Just when you thought the 2012 Republican presidential field couldn’t get much zanier, who should appear on the highways and byways of Iowa than Judge Roy Moore!
Yes, we’re talking Roy Moore, Alabama’s famous Ten Commandments Judge, who won brief notoriety by getting himself forcibly ejected from office for insisting on the installation of a large monument to the Decalogue at his courthouse, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. Moore was treated as a martyr by theocrats everywhere, but his two subsequent bids for governor of Alabama–most recently last year, when he finished a poor fourth in the GOP primary–didn’t go much of anywhere.
Judge Roy has also been a fixture at Tea Party events, serving as the most visible link between that “movement” and the Christian Right. But resistance to GLBT rights has long been his go-to issue, and that’s what has drawn him to Iowa, where conservative activists are obsessed with an effort to overturn the State Supreme Court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. Indeed, Moore’s appearance at an anti-marriage-equality rally in Des Moines last month seems to have led directly to his decision to launch a presidential exploratory committee and stick around Iowa as a putative candidate. He’s being squired around the state by one of the co-chairs of Mike Huckabee’s 2008 Iowa campaign.
If nothing else, Moore’s move should help make Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain seem more moderate by comparison, though you do have to wonder exactly how much oxygen exists for multiple candidates associated with the harder-core elements of the Christian Right. The more conventional Iowa Republicans have to be getting a bit uncomfortable by now at the realization their state party has become a global wingnut magnet.

So Beltway deficit hawks probably enjoyed the little scare thrown into financial markets today by Standard & Poor’s (yes, the folks who completely missed every sign of the financial crisis), which suggested future action to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating if nothing is done soon to achieve a bipartisan deficit reduction plan.
But the warning wasn’t really music to the ears of the supposedly-debt-obsessed Tea Party Movement, whose leaders right now seem to treat as Public Enemy Number One the possibility of a bipartisan budget plan, because they know it would have to include increased revenues.
RedState’s Erick Erickson has declared war on his own senator, Saxby Chambliss, for participating in the Gang of Six negotiations aimed at a Bowles-Simpson modeled deficit reduction package. All over the country, Tax Weekend Tea Party gatherings were focused on intimidating Republican pols into opposing any compromise with Democrats on budget issues.
It’s far past time to understand that conservative activists only care about budget deficits and debts when Democrats are in office, and only favor action on deficits and debts if they involve wrecking the New Deal/Great Society programs, and actually cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
No bipartisan deficit reduction package will ever get the support of today’s conservative movement. It has to be their way or the highway, and their way means repeal of progressive taxes and progressive policies generally.
I hope the mainstream media finally gets that rather important detail straight.

