This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I’ve spent the past week in Israel listening to as many voices as I could. Based on what I’ve heard, a rough summary of the situation is this: Benjamin Netanyahu offers no viable alternative to the status quo, and the opposition offers no viable alternative to Netanyahu. Until Mahmoud Abbas recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, the prime minister says, serious talks are impossible. And besides, negotiating with a coalition that includes Hamas is unthinkable. For their part, the Palestinians are insisting that serious talks can’t begin until the Israelis endorse the “1967 borders with agreed-on swaps” principle that President Obama articulated last month. Meanwhile, the once-dominant Labor Party is all but defunct, and Kadima is riven by debates over such momentous matters as their leader Tsipi Livni’s alleged mismanagement of party funds. While Netanyahu is hardly a giant, he bestrides the Israeli political scene like a colossus. The near-certain consequence of these realities is continuing stagnation.
The skeptics, of course, love to object that “the status quo is unsustainable.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered that phrase over the past 44 years, I could retire tomorrow. The majority of Israelis actually seem comfortable to the point of complacency with today’s de facto truce and limited Palestinian autonomy. The Palestinians are anything but comfortable, of course, but what can they do? If they choose to take their case to the United Nations General Assembly this fall, they’ll get a symbolic vote of support that changes nothing on the ground. To be sure, non-violent demonstrations could mobilize sympathizers around the world while further isolating Israel. But the Israelis are working quickly to deploy more effective crowd control weapons and tactics and to create a more seamless allocation of responsibilities between the IDF and the police. Unless they drop the ball, they should be able to avert a repetition of the army’s heavy-handed and needlessly lethal response to recent breaches of the line of demarcation between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan.
Many retired generals and former intelligence officials, for their part, regard Netanyahu as a reckless adventurer guided more by dogma and short-term political calculations than by a sober analysis of long-term national interests. They may well be right. But Netanyahu clearly thinks of himself as a principled visionary with time on his side. In a recent interview, he referred to the decades it took for the conflict over Northern Ireland to yield to fruitful negotiations. He’s waiting for the Palestinian equivalent of Sinn Fein’s abandonment of armed struggle and willingness to accept a divided Ireland. The Palestinians believe they’ve made that transition without getting much in return; Netanyahu disagrees. Some worried Israelis think that it’s stupid to antagonize the government of the United States; Netanyahu thinks that his current strategy will enable him to dominate American as well as Israeli politics. And there matters stand.
I wish I had more confidence that the United States can make things better. But our influence in the region is at a very low ebb, and even supporters of the Obama administration concede that its efforts to date have been counterproductive. Each time the administration enunciates more “even-handed” policies, the Palestinians adopt them as preconditions for renewed talks while the Israelis dig in their heels. I would have thought that the art of diplomacy is not to say what you think to be true, but rather to use all instruments of national power, including verbal evasion, to get the parties themselves to act in accordance with that truth. Speeches can be tools of diplomacy; they are not substitutes for it. The administration is running out of time–may already have run out of time–to get it right.

Molly Ball of Politico noticed something interesting about the 2012 Republican presidential field: most of them aren’t very popular in their original stomping grounds.

Romney’s not the only presidential hopeful whose home state popularity is lagging. Just about all of the GOP presidential candidates would have a hard time winning their own states if they ended up as the party nominee, which may factor into the thinking among many Republicans that the 2012 field is lackluster.
The phenomenon marks a departure from the campaign days of old when “favorite son” candidates could point to their home-state popularity as a crucial part of their sales pitch.
The 2012 field, by contrast, is largely made up of unfavorite sons.
Tim Pawlenty never received a majority of the vote in Minnesota in his two successful runs for governor. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann almost certainly couldn’t win the state — her high-water mark in her own GOP-friendly district was 53 percent, registered during the Republican landslide year of 2010.
In statewide polls conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, both had higher unfavorable ratings than favorable.
It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania, where voters drummed Rick Santorum out of the Senate by 18 percentage points–he was the rare incumbent to lose by a blowout margin. Newt Gingrich, who has yet to set foot in his campaign’s Georgia headquarters, would lose the state to President Barack Obama, according to one recent poll. Fellow Georgian Herman Cain ran once for statewide office and failed to make it out of a Senate primary. Sarah Palin, once an overwhelmingly popular governor of Alaska, saw her statewide approval decline after the 2008 presidential campaign, then crash after she left office in July 2009.

