A lot of Republicans have been pining for late entries into their 2012 presidential nomination contest. The apparently imminent announcement of a campaign by Rudy Giuliani is probably not what most of them had in mind.
But Bill Kristol gives the old college try to an argument that somehow the former America’s Mayor could succeed in 2012 despite his abject failure in 2008:

Rudy’s theory of the race: In the fall of 2007, he decided he couldn’t compete with both Mitt Romney and John McCain in New Hampshire, and disastrously decided to try to pull back there and pitch his tent in Florida. This year, he’ll commit everything to New Hampshire, where he thinks he has a good shot at beating Romney–whom he criticized there earlier this week. He then thinks he can beat whichever more socially conservative candidate(s) is left by winning what are still likely to be winner-take-all primaries in big states like California, New York, and New Jersey.

It’s not at all clear to me why Rudy has “a good shot of beating Romney” in New Hampshire in 2008 any more than he had a good shot in 2008. And bad as his back-loaded strategy of waiting until Florida turned out in 2008, waiting for late-season primaries in big states in 2012 sounds even worse. Sure, you can construct some scenario where Rudy’s slugging it out with Michele Bachmann or Herman Cain in California and New York after the rest of the field has vaporized, but in today’s GOP, it’s not all that obvious Giuliani would win even with that fortuitous series of developments.
Put aside all the negative stuff about Giuliani you can imagine–his marital history, his questionable associations, his less-than-Reaganesque personality–and the simple fact remains that the Republican Party will not nominate a pro-choice candidate for president. The very idea that John McCain was considering a pro-choice running mate in 2008 nearly produced a convention revolt, and instead led McCain to bend the knee by selecting anti-choice ultra Sarah Palin. The powers-that-be in the conservative movement will destroy Rudy the moment it appears–if it ever appears–he looks viable. They would rather take their chances with a nominee who looked weak against Obama than to give up their iron control over the GOP.
Put it in the bank: Rudy 2012 ain’t happening.

At Politico today, Glenn Thrush writes the first of what will be a vast number of articles about the state-by-state targeting strategy of the two parties in 2012, this time focusing on Obama’s map. There’s actually not a lot of mystery about its basic outlines; there are only so many winnable states and so many ways to get to 270 electoral votes. But the 2008 Obama campaign’s willingness to put resources in an “expanded map,” which helped produce upset wins in states like Indiana and North Carolina, has created expectations for surprising decisions on targeting this time around, and Thrush gets Obama sources talking about the possibility of Arizona and Georgia being in play.
Much of the piece, however, is absorbed by quotes from Republican officials mocking this or that possible targeted state on grounds that Democrats did horribly there in 2010. Here’s RNC political director Rick Wiley:

You are going into Arizona and Georgia to expand? Republicans control everything in those states. It’s lunacy. We welcome their expenditure of resources in states we are going to win. What’s next? Montana? Nebraska?

A lot of this talk on both sides is just spin. But for the record, there are at least three factors that make the 2010 performance of the two parties in this or that state a less than reliable indicator of 2012 results:
1) It’s a different electorate. Yes, dear readers, I apologize in advance for beginning to bring this up as incessantly as I did between the 2008 and 2010 elections, but it’s a big deal. The shape of the electorate in 2012 is likely to be much more similar to 2008 than to 2010, with very significant partisan implications thanks to the polarization of the electorate by age and ethnicity.
2) A “two-futures” election is entirely possible. The challenge for any re-election campaign in difficult economic times is to make the results turn on a choice of two future courses for the country rather than simply a referendum on the status quo. Democrats signally failed to do that in the midterm election of 2010. But Republicans are cooperating quite nicely with current Democratic efforts to draw attention to the radicalism of their agenda, most notably via heavy congressional GOP support for Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. Republican behavior over the debt limit issue could reinforce negative impressions that they’ve lurched in a dangerous direction more thoroughly than at any time since 1995 or maybe even 1964. The identity of their presidential nominee could also trouble voters, given the nature of the field as it has emerged so far.
3) Republicans aren’t helping themselves in battleground states. As noted here before, Republican administrations in numerous battleground states (especially Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan) are pursuing highly unpopular policies that seem deliberately provocative. This could hurt their presidential ticket in those states, though the precise effect is very difficult to predict (after all, the deep unpopularity of some Democratic governors in battleground states in 2008 didn’t seem to hurt Obama). Let’s just say is will be a serious complicating factor for the GOP in 2012. How does a presidential campaign in Florida deal with a political landscape dominated by Rick Scott? How does the Republican candidate avoid us-versus-them demands to exhibit solidarity with Scott Walker and John Kasich? If nothing else, traumatized Democratic groups in such states won’t have to rely strictly on the Obama campaign to motivate get-out-the-vote efforts.
These are just three of a host of factors that will affect targeting strategies in 2012. Republicans would be foolish to assume it will just be a do-over of 2010 with similar results, and Democrats obviously need to take advantage of every opportunity the GOP gives them.