I know, I know, early presidential nominating polls are not very meaningful, and usually reflect name ID as much as anything else, and yes, I know, “national” polls of this nature are especially insignificant, because a handful of early states are likely to determine the nomination. But still, PPP’s new poll showing Donald Trump pulling out to a big lead (at 26%, he has higher numbers than anyone has shown in any national poll that I’ve seen) over the entire GOP presidential field is pretty shocking.
Equally shocking is PPP’s finding that 23% of self-identified Republicans say they won’t vote for any candidate “who firmly stated they believed Barack Obama was born in the United States,” with another 39% being unsure if they could stomach such a radical proposition. Trump pulls 37% among the self-proclaimed birthers, and 28% among the maybe-birthers, so it’s reasonably clear his overall standing isn’t just the product of being a television celebrity.
Now maybe he won’t run, or he’ll run as an indie, or he won’t run seriously (there seems to be a lot of doubt about whether he’s remotely as rich as he claims to be), or those voters expressing support for him will reject him when they know more about his background and views. I certainly don’t think he’s in any danger of winning the nomination. But the real issue is that if he maintains or increases these levels of popularity among rank-and-file Republicans, the tolerance of GOP insiders for lower levels of craziness is bound to increase, giving them exactly what they do not need right now: another big push to the right.
Already, “mainstream” candidates are making some pretty crazy sounds. Newt Gingrich is addicted to Muslim-baiting. The quintessentially unthreatening Tim Pawlenty has recently been flirting with gold standard advocacy, while opposing the last appropriations deal and saying extremely irresponsible things about the upcoming debt limit vote. They’ve all adopted the habit of calling the current administration “socialist” and referring to rich people exclusively as “job-producers.” What’s next? Mitt Romney buying ads to endorse the Atlas Shrugged movie? Haley Barbour coming out for repeal of the 14th amendment? Who knows.
Perhaps some candidate will successfully play the Trump Card by convincing the powers that be in the GOP to quietly designate him or her as the one who can save the party from The Donald’s level of kookiness, and get a blank check to compete with him for the crazy-person vote. If so, things could get very weird on the campaign trail.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
By now, it should be obvious that anyone hoping party insiders will draft a Jeb Bush or Chris Christie or Rick Perry to rescue the lackluster Republican 2012 field from itself is living in a hopeless fantasyland. But in case you need even more evidence, consider this: Dark-horse candidates who aren’t fully committed to running for president, deep within their bones, have a terrible track record of misfires and flameouts.
We need look no further back than 2008 for a vivid historical example. That year, Republicans were in a similar mood, disenchanted for one reason or another with Giuliani, McCain, Romney, Huckabee, and the whole crew. At that point, the GOP’s brilliant backup plan was Draft Fred Thompson. His positive qualities were obvious enough: The former senator and longtime actor had a conservative enough record to be acceptable to activists without being threatening to swing voters; he seemed articulate and reasonably smart; and he was, of course, a celebrity who got to play a gruff, tough, avuncular prosecutor. He was sort of Tim Pawlenty with a growl and gravitas.
Thompson’s perceived electability was such that his putative candidacy was a much-awaited event, expected to change the dynamics of the race overnight. And once he finally announced in September of 2007–on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” no less–he won a slew of early endorsements, including the coveted nods from the National Right to Life Committee and Iowa’s conservative potentate Steve King.
But it was already becoming clear that he lacked commitment. Even before his appearance on “Leno,” there were abundant signs that he wasn’t running for president so much as walking–or even riding a golf cart–with abundant stops for rest and ice cream. His first Iowa appearance, in August, was at the Iowa State Fair, a must-do for any candidate and particularly one like Thompson, who had already skipped the official Straw Poll that serves as the major fundraiser for the state GOP. With the eyes of the first-in-the-nation-caucus state on him, Big Fred showed up at the sweaty, extremely informal event sporting Gucci loafers and proceeded to spend the day tooling around the fairgrounds in the aforementioned cart–a very big no-no for anyone who wasn’t either disabled or a major Fair donor.
This turned out to be an apt harbinger of Thompson’s campaign style. In their account of the 2008 campaign, Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson summed up the problem:

His campaign went through three phases: anticipation, hype, and disappointment. He initially surrounded himself with a team that had little experience in modern presidential campaigns. They convinced him new media offered a way around the rigors of the campaign trail, which appealed to a man with a reputation in Republican circles as a not particularly hard worker. …
“Fred was sold a bill of goods about what it took to run for president,” communications director Todd Harris later told us. “He was given the distinct impression … that in 2008 all you needed to do was have a heavy blog presence, appear regularly on Fox News and specifically on Hannity & Colmes, and from time to time go out and have an event.”

Despite tons of national press, and the support of King and the NRLC, Thompson limped home with a poor third-place finish in Iowa. He then staked everything on a final effort in South Carolina, and again finished third, managing in the end simply to take votes from Huckabee and guarantee McCain a win that got him to the brink of the nomination. The whole exercise was a pointless disaster that raised the GOP’s hopes and ultimately saddled the party with a weak nominee–so weak, in fact, that McCain had to choose Sarah Palin as his running-mate in order to preserve a semblance of unity.
The truth is that Republicans ought to take a good honest look back at the Thompson campaign and ask themselves if they really want a candidate who has to be talked into running. Indeed, Fred is by no means the first to be coaxed into a race by insiders who made it sound easy to convert the acclaim of elites into caucus or primary wins. Political history is littered with Big Dogs who quickly got into trouble in the tall grass of actual nomination contests: Wilbur Mills in 1972, who won a booming 4 percent in New Hampshire; Birch Bayh in 1976, who lost with a seventh-place finish in Massachusetts; Lloyd Bentsen, who was destroyed by Jimmy Carter despite raising tons of money; John Connally, another big fundraiser who couldn’t win actual votes; Howard Baker, who dropped out after New Hampshire in 1980; and Phil Gramm, who burned out in 1996. Fred Thompson was also not the first candidate of “half a mind” to run for president whose diffidence ultimately repelled voters. Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and Bill Bradley in 2000 both famously had trouble taking their own campaigns seriously; and Nelson Rockefeller in 1968 and Ross Perot in 1992 stumbled painfully because of their indecision about whether to run at all.
The moral of the story for 2012 is that the presidential campaign trail is brutal and unforgiving–particularly right now, and particularly for Republicans. The early Republican caucuses and primaries will be dominated by conservative activists who want a crusade, not a mere political campaign, and will almost certainly punish candidates who don’t give the impression that they will fight for every vote. This is a very poor environment for a “draft,” or for a politician pretending to run, reluctantly, out of a sense of civic obligation. Even Ronald Reagan got himself into early trouble in 1980 by campaigning as though voters owed him the nomination, with bands playing “Hail to the Chief” before every speech. He lost Iowa that year, and had to run a savagely ideological campaign in New Hampshire in order to recover.
So as the days rush by and this already slow-to-develop Republican nomination contest begins in earnest, insiders hoping for dark horse salvation need to get a grip and realize that it’s very unlikely they’ll be saved from this field by Christie or Jebbie or Petraeus or Rubio or Perry. All the hype in the world can’t replace commitment and extra time spent in church basements or living rooms in Pella and Nashua and Spartanburg. Just ask Fred Thompson.

