The day after California’s special election “jungle primary” to choose two candidates to compete for the vacant congressional seat of former Rep. Jane Harman, the precise outcome remains uncertain. Democratic Los Angeles city councilwoman Janice Hahn has definitely won a place in a July 12 runoff. But second place, and the other runoff spot, remains up in the air. In a big upset, little-known self-funding Republican Craig Huey ran 200 votes ahead of Democratic Secretary of State Deborah Bowen with all precincts reporting. There are enough absentee and provisional ballots out to theoretically erase Huey’s lead, and there’s also the possibility of a recount (though Bowen’s role as California elections chief makes that scenario tricky).
The district’s heavily-Democratic complexion means that Huey is very unlikely to prevail even if he does make the runoff. And regardless of who wins the remainder of Harman’s term, the district lines may soon be scrambled by California’s unique “citizens’ commission” redistricting system.
But the results have been watched carefully by political pros for signs of how California’s new “top two” electoral system will work. Imposed by a 2010 ballot initiative, and in place already in Washington State, the “top-two,” or “jungle” primary allows all candidates from any or no party to compete in a single primary contest, with the top two finishers proceeding to the general election ballot. So for the first time, general election contests in California could feature two Democrats or two Republicans, which might well happen in quite a few of today’s highly gerrymandered congressional and legislative districts in the Golden State.
Since this was a special election, the “top two” finishers proceed to a special runoff, not to the next general election. Additionally, had someone won a majority yesterday, he or she would have been declared elected; that won’t be the case in regular elections in the future (this is the one of two key differences between the California system and Louisiana’s, where a majority wins; the other difference is that Louisiana’s jungle primary only applies to elections for state offices).
Yesterday’s “special election” features make it difficult to draw any major conclusions about the impact of “top two” in the future. But one claim about the system–that it would make intraparty conflict a more visible feature of primaries–may already be coming true. According to one California political wizard quoted at Politico, Hahn helped lift Huey towards a primary spot by going after Bowen in a way that diverted Democratic votes to fourth-place finisher Marcy Winograd (an anti-war activist who twice challenged Harman). And let’s say Bowen does make it to the runoff: you can imagine that what is essentially an extended primary contest could get pretty abrasive if it were to run all the way to November, which will be the case in the future.
There are quite a few other questions about “top two” that remain to be answered; one in particular is whether primary contests on general election day in heavily D or R districts will boost general election turnout. Another is whether “true independents” will play a more visible role. But we’ll have to wait until 2012 for most of the answers.

For those of you interested in the battle over abortion policy, I’ve written a review for The Washington Monthly of a book on the notorious 2009 political murder of Dr. George Tiller, the Kansas late-term abortion provider. The book, The Wichita Divide: The Murder of Dr. George Tiller and the Battle Over Abortion, by “true crime” specialist Stephen Singular, is a solid recounting of the facts of the case. But as I tried to convey in my review, its treatment of late-term abortion as the central theater in the war over reproductive rights is misleading, and its treatment of anti-choice activists as “fringe” players little different from (and in fact, often the same as) militia members underestimates their power.
A lot has happened to confirm my concerns since I wrote the review. Republicans in Congress and in the states have waged war on any sort of direct or indirect public funding for Planned Parenthood, which is not a late-term abortion provider, and in fact, is most significant as a dispenser of contraceptives. A House-passed appropriations bill also sought to all-but-terminate federal family planning services. And most ominously, states (so far, Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana, with a bill pending in Missouri) are beginning to act on “fetal pain” bills designed to roll back abortion rights taken for granted for years, typically via bans on abortions that occur after 20 weeks of pregnancy. No one seems confident the Supreme Court will invalidate these new laws.
With respect to the late-term abortion issue, the most interesting development is currently unfolding in Iowa, where the planned relocation of a late-term abortion clinic run by Dr. Leroy Carhart (one of Tiller’s colleagues featured in the Singular book), whose Nebraska practice was shut down by the first of the “20 weeks” laws, is hanging fire. Iowa Republicans managed to get their own “20 weeks” law through the state House, which they control, citing Carhart’s plans as a chief motive. Senate Democrats (whose leader, Mike Gronstal, represents the Council Bluffs district where Carhart’s planned clinic would be located) have countered with a bill that through various technical means would thwart Carhart’s plans, but would not actually ban any late-term abortions, much less the second-trimester abortions that would be affected by the “20-weeks” bill.
The anger of anti-choicers (some of whom actually opposed the “20-weeks” bill as insufficiently radical) at this maneuver makes it pretty plain that their alarms over late-term abortion providers like Carhart simply provided a pretext for steps to shut down abortion providers more generally.
The drive to overturn reproductive rights is enjoying much more success than is implied by books like Singular’s, and is far more extensive than the controversies over Tiller and Carhart, reaching increasingly into the use of contraceptives by the vast majority of Americans. The election of a Republican president, who would be under an iron pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices sure to overturn Roe v. Wade more explicitly, could have enormous implications in this area.
UPDATE: Stephen Singular offered a thoughtful comment to this post, and I responded in a way that I hope will allay any impression that I don’t fully appreciate his work. We’re equally alarmed about what’s going on in the “abortion battle” right now. Please check out the comments thread.