When a candidate for President of the United States publicly talks about his or her campaign strategy, it’s typically because there are questions about said candidate’s viability that need to be addressed by the articulation of a plausible path to victory. That’s usually not the case with a candidate who is consistently running first in national polls. But in an interview with Piers Morgan, Mitt Romney went out of his way to let people know he was going to be pretty scarce on the early campaign trail, to the point where he claimed to be happy that Sarah Palin stepped on his formal announcement speech:

“In a lot of respects it’s the best thing that could happen to me,” he said on CNN’s “Piers Morgan Tonight.”
“Right now, your greatest enemy is overexposure. People get tired of seeing the same person day in and day out”….
“People are going to start focusing on the elections probably after Labor Day,” he said.
“For us, I’m not doing a lot of TV – just a couple of very key interviews where I get a chance to talk about things I care about,” Romney revealed.
“Until Labor Day hits I’m going be pretty quiet.”

I’d say this solves any mystery about whether Romney is going to succumb to the temptation created by his relatively high Iowa poll numbers to compete in the August Iowa State GOP Straw Poll, unless he’s figured out a way to get thousands of Mitt-o-Maniacs on buses to Ames on August 13 without making any noise. He could still theoretically go for broke in the Caucuses a few months later, since a win might well propel him to the kind of winning streak that could lock up the nomination. But Iowa Caucus-goers tend to look dimly on candidates who refuse to help them hoover up money at the Straw Poll, which is the state party’s principal fundraiser.
More generally, his remarks indicate that he really does seem committed to a late start for his campaign. If he more or less skips Iowa, his strong position in New Hampshire and Nevada would indeed make it less important for him to get out there early. But this strategy runs the risk of exposing him to a slow bleed of support as other candidates pound him on RomneyCare day in and day out. It’s not as though his major problem is the possibility of committing some new gaffe; he committed his big gaffe by signing health reform legislation in Massachusetts in 2006, and then defending it to the point of no return.
Perhaps Mitt thinks if he marshals his resources carefully, he can manage early expectations and then drown the rest of the field in a sea of money. But contrary to his claim that nobody’s paying attention to the campaign, a lot of impressions are going to be made among Republican elites and the rank-and-file as well between now and Labor Day, and he’ll just have to accept the hand he’s dealt after rivals have begun to shape the contest.

In joining the widespread mockery towards Tim Pawlenty’s Big Economic Speech in Chicago yesterday, TNR’s Jonathan Cohn makes an interesting comparative point.

The contrast to the environment for Democrats seeking the presidency is fairly stunning. At this point four years ago, John Edwards and Barack Obama had put out detailed health care plans that had realistic assumptions, vetted by economists and health care experts, and actually looked pretty similar to what eventually became the Affordable Care act. Hillary Clinton would soon do the same. By the time the primary season was over, all three had also put out detailed plans on the economy and foreign policy.
They were running for president and so, no, they didn’t tell every “hard truth.” Their numbers didn’t always add up and some of their boasts turned out not be true. But, by and large, Democratic domestic policy proposals were both more detailed and more realistic than anything we’re seeing from the Republicans, partly because Democrats knew analysts would demand rigor and partly because they understood these plans could become templates for actual governing.

The notable wonkery of the 2008 Democratic candidates was quickly forgotten. In 2009, many Beltway pundits quickly joined conservative complaints that Barack Obama was “overreaching” on grounds that he was elected on a platform that didn’t extend much beyond a pledge to work with Republicans. He surely didn’t have any mandate to pursue health care reform, a subject on which even relatively small differences between the Democratic contenders were endlessly aired in debates, press releases, and even in paid campaign ads. Perhaps T-Paw is counting on a similar amnesia to afflict the commentariat if he is elected president.
But the threshold for being taken seriously on policy issues is definitely a lot lower for Republicans, if only because there are only so many ways you can say you want to cut high-end taxes and ravage the social safety net. Even the title Pawlenty is giving his economic program–“The Better Deal”–sounds like it was pulled out of the air ten minutes before he made his speech. By contrast, Democratic wonkiness seems almost quaint in its concern for facts and details.

