It’s been obvious for a while that whereas Republicans are a bit depressed about their 2012 presidential field, they are very excited about the not-ready-for-presidential-prime-time folk available to fill out the ticket.
Politico’s Alexander Burns wrote about Republican veep-love today:

Even if the class of 2010 is not yet ready to run for president, the range of new officeholders elected in just the past two years assures that the Republican nominee will be able to offset virtually any perceived shortcoming with a running mate who compensates for it.
A candidate light on federal experience could tap Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, perhaps the best-credentialed Republican in the country as a former congressman, budget director and trade representative. A nominee who’s viewed as too conservative could pick a governor from a state Obama won in 2009, like New Jersey’s Chris Christie, Virginia’s Bob McDonnell or Michigan’s Rick Snyder.
For a candidate who struggles to connect with women voters, Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire or Govs. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and Susana Martinez of New Mexico might help broaden the GOP’s reach. Martinez, along with Rubio and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval, could help a nominee who’s unappealing to Hispanics.
And if the nominee has trouble firing up conservatives, nearly all the previously mentioned names would likely do the trick, as would a prominent state leader such as Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

Early ticket-making is all good clean fun, and much of it is designed not to strengthen the 2012 drive for the presidency, but to position someone to be the Big Dog in 2016 if Obama wins a second term.
But I hope Republicans take at least a moment to think about their recent history of really bad running-mate selections. Forget about Sarah Palin, if you can, and look at the last five Republicans who were actually elected vice president.
Their names are Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, George H.W. Bush, Spiro T. Agnew, and Richard Nixon. By my count, that’s two pols who resigned in disgrace, one who became a national laughingstock, one who became a national pariah. Daddy Bush was obviously the respectable exception to the rule.
But one out of five is actually pretty bad. Republicans need to a bit more patriotic in their ticket-making. It can matter.

Yesterday I talked about the more-or-less official beginnng of the 2012 presidential cycle, which will formally get under way in Iowa on February 6, 2012 (if not earlier due to scheduling changes). Interestingly enough, one of Iowa’s better-known political writers, former state GOP political director Craig Robinson, at his The Iowa Republican site, has already gone to the trouble of ranking ten likely candidates in term of their current strength in his state. He refuses to rank Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin on the questionable ground that their refusal to appear at this week’s CPAC conference in Washington indicates they are not planning to run for president. We’ll see about that!
But the candidates Robinson does rank do not necessarily come out in the order you might expect. He has Newt Gingrich topping the list, thanks to his many, many years of speaking in Iowa and his grasp of the full range of issues. His second-place candidate is none other than Michelle Bachmann, thanks to her friendship with Iowa congressman Steve King, her close ties to the religious right, and her fundraising prowess.
Robinson has this to say about Tim Pawlenty, who has probably done the most to create a campaign infrastructure in Iowa:

Some believe that Pawlenty is Mitt Romney without the flip-flops and the albatross known as Romneycare. Pawlenty’s problem is that he’s probably going to be a lot of people’s second choice. For that to benefit him, he needs to see some big-name candidates drop out because, obviously, if people’s first choice is still on the ballot, that’s who they will be voting for.

He ranks Mitt Romney fourth on grounds that his frequent hints of less than full commitment to participation in the Iowa Caucuses will make it very difficult for him to attract and keep local support. That’s no problem for fifth ranking Rick Santorum, who is already spending lots of time in Iowa, and is well positioned to attract hard-core social conservative support if Huckabee and Palin don’t run.
Interestingly, Robinson ranks national pundit heartthrobs Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels and John Thune seventh, eighth and ninth, respectively, ahead only of talk-show host Herman Cain.
I have no idea if Craig Robinson’s take is accurate, and he may have his own axes to grind. But to tell the truth, I’d trust his opinion on Iowa more than that of DC speculators who haven’t had shoes ruined by the muck of the Iowa State Fair.

