It’s not clear just yet that “electibility” is going to be an overriding factor in the Republican 2012 presidential nominating contest, partly because so many Republicans are convinced that electibility and ideological coherence are the same thing, and partly because they think the election will be a referendum on a “failed” Obama administration. But it’s always useful to keep an eye on head-to-head trial polls pitting the president against this or that would-be successor, and PPP has a new batch out that are quite interesting.
Against the five best known GOP probables, Obama leads Huckabee by three points, Romney by five, Gingrich and Ron Paul by nine, and Palin by twelve. But in terms of positive support for the five GOPers, there’s surprisingly little variation: just five points between Paul’s 39% and Huck’s 44%. Meanwhile, a “generic” Republican candidate would get 47%, tying Obama (and a generic “moderate” Republican, not that there’s any such thing these days, would receive 46%, actually leading Obama by two points).
The other interesting finding involves someone rarely tested in polls, but who is the object of intense longing and speculation among many conservatives (most notably the folks at National Review, who devoted much of a recent issue to an effort to get him to consider running): Jeb Bush. In a trial heat with Obama, Jebbie lost by the exact same fourteen-point margin as a rather less than serious possible candidate, Donald Trump. He also did a lot more poorly than his older brother (in a hypothetical in which W. was allowed to run for a third term), who ran within four points of Obama. Meanwhile, 44% of respondents (including half of independents) said they wouldn’t vote for another member of the Bush family at all, a good measurement of hard-core dynastic fatigue.
These polls obviously don’t mean that much this early in the 2012 cycle, but they do suggest two things: nobody in the current presidential field is lighting up supporters, and while Jeb Bush might solve a lot of the GOP’s internal problems, his famous name remains more poison than magic.

One of the great mysteries of the Egyptian crisis was the ability of the Mubarak government to disrupt internet services, in a vain effort to disrupt protests. James Glanz and John Markoff have written a fascinating account in the New York Times about that phenomenon, and exactly how and why it occurred:

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.
Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.
China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.
But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

In the end, finding the “off switch” for the internet hardly saved the Mubarak government, but other authoritarian regimes were probably watching and taking notes.

A New Republic piece by Alexander Hart that tries to draw attention not only to the fiscal crisis in the states, but to the human and economic consequences of massive state spending cutbacks, almost feels quaint. Yes, everything he says is correct; it really is dumb to tolerate big state employee layoffs and public benefit cuts in the midst of an economy struggling to recover. But the GOP takeover of the House makes any relief package for state and local governments a complete non-starter.
Sure, Republicans are willing to “help” the states by eliminating Medicaid coverage mandates and thus encouraging states to dump millions of poor and elderly recipients from the rolls. Beyond that, any relief, however humane or sensible, would be denounced as a “bailout” or another “failed stimulus package.” So it ain’t happening.
Indeed, the hot conservative idea for the states at the moment is the suggestion, made most visibly by Newt Gingrich and Grover Norqust, that they be allowed to declare bankruptcy. And Gingrich has made it abundantly clear what his motives are in pushing for this extraordinary measure:

I … hope the House Republicans are going to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy, so that states like California and New York and Illinois that think they’re going to come to Washington for money can be told, you know, you need to sit down with all your government employee unions and look at their health plans and their pension plans and, frankly, if they don’t want to change, our recommendation is you go into bankruptcy court and let the bankruptcy judge change it, and I would make the federal bankruptcy law prohibit tax increases as part of the solution, so no bankruptcy judge could impose a tax increase on the people of the states.

So two of the major tribunes of the alleged party of fiscal probity are encouraging states to default on their obligations in order to screw over public employee unions and cut current retirement and health benefits.
This won’t actually happen, if only because Newt and Grover’s Wall Street buddies aren’t about to get in line to recoup their own state debt holdings. But it’s an interesting reflection on the true conservative commitment to federalism that prominent leaders would even discuss this idea, even as they frown on middle-class consumer debtors and reject any genuine relief for the states.