It’s always noteworthy when a 2012 Republican presidential candidate decides to deliver a substantive speech instead of simply shoveling out red meat and expressing the radical sentiment that America is great and God is good. Tim Pawlenty, who despite his position as a smart-money favorite for the nomination remains mired in single digits in most polls, gave a Big Economic Speech in Chicago today, and it’s interesting how much sheer silliness was packed into it.
As many progressives are derisively noting, T-Paw tossed out what he called “the Google Test” for determining what government should and shouldn’t do: “If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.”
Taegan Goddard spotted the genesis of this ludicrous “idea” right away:

It’s hardly a new idea, however. Former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith (R) called the same principle a “yellow pages test” more than 15 years ago in the pre-Google era.

T-Paw’s speechwriters might have observed that there is vastly more information on Google than in the Yellow Pages, to the point that there are few government functions other than, say, the firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that wouldn’t flunk the test. Updating Goldsmith’s “test” in this manner is really bone-headed.
”
But let’s give Pawlenty a break and write off the “Google Test” as a comic-book illustration of his devotion to privatization that he didn’t mean literally. Elsewhere in the heart of the speech, there stands a contradiction so blatantly obvious that it’s hard to believe he’s not aware of it. He goes on at some length promising to return the economy to the growth levels of the early 1980s and late 1990s. He then proposes the usual GOP-favored tax cut program (sharply lower rates on corporations and wealthy individuals and abolition of the capital gains and estate taxes, offset in theory by the elimination of “loopholes”), and then begins assaulting President Obama for wanting to eliminate the Bush tax cuts on high earners:

Regrettably — President Obama is a champion practitioner of class warfare. Elected with a call for unity and hope. He’s spent three years dividing our nation. And fanning the flames of class envy and resentment. To deflect attention from his own failures. And the economic hardship they have visited on America.
But class warfare is not who we are.
I come from a working class background. I didn’t grow up with wealth. But I’ve never resented those who have it.
The top ten percent of income earners already pay more than 70% of income taxes. We could jack that up to 80 or 90% — as President Obama would have us do. But that’s not the point.While it might make the class warfare crusaders feel better. It wouldn’t create a single job in America. And it would destroy many.

Er, say, Tim, weren’t those horribly confiscatory high-end tax rates in place during both of those go-go periods you say you want to bring back? And actually, weren’t top rates a lot higher during the early 80s, even after Reagan’s tax cuts?
As often as Democrats make this simple point, and Republicans just ignore it, it appears the latter have decided to just brazen it out on sheer assertion that the 80s and 90s were some sort of low-tax paradise that Obama is determined to destroy.
I wish I could say this, or the Google Test, is the silliest thing in Pawlenty’s deep, deep speech, but it’s not: he also announces he will demand the Fed take a hard-money policy aimed at coping with that great contemporary economic emergency, runaway inflation. To the extent that rising prices are a problem, it’s associated mostly with energy prices, which operate independently of general price levels. If the Fed is going to try to combat that, it would have to be through deliberately deflationary policies, which is the dumbest thing imaginable given the current state of the economy.
It says a lot about today’s GOP that the purveyor of this economic nonsense is usually regarded as a safe, semi-moderate, and above all tediously conventional pol. Just wait until Michele Bachmann delivers her Big Economic Speech!