I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.
As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.
But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:
First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.
Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.
Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.
Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.
And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

So it’s officially no longer too early to speculate about the 2012 presidential election cycle, or wonder about the late-to-develop Republican field. Why? Because the Iowa Caucuses are currently scheduled to take place on February 6, 2012, less than a year from now. It’s always possible, of course, that the date could be moved up, as occurred in 2008, if some states again defy national party rules and try to threaten the privileged status of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, the four states authorized to hold nominating contests prior to March 1.
You may have noticed that the red-hot blogospheric talk of just a couple of months ago about a left-bent primary challenge to Barack Obama has almost entirely subsided, as some of us suggested it would.
But why have no Republican candidates formally announced candidacies, or even (with the exception of obscure talk show host Herman Cain) set up exploratory committees?
One of the best of the Beltway Insider pundits, the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, offers an explanation today, based on conversations with alleged GOP movers-and-shakers. I have to say, two factors he cites aren’t really factors at all: the need to raise lots of money (which has little to do with when a candidate begins building an organization in places like Iowa where money is far from the most important issue) and the poor historical track record of early announcers (a double-loaded statistic if ever there was one: strong front-runners, who often tend to win, have no reason to declare candidacies early, but there’s not a strong front-runner this time around).
Cillizza’s other two explanations are more interesting. One is the theory that internet-based fundraising and organizational tools have condensed the amount of time necessary to mount an effective presidential campaign. That may be true, but the fact remains that the pioneer in using these tools, Barack Obama, announced his exploratory committee, and was assumed to be a full-fledged candidate, in January of 2007. Is Haley Barbour (the Great White Hope of GOP insiders at the moment) really going to be a social media sensation later this year? Doesn’t seem likely.
The final factor cited by Cillizza is the overriding shadow of Sarah Palin:

The former Alaska governor is a prime mover in the contest; she acts and everyone else reacts. If she is in the race, it fundamentally alters the winning calculus for everyone from a front-running Romney to a lesser-known candidate such as former senator Rick Santorum. If Palin is out of the race, the contest is even more wide open – a no-go decision could expand the field as more ambitious pols see more of a path to the nomination.

Interesting, isn’t it? The political figure whose national approval ratings have been sinking like a stone, who has been losing to Barack Obama in general election trial heat polls in states like South Carolina, remains the decisive force in shaping the 2012 field. This could not be good sign for the GOP, regardless of what St. Joan of the Tundra decides to do.

In this phony-war phase of the 2012 presidential cycle, when all things are theoretically possible, ’tis the season for crackpot theories on how the Republican nomination process can become something different from the unedifying spectacle that is likely to unfold. The venerable David Broder has put in his bid with a column suggesting that GOP governors could conspire to run as favorite sons in their various primaries in order to kill off the ostensible front-runners and produce a dark horse nominee. It’s not entirely clear who the beneficiary of this conspiracy would be, though Broder mentions Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty as possibilities.
Now you have to understand that David Broder has conducted a career-long love affair with governors, and has always looked to the GOP governors as a corrective to the ideological zaniness of their party as a whole. But still, the “favorite-son” scenario is beyond far-fetched, and as both Jonathan Bernstein and Josh Putnam have observed, it seems to reflect nostalgia for the days before voters were given a guaranteed role in the nomination process–sort of like the enthusiasm in some Democratic circles in 2008 for a “brokered convention.”
And that’s the very specific reason Broder’s scenario ain’t happening: Republicans voters would have to go along with it, and there’s no particular reason to think they would spurn the importunings of actual candidates in order to promote some backroom deal. Consider the governor who (as Broder notes) would have to put the conspiracy in motion, Iowa’s Terry Branstad. You think Iowa’s conservative activists, who aren’t crazy about Branstad to begin with, would support an effort by him to neuter their hard-earned right to help pick an actual presidential nominee? Ask Democrat Tom Vilsack how well the “favorite-son” thing worked out for him in 2008, when he was actually making a serious run for president.
If Republican governors want to have a collective impact on the presidential nomination they could all get together and endorse someone, much as they did in 2000 when governors were part of the massive establishment infrastructure for George W. Bush. But there’s the rub: there is no such consensus, which is one reason why the 2012 Republican field is such a mess.