The release of the president’s FY 2012 budget and the beginning of a protracted budget battle distracted a lot of attention from the denoument of the CPAC conference, which concluded on Saturday. Suffice it to say that if CPAC was indeed the “starter’s gun” for the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest, it was something of a false start, since it changed little or nothing.
First of all, the “barometer” value of the presidential straw poll held at CPAC was spoiled, for the second year in a row, by a heavy turnout from Ron Paul’s collegiate cadres, who would have won the poll for him even if he had spent his time at the podium hustling gold coins. You could try to make a case that this or that candidate’s single-digit finish in the straw poll was more significant than another’s, but any survey won by Ron Paul is suspect as a measurement of conservative grassroots support.
Second of all, none of the would-be presidents at CPAC bombed and none broke away from the pack. You can read lots of assessments of the speeches (I’d recommend those by Politico‘s Alexander Burns and Slate‘s Dave Weigel). But even the consensus “top speaker,” Mitch Daniels, probably didn’t do much to sway social conservatives with his double-down justification for elevating fiscal issues above all other concerns. (If you believe that legalized abortion is a second Holocaust, then you aren’t going to be convinced to stop focusing on that even if you agree with Daniels that public debt is “the new Red Menace.”) Yes, Tim Pawlenty showed some fire, but didn’t quite get audience members beating on each other with big sticks. And yes, by touting his record as governor Haley Barbour finally gave conservatives a reason to like him other than his prodigious fund-raising ability, but it won’t be easy over time to convince actual voters that Mississippi is some sort of model for the rest of America.
At the same time, extreme dark horses like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and John Bolton didn’t do anything to create some credibility-earning buzz or get big donors reaching for their checkbooks. It’s hard to conclude that Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee lost much of anything by skipping the whole show.
It’s clear attendees had a good, rousing time (pure entertainment offerings like Donald Trump helped), but fissures in the conservative movement were not healed and may have grown deeper. Libertarian/neocon tensions were definitely heightened by the disruption of a Cheney/Rumsfeld lovefest by Paulites. The furor over gay conservative group GOProud’s inclusion at the event–puncuated by the denunciation of “bigots” by GOProud leader Chris Barron–appears to have led to a ban on the group for next year’s conference. And Islamophobic attacks on Grover Norquist for defending Muslims for America participation at CPAC took on a whole new dimension after the conference when RedState proprietor Erick Erickson called on conservatives to find a new DC gathering point and abandon Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings.
So at a conference where genuine diversity of opinion was limited, and pretty much everyone joined in trashing Barack Obama as a socialist and a terrorist-loving wimp, the big concern remained rooting out heresy rather than helping Republicans settle on a presidential nominee. No wonder conservatives continue to idolize Ronald Reagan. They could use a little more leadership right now.

In a perfectly rational world, you’d think Republicans would make Latino voters a very ripe target. It’s a rapidly growing segment of the electorate in which Republicans have occasionally shown strength, and it was an especially important element of the Obama coalition in 2008.
But in a new tracking poll from Latino Decisions based on surveys of Latinos in 21 states (representing 95% of the Latino population), Obama is showing impressive strength in this community, and Republicans are making no gains at all.
The president’s job approval rating in this poll is at 70%, up from 57% in the last LD survey in September. The percentage of respondents saying they are “certain” they will vote to re-elect Obama is at a relatively soft 43%; but with “probables” and leaners, his “re-elect” number rises to 61%. Meanwhile, the total percentage of Latinos inclined to vote for a Republican candidate in 2012 is at 21%, with only 9% certain to vote that way. It’s worth noting that in most polls, a “generic” Republican presidential candidate has been doing a lot better than named candidates in trial heats against Obama. And the 61-21 margin he enjoys among Latinos in this survey compares favorably with the 67-31 margin he won in 2008 against John McCain.
With the Republican presidential nominating process more than likely pushing the candidates towards immigrant-baiting statements, and with Latinos having relatively positive attitudes towards the kind of federal health care and education policies the GOP will be going after with big clawhammers, it’s hard to see exactly how the GOP makes gains among Latinos between now and Election Day. They’d better hope their 2010 margins among white voters hold up.

