There are many “silly seasons” in politics, when either the absence of real news or the devious interests of “sources” create “stories” that aren’t quite legitimate. We’re definitely in a silly season right now when it comes to the 2012 presidential race. It’s still theoretically possible for late entries to get in, and widespread unhappiness with the Republican field has created a ripe environment for completely baseless speculation about this or that possibility.
Fortunately, Dave Weigel of Slate has done a quick rundown of what he calls the “Why the Hell Not?” candidates, including an indication of their possible motives in promoting talk of a run (often a book that needs publicity). His list includes the famous Rep. Paul Ryan, the not-so-famous Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI), retread Rudy Giuliani, and Govs. Rick Perry of TX and Rick Scott of FL. Dave clearly doesn’t think any of them are actually going to run, which may underestimate Giuliani’s ego and the vast encouragement currently being given to Perry to jump in.
But maybe we’ll get lucky and none of them will run. Then we won’t have to re-explain why the Republican Party will not in a zillion years nominate a pro-choice pol like Rudy, no matter what else he allegedly brings to the table, and we won’t have to learn to take seriously Rick Perry’s arguments that just getting rid of inconvenient government programs and regulations has made Texas an economic paradise. As a native southerner, I also fear that a Perry candidacy–which would be predicated on the idea that someone from the South has a big natural advantage–would make me long for Haley Barbour as a representative of the region. Better Foghorn Leghorn than “Adios MoFo!”
Ed Kilgore
This item appeared as part of a column at Progressive Fix.
It’s happened so quickly that its significance may have been obscured, but one of the biggest recent developments in Wingnut World has been the rapid devolution of conservative opinion on the pending debt limit crisis–from demands for hard-line negotiations to outright rejection of negotiations at all, often supplemented by claims that the government doesn’t need new debt authority anyway.
This last phenomenon, which Jonathan Chait and others have been calling “debt-ceiling denialism,” is spreading like kudzu since it was first notably articulated by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) in a January column in the Wall Street Journal. There are different forms of the argument, but the common threads are the claim that the federal government can prioritize the use of revenues in a way that avoids debt default, and the complaint that the whole issue has been manufactured by Democrats to avoid big spending cuts. Toomey attracted 100 House members and 22 Senators to his “Full Faith and Credit Act” legislation that would supposedly avoid a default by forcing debt payments to the top of the spending priority list.
Short of explicit denial that a real breaching of the debt limit would be a bad thing, other conservatives (including presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain) take the parallel position of opposing any increase in the debt limit on grounds that spending (without, of course, any tax increases) should be cut enough to make the increase unnecessary.
The usual reaction in Washington to this sort of talk is to dismiss it as tactical positioning for the “deal” that will ultimately be cut–as “hostage-taking” aimed at maximizing the “ransom.” Perhaps that’s exactly what it was initially. But at some point, arguments that the hostage’s life is worth nothing, or worse yet, that the ransom can be earned precisely by killing the hostage, undermine the very idea of a deal, particularly when refusing to negotiate with Democrats is a posture that conservatives value as an end in itself anyway. Indeed, the trend in conservative rhetoric on this subject is to accuse Democrats of hostage-taking by their adamant refusal to accept vast spending reductions. It’s a dangerous gambit, made even more tempting to Republicans by the fact that debt limit increases are perpetually unpopular among the overwhelming percentage of Americans who have no real idea of the merits of either side of the dispute.
The key question is the extent to which the GOP’s business elites forcefully push back and demand a more reasonable attitude before things get out of hand. That’s particularly urgent since debt-limit deniers and hard-liners alike are getting into the habit of arguing that financial markets care more about spending reductions than any hypothetical default on the debt. Moreover, debt-limit ultras are also playing with fire by systematically eliminating any incentive for the Obama administration or congressional Democrats to make concessions to a credible negotiating partner. Why offer a ransom when the hostage-takers no longer seem to care what you offer? Better to just send in the SWAT team and take your chances.
Mitch Daniels’ decision not to run for president next year, communicated to key supporters in the wee hours of Sunday morning, clearly surprised those most in the know about his preparations for a candidacy. Indeed, it seems that much of the elite conservative commentariat that was so visibly pining for a Daniels run is in a state of shock. The public grieving has barely begun. We will soon see writers fond of scolding the public for its addiction to self-indulgences like a social safety net turn and scold the media for scaring Daniels out of a presidential run by speculating about his marital history and its possible impact on the race.
