drive down government involvement in national life to levels not seen since the 1920s. And that, folks, is the whole idea.

Earlier today J.P. Green offered a balanced assessment of Jon Huntsman’s general election prospects in the unlikely even that he wins the GOP presidential nomination. But it’s hard to imagine Obama’s former ambassador to China ever getting to that point. Here’s Dave Weigel’s brutal take on Hunstman after watching his launch event:

Huntsman 2012 is a joint production of the political media and the fun wing of the GOP’s consultant class. (His chief strategist is McCain veteran John Weaver, who made a hobby of criticizing McCain’s negative turn in 2008; his adman is Fred Davis, who made sure you knew Christine O’Donnell was not a witch.) There is no Huntsman groundswell. There was no Draft Huntsman movement. One metric to show this: He has about 5,000 Facebook fans. A reasonably busy senator has that many. The wildly ignored 2012 contender Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, has more than 120,000 fans. True, Huntsman’s team cleverly secured a second-place showing in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference [straw poll]. When that result came down, my colleague John Dickerson heard only two hands clapping.

As for the positive hype over Huntsman cleverly choosing the same Statue of Liberty site for his launch that Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 general election campaign: Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics points out that it’s the same place where the less-than-immortal 1996 campaign of Pete Wilson started out. Right now Huntsman’s destination looks more likely to resemble Wilson’s than Reagan’s, at least in 2012. His hunch that Republicans are looking for a nominee who is civil towards Barack Obama and even shares some of his views–but who eagerly embraces the least popular recent GOP initiative, the Ryan budget–just seems a bit counter-intuitive.

It’s hardly news that the anti-choice movement has all but conquered the Republican Party. Pro-choice Republicans (or at least pols who call themselves that because they don’t favor complete abolition of abortion rights) still exist, but are few and far between. At the presidential level, the self-described Right to Life Movement has an effective veto on candidates, as was evidenced once again in 2008, when Rudy Giuliani’s campaign crashed and burned and John McCain was prevented from selecting Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as his running-mate.
But impatient anti-choicers, who have always suspected Republican pols of playing them for suckers by making their concerns a low priority once in office, are ratcheting up the demands in this presidential cycle. The Susan B. Anthony List, a relatively new group modeled on the pro-choice organization Emily’s List, has devised a new and fairly complex pledge that it is urging Republican presidential candidates to take. Here it is:

FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;
SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;
THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;
FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.