It’s sometimes said that Republicans think they can’t lose in 2012, particularly if the economy doesn’t significantly improve between now and November of next year. Looking at the shelf-value of their presidential field, they’d better hope that is true.

August is looking to be a hot month for politically-tinged mega-events. There is, of course, the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll on August 13, which is likely to winnow the Republican presidential field and perhaps produce the long-awaited “conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.”
But there’s big fun elsewhere. Glenn Beck is planning a sequel to last year’s “Restoring Honor” event–not in DC, but in Jerusalem, on August 24. It’s dubbed “Restoring Courage,” and best as I can tell, its aim is to oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There will apparently be rock bands and other pyrotechnics, and as many Israeli and American politicians as Beck can rope in to the event. There have been conflicting reports about which American pols are likely to show up, but so far, it looks like Beck can probably count on Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Joe Lieberman if no one else.
A bit closer to home, and earlier in the month (August 6), in Austin, Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, who may be an announced candidate for president by then, is hosting a mega-rally of right-wing religious figures called “The Response”. It’s a follow-on to Perry’s famous “pray for rain” event in April, but with much, much bigger ambitions for divine intervention in American affairs. And it’s attracting practically every well-known theocrat in the country.
Here’s the indispensable Sarah Posner on the nature of “The Response”:

I’ve reported on, and experienced, the very type of rally Perry is planning…. They are indeed intended to convert new followers to Christ. But they really are about something much, much more: purging America of non-believers, LGBT people, and perceived political enemies, depicted as satanic…..
So while Rick Perry is out to pander for votes, he’s pandering to people who believe in signs and wonders and spiritual warfare; who care nothing for policy or respecting other people’s faith beliefs; who disdain other people’s reproductive choices and gender identities; and who believe that God is calling them to engage in a bloodless (although apocalyptic) battle with political enemies. If Perry runs for president, it won’t be for the United States of America. It will be for a new Zion whose followers believe God will smite their enemies and declare a new Kingdom on earth, and in America, one that is ruled by their singular version of Jesus Christ.

If Perry is a candidate by then, it sure looks like “The Response” could position him to decisively outflank his rivals–perhaps even Michele Bachmann–among the hard-core conservative evangelical faithful. I guess they’ll first have to forgive him for endorsing that sodomite-loving, adulterous baby-killer-enabler Rudy Giuliani for president in 2008, but repentance is always welcomed by these folk.

After carefully watching and writing about last night’s first 2012 GOP presidential candidates’ debate, I woke up this morning and was surprised to hear a lot of talk, much of it from left-of-center observers, suggesting the candidates had shown all sorts of surprising maturity and moderation. This take by Jacob Weisburg of Slate is representative:

The GOP presidential field, while hardly dominated by political giants, appears far less outlandish than one might have predicted. At the first Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday night, the seven candidates competed not for evangelical or libertarian favor, but for the status of someone plausible to compete with the president for swing voters.
Here are some of the things that did not happen in the debate. No one called Obama a socialist. No one gave ambiguous encouragement to the “birther” faction. While all of the candidates oppose gay marriage, no one bashed homosexuals. With the exception of the marginal former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, no one directly endorsed the Ryan Plan. Two months ago, every Republican in the House backed this plan; now, no one wants to talk about it.