After the rending of garments and the finger-pointing, the Gravitas Lobby could scatter in different directions. Some will panic and beg for another Great Big Adult to enter the race at the last moment–Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, perhaps even Rick Perry, who isn’t necessarily all that adult, but does have the ability to raise money and a record of saying the kind of highly irresponsible things beloved of Tea Party activists, and has a plausible path to the nomination. Others will make their peace with the existing field, and gravitate (no pun intended) to damaged-goods Mitt Romney or smaller-than-life Tim Pawlenty (who is formally announcing his own candidacy today).
We’ll never know if Daniels would have indeed gotten on his Harley and barnstormed across the early primary states exuding the “charisma of competence,” and getting Republicans all lathered up by his austerity message, or would have instead crashed and burned like many candidates in the past who excited elites more than actual voters. But we do know time is beginning to run out on efforts to recruit a dark horse savior for the Republican presidential field.
As you may know, tomorrow is the day the End Times are supposed to begin, according to an odd but pervasive California-based “radio ministry” led by one Edward Camping. Perhaps you’ve even seen the group’s billboards or warning-emblazoned vans.
Now there’s nothing new about what theology wonks call “dispensationalist premillenialism,” which is basically the believe that it is possible to calculate the date of the Apocalypse as described in the New Testament Book of Revelation (which is taken quite literally) with clues from other parts of scripture. Camping himself earlier proclaimed the Apocalypse would begin on September 6, 1994, and then admitted to some calculation errors, since corrected.
There is certainly a ready audience for such predictions. According to the Pew Research Center, 41 percent of Americans believe that Jesus Christ will “definitely” (23%) or “probably” (18%) return to Earth by 2050. The total number rises to 58 percent among white evangelicals. Indeed, as is well known, the belief that the State of Israel will play a particular role in touching off the Apocalypse has strong currency in conservative evangelical circles, and is often associated with Christian Right support for an aggressive posture on expansion of Jewish settlement into areas long controlled by Arabs (e.g., Mike Huckabee’s recent claim there is no such thing as “Palestinians” and thus no reason for a two-state solution in the biblical Land of Israel).
Beyond the ranks of believers, doomsday predictions can disturb people prone to anxiety. Salon‘s Steve Kornacki has a post up today about his own vulnerability as a teenager to Camping’s earlier prediction, even though he was neither an evangelical or from a particularly religious background.
Catholic and mainline Protestant sources typically view dispensationalist premillenialism as misguided, beginning with its literal interpretation of Revelation, which is more conventionally interpreted as a warning of coming Roman persecution of Christians utilizing a common ancient literary form. Abuse of Revelation led Martin Luther, early in his career, to propose deletion of the book from the Canon of the Bible.
But even without specific religious sanction, fear of–or longing for–Doomsday are too deeply planted in our culture to go away just because one prophecy or another proves wrong. It takes an awful lot of false alarms to eliminate the human fear of “the fire.”
It’s always a good idea to read National Journal‘s Ron Brownstein, and his column today is no exception. It’s about Mitt Romney’s problems with evangelical voters, which, ironically, could be exacerbated by the withdrawal of evangelical hero Mike Huckabee from the presidential race, making them more available to candidates better able than Huck to put together a majority coalition (e.g., T-Paw).
But what interested me most about the column was Brownstein’s discussion of the deployment of evangelical voters in particular states, supplemented by a nifty map showing the percentage of 2008 Republican primary or caucus voters self-identifying as evangelicals. The numbers for Iowa (60%) and New Hampshire (23%) have been repeated often enough that they should be familiar, but important, too, are the percentages for South Carolina (60%), Florida (39%), Michigan (39%), Virginia (46%) and Texas (60%). File away this map for future reference.
Today Senate Republicans filibustered the confirmation of Goodwin Liu to the 9th Circuit U.S. Appeals Court. The official rationale from Senate Republicans was, basically: so’s your old man! During the Bush administration, Democrats preserved the right to filibuster Republican nominees for federal judicial spots, so we will filibuster your people!
I’m a bit heretical on this subject, believing that if we are going to have filibuster rights at all, they are more appropriate for lifetime appointments to the federal judiciary than for legislation that future Congresses can repeal.
But the Liu controversy reveals the very different levels of emphasis that conservatives and progressives place on judicial appointments. It’s holy war for conservatives, as suggested by their ready flip-flop from support for a “nuclear option” to kill judicial filibusters when it happened to suit their purposes, to an entirely contrary position now. It just doesn’t seem to be that big a deal for Democrats. And that’s a problem.