With the release of the president’s FY 2012 budget today, what promises to be a proctracted struggle between the White House and House Republicans (with no telling how many side-struggles involving Senate Democrats and progressive Democrats) over the size and shape of the federal budget.
There’s already some understandable progressive angst over the way the president has positioned himself for this fight–proposing his own five-year freeze of nondefense discretionary spending, and offering specific cuts to programs that are by no means useless or counterproductive (e.g., low-income heating assistance). Why not just refuse to concede anything on the domestic spending front and start the battle on more neutral ground?
That strategy would be based on the assumption that both sides will eventually meet in the middle on budgetary issues, making the starting point extraordinarily important. I suspect the White House believes public opinion will matter a great deal in the resolution of the budget battle, and wants its initial offer to be credible, not just as far away from the GOP’s as is possible. Before dismissing his approach as excessively conciliatory, It should be kept in mind that Obama has refused to make any concessions on “entitlement reform,” despite the recommendations of his own deficit commission; this is the concession Republicans desperately want, because they are afraid to “go there” without bipartisan cover. This dynamic, along with the decision GOPers have made to focus not on the actual overall federal budget, but on the discretionary spending contained in the continuing resolution due to expire on March 4, is what has made it necessary for Republicans to propose specific and draconian cuts to popular programs. Thanks in part to Obama’s tactics, they’ve exposed themselves to the characterization of their position well explained by the title of a Jonathan Cohn post at TNR: “Good Bye Big Bird. Hello E. Coli.”
The more immediate problem for Obama is that he has proposed his own nondefense discretionary spending cuts in order to protect “investments”–some in infrastrucure programs, most in education–that requiring spending increases. He began making the economic case for these investments in his State of the Union Address. But he’s got a long way to go before convincing sizable majorities of the public that they are essential to the immediate task of creating jobs and reducing epidemic levels of income inequality.

The pious claim of many Tea Party and other conservative movement activists and apologists is that they simply want to rein in runaway government spending and reduce disastrous levels of public debt. In practice, of course, they don’t care about debt if it’s created by corporate or high-end tax cuts, and they are often less interested in reducing government spending than in redirecting it to their favored constituencies.
A very good example of this phenomenon is coming to light in Florida, where newly elected governor Rick Scott, the famously controversial (that’s putting it nicely) health industry executive who bought himself the Republican nomination last year and then won a very close general election, has rolled out his budget proposals for the economically battered and nearly dysfunctional Sunshine State.
Yes, Scott is proposing $5 billion in state spending reductions (in absolute terms, not reductions from some sort of current-services budget). Many of these cuts seemed to be ideologically driven, such as the decimation of the state Department of Community Affairs, which runs growth-management programs hated by developers; and a (roughly) ten percent cut in K-12 education, part and parcel of the state GOP’s war with teachers and other state employees.
But the size of the cuts wouldn’t be nearly so high if Scott were not also insisting on major tax cuts, notably in corporate taxes (due to be phased out entirely in a few years) and in state-controlled property taxes that support public schools.
Moreoever, nestled in his budget proposal are spending increases that are designed to redistribute resources according to conservative ideological prescriptions. Most remarkable is his request for $800 million (over two years) for “economic development incentives,” which almost certainly means a gubernatorially-controlled slush fund to be used to bribe companies to relocate to Florida through tax abatements, free government services, and other subsidies. And even as he sought major cuts in public school funding (in a state already facing something of a school financing crisis), he managed to find room to propose $250 million in private-school vouchers.
Scott seems to be exulting in the radicalism of his budget, which he chose to announce not at the state capitol but at an actual, billed-as-such Tea Party rally at a Baptist Church (!). He may or may not get his way on the details with a Republican-controlled legislature, but he has certainly initiated class warfare, and a redistribution of public resources to those “job creators” at the top of the income and power pyramid, with a vengeance.
UPDATE: Steve Benen hit the publish button about the same time as I did on a similar piece on Scott’s budget, though he provided more detail about the cuts, while I really focused on the ideological meaning of the increases Scott sought. Steve also linked to an Atrios tweet that noted Scott’s resemblence to the Superman uber-villian Lex Luthor.

So for all the endless efforts by the managers of the CPAC conference to head off a visible revolt of social conservatives, looks like they were preparing for the wrong threat to unity. When Dick Cheney showed up to give Donald Rumsfeld an award, it was an irresistable provocation to the large number of Ron Paul Revolutionaries in the audience, some of whom walked out while others stayed to noisily heckle the two old warriors.
As Dave Weigel quickly pointed out, the CPAC folks blundered badly by scheduling the neocon nostalgia-fest immediately after Rand Paul’s speech, which naturally attracted every Paulite in greater Washington. All whipped up by Paul the Younger’s remarks, they naturally cut lose when two of their most formidable enemies took the stage. The name of Rumsfeld’s award–“Defender of the Constitution”–probably didn’t help.
Now that they are properly aroused, it will be interesting to see how many Paulites participate in Saturday’s presidential straw poll, which their zany leader won last year.