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It was serendipitous: The day after Mitt Romney announced his presidential candidacy in a speech that focused heavily on claims that he’s the guy to turn around the economy, a jobs report came out that threw cold water on earlier optimistic sentiments about the prospects of the unemployed and of those threatened by depressed wages and unemployment. On the heels of lower growth estimates for the economy as a whole, this development creates a news context for the early phases of the 2012 election cycle that seems to be, as veteran Democratic pundit Mark Shields put it, “tailor-made for Romney.” And you can understand the argument. Romney has an extensive corporate background, looks the part of a CEO, and without question, he would prefer an issues environment focused on anything other than health care reform or the cultural issues on which he’s never inspired trust among conservatives.
If Romney wins the Republican presidential nomination, bad economic news will, of course, help him against Barack Obama, though that would be true of any GOP nominee. Perhaps it would help Romney even more, however, because his background makes him a plausible economic “pragmatist” who takes ideological oaths with a wink and crossed fingers. But will bad economic news help Romney win the Republican nomination? Don’t count on it.
While Romney’s business background endears him to pro-Republican business elites, it’s worth noting that such a personal history has rarely been a boon to Republican candidates in the past. Despite the GOP’s ancient pedigree as the party of business, being a successful corporate or entrepreneurial figure has never been treated as a prerequisite for a presidential nomination. With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, whose early adventures in the Texas oil industry were a less than prominent feature in his resume, there hasn’t been a Republican presidential nominee known mainly for his business experience since Wendell Willkie in 1940. Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, and Mitt himself in 2008, are among the few major candidates who could even make business experience a major calling card, and both these men campaigned more as ideologues–True Conservative alternatives to more moderate front-runners–than as job creators. Moreover, Romney’s background as a corporate “turnaround” (often a euphemism for downsizing) consultant makes his resume a mixed blessing. He’s identified more commonly with the Wall Street, not the Main Street, segment of the American business community, and that’s a problem for him in both the GOP primaries and any hypothetical general election.
Moreover, when you consider the state of contemporary conservative economic philosophy, it’s by no means clear that Republicans are looking for a highly competent, hands-on manager of the federal government’s economic development efforts. Indeed, the whole point of the current conservative push is to keep hands off the economy on the grounds that the federal government can’t make any meaningful positive contribution to economic growth, other than perhaps by opening trading relationships with other countries. And when it comes to reducing unemployment, most Republicans claim to believe that a Republican administration sworn to oppose tax increases and hell-bent on wholesale deregulation and major federal spending cuts will have an immediate positive effect on job growth, presumably by reassuring lenders and employers that uncertainty about future tax and regulatory trends is no longer warranted. Others, meanwhile, are candid in rejecting short-term economic trends–and particularly high unemployment–as top concerns, other than as the unfortunate price that some Americans must pay for past fiscal profligacy.
In this environment, it’s not clear what advantage Romney would have; his own economic message for 2012 is almost entirely negative, and it differs in no important respect from that of the other candidates. Indeed, Romney might even come off as lacking when compared to Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, who have been consistently more extreme in their demands that congressional Republicans threaten economic havoc if their desired spending cuts or entitlement reforms aren’t enacted. And it should be obvious, in a party that equates economic growth with limited government, that Romney’s huge problem–the Massachusetts health reform plan he championed and still defends–is by no means eliminated by an increased focus on the economy. Romney himself, in his presidential announcement speech, knelt before the altar of small government by saying: “We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” ObamaCare, and its close relative, RomneyCare, is without a doubt the preeminent symbol to conservatives of that alleged lurch into socialism.
Finally, continued bad economic news could undermine Romney’s most important asset (aside from money) in the nomination contest: the possibility that early caucuses and primaries could create a fight between Romney and one or two opponents perceived as being “unelectable” against Barack Obama (e.g., Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or Herman Cain). To put it bluntly, any development–including a struggling economy–that weakens Barack Obama’s standing going into 2012 also reduces the willingness of conservatives to accept a nominee they really don’t like in the name of electability. Romney will do best if Republicans think they must have him to win. In a worsening economy, it will be much easier for them to vote with their hearts, none of which belong to Mitt.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Among the many striking features of Georgia-based radio talk show host Herman Cain’s presidential announcement speech in Atlanta on May 21, the most surreal was to hear an African-American in front of a heavily white audience of hard-core conservatives, at a site within shouting distance of the Martin Luther King Center, end his remarks by declaring, “When Herman Cain is president, we will finally be able to say, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, America is free at last.'” Cain’s decision to appropriate those famous words from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is in many ways characteristic of the man himself and the kind of campaign he’s been running. But give him credit: Outperforming Tim Pawlenty in many recent polls, running tied for second in Tuesday’s latest PPP poll of Iowa, Cain is surging on the backs of the Tea Party faithful. He is nothing if not audacious, and his popularity is due in large part to the fact that he has come to embody some of the more dubious but emotionally central claims of the Tea Party Movement.
The first thing Cain has going for his fan-base is his biography. He’s a successful business executive who saved at least one company, Godfather’s Pizza. He made his bones on the national political stage by attacking the Clinton Health Reform plan in 1994. And after liquidating his business holdings, he became a motivational speaker and author, with many opportunities to hone his communications skills. Following his one, unsuccessful race for office–a surprisingly strong second-place showing in a primary won by now-Senator Johnny Isakson–Cain worked his way into the world of conservative talk radio under the tutelage of the veteran quasi-libertarian gabber Neal Boortz, who has a big national audience. He soon got his own syndicated show, in which he identified himself with one of the most durable conservative pet rocks, the Fair Tax proposal (a flat consumption tax that would theoretically replace federal income and payroll taxes). And unlike other pols who have since tried to ingratiate themselves with the movement, Cain was a big Tea Party proponent from day one, quickly becoming a fixture at Tea Party events in Georgia.
And then, of course, there’s one other item in Cain’s background that matters politically: his race. Cain’s popularity among conservative activists provides a sort of ongoing inoculation against the charges of racism that have been levied–sometimes speciously, sometimes fairly–against them, and he cleverly cultivates this element of his popularity with the stock-speech line, “People who oppose Obama are said to be racists–so I guess I’m a racist.” Like South Carolina congressman Tim Scott and Florida congressman Allen West, as a hard-core conservative African-American Cain has quickly become one of the most popular pols in the Tea Party universe.
But beyond serving as a counter-race-card, Cain’s rhetoric offers vital ammunition in the fight over the endlessly contested American value of “opportunity.” Indeed, at a time when many white Americans believe that anti-white bias is now a greater social problem than anti-black bias, Cain’s words and deeds coincide nicely with the common conservative belief that minorities who embrace traditional values, work hard, and become entrepreneurs can avoid the liberal “welfare trap” that leads to dependence on government, broken homes, and crime. And Cain’s angry defiance of liberals validates the Tea Party conviction that white liberal elites have corrupted minority Americans by, for instance, encouraging them to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford, thus triggering the recent housing and financial crises. In other words, Cain has become not a role model but an implicit living rebuke to his fellow African-Americans, who have, in the imaginations of many white conservatives, been led like sheep to the slaughter by the shadowy forces who use them as pawns in their socialist schemes.
Nothing illustrates Cain’s ability to turn his race into a weapon against white liberals than the racial spin he has placed on the abortion-as-Holocaust meme of the anti-choice movement (of which he is a long-time champion, at least since he spent most of his 2004 senatorial campaign attacking Johnny Isakson for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical ban on abortions). Here’s what he told the conservative website CNSNews.com in March of this year regarding his support for congressional Republican efforts to ban any use of public funds by Planned Parenthood:

Here’s why I support de-funding Planned Parenthood, because you don’t hear a lot of people talking about this, when Margaret Sanger–check my history–started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.
You don’t see that talked that much about … It’s not Planned Parenthood. No, it’s planned genocide. You can quote me on that.

This sort of talk is immensely useful–and powerful–for conservative activists who have a complicated view of minority Americans as both perpetrators and victims in the ongoing destruction of the country as they know it.
In this as in other areas, the third thing going for Cain is simple: He does not hold back. Indeed, he gives conservative audiences the full, rich, red-meat diet they crave, along with the occasional dog-whistle appeal only they can hear. For example, in his announcement speech, he made a casual reference to the Constitution’s language guaranteeing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Since the language in question appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, Cain was subsequently accused of an ignorant gaffe by observers who themselves did not seem to understand the Christian Right/Tea Party tenet that the former document was incorporated into the latter via the manifest intent of the Founders. This is how God and the idea of divinely derived “natural law” (including protection of the unborn and, for some, absolute property rights) are read into the Constitution by constitutional conservatives who consider twentieth-century social legislation and court rulings un-American.
Add all these factors up, and it’s not that surprising Cain has been wowing audiences in early caucus and primary states and developing the kind of online following that only Ron Paul can typically command among Republicans. He has routinely won audience straw polls after candidate forums–most famously, at the Tea Party Patriots convention in Arizona in February and at Steve King’s Conservative Principles Conference in Iowa in April. He also greatly enthused a focus group convened by conservative pollster Frank Lutz to watch the first televised candidate debate in South Carolina in May. As a result, he’s now surging in the polls (registering 8 percent in the latest Gallup poll of Republican presidential proto-candidates, 10 percent in the latest CNN poll, and 11 percent in a recent Insider Advantage poll), and regularly running ahead of supposedly more serious candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. And all this is happening, as Nate Silver has pointed out, in spite of the fact that Cain still has low name ID and hasn’t, until now at least, gotten much media attention (in both respects, this is the exact opposite of the context surrounding Donald Trump’s earlier surge in the polls).