The third and fourth planks represent the latest strategic initiatives of the RTL movement: systematic defunding of institutions providing not only abortions but contraceptive services, and “fetal pain”-rationalized bans on abortions after 20 weeks, which have been enacted in several states (the SBA List wants similar federal legislation, which would, of course, trigger a major constitutional test in the federal courts).
So far five candidates (Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul, Pawlenty and Santorum) have signed the SBA pledge, and two–Cain and Romney–have refused to do so (it doesn’t appear Huntsman has been pushed to pledge just yet; Gary Johnson also wouldn’t sign it). The excuses made by the two non-signatories are a bit weak: Cain objects to the idea that the president would have to “advance” the abortion ban legislation, on grounds that’s the legislative branch’s responsibility. Romney said he had issues with too-broad language on both funding and nominations.
Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann both went after Romney on this incident, using it to remind Republican voters of Mitt’s shaky past on abortion policy.
Will this brouhaha matter over time? Perhaps, but only at the margins. SBA isn’t the only anti-choice group out there, and many conservatives would advance a different strategy on this subject, and/or don’t like public litmus tests.
But it does provide another kernal of doubt that Mitt Romney is “one of us” in the minds of conservative activists, particularly in Iowa and the South, who don’t buy the idea that social issues aren’t significant in this election cycle.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the first major 2012 Republican presidential candidates’ debate over with, and the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll less than two months away, the window for additional candidates to emerge and strengthen a shallow field is rapidly narrowing. But there’s still one proto-candidate, due to announce a decision by the end of the month, who’s piquing the interest of many a Republican: the ever-colorful, if somewhat erratic, governor of Texas, Rick Perry.
On paper, Perry’s got a lot of plus-marks for a Republican Party that currently values three qualities that are difficult to combine: extensive executive experience, an economic success story to tell, and anti-Washington Tea Party cred. He’s also gives good (if not terribly substantive) speeches, loves to campaign, and has access to deep pockets via his Texas background and his Republican Governors’ Association rolodex. And as an ally of the hard-core Christian Right, he would become immediately viable in Iowa, as well as having a step up in South Carolina.
Moreover, Perry’s peculiar credentials make him a problematic rival for virtually everyone already in the field. Texas’ strong economy (whether or not he had much to do with it) gives him economic and fiscal talking points easily rivaling Romney’s. He’s as popular in both Tea Party and Christian Right circles as Bachmann or Cain. And he would immediately double the number of electable-true-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney in the race, which isn’t good news for the other one, Tim Pawlenty.
So what’s not to like? In short, every one of the enigmatic governor’s supposed strengths turns out to be yoked to a big, potentially damaging weakness.
To begin, Texas’ economy may have done well during most of his ten-year-plus tenure as governor, but it’s done so at the price of very low levels of public services, high rates of poverty, and a long line of sweetheart corporate deals, not all of them successful, between Perry and some of his friends and allies, which could prove to be an opposition researcher’s playground. (His pet plan for a privately operated mega-highway through the state, the Trans-Texas Corridor, which has never reached fruition, is a good example). Moreover, his budgetary record has also depended on some questionable accounting measures (e.g., temporarily delayed payments to schools) and a willingness to rely on the federal government he purports to loath (stimulus dollars played a big role in propping up the most recent Texas budget).
Second, while Perry has become a Tea Party favorite, he has done so in part by making inflammatory statements that may trouble even a healthy number of Republican primary voters, the most famous of which was his suggestion that secession might be on the table for Texas. In addition, he’s also made threats to withdraw the state from the Medicaid program–with only the vaguest suggestion of how or whether poor families would receive medical treatment–and even sought the power to opt Texas out of Social Security, a rather egregious stomping on the third rail of politics.
And finally, Perry is close to the Christian Right, but the fact of the matter is that he hasn’t chosen the most seemly of allies in that camp. As a follow-on to his famous “Pray for Rain” rally in April, he’s now planning an evangelical hoedown in August, called “The Response,” that features a sort of who’s who of radical theocrats, including John Hagee, the Christian Zionist leader whose support John McCain felt constrained to repudiate in 2008 after Hagee called Adolf Hitler an agent of God’s plans to return the Jews to their biblical homeland. The expressed purpose of the upcoming event is to seek divine intervention to fix America, apparently via the propitiation of an angry God by the abandonment of such abominations as legalized abortion, same-sex relationships, and church-state separation. If the Texas governor is by then running for president, it won’t be much of a mystery who might be called upon by the assembled divines to restore righteousness in Washington: Perry himself, once again in the right place at the right time.
On top of it all, persistent doubts about Perry’s competence (and in some quarters, honesty) have made him less than a political powerhouse in his home state of Texas, even as the state’s powerful Republican trend in the last decade, along with an energy-industry-boom, have given him enormous advantages. In 2006, for instance, he only won 39 percent of the general election vote in a peculiar, four-way gubernatorial race (with one independent candidate, the comedic musician and novelist Kinky Friedman, probably taking most of his double-digit-percentage vote from Perry’s Democratic opponent). In 2010, meanwhile, he won by solid margins against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and his general election opponent, Houston Mayor Bill White–but this was right at the peak of the Tea Party uprising, which Perry very successfully exploited, and the fact remains that he was vulnerable enough to draw these legitimate challenges in the first place. His relationship with Texas Republicans, moreover, has always been somewhat shaky, as evidenced by the revolt of GOP legislators against a business tax plan Perry pushed through a few years ago, and his rumored frosty relations with his great benefactors, the Bush family. And even his friends in the social conservative wing of the Texas GOP were appalled by his 2007 proposal to require that every sixth-grade girl in Texas be vaccinated for the HPV virus.
All in all, you have to wonder why Texans, including hard-core conservatives, seem less impressed than people in other states with the prospect of a Perry presidential run. Some appear to be stunned at the very idea, treating him as a sort of Chauncey Gardiner figure who has stumbled, through remarkable luck, into the national spotlight. But Perry’s ultimate stroke of luck could be in appearing on the scene at a time when the Republican Party considers the power of its ideology, not the brains or accomplishments of its leaders, its trump card in 2012.