This item is cross-posted from Progressive Fix.
Tomorrow every wingnut’s attention will be on Washington, where the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) begins its annual meeting and vetting session for Republican presidential candidates. The three-day affair will end with a straw poll of attendees that becomes, for better or worse, a data point in the nominating process (last year’s straw poll was sort of ruined, according to most accounts, when Ron Paul’s college-aged supporters packed the room and won it for him). The significance of the event has probably been increased by the late-developing presidential field; this really does represent, as Michael Shear of the New York Times put it yesterday, the “starter’s pistol” for the 2012 cycle.
There’s always some maneuvering about who shows up and doesn’t show up, and who’s behind the scenes manipulating things, at CPAC meetings. But this year is kind of special in that there has been a sustained and ostensibly ideological effort to boycott the event from the right. It’s been organized by social conservatives who are unhappy that a gay conservative group–known as GOProud, which is distinct from the better-known Log Cabin Republicans in that it is more explicitly conservative on issues other than GLBT rights–has been allowed to become one of the meeting’s many sponsors.
More generally, elements of the Christian Right may be using this brouhaha to send a message that they will not accept subordination to those in the conservative movement who demand an exclusive focus on fiscal issues. Indeed, in addition to the GOProud’s inclusion, one of the grievances against CPAC among social conservatives is the very fact that Mitch Daniels has been given a featured speaking slot, presumably as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels has enraged the Cultural Right by calling for a “truce” in the culture wars, which from their point of view means a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding refusal to go beyond lip service on issues like abortion, gay rights and church-state separation.
There’s a secondary behind-the-scenes issue with CPAC that’s drawn less attention outside the fever swamps of right-wing internecine warfare: anger among Islamophobes at the inclusion of a group called Muslims for America, which noted neoconservative agitator Frank Gaffney has attacked as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brouhaha in turn reflects long-standing hostility among some conservatives to the efforts of anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, long a fixture at CPAC meetings, to legitimize Muslim-American organizations and convince Republicans to pursue Muslim voters.
Finally, some conservatives have always had issues with CPAC due to concerns over the alleged financial irregularities of David Keene, long-time head of the American Conservative Union, the primary sponsor of the event. It’s often hard to untangle the personal from the ideological in these disputes, but they both definitely exist.
In any event, eight significant conservative organizations have joined the boycott of this year’s CPAC conference, the most prominent being the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. But the boycott hasn’t had much of an effect on the would-be presidents invited to speak. According to Slate‘s Dave Weigel, no-shows by Sen. Jim DeMint and House Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan may be partially attributable to sympathy for the boycott, and/or for the complaints of social conservatives that their agenda is being deep-sixed.
It’s also possible that the most notable no-shows, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, are being influenced by it; it’s hard to say, though in an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody, Palin seemed to be saying in her elliptical manner that she had no problem with GOProud’s inclusion in the conference. Palin has now found reason to skip four CPACs in a row, and some of her detractors say she simply does not want to speak without a hefty fee and an unchallenged spotlight.
Others have interpreted Huckabee’s and Palin’s decision to take a pass as indicating they really aren’t running for president in 2012. Influential Iowa Republican activist Craig Robinson took this tack in ranking the presidential candidates’ potential appeal in his state’s pivotal caucuses, refusing to list Huckabee and Palin as members of the potential field.
So background noise aside, what should astute observers look for at CPAC, particularly in the cattle-call series of “featured speeches” that begin with Michele Bachmann tomorrow and conclude with fiery Tea Party congressman Alan West of Florida on Saturday? Obviously the straw poll results–and the frantic efforts of the winner and the losers to spin them–will be of interest. The speeches may get tedious to non-conservatives; this is not a venue for truth-telling challenges to conservative shibboleths, and the smell of red meat will be overpowering. You can count on metronomic shout-outs to the power and the glory of the Tea Party Movement, and vast quantities of Obama-bashing.
Since no one can rival Michele Bachmann in appealing to the conservative id, I’d keep an eye on her speech, particularly since she’s playing with the idea of running for president (probably if Palin does not run), and could be formidable in Iowa. Similarly, a much longer long-shot for the presidency, John Bolton, could use his Saturday address to play off the news from Egypt and challenge both the administration and his fellow-conservatives to treat the disturbances in the Middle East as an Islamist threat to U.S. security.