In other words, the candidates did not howl at the moon, and did not go out of the way to associate themselves with a dangerously specific and unpopular Medicare proposal.
They did, however, with the exception of Herman Cain’s brief endorsement of food safety inspections, uniformly reject any positive government role in domestic affairs, and more specifically, any legitimate government role in the economy, other than keeping money tight and getting rid of its own regulations. If anyone thought government could do anything at all to help the unemployed other than give more tax dollars and power to the people who had laid them off and/or foreclosed on their mortgages, they kept it to themselves. They engaged in an orgy of angry union-bashing that was entirely unlike anything that’s ever happened in a debate among people running for president. And the sort of reticence Weisberg perceived on cultural issues basically meant that candidates who favor criminalization of abortion and re-stigmatization of gay people say they won’t make it a major campaign issue. And why should they? They all agree on these extremist positions.
And that’s an important thing to keep in mind: When the political center of a party, or a country, is in the process of shifting, there’s a lot of noise and conflict. When it settles in its new place, however, it gets very quiet. To a very great extent, that’s what has happened in the GOP. It is not a sign of “sanity” or “moderation;” simply one of consensus.
I also think a lot of the “how nice they are” assessments of the field after the debate reflect little more than the belief that Mitt Romney did really well and may actually get the nomination. That makes non-hardcore-conservatives feel better, if only because they tend to assume Romney’s own hardcore conservatism is fake.
All the talk about Mitt dodging a bullet could be a mite premature. Yes, Tim Pawlenty passed up a chance to hit Romney at his weakest point, “ObamneyCare.” Politico was so stunned by this turn of events they devoted their top story this morning to endless quotes from pundits and campaign strategists savaging poor T-Paw for cowardice or stupidity. But it’s a long way to the 2012 convention, and the assumption that last night’s scenario will be repeated in future campaign developments is entirely unwarranted. Perhaps Pawlenty thought other candidates would “go negative” in the debate before he had to. Or perhaps he figures he’d better become the “conservative alternative to Romney” before he has to worry about actually beating him. Who knows?
But the bottom line is that the GOP did not suddenly transform itself overnight. The drive to the right in the GOP has been underway for more than four decades. If it seems to have stopped, that’s probably becomes it has arrived at its destination.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The first big GOP candidate debate of the 2012 presidential cycle was from a conventional perspective unexciting. Nobody hit a home run, and nobody made a major gaffe. From a tactical point of view, the most astounding moment was Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to stand behind his “ObamneyCare” sound bite about health reform delivered over Fox News this weekend. T-Paw disingenuously argued the term was simply his gloss on the president’s description of the similarities between the Affordable Care Act and Romney’s Massachusetts health plan–a decision which essentially took the issue off the table for the rest of the debate (if not the rest of the campaign). And whenever RomneyCare is off the table, Mitt Romney has to be judged the winner.
But from a broader perspective, the overriding message of this debate is how thoroughly the conservative movement has conquered the GOP on domestic policy. Like myna birds, the candidates emphatically agreed the economy is the main issue, that radically reducing the power of government to do good or ill is the only thing a president can do to help the economy, and that there is scarcely a problem where the federal government can make a single positive contribution to national life, other than by deploying National Guard troops to the border.
The main differences between the candidates on domestic issues strictly revolved around the precise strategy–mechanical and political–for destroying any vestige of a positive government role in the economy. When former restauranteur Herman Cain was corned by moderator John King into admitting the federal government ought to continue food safety inspections, the candidate rapidly changed the subject into areas where government is doing a terrible job that it ought to abandon. But Cain won the biggest audience reaction of the entire night with his fiery support for state right-to-work laws, including a prospective decision by New Hampshire to join the South in that anti-union policy; Pawlenty tried to trump him by supporting a national right-to-work law.
On the politically sensitive issue of Medicare, Gingrich repeated his critique of Paul Ryan’s voucher proposal on political grounds, a lot more effectively than he did in his disastrous Meet the Press appearance a few weeks ago, and Pawlenty reserved the right to propose his own radical approach to Medicare. Not a soul challenged the idea that Medicare as we know it had to die, sooner rather than later, as rapidly as political markets would accept.
And on the tax front, no one took up King on his open invitation for someone to disagree with Pawlenty’s claim that tax cuts and total deregulation of the private sector could produce never-before-experienced rates of economic growth. Any doubt on this subject, it seems, smacked of dark, decadent Europeanism.
Moreover, none of the candidate gave a single hint of support for the idea that the risk of a fresh financial disaster might trump the demands for radical spending cuts in negotiations with Democrats over the debt limit.
So if the Republican candidates lined right up in favor of the most radically conservative economic positions since Barry Goldwater, did they distinguish themselves elsewhere? Not a lot. Bachmann, who needs no additional credibility among social conservative ultras, said she wouldn’t spend time as president intervening in state debates over same-sex marriage. Cain, who recently endorsed the idea that Planned Parenthood was pursuing a genocidal policy towards African-Americans, also had sufficient Christian Right street cred to say he wouldn’t make restoration of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell a big priority. Nobody was even vaguely pro-choice or pro-marriage-equality; it was all about tactics for achieving Christian Right goals. It said a lot about the horizons of conservative opinion these days that no one defended church-state separation, and Mitt Romney came across like Thomas Jefferson by demurring in response to the suggestions of Cain and Gingrich that American Muslims posed a risk of subjecting America to Sharia law (crowd-pleasers, by the way).
There was a faint glimmer of potential diversity on foreign policy and national defense, aside from Ron Paul’s predictable heresies: Bachmann attacked the Libyan engagement categorically, and Romney hinted that the Afghanistan war might need to be liquidated.
Insta-reaction to the debate suggested that Romney and Bachmann were the big winners; Romney because no one laid a glove on him, and Bachmann because she fit right into the mainstream of the debate, managing to seem engaging and reasonable. For those who know Bachmann well, that should be a bit scary.
But it’s also fitting. This debate was the most homogeneous discussion among presidential candidates I can remember, the more remarkable because all the candidates were many degrees to the right of where Republican candidates were in 2008 or 2000. For the first and probably last time in this cycle, I yearned for the presence of Rudy Giuliani, who at least would have created a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Throughout the debate, King tried to supply light moments by asking candidates boxers-or-briefs type questions that were unrelated to politics. The closest thing to a decisive answer was Gingrich’s emphatic endorsement of American Idol over Dancing With the Stars. This Republican presidential debate was like an Idol contest where everyone sings the same song, over and over.