You have to wonder if Newt Gingrich wishes he’d just never bothered to run for president in the first place. The day after he announced, he spoke at the state Republican convention in his home-base of Georgia, and was upstaged by talk-show host Herman Cain (who is also from Georgia, but has spent twenty-one fewer years than Gingrich representing the state in Congress). Then on the eve of his first big tour of Iowa as a candidate, he went on Meet the Press and casually dissed Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposal, which has earned him vast abuse from conservative opinion-leaders and Republicans generally (even those who undoubtedly agree in private with his assessment of RyanCare as a political non-starter). The gaffe even got him some personal grief from a loud Iowan who accosted him during a campaign swing and demanded he just get out of the race.
And now Jake Sherman of Politico did some inspired digging through the financial disclosure forms that Callista Gingrich was required to file as a highly paid House employee up until 2007, and discovered that Newt owed somewhere between a quarter and a half million dollars to Tiffany and Company as recently as 2006. Considering that the same forms showed the Gingriches as having total assets valued at somewhere between one and two-and-a-half million dollars at the time, that’s some pretty serious jewelry debt for such debt-conscious times.
You can imagine what the late-night comics will do with this story. I mean, the jokes just write themselves. Did Newt exceed his Tiffany’s Debt Limit? Is he still paying on all three engagement rings? How many jobs did he produce at Tiffany’s? Would a tax cut help him grow out of debt? Does he really just like eating breakfast at Tiffany’s? Ba-da-bing, ba-da- boom.
I’ve never been that high on Newt’s chances of becoming the 45th President of the United States. But if he can overcome this campaign launch, he deserves some real respect as a survivor.