Reactions to the president’s “budget speech” today are slowly rolling in, but based on how he tackled the basic issues, I think we can expect two fundamental positions from Democratic opinion-leaders.
Some progressives believe any talk about budget deficits being a paramount issue or spending cuts being necessary concedes crucial ground to Republicans. Others–often the same people–think any talk of a “budget deal” with Republicans concedes equally crucial ground, because (a) GOP intransigence will inevitably make any deal a victory for their cause, no matter what Republicans say about it publicly, and (b) any gestures of bipartisanship make both parties seem equally responsible for failures to reach agreement, which disguises GOP extremism
To these folk, Obama’s speech probably represented a continuation of a deeply flawed strategy, albeit not so bad as the full-throated endorsement of the Bowles-Simpson recommendations that some had feared.
Other progressives think genuine public concern (not to mention elite concern) over deficits is now significant enough that it cannot be ignored, and that the persuadable element of the public also wants bipartisan action with visible participation by the president, which means regular gestures of bipartisanship are valuable if only to expose Republican extremism.
For this faction, which views deficit-talk and bipartisanship-talk as a strategic necessity, Obama’s speech will probably be viewed as quite good, particularly since most of it was devoted to an attack, explicit and implicit, on the GOP “narrative” of the deficit problem and its recommendations for dealing with it.
Without question, the president provided a brisk but pointed critique of Paul Ryan’s budget proposals that highlighted their radical intent–not just in the context of public opinion but of American history–and deceptive nature. He also, however briefly, introduced a discussion of income inequality as background to his call for “shared sacrifice” and his resistance to Ryan’s demand for still more tax cuts for the wealthy. These are themes progressives have been begging him to raise.
All in all, the speech will probably reassure those progressives who hadn’t already despaired of Obama’s budget strategy. And it’s worth noting that this cohort of Democrats remains dominant among the rank-and-file, if not elites. The latest Gallup weekly breakdown of presidential approval ratings showed 80% of self-identified “liberal Democrats” approving of his job performance. For the record, that’s a bit better than Bill Clinton’s 76% approval rating among Democrats as a whole at this point in 1995.

When the alleged presidential front-runner of the allegedly ascendant political party takes his first formal step towards candidacy, and pretty much everybody either yawns or jeers, it is clearly not a good sign for the politician in question. And in general, I can’t recall a presidential “front-runner” who’s been written off as a hopeless loser long before the contest begins by about half the political cognoscenti.
But that’s where we are with Mitt Romney. In a piece designed to be studiously neutral, and the first of a series outlining the strategies of the leading GOP candidates, Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post goes through the case for Romney’s nomination methodically: he’s got the obsessive economic message the country’s waiting for; he’s got two early caucus and primary states he ought to win; and he’s got money out the wazoo. Then Chris gets to the “hurdle” part of his analysis, and pretty much says he doesn’t think Romney has a clue about how to overcome it:

Today marks the five-year anniversary of his signing of a health care bill in Massachusetts that has drawn unfavorable comparisons among conservatives to the law pushed by President Obama last year.
Romney, to date, has given little indication of how he will clear this hurdle; he never mentioned health care in his announcement video on Monday, for example….
Romney allies also insist that the idea that a single issue will bring down his candidacy ignores the recent history of nomination fights, noting that Sen John McCain’s embrace of comprehensive immigration reform didn’t foreclose his chances in 2008. (Of course, only when McCain abandoned any talk of immigration reform did he begin his political comeback.)
What’s clear is that whether or not Romney wants to talk about health care, his primary opponents are going to do their damndest to make it issue number one for him.