The long-awaited congressional and state legislative maps generated by the new California Citizens Redistricting Commission are now out, and unless public hearings or lawsuits change things, Democrats stand to pick up seats at every level, perhaps even gaining the two-thirds legislative majority that could theoretically break the state’s long-standing budgetary gridlock.
But the party’s gains could come at the expense of some Democratic incumbents, since the maps, drawn up to make more districts competitive, place ten of them in districts with each other, and another four in districts with Republican incumbents.
To understand the heavy turnover likely to ensue, it’s important to know that California is a state where the last two redistricting cycles pursued bipartisan incumbent protection to an extraordinary degree, creating very few marginal districts at the federal or state levels. Some Democrats have long felt this tradition limited Democratic opportunities to exploit big demographic advantages in California, which is why the new maps could help.
According to redistricting wizard Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California (as reported at CalBuzz):

[T]he number of competitive districts, counting both houses of the Legislature and Congress, increases from 16 to 34 under the draft plan; the total includes 7 additional Assembly districts (9 competitive to 16); 6 additional Senate districts (3 to 9) and 5 additional House districts (4 to 9).

At the congressional level, initial estimates are that Democrats are likely to pick up around four new House seats, according to Chris Cillizza:

Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell projects that the proposed map includes 32 Democratic seats and five Democratic-leaning seats, with 13 Republican seats and three seats that lean Republican. If each side won the seats that were solidly or leaning in their favor, Democrats would see a net gain of three seats in the delegation in 2012.
Similarly, Republican consultant Matt Rexroad estimates the Democrats’ advantage at 3-5 seats, though other Republicans place the estimate slightly lower and insist they will also get new opportunities from the map.

The new maps are by no means, however, final: the commission is going through a formal public hearing process next, and perhaps more importantly, the maps could be challenged on Voting Rights Act grounds, either in terms of the effect on incumbents from minority groups, or a failure to achieve optimal minority representation overall.
So far, however, in a redistricting cycle expected to produce a fair amount of bad news for Democrats, California is offering good news, and gains achieved not by gerrymandering but by better representation of this diverse and Democratic-trending state.