Can anyone say today with any degree of certainty where the Republican Party is on “reforming” Medicare?
Sure, nearly all House Republicans are stuck with a vote for a budget resolution whose most visible feature was Paul Ryan’s proposals to voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid into a block grant. Harry Reid may yet maneuver Senate Republicans into a similar vote.
But in the meantime, the self-same Senate Republicans, most notably the Senator from the Club for Growth, Pat Toomey, and the Senator from the Tea Party, Jim DeMint, are backing a different budget that avoids any long-term changes to Medicare, opting instead for very deep cuts in non-defense discretionary spending.
And now Newt Gingrich has come right out and said what his fellow-candidates-for-president seem to have privately concluded: Ryan’s Medicare plan is “too big a jump” from a political point of view. The hysterical reaction of many conservatives to Gingrich’s remarks has all the signs of an attack on a rogue commander who has sounded a retreat before it can be made to look “orderly” and “strategic.”
I suspect the original idea among Republicans was to embrace a “bold” form of “entitlement reform” in hopes that the White House would give them cover by accepting something a little less “bold” but aimed in the same direction. If so, it hasn’t worked. And if Republicans manage to lose next week’s House special election in New York after a campaign in which their candidate was pounded for supporting Ryan’s budget, the retreat, orderly or not, is likely to begin in earnest.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, there’s been a silly effort among the conservative chattering classes to bat down the idea that this development means a permanent boost in Barack Obama’s approval ratings, or even guarantees his re-election. It’s silly, of course, because no one really believes the straw-man proposition in the first place. But this time-wasting exercise has obscured a more interesting question: How does this event affect the Republican national security case against Obama, and what are the implications for Republican presidential candidates who have been planning–in some cases for years–to make this a major part of their campaigns?
Lest we forget, until very recently the conservative narrative about Obama–and the Democratic Party as a whole–has been that the people running the country are constitutionally allergic to the use of military force and hopelessly addicted to multilateralism. At least two major Republican proto-candidates, Mitt Romney (as expressed in his 2010 manifesto, No Apologies) and Newt Gingrich (through an array of books, speeches and projects), have taken this argument to the front-and-center of their campaigns, and a highly influential article in National Review made the idea of “American exceptionalism” the linchpin of the conservative critique of Obama in general. Obama’s reluctance to use unilateral force to defend America from its enemies, the argument went, speaks to a broader incapacity of the president to reflect and defend American values in all walks of life, including domestic policy, where he is trying to impose European welfare-state limitations on American capitalism.
But the difficulty in challenging incumbent presidents is that they have the power to confound the best-laid arguments of their challengers. The Libya intervention called into question the alleged allergy of Obama and Democrats towards the use of force, driving conservatives to instead object to Obama’s deference to multilateral allies. But the Bin Laden operation, which involved a lethal mission in Pakistan without specific notice to its government, refuted the entire conservative critique in a manner that’s hard to undo.
As a result, the first problem Republicans now face is that there is little left in their foreign policy critiques to which they can still cling. For the most part, conservative commentary on Obama’s decision to authorize the OBL operation has focused on its alleged hypocrisy: Obama supposedly relied on intelligence derived from torture, or from his predecessors’ general approach to counter-terrorism, which he claimed to oppose in 2008. This line of attack is reminiscent of the feeble efforts of conservatives during the 1990s to attack Bill Clinton for “stealing our issues” or “stealing our ideas.” In short, who cares?
For someone like Mitt Romney, who dedicated the bulk of his recent book to railing against Obama’s foreign policy as weak willed and self loathing, it’s unclear exactly what he should do. Having spent a good deal of the last four years trying to recast himself as a foreign policy heavy, should he simply discount recent events as an aberration and plunge on with the claim that the administration is indifferent to terrorism and hostile to America’s right to unilateral self-protection? Or should he cut his losses and shift to other issues? In either case, he can’t exactly pivot to health care.
The second problem for the Republican field is that the death of bin Laden could accelerate the administration’s timetable for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. If this happens, it would not only heal long-standing Democratic rifts over Afghanistan, but expose the degree to which Republicans are newly divided over the same issue.
While it’s highly unlikely that foreign policy will be the driving factor in 2012, Republican presidential candidates are still going to have to talk about foreign policy and national security issues in a vast number of primary debates. At this point, there will likely be not one, but two libertarian candidates, Ron Paul and Gary Johnson, making constant trouble with their isolationist views, which–unlike in years past–are clearly finding some traction among Tea Party folk and other grassroots conservatives. Former governors Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, and (if he runs) Mike Huckabee, for their part, will be torn between trying to appeal to these groups and trying to out-hawk Obama. Moreover, Tea Party-generated conflict about whether the Pentagon should be exposed to budget cuts will be unavoidable.
And finally, if the GOP nominating process delivers up a candidate with questionable foreign policy credentials–as it likely will, unless Jon Hunstman pulls off a political miracle–then foreign policy issues could actually be an important advantage for Obama. It’s worth remembering that in the contest Republicans like to cite as a precedent for 2012, the 1980 race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, doubts about Reagan’s competence as commander-in-chief helped keep the contest competitive until doubts about the actual commander-in-chief’s competence in handling the Iran hostage standoff took over. And, if nothing else, the snuffing of OBL made it clear that Obama is no Jimmy Carter.
Perceptions of political parties are hard to change, of course. Many progressives thought Bill Clinton’s successful (if multilateral) use of force in Kosovo convincingly slayed the dragon of Republican claims that Democrats were latent hippies unwilling to kill bad guys. A couple of years later, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were campaigning on the argument that Clinton and Gore were starving the military of resources and that “help is on the way.” And less than two years into the Bush administration, Republicans had revived the Democrats-won’t-defend-you claim with a vengeance.
At this particular moment, however, Republicans are hard-pressed to pass themselves off as the party of patriotic clarity and determination. They may soon have their own fractious debate over Afghanistan, our country’s overseas commitments in general, and whether to make cuts to the defense budget. And whatever transpires on the GOP side, the President of the United States is certainly a more formidable figure on national security than he was two weeks ago.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Mike Huckabee pulled off quite a Sweeps Week carny act Saturday night, pulling in what must have been a record audience for his Fox show by sending all sorts of mixed signals about his presidential intentions. Prior to his announcement, he presided over a spirited trashing of Mitt Romney’s health care speech and listened good-naturedly to guest Ted Nugent call for Navy SEAL teams to “secure” the borders by giving transgressors the ol’ bin Laden treatment. He then sat in on bass guitar with the bow-hunting rocker on “Cat Scratch Fever,” and, finally, he faced the cameras, bobbing and weaving for a good five minutes before informing viewers that God had vetoed what could have been a successful 2012 presidential run for His Faithful Servant.
Production values aside, Huckabee’s announcement might not affect the presidential race as much as a divinely sanctioned green light would have: Until recently, after all, most handicappers had assumed he’d give 2012 a pass. But the certainty of a Huck-less field is a big deal all the same–and not without its winners and losers.
The loudest huzzahs for Huckabee’s announcement undoubtedly occurred in the Greater Minneapolis Area. With Huck out, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann now has a clean shot at the conservative evangelical activists who backed him in 2008. Indeed, many of them today might even prefer Bachmann’s Old Testament thunder to the New Testament cheeriness that Huckabee so reliably exudes. Bachmann, therefore, can’t be counted out in Iowa, since the biggest threat to her among serious social conservative zealots is no longer the 2008 Caucus winner, but probably talk-show host Herman Cain, the champion crowd-pleaser whose prospects for actual victory remain miniscule.
The ultimate beneficiary of Huck’s demurral, however, is likely to be Tim Pawlenty. His all-in-for-Iowa strategy now looks considerably more promising, and he is appealing to many pragmatic social conservatives as an electable alternative to the unpalatable Mitt Romney and (if he runs) Mitch Daniels. A field without Huckabee, moreover, is a field without a viable deep-fried southern option, which could be great news for a guy like T-Paw in South Carolina and other southern states. Pawlenty is already ahead of the game in Palmetto State pandering: He has long championed the balanced budget constitutional amendment that is Senator Jim DeMint’s litmus-test for 2012 candidates, and he’s outdoing his rivals in championing Governor Nikki Haley’s demand that they all join her crusade against the National Labor Relations Board’s intervention in a dispute between Boeing and the machinists’ union over the relocation of an airplane production plant to South Carolina.
The candidate who would appear to suffer most from this decision, on the other hand, might well be Huck’s old nemesis, Mitt Romney. After all, a Huckless field not only bolsters the chances of Pawlenty; it also increases the temptation to run for other candidates with the potential to steal support away from Romney, most obviously Mitch Daniels. And ironically, Huck’s absence from Iowa could mess up Romney’s efforts to stay out of the state entirely or at least keep expectations there very low. Polling in Iowa that does not include Huck invariably shows Mitt running first–an assessment of strength that few analysts consider real, given the heavy campaigning of other, lesser-known candidates in the state, and the cap on Romney’s support that attacks on his health care record will likely impose. Still, his illusory poll position could lure him into re-entering the state that tripped him up so badly in 2008. And if, instead, he rebukes the state decisively, ever-sensitive Iowans could deny him even a respectable finish going into the more Romney-favorable contests in Nevada and New Hampshire.
Of course, some of Huckabee’s key assets–his backers and former political operatives–have yet to declare their new allegiances, meaning that at least some of the benefits from Huck’s announcement have yet to be allocated. For instance, one of Huckabee’s key South Carolina backers, former Governor David Beasley, has started making unlikely positive noises about Jon Huntsman. But at least two important pols close to Huckabee are now truly up for grabs: Iowa’s Bob Vander Plaats, who is heading up a social conservative group that may make a big endorsement in the fall, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. Whatever direction in which these folks ultimately lean could have a decisive effect on Iowa and the subsequent contests. For the time being, however, look for Pawlenty, everybody’s favorite second choice, to acquire some more believers.