In today’s Washington Post, Amy Gardner reported, with apparent surprise, a phenomenon that, frankly, anybody who was really paying attention already understood: in Iowa, cradle and graveyard of presidential aspirations, the Tea Party Movement, and conservative activism generally, is heavily dominated by religious folk deeply interested in those cultural issues Republicans are said to have put aside.
That’s undoubtedly true, but Gardner’s claim that this “sets Iowa apart” is not so clearly true. It’s impossible to miss the dominance of cultural issues in Iowa, given (a) the astonishing 2008 Caucus win by Mike Huckabee, who had nothing else going for him, and (b) the state of semi-hysteria bred among Iowa conservatives by the 2009 Iowa Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage. That decision, which for obscure Iowa constitutional reasons cannot be overturned until after 2012 at the earliest, led to the successful recall of several Supreme Court justicies in 2010.
But the interplay of cultural and non-cultural issues among Tea Party types which Gardner documents in Iowa is common, if less visible, in other parts of the country. Consider her observation about Iowa social conservative warhorse Bob Vander Plaats:

In the wood-paneled back room of a pizza joint in Winterset last week, about 30 miles west of Des Moines, Vander Plaats invoked the unmistakable language of the tea party. He said that politicians will lose if they “overreach their constitutional authority.” He said Iowans want a pro-family president who also takes the right positions on states’ rights, the Constitution and the separation of powers.

Talk about “overreaching their constitutional authority” is not, in fact, the “unmistakable language of the tea party movement.” Long before conservative activists put on wigs and beat drums, it was the language of the Christian Right, whose obsession with overturning Roe v. Wade, and with opposing church-state separation, constantly fed constitutional originalism. Similarly, the importation into the constitutional design of the Declaration of Independence, which is semi-universal in Tea Party circles, originated with the Christian Right, which used the Declaration to smuggle God into the Constitution, along with a notion of natural rights that supported, in their own minds at least, the rights of “the unborn” and the prerogatives of the traditional family.
More generally, it’s hard to identify Christian Right pols who haven’t strongly identified themselves with the Tea Party Movement (two of its best-known leaders, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachman, are highly illustrative of this fact), and hard to find Tea Party spokesmen who favor any policies that would in any way discomfit the Christian Right. Where they aren’t the same people, they are certainly strong allies, and essentially two sides of the same radicalized conservative coin with the same apocalyptic vision of a righteous nation led hellwards by evil progressives. Iowa is not an outlier in this respect, but perhaps just a place where the political context makes it easier to see.