But the most interesting speeches may be from presidential wannabes not known for their ability to get conservative crowds growling and roaring. Tim Pawlenty, for example, is putting together a credible Iowa campaign and seems to be every Republican’s second choice, but desperately needs to show he can fire up the troops. Mitt Romney (who won the CPAC straw poll at this point in the 2008 cycle) needs to recapture the mojo that made him the “true conservative” candidate four years ago, particularly now that he’s being generally depicted as representing what’s left of the moderate tradition in the GOP. Rick Santorum is a good bet to bring the grievances of the Christian Right into the open. Haley Barbour could really use a speech branding himself as something other than a former tobacco lobbyist who can raise large stacks of cash when he isn’t displaying an unfortunate nostalgia for the Old South.
It should be a good show, and an illustration of the hard-core Right’s emergence from the sidelines of Republican politics into the very center of power and attention.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
After a good quarter-century run, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has announced it will close its doors this month. Its original mission has long been accomplished: This small but famous–or, depending on your orientation, infamous–organization was founded in the wake of the 1984 Walter Mondale debacle by two House Democratic Caucus staffers named Al From and Will Marshall, who enlisted an assortment of elected officials with names like Clinton, Gore, Gephardt, Nunn, Babbitt, and Robb. Its goal was to lay the “message” and policy groundwork for a successful Democratic presidential run, at a time when Republicans were said to have an “Electoral College lock.” With an eight-year Clinton presidency on the books and Obama looking pretty well positioned for reelection, it’s past time to conclude that the lock has been picked.
In fact, there’s a case to be made that the DLC’s immediate raison d’etre was fulfilled in 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush. At that point, the council had already evolved from a clubhouse for elected officials disgruntled with the ineptitude of the national party to an idea factory for its prize pupil and tutor (Clinton). Having decided to sojourn on, it became a well-established political fixture that managed a distinctive ideological brand while occasionally engaging in high-profile factional battles with “the Left,” a term it often applied to orthodox liberals, as well as antiwar activists and various interest and identity groups. Sometimes, the DLC even disagreed with Clinton, as it did on HillaryCare (supporting, instead, an approach to health care reform close to what Barack Obama offered upon becoming president).
After Bill Clinton left office, however, they–perhaps I should say “we,” since I served as a policy director there for about a decade before I left in 2006, and I’m still a part-time fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), originally the DLC’s think tank–clearly experienced something of an identity crisis. Beginning in 2000, the DLC determined to rebuild its bench and recapture its original role as a home for non-Washington Democrats left behind by the national party. It engaged in an immensely useful, but not very visible, effort to build a network of state and local elected officials, focused on training and fostering policy cross-pollination among state legislators, mayors, county officials, and sub-gubernatorial statewide officeholders. That network has a pretty impressive alumni list, ranging from Obama cabinet members Tom Vilsack, Kathleen Sebelius, and Janet Napolitano to new Senator Chris Coons and California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom. Yet, with “New Democratic” ideas permeating almost the entire Democratic Party, it was clear that the DLC was searching for new ways to be useful, if not a new rationale.
Strangely, just as the DLC was reorienting itself away from Washington, the myth that the DLC served as a shadowy and very powerful link between corporate lobbyists and Beltway Democrats began to grow and grow–fueled by a series of noisy verbal joists between DLC leaders and Howard Dean during the 2004 presidential cycle, followed by extended cold warfare with progressive bloggers in the aftermath of that election. None of this had much to do with what the DLC was doing every day, but it sure got a lot of attention, most of it negative, and preempted any progressive appreciation for the DLC’s policy work or its regular savaging of Bush-era Republicans.
In truth, the DLC was never the ideological or political monolith that its enemies–or even its friends–sometimes imagined. Yes, it was partially financed by corporate money (mainly because corporations wanted to hedge their partisan bets, and because the DLC was at least friendly to them), and it undoubtedly went far over the top in celebrating the “New Economy,” along with the deregulatory demands of the tech industry and its financial allies. But it also pioneered attacks on “corporate welfare” in the federal budget and tax code, opposed state-level tax giveaways as an economic-development tool, and opposed most of corporate America’s legislative priorities (other than on trade policy), most notably the Bush tax cuts and the health care industry’s cherished Medicare prescription drug benefit. Yes, the DLC fought with the labor movement over trade policy, but it also supported the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which could not have pleased corporate donors, and, on one occasion, PPI’s Will Marshall co-authored an economic policy manifesto with American Prospect editor Bob Kuttner. And yes, the DLC often scourged Democrats for appearing to be weak on defense, and it became too closely associated with the Iraq war (though it quickly split with George W. Bush’s policies on Iraq after the invasion). But DLC founder Sam Nunn led the Democratic opposition to Operation Desert Storm, and many elected officials associated with the DLC opposed the 2003 war from the get-go. The DLC’s reputation for “Republican Lite” policy ideas was never that well-merited: At a time when these ideas were outside even the Democratic mainstream, the group came out for public financing of congressional elections and GLBT rights.

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