As a close observer of the Christian Right and its preoccupations, I try to make a habit of checking The Brody File–the blog of CBN political correspondent David Brody–now and then. Today I ran across a video of his show from last week, a feature on the “Teavangelicals” (people equally at home in the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right) shot in Atlanta. It included interviews with Jenny Beth Martin of the Tea Party Patriots, Amy Kremer of the Tea Party Express, and the teavangelical godfather himself, Ralph Reed–all of whom live in Atlanta.
The whole thing is actually worth watching. But the most interesting moment for me was when Brody began rating a few Republican presidential candidates, on a scale of 1 to 5, in terms of their “Teavangelical” street cred. Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain, unsurprisingly, got a 5. Mitt Romney got a 1, and apparently only rated above a zero because he occasionally wears Tea Party ties (“He’s not, after all, an evangelical” noted Brody). But guess who else got a 5? Tim Pawlenty, which might come as a surprise to those who persist in thinking of him as some sort of “moderate.”
Brody interspersed a clip of a walk-and-talk interview he did with the former Minnesota governor recently, wherein he quizzed him about his appeal to Tea Party folk and evangelicals. Not missing a beat, T-Paw rattled off a list of all the GOP’s factions (including libertarians, economic conservatives and national-security conservatives in addition to evangelicals and Tea Folk) and said he appealed equally to them all. (Note that “moderates” didn’t make the grade.) This is clearly his calling card as a candidate, and he sure can stay on message, even if it means passing up a chance to do some more specific pandering.
This item by Ed Kilgore was originally published on May 12, 2011.
Think there will eventually be a bipartisan deal to increase the public debt limit after an extended period of Kabuki Theater posturing? Maybe it’s time to think again.
Ezra Klein really hits the nail on the head in describing the “negotiations” as they stand today:
The negotiation that we’re having, in theory, is how to cut the deficit in order to give politicians in both parties space to increase the debt limit. But if you look closely at the positions, that’s not really the negotiation we’re having. Republicans are negotiating not over the deficit, but over tax rates and the size of government. That’s why they’ve ruled revenue “off the table” as a way to reduce the deficit, and why they are calling for laws and even constitutional amendments that cap federal spending rather than attack deficits. Democrats, meanwhile, lack a similarly clear posture: most of them are negotiating to raise the debt ceiling, but a few are trying to survive in 2012, and a few more are actually trying to reduce the deficit, and meanwhile, the Obama administration just met with the Senate Democrats to ask them to please, please, stop laying down new negotiating markers every day.
If we were really just negotiating over the deficit, this would be easy. The White House, the House Republicans, the House Progressives, the House Democrats and the Senate Republicans have all released deficit-reduction plans. There’s not only apparent unanimity on the goal, but a broad menu of approaches. We’d just take elements from each and call it a day. But if the Republicans are negotiating over their antipathy to taxes and their belief that government should be much smaller, that’s a much more ideological, and much tougher to resolve, dispute. The two parties don’t agree on that goal. And if the Democrats haven’t quite decided what their negotiating position is, save to survive this fight both economically and politically, that’s not necessarily going to make things easier, either. Negotiations are hard enough when both sides agree about the basic issue under contention. They’re almost impossible when they don’t.
It’s worth underlining that “deficits” and “debt” don’t in themselves mean any more to conservatives than they did when then-Vice President Dick Cheney said “deficits don’t matter” in 2002. Every Republican “deficit reduction” proposal is keyed to specific spending cuts–without new revenues–and increasingly, to an arbitrary limit on spending as a percentage of GDP. Even the version of a constitutional balanced budget amendment that Sen. Jim DeMint is insisting on as part of any debt limit deal would have a spending-as-percentage-of-GDP “cap” (at 18%, as compared to about 24% currently) that would force huge spending reductions (you can guess from where since GOPers typically consider defense spending as off-limits as taxes).
Today’s Republicans are simply using deficits as an excuse to revoke as much of the New Deal/Great Society tepid-welfare-state system as they can get away with. And it’s really just a latter stage of the old conservative Starve-the-Beast strategy for deliberately manufacturing deficits in order to cut spending. Democrats should point this out constantly, and not let Republicans get away with claiming they are only worried about debt and fiscal responsibility.
This item by J.P. Green was originally published on May 10, 2011.
Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA15) has a post up at HuffPo “Why Dick Lugar Wants Drawdown; Why Defense Industries Don’t,” which makes a strong case for accelerating withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Honda, chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Peace and Security Taskforce says:
A drawdown is what the majority of the American people want. They want us to end America’s longest war in history. They want us to stop spending $120 billion a year in Afghanistan, particularly when our heavy military footprint is not making Americans or Afghans safer. In the last year, we had the highest number of U.S. casualties, the biggest single-year spike in insurgent attacks, the most devastating of Afghan civilian deaths (an airstrike on nine youths gathering wood), an Afghan majority that says their basic security and basic services have worsened substantially, and majority populations in the U.S. and Afghanistan that want the troops to leave.
Senator Lugar (R-IN) had made news with this sobering observation about U.S. involvement in Afghanistan:
“Our geostrategic interests are threatened in numerous locations, not just by terrorism, but by debt, economic competition, energy and food prices, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and numerous other forces,” he said in a statement. “Solving these problems will be much more difficult if we devote too many resources toward one country that, historically, has frustrated nation building experiments.”
Honda’s claim about public opinion is affirmed to some extent in the latest Pew Research Center poll, conducted May 5-8, which found that 49 percent of respondents want to “remove troops as soon as possible,” while 43 percent want to “keep troops in until situation has stabilized.” In an NBC News-Hart/McInturff poll conducted 5/5-7, 46 percent of respondents “somewhat disapprove” or “strongly disapprove” of “leaving some American troops in Afghanistan until 2014,” while 42 percent said they “strongly approve” or “somewhat approve.”
Honda advocates transferring U.S. funding for our large occupation force to support “policing, intelligence and negotiations…at a fraction of the cost of the heavy military, air and navy operations that currently characterize our security strategy.” He admits it won’t be easy, but he argues persuasively that it is the right way to go:
Such a shift requires courage, especially for members of Congress, given all the industries that benefit from our footprint-heavy warfare. But now is the time to take that necessary step. Our country has been emboldened, and we must now leverage this unity into a new direction for our defense apparatus — one that will keep us safer in every possible way, from our forces to our finances.
Writing in The American Prospect, Heather Hurlburt, executive director of the National Security Network, believes that that bin Laden’s death may provide an opportunity to open political dialogue:
By dealing a blow to al-Qaeda — and by implication, to its allies in the Taliban and its protectors in Pakistan’s intelligence establishment — bin Laden’s death may have created new opportunities for a political settlement in Afghanistan. While experts across the political spectrum have been calling for talks with elements of the Taliban, opponents have argued that because the U.S. had not turned the tide militarily, now was not the time. It’s hard to imagine a bigger military momentum-changer than the bin Laden operation. Military and regional experts from Gen. David Petraeus on down have said for years that a political solution — one that gives Afghans a stake in their government — as opposed to military intervention is the key to scaling back the administration’s 2009 surge and ultimately ending U.S. combat operations there. But given that the war in Afghanistan was about more than just finding bin Laden, our withdrawal will likely occur independently of his death.
President Obama showed bold leadership in ordering the raid on bin Laden’s compound at considerable risk. His challenge now is to provide equally-strong leadership in dramatically scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan, while advancing the incentives for a political settlement. In so doing he will strengthen Democratic prospects, as well as our national security.
It may seem a bit cruel to dwell on the smoking ruins of Newt Gingrich’s presidential ambitions at this particular moment. But the rejoinder sent to Huffington Post by his press secretary Rick Tyler yesterday really must be mentioned as one of the great masterpieces of unintentional humor in American political history. Gaze in awe:
The literati sent out their minions to do their bidding. Washington cannot tolerate threats from outsiders who might disrupt their comfortable world. The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods. Now they are left exposed by their bylines and handles. But surely they had killed him off. This is the way it always worked. A lesser person could not have survived the first few minutes of the onslaught. But out of the billowing smoke and dust of tweets and trivia emerged Gingrich, once again ready to lead those who won’t be intimated by the political elite and are ready to take on the challenges America faces.
I’d normally feel sympathy for Tyler, who has just suffered through a truly nightmarish week. The poor guy is probably updating his resume as we speak. But the bizarre mix of paranoia, idolatry, and idiocy in the passage just quoted indicates that Tyler needs a good long vacation somewhere far away from any keyboard or microphone–just like his boss.
UPDATE: Via Salon‘s Alex Pareene, check out this hysterical cartoon illustration of Tyler’s statement.
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