Just in time for tonight’s first field-wide candidate debate, Tim Pawlenty has come up with a cute sound-bite for the contention that ObamaCare–the greatest threat to American liberties since the British gun control initiatives that touched off the Revolutionary War–was essentially pioneered in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. It’s “ObamneyCare,” a term I am certain we will hear during the debate.
Romney will presumably try to deflect attention from attacks on his health care record by talking about his obsessive, maniacal, and above all hyper-competent focus on jobs and the economy. This is, after all, the strategy being urged on him by most of the punditocracy, who appear (viz. this counter-counter-CW piece from Alexander Burns at Politico) to assume that jobs and the economy are clearly distinguishable from health care as topics of public debate.
Since I wrote a full column just last week challenging the idea that the sluggish economy could vault Romney to the nomination, I won’t repeat my whole argument. But I will reiterate a point that the MSM seems to be missing entirely: today’s conservatives do not think of the economy and “ObamneyCare” as in any way separate issues. They believe, or at least so they incessantly say, that the sole cause of our economic problems is “big government,” of which health reform is the most notorious recent example, and the only route to economic revival is to disable “big government,” beginning with health reform. So for Romney to essentially say “I don’t want to talk about big government any more, I want to talk about the economy,” translates to conservative audiences as “I don’t want to talk about the causes of or solutions to our economic problems, I just want to talk about what a great manager I am.”
Maybe some Republican primary voters want a presidential nominee who will do a more competent and/or tight-fisted job of managing the satanic enterprise of the federal government than other candidates, but that’s more generally considered a deeply suspect RINO credential. I suspect Romney’s rivals, including T-Paw, are smart enough to figure that out, and we will see it tonight.

One of the byproducts of Newt Gingrich’s meltdown is a resurgence of interest in the possibility of Texas Gov. Rick Perry as a late entrant in the GOP 2012 field. Partly that’s because two of his long-time political advisers were among the hordes who have just left Gingrich’s campaign. Perry himself has been making slightly more positive noises about his interest in becoming the 45th president of the country he once implied Texas might consider abandoning (he will supposedly announce his intentions at the end of the current special session of the Texas legislature, which is due to wrap up before Independence Day). And he’s always been a favorite of handicappers on grounds of his fundraising potential and his popularity among Tea Folk.
I’m a little less sold on Perry as a candidate, if only because he’s never been wildly popular with the people who know him best, Texans (yes, he fought off a primary challenge from Kay Bailey Hutchison last year, and won a relatively close general election race against Bill White, but you have to ask why Perry was so vulnerable in the first place). I’m not sure he’s a great cultural fit for places like Iowa (where he’d been starting from scratch very late) and New Hampshire, either.
But in any event, the game for the immediate future will be guessing how a Perry candidacy would affect the rest of the field, most notably quasi-front-runner Mitt Romney. RedState’s Erick Erickson has an interesting post on that subject making a counter-intuitive but persuasive argument that Perry would help the Mittster:

The constant factor in the 2012 Republican Presidential race right now is that Mitt Romney has the highest name ID of declared candidates. While you and I know who Rick Perry is, we are not normal primary voters. Those people are only now just becoming engaged and they remember Romney from 2008, but many do not know Perry.
So Perry would have to build up his name identification and raise money. This leaves Romney in the lead as the clock continues ticking.
Every day that the media is focused on the ups and downs of other candidates, including an obsessive media rectal exam of Rick Perry as he gets in and starts hitting the stump is another day that Mitt Romney stays in the lead….
There is a lot of money on the sidelines waiting to find who is going to be the legitimate leader of the anti-Romney coalition. Rick Perry getting in delays finding that leader, keeping that money on the sidelines, keeping Mitt Romney on top. It really is that simple.

Erickson might have added more specifically that a Perry candidacy could delay or even endanger the emergence of Tim Pawlenty as the electable-conservative-alternative-to-Romney, which is already being threatened by the strength being shown in Iowa by Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. But that leads me to a contrary observation: If Perry runs, the number of electable-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney would double. By the same token, the odds drop that Romney will get a post-NH match-up against someone (i.e., Cain or Bachmann) considered unacceptable by the Republican Establishment, and/or unelectable against Obama. That’s bad news for Mitt, since the one-on-one-with-a-crazy-person scenario may be the only way Republicans will hold their collective noses and nominate a guy they don’t actually like.