Given the fairly large disconnect between talk about budget deficits in Washington, and the general unwillingness of pols to talk about specific programs they will cut (even the draconian House Republican Study Committee plan is full of TBD vagueness), budget gimmickery is a constant temptation. And it’s sad to see one prominent Democrat, Sen. Claire MacCaskill of MO, sign onto the mother of all gimmicks, the Commitment to American Prosperity Act of 2011, along with a group of Republicans led by Bob Corker of TN.
The problems with this “CAP Act” begins with the fatuous title, which reflects the current Republican line that government spending is somehow the only obstacle to a booming economy. Beyond that, the bill is one of those which is crazy if serious, and deeply cynical if it’s not.
The craziness comes from the central idea that total federal spending needs to be immediately and inflexibly limited to a fixed percentage of GDP that’s lower than the levels of the Reagan administration. As a long analysis from Paul Van de Water of the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities points out, this sort of “cap” is not only arbitrary, but does not reflect the aging of the U.S. population (which inevitably increases retirement costs), the recent spike in health care costs, or the automatic increase in government spending that occurs during a recession, and, well, the basic need in a democracy for representative institutions to make decisions on taxes and spending. Reaching the target proposed in this bill would involve reducing federal spending–all of it–by about 20% as compared to current levels. So much for Washington having any ability to deal with any challenges to the country, domestic or international. The negative impact on the economy would be vast and immediate.
But the cynicism comes from the mechanism by which the CAP Act would achieve its crazy goals: “sequestrations” of spending conducted by the Office of Management and Budget and enforced by an executive order of the president. The “sequestration” gimmick was first devised in the 1980s-era Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law, described by one of its sponsors as “a bad idea whose time has come.” The “idea,” so to speak, is to respond to the inability or uwillingness of Congress to identify specific program cuts by administratively cutting every single program by the same percentage. The only difference is that the CAP Act, unlike Gramm-Rudman-Hollings, would include mandatory spending–basically Social Security and Medicare–in the sequestrations. So under this system, one fine day, without a single vote being taken in Congress, Social Security beneficiaries would see reductions in their checks necessary to achieve some arbitrary level of annualized savings; doctors would see their Medicare reimbursements docked; Medicare beneficiaries would see their premiums jump.
Now the CAP Act isn’t going to be enacted any time soon, if only because Republicans will not seriously contemplate exposing the Pentagon to across-the-board cuts. But this sort of gesture is not benign, particularly for Democrats. Aside from very literally establishing federal spending reductions as the overriding national priority, more important than the economy, fundamental fairness, and every public responsibility imaginable, Democratic sponsorship of such measures offers Republicans a specific concession they very badly want, and that President Obama denied them in the State of the Union Address: bipartisan cover to go after Social Security and Medicare, which they fear to do on their own because it would provoke the certain wrath of their increasingly elderly electoral base. Already, conservative opinion-leaders are touting MacCaskill’s sponsorship of the CAP Act as representing a potential sea-change in the prospects for draconian spending cuts.
Democrats, even–perhaps especially–those who are in politically vulnerable territory, should not be making life easier for conservatives who have contempt for the very ideas of a social safety net and of public investment, and who refuse to let their supposed commitment to fiscal discipline extend to support for progressive taxation or the elimination of special-interest tax benefits. The Donkey Party, after all, didn’t create the current fiscal mess, and presided over the last achievement of a balanced federal budget before George W. Bush took office and demanded a “rebate” for high-income taxpayers and corporations. Moving to the right of Republicans on federal spending will just undermine the few responsible leaders in the GOP, and spur a mindless race to the bottom that obliterates all thoughtful efforts to bring long-term spending and revenues into better balance.

As the 2012 Republican presidential field slowly takes shape, there’s been some very interesting discussion hither and yon about the nature of the GOP and its nominating process, and what separates a viable from a non-viable candidacy. Some of it has been stimulated by talk of various potential dark-horse candidates, from Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour to (most recently) Jon Huntsman, and I’ve been pretty outspoken in skepticism about the ability of such folk to make a serious run for it against better-known and better-prepared personalities.
But one dispute that remains wide-open involves the strange case of Mitt Romney, and whether his never-recanted sponsorship of state health reform legislation in Massachusetts that closely resembles (particularly in its use of an individual mandate for health insurance purchasing) ObamaCare will or will not doom his 2012 presidential aspirations.
Yesterday I took issue with Ben Smith’s claim that the shift in emphasis to “federalist” arguments against ObamaCare as a result of judicial challenges would save Romney’s bacon. Today let’s look at the argument of my brilliant friend Jonathan Bernstein that the elites who decide who lives or dies in GOP politics just won’t care enough about Mitt’s health care apostasy to count him out.
Here’s Jonathan:

As far as supporters, it seems to me that the groups most inclined to choose Romney are the business community and, perhaps, GOPers who are afraid of nominating a fringe factional candidate–he’s the safe port candidate. For the most part, I don’t think his health care history will prevent any of them from signing on. Will it make him clearly unacceptable to activists who might otherwise have little interest, but not actively try to veto his selection? I doubt it. As far as I can tell, health care is just one of many issues on which Romney previously supported things that are anathema to activists and some interest groups. If they’re willing to accept his abortion conversion, I can’t see why they wouldn’t accept this one (which involves not a conversion, at least so far, but a willingness to believe that his position is really way different than ACA). Sure, it could be one-too-far, but there’s no way that health care individual mandates is as big a deal to GOP activists as abortion (and there’s no organized group that really cares about it, either). And, remember, Romney will certainly shift to whatever position he needs to hold in order to get the nomination (given that anyone who cares about long-term consistency will be looking elsewhere).