Alert readers don’t need me to tell them that Mitt Romney’s Great Big Speech on health care at the University of Michigan yesterday was in political terms an epic disaster. By adamantly defending the Massachusetts health plan that has become his personal albatross; reasserting distinctions between “RomneyCare” and “ObamaCare” that conservatives just don’t buy; and then laying out a “plan” for what he would propose as president that is no more than a compilation of every tired conservative health policy pet rock of recent years; Romney did himself no tangible good and simply provided an opportunity for a united, high-profile chorus of denunciation and mockery from the growing ranks of his detractors, right, center and left.
Yes, he gets the occasional grudging prop for refusing to “flip-flop” on health care as he famously did on abortion and same-sex relationships, but a small “authenticity” credential is no substitute for being in synch with the conservative zeitgeist on perhaps the central policy issue going into 2012.
But what I find most interesting about the reaction to Romney’s speech is that this supposed favorite of Republican “elites” seems to have become unacceptable in some pretty elite precincts. The Wall Street Journal editorial board is about as “elite” as you can get, and it fired off an op-ed on the eve of Romney’s speech that essentially told him not to even bother running for president. National Review magazine is an elite conservative opinion-leader and one which, moreover, endorsed Romney’s 2008 candidacy. NR’s editors today published an institutional take on Mitt’s speech that used “failure” in the title and scathingly criticized nearly every word Romney said, concluding with this condemnation:

We understand that Romney does not feel that he can flip-flop on what he had touted as his signature accomplishment in office. But if there is one thing we would expect a successful businessman to know, it is when to walk away from a failed investment.

Jennifer Rubin, the designated conservative blogger for the Washington Post, occupies an unusually visible spot in the GOP chattering classes. Here’s her reaction to the politics of Romney’s gambit:

Romney is entirely lacking in self-awareness and understanding of the current Republican primary electorate if he thinks this speech is going to help. I’m sure his primary opponents, like many pundits, are dumbstruck that such a capable man could be so dense when it comes to his chosen profession.

These condemnations are pretty categorical, to put it mildly. And it shows the importance of a little nuance in talking about Republican “elites.” Some elements of the “elite,” mainly political professionals and corporate lobbyists, care more about “electability” and demonstrated “competence” than any particular item of ideology. These are the folk who are made uncomfortable by cultural issues, have patronizing attitudes towards the Tea Party movement, and think debt-limit brinkmanship and absolute ideological litmus-tests generally are irresponsible. This is what’s left of Mitt Romney’s “base,” aside from regular voters who are (a) members of the LDS faith, (b) older Michiganders who fondly remember his father and mother, (c) New Englanders who have an understanding attitude about what it took for Romney to win office in a state like Massachusetts, and (d) people not paying much attention yet to the issues that divide potential Republican candidates.
Indeed, Romney’s main hope at this point seems to be based on the fact that these voters are disproportionately represented in such early-caucus-and-primary states as Nevada, New Hampshire, and Michigan.
The more ideologically committed elements of the Republican “elite,” though, seem to have already given up on Romney, and even the “practical-minded” elites on his donor lists and organizational charts could easily defect if Mitch Daniels decides to run or Tim Pawlenty begins to gain some real popularity. Mitt’s own wealth and name-identification numbers will keep his candidacy alive for the immediate future. But it’s more and more likely that he’ll need an absolute demolition derby among his opponents to get to the point John McCain improbably achieved in 2008, when hostile ideological elites sucked it up and ate their words about him in an act of partisan solidarity.

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.

The publicity surrounding the Koch Brothers’ payments to Florida State University for the hiring of economic department faculty who will have to answer to the Kochs casts an interesting light on a growing phenomenon. The Kochs have already poured a ton of money into George Mason University in Virginia, and the similarly minded BB&T Foundation has endowed “free market” faculty at the University of Texas, West Virginia University, Western Carolina University, and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.
What makes this interesting is that this new breed of right-wing donor is subsidizing the Capitalist Gospel not just at private institutions, but at money-hungry state schools. And ironically, they are propagating a particular point-of-view, namely Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, that is aggressively hostile to the Christian beliefs of the bulk of the populations of Florida, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Texas.
You have to wonder if the vigilant Christian Right organizations in these states will wake up and protest these capitalist subsidies for secular humanist teaching.