Recent highly publicized national jobs reports showing private-sector gains being offset by public-sector losses have drawn attention to the macroeconomic costs of the austerity program already underway among state and local governments, and gaining steam in Washington. But the effect on the most vulnerable Americans–particularly those out of work–is rarely examined in any systematic way.
At The American Prospect, Kat Aaron has put together a useful if depressing summary of actual or impending cutbacks (most initiated by the states, some by Congress) in key services for the unemployed and others suffering from economic trauma. These include unemployment insurance, job retraining services, and family income supports. In some cases, federal funds added by the 2009 stimulus package are running out. In others, the safety net is being deliberately shredded.
A recent report from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities notes that the most important family income support program, TANF (the “reformed” welfare block grant first established in 1996) is becoming an object of deep cuts in many states, precisely at the time it is most needed:

States are implementing some of the harshest cuts in recent history for many of the nation’s most vulnerable families with children who are receiving assistance through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) block grant. The cuts will affect 700,000 low-income families that include 1.3 million children; these families represent over one-third of all low-income families receiving TANF nationwide.
A number of states are cutting cash assistance deeply or ending it entirely for many families that already live far below the poverty line, including many families with physical or mental health issues or other challenges. Numerous states also are cutting child care and other work-related assistance that will make it harder for many poor parents who are fortunate enough to have jobs to retain them.

This is perverse precisely because such programs were once widely understood as “counter-cyclical”–designed to temporarily expand in tough economic times. Not any more, says CPBB:

To be effective, a safety net must be able to expand when the need for assistance rises and to contract when need declines. The TANF block grant is failing this test, for several reasons: Congress has level-funded TANF since its creation, with no adjustment for inflation or other factors over the past 15 years; federal funding no longer increases when the economy weakens and poverty climbs; and states — facing serious budget shortfalls — have shifted TANF funds to other purposes and have cut the TANF matching funds they provide.

This retrenchment, mind you, is what’s already happening, and does not reflect the future blood-letting implied by congressional Republican demands for major new cuts in federal-state safety net programs–most famously Medicaid, which virtually all GOPers want to convert into a block grant in which services are no longer assured.
If, as appears increasingly likely, the sluggish economy stays sluggish for longer than originally expected, and both the federal government and states continue to pursue Hoover-like policies of attacking budget deficits with spending cuts as their top priority, it’s going to get even uglier down at the level of real-life people trying to survive. If you are unlucky enough to live in one of those states where governors and legislators are proudly hell-bent on making inadequate safety-net services even more inadequate or abolishing them altogether, it’s a grim road ahead.

I swear I didn’t intend to do two posts today about doomed Republican presidential candidacies, but it’s hard to avoid comment on the mass resignations of most of Newt Gingrich’s campaign staff.
Chris Cillizza confirms that the deal-breaker for Team Newt wasn’t so much his disastrous campaign launch as his decision to follow that up with a Mediterranean cruise with Callista, leaving his minions to clean up his mess. The canary in the mine-shaft for that dumb decision was the resignation last week of Newt’s Iowa political director, Will Rogers, who publicly doubted his candidate’s willingness to run a viable campaign.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jim Galloway reports this rather telling quote from Bill Byrne, a long-time Gingrich backer from Georgia:

When on a national news station, Newt slammed Congressman Ryan and his proposal as right wing extremist, at that point in time his campaign ended,” Byrne said. “And I think if you watch any of the polling data from any source — Republican, Democrat, Independent — Newt never breaks in to double digits.
“Of the announced candidates he’s always been at the very bottom and the last poll I saw yesterday showed Herman Cain has passed him. Political people realize his campaign is over with and he has self-destructed. Those who signed up now realize that,” Byrne said.

Newt, of course, is pledging to move on to victory without his staff. That’s probably a brave, temporary holding position while he figures out exactly how to bow out. But maybe he’s going to emulate the post-disaster strategy of Democratic candidate Gary Hart in 1988: running a quasi-campaign that mainly depends on free media opportunities like televised debates, and getting a reputation for saying impolitic things no serious candidate would say. It would certainly help boost Newt’s book and video sales, which he’ll now need more than ever.