The real key to Jonathan’s argument is that any conservative activists who have already swallowed Mitt’s flip-flops on gay rights, gun control, or (especially) abortion are probably going to be able to stomach his position on health reform. But here’s the thing: Romney did in fact flip-flop on the earlier issues. He hasn’t abandoned his support for RomneyCare, with its individual mandate and health insurance purchasing exchanges, at all; he’s just tried to claim, without much success, that they are fundamentally different from the same provisions of ObamaCare. As for the idea that Romney will eventually flip-flop on his own health care plan, I just don’t buy it: he’s been defending it for years as his signature contribution to health care policy. It’s just too late for him to suddenly decide it was a bad idea all along.
I agree with Jonathan that the whole subject is less viscerally important to conservative activists than abortion, but I’m not sure that will be true after this year’s (and possibly next year’s) daily demonization of ObamaCare in general and the individual mandate in particular.
More importantly, even if Romney is not “vetoed” by activists or party leaders for his health care problem, it’s hardly going to help him nail down their support, either, which is a real concern for a candidate who does not inspire much excitement anywhere in the party. And as Jonathan notes, other candidates’ attacks on Romney for his health care record can and will matter to that other vital constituency in the Republican nominating process, actual voters in the caucuses and primaries.
Now Jonathan has a much lower estimate of the power of actual voters in the GOP nominating process than I do. Yes, the elites that run the “invisible primary” can and often do make or break candidates. But they are not invincible. Consider 2000, when George W. Bush amassed the most impressive array of elite support going into an open presidential year that anyone’s ever seen. He had the money guys. He had the right-to-lifers and other cultural conservatives. He had the foreign policy mavens. He had the Wall Street Journal/business crowd. He had anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist. He had it all, and nearly lost the nomination to John McCain–whom the elites heartily disliked–by getting drubbed in New Hampshire. I was living in Washington at the time and knew some pretty influential conservatives, and they were in a state of complete panic the week after that primary. And as we remember, it took a scorched-earth, Total War effort against McCain in South Carolina to derail him and put Bush back on track.
And that was with the elites totally behind a candidate. This will not be the case in 2012; it’s more likely to resemble the untidy process of 2008, when a handful of activists in Iowa and a relatively small number of voters in New Hampsire, South Carolina and Florida decided the contest in favor of the elites’ least favorite candidate.
Even if the elites do unite behind someone, it almost certainly will not be Mitt Romney. He will have to sell himself in the early primaries, and I’d be shocked if his health care record doesn’t come up every single day on the campaign trail. It won’t be the only concern raised by Romney, but it could very well be the first and last and the most crucial.
Sure, we won’t know until it all comes down. But the bottom line is that the people who control the Republican nominating process–both the elites and actual voters–are not particularly in the mood to be tolerant about ideological heresies, or give candidates a pass based on electibility (after 2010, they believe all their candidates, with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, are electable) or general good behavior. Without his health care problem, Mitt Romney would have a tough time in Iowa and perhaps elsewhere in the early going, but would probably be the front-runner. With his health care problem, he’s a very bad bet to be on the podium in Tampa to raise hands with Marc Rubio as leader of the GOP ticket.

Because, I suppose, every well-aired political argument eventually stimulates second thoughts, the idea that the similarity between Mitt Romney’s and Barack Obama’s health care policies could doom the former’s odds of getting to face the latter in 2012 is now arousing some significant pushback.
At Politico, Ben Smith suggests that the shift in the conservative fight against health reform to the courts, and more specifically, to a “federalist” argument against the constitutionality of last year’s legislation, may save Mitt’s bacon, since he, too, has argued that mechanisms (like an individual health insurance purchasing mandate) perfectly appropriate for state-level policymaking are illegitimate if pursued at the federal level. Here’s Ben’s conclusion:

One of Romney’s weak arguments was that the Massachusetts plan was fundamentally different, as a matter of policy, because it had been enacted on a state rather than federal level. The argument got little traction and Romney, after an effort in the Spring of 2010 to explain his record, simply fell silent.
Romney’s argument is now much stronger. Because the main objection to ObamaCare, as its critics call it, is no longer a matter of policy nuance. Now critics primarily make the case that it’s an unconstitutional expansion of specifically federal power. And on that turf, the similar structure of the plans doesn’t matter. Romney enacted his at a state level, and states have — conservatives argue — more power to regulate the insurance industry, as they do with car insurance.