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Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of a 2012 presidential candidacy today, perhaps because it is hardly an unexpected event, is spurring some deeper thinking about the chimera of a successful blue-state Republican governor who can hardly be called a liberal struggling to obscure his own record to run for president. Jon Cohn and Jon Chait are conducting a colloquoy at The New Republic to debate whether Romney’s past dooms his future. But also at TNR, Mark Schmitt has penned a valuable rumination on Romney’s status as among the last in a wave of successful Republican governors who have now been replaced by highly controversial confrontationists like Scott Walker, Rick Scott and John Kasich.
I’ve always thought the rave national media reviews of the Republican governors of the late 1990s–people like Tommy Thompson, John Engler, and yes, George W. Bush–underestimated the extent to which the Clinton-era economic boom made it easy to cut taxes without significantly reducing services, making everyone happy. But as Schmitt notes, the style of these governors, depending on at least some cooperation across party lines, now seems completely alien to the national GOP mood. In any event, Schmitt is spot-on in his assessment of Romney’s plight:

With that golden-era model of Republican governors so thoroughly rejected, Mitt Romney looks like a relic from a long-forgotten time–like his father’s actual moderate Republicanism–even though it’s only been five years. Were Romney trying to check off the “served in government” box on his resumé today, he’d probably pick a different state and adopt a showdown style more in keeping with the times. But it’s too late for that. The shape-shifting Romney will surely adapt to whatever he’s required to say, but, in doing so, he will have to renounce not only his governorship–his own principal credential for the presidency–but also his party’s most important political triumph in recent memory.

It’s one thing for a presidential candidate to be forced to reshape his or her record to fit a new environment or a national as opposed to a local or regional context. That happens all the time. But it’s another thing altogether to be forced to deny the very accomplishments that made the candidate noteworthy in the first place. And that’s Mitt Romney’s main problem today.

During a rumination on the proposition that a slow-to-develop presidential campaign cycle could reduce opportunities for the thorough media vetting of candidates, Jonathan Bernstein makes this simple but important observation:

[W]hile I’m generally reluctant to be one who says that the internet changes everything, I do think this is at least plausibly a case where it matters. For one thing, in the old days — say, before the debut of the Hotline in the 1988 cycle — it was still possible for a local story to sit out there for a long time without anyone knowing it. No way could that happen now.

I’d agree, with the crucial qualification that in the past a “local story” about a presidential candidate did not have to be completely unknown nationally to be functionally invisible or at least unimportant. A great example was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter’s fairly elaborate and not-too-distant history of flirtation with segregationists was hardly a secret, but never became a factor during the Democratic primaries or the general election. Indeed, one aspect of that history, his vote for arch-segregationist Lester Maddox when the Georgia legislature was forced to elect a governor of Georgia in 1966, went almost entirely unnoticed.
Now it’s true that the staunch support of Andrew Young and the King family helped inoculate Carter from charges of past racism in 1976, along with Carter’s own decent civil rights record once he actually became governor in 1971. Indeed, Carter was very popular among African-American primary voters around the country (just like Bill Clinton years later, even though Clinton, like Carter, was perceived as less than ideally progressive, albeit never vulnerable to accusations of racism). But you have to wonder if Carter could have survived the kind of early exposure of and daily questioning about his past positioning on civil rights if he had been subjected to today’s levels of scrutiny and discussion.
My point is that modern media have not only made it harder to hide damaging information about politicians, but have made it harder to hide such information in plain sight, passed over as irrelevant or unimportant. To cite a seminal example, Trent Lott’s 2002 remarks expressing regret that Strom Thurmond hadn’t been elected president back in 1948 were widely reported, but it took relentless discussion of them by blogger Josh Marshall and others to make it something other than a “local story” of brief interest to Beltway insiders and Mississippians.
While it’s still possible for candidates and political parties–supported by friendly media–to “control the narrative” in a way that shoves negative information under the rug, it’s simply not as easy as it used to be. And that could very well be a factor in the decisions of potential 2012 presidential candidates to take a pass.