Over at the Daily Beast, long-time Republican operative Mark McKinnon didn’t bother to attempt neutrality:

[W]hy is it that with the announcement of his exploratory committee today there seemed to be a huge collective yawn? And the refrain from most people, including me, “What, I thought he announced his exploratory committee a year ago.”
Mitt Romney is damned by timing and circumstance.
Let us ponder some of Romney’s problems:
• He is an entirely conventional candidate in an entirely unconventional time in American politics. People don’t want the Cola. They want the Un-Cola.
• He may try to make the moves, but he sure doesn’t look or sound like a Tea Party candidate. And the more he makes the moves, the more he looks like the human pretzel he became in 2008, when he contorted himself to try to please the right wing of the party.
• The No. 1 issue for Republicans in 2012 is going to be President Obama’s health-care law. And Romney is already wrapping himself around the axle trying to explain how the health plan he engineered in Massachusetts is substantially different than Obama’s. And how is this for irony: Romney announced his exploratory committee on the fifth anniversary of “Romneycare.”
• Nobody really thinks or talks about Romney as the prohibitive favorite he ought to be.

Whatever else it means, this insider attitude guarantees that Romney is going to be operating without a net once the campaign is under way. With the entire political world impatiently waiting for his inevitable demise so that the “real” campaign can get under way, every mistake the man makes is going to get exaggerated in the hope that he will see the light and stop taking up space.
I do know people who think Mitt will win the nomination, but only because they rate the GOP field as so bad and chaotic that Romney will probably wind up in one-on-one competition with someone blatantly unelectable (e.g., Michele Bachmann) or incapable of rubbing two nickels together (e.g., Mike Huckabee). In other words, Romney’s a loser unless he’s facing an even bigger loser than he is.
From the perspective of the Invisible Primary of elite opinion, it’s not the sort of atmosphere that makes you hear faint but unmistakable strains of “Hail to the Chief” when Romney enters the room.

Anyone interested in the history of the Christian Right–and given its continuing power in the conservative movement and the GOP, that should include readers of this site–is encouraged to take a look at my latest book review for the Washington Monthly. It’s a review of From Bible Belt to Sun Belt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism, by Purdue University historian Darren Dochuk.
It’s a complicated book, but well worth the effort. Dochuk convincingly argues that much of what later became the Christian Right was first incubated not in the Deep South, but among southern transplants in the Los Angeles area. In the cultural maelstrom of southern California in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, an impressive array of evangelical ministers who combined rigidly conservative theology and politics with a highly adaptive institutional style pioneered a variety of innovations that later “went national,” including close cooperation with corporate leaders, joint Protestant-Catholic initiatives, parachurch organizations, school textbook and curriculum wars, the “Jesus Movement,” neo-pentecostalism, and even megachurches. All this happened long before the southern-led Moral Majority organization helped elect the favorite politician of SoCal evangelicals, Ronald Reagan, as president.
Dochuk’s book is also a good primer on the post-WW2 history of La-La-Land itself, with its rapidly expanding defense industry, its land use battles, its labor and racial conflicts, and the search of many of its citizens–particularly white working-class migrants from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas–for certainty amidst radical cultural and economic change.
You’ll learn a lot about California history, but even more, about California’s influence on the country as a whole, even now.

If you are a progressive depressed by the concessions made on appropriations by the White House and congressional Democrats late last week, maybe it will help to read this assessment from the very influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson:

The most depressing bit of all of this is how quickly conservative pundits who promised they were to going to throw off the shackles of fidelity to the Republican Party after Bush and become again true conservative warriors for freedom have descended, automaton like, into guttural cheerleading for a Republican Party that just went from $100 billion in promised cuts to a third of that in actual cuts while selling out the unborn for roughly $1000 per murdered child assuming reports are true that they got the Democrats to increase cuts $1 billion in exchange for dropping the defunding of Planned Parenthood.

Actually, I’d encourage a careful reading of this and similar posts by anyone who is under the illusion that a compromise over abortion policy is ever a lively possibility.

So the federal government didn’t shut down, and the appropriations deal that was cut disappointed many Tea Party types (particularly those focused on defunding family planning) and probably even more progressives, with the latter being particularly upset by White House boasting over the level of spending cuts involved.
But just about everyone understands the bigger fight over the long-term budget is a much bigger deal, with the possibility of a rejection of a public debt limit increase being the hand grenade Tea Party allies are threatening to unpin.
This is the point at which tactical retreats by Democrats will stop making much sense. And for that reason, there is already heavy grumbling among Democrats about reports the White House is going to soon release plans for a deficit reduction strategy that includes “entitlement reform.”
The key thing to watch for is whether the administration consistently links changes in entitlement programs (sure to fall far short of the kind of toxic “reforms” being proposed by Paul Ryan) to tax increases for the wealthy. So long as they do that, and Republicans continue to oppose revenue increases as a theological matter, then talk of “betrayal” or “surrender” is simply wrong. Sure, many progressives prefer a different strategy based on out-front, unambiguous opposition to any change in entitlements. But that’s not the same as asserting that anything less is no strategy at all.