I think this counter-argument is off for two reasons. First of all, the current conservative enthusiasm for a second federal district court decision invalidating some or all of “ObamaCare” does not mean the judiciary is now the sole front against this legislation. Yes, conservatives will echo the “federalist” arguments of their judicial heroes, but they won’t stop attacking ObamaCare on other grounds–cost, coercion, redistribution, alleged threats to Medicare, etc., etc.– in other venues, including Congress and state governments.
Second of all, conservative commitment to federalist principles is almost certainly being overrated on this issue as on many others over the years. If conservatives oppose a particular federal policy that is unpopular in many states, they will of course support the right of those states to go their own way. But when the shoe is on the other foot, federalism goes out the window quickly. This is most obvious on cultural issues like abortion, where conservative activists simultaneously rail at the preemption of state policymaking wrought by Roe v. Wade, and favor a federal constitutional amendment protecting the fetus regardless of what individual states want. But it’s also evident in the vast array of issues involving business regulation, where conservatives regularly support the right of states to enact less stringent environmental or labor regs, and just as regularly support (where they can get it) federal preemption of more stringent state regulations. Conservative adulation for the supremely anti-federalist decision in Bush v. Gore is the capper, in my opinion: federalism is primarily a mean to a desired end, and is disposable otherwise.
In any event, the attack on the individual mandate as a dangerous extension of federal power is inextricable from the idea that the individual mandate is itself dangerous to individual liberty. Consider this key line from Judge Roger Vinson’s ruling this week:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Aside from the gratuitious and revealing shout out to the Tea Party Movement in this line, Vinson is excoriating the tyrannical nature of a mandate against “inactivity” by government, any government. And Mitt Romney has done nothing to defend himself against that conviction, which will endure among conservatives no matter what happens to the constitutional challenge to health reform.

There’s a surprising amount of buzz going around about the significance of Democrats choosing Charlotte as the site of the 2012 National Convention. Does it mean Obama’s brain trust has decided to make North Carolina–which Democrats improbably won in 2008–a major target in ’12? Does it represent an “invasion” of a southern region where anti-Obama sentiments have been powerfully on the rise?
Probably not. The consensus of political science research is that convention locations have little or no impact on general election voting patterns. Choosing a convention city has more to do with local “buy-in”–facility, fundraising and volunteer commitments, hotel space, airline access, etc.–than with any strategic considerations. Democrats met in “blue states” in every convention between 1976 (New York) and 2004 (Boston), other than in 1988 (Atlanta). I don’t know anyone who thinks Obama won Colorado in 2008 because the convention was in Denver. Indeed, you can make the argument that conventions distract local partisans and disrupt general election planning as much as they contribute anything to the cause, though the Obama folk did do a good job of mobilizing convention attendees in Denver to conduct some door-to-door campaigning while in town.
Democrats do have a bit of a problem in Charlotte because there are no union hotels there (there was only one in Denver). Presumably some accomodation will be made to satisfy the labor movement that its concerns are being met.
The more interesting question (particular to me, as one of the floating tribe of volunteers who help staff Democratic conventions every four years, or at least since 1988) is whether either party will decisively break the mold and make the convention something other than a long series of podium speeches pitched to an ever-declining television audience. In 2008, Republicans killed off most of the afternoon sessions that gave non-celebrity pols a chance to say they had spoken to a national convention. But the basic construction of suits-at-a-podium remained in place. As with the nominating process that leads up to the convention, changing the system is difficult without knowing whom it might favor or discomfit; conventions are invariably run from top to bottom by the nominee and his or her staff. But since Democrats already know the identity of their 2012 nominee, they are theoretically in a position to think outside the box in staging a convention. We’ll see if Democrats rise to the occasion.