I’m pretty strongly on record dismissing as a media invention the idea that a serious primary challenge to Barack Obama is in the works, barring unforeseen developments.
Now we have some polling data from a state that would have to play a big role in any anti-Obama revolt, New Hampshire.
Magellan Strategies polled over 1000 likely 2012 Democratic presidential primary voters, and didn’t find much in the way of an uprising, at least as measured by hypothetical primary matchups. You may recall that Hillary Clinton won NH in 2008. She’s not about to challenge Obama in 2012, but according to Magellan, if she did, she’d be trailing 59-28. There’s been talk of Howard Dean taking on the president; he trails Obama in the poll 78-10. How’s about Bernie Sanders, who filibustered the tax deal that upset progressive elites so badly? He’d be in even worse shape in NH, down 79-8 to the president.
Keep in mind that NH is a state with a very robust progressive activist tradition, and few of the minority voters that serve as Obama’s hard-core base. Moreover, two of the three hypothetical challengers in the Magellan poll are from the neighboring state of Vermont. If big names like Dean and Sanders can’t get traction against the incumbent in NH, it ain’t much happening anywhere.

It’s increasingly apparent that the Congress which hadn’t gotten a whole lot done since the enactment of health reform legislation may well go out with a flurry of genuinely significant activity. The tax deal cleared Congress last night, even as the Senate killed an omnibus appropriations bill leaving most discretionary spending decisions to the next session. And it looks like the repeal of DADT is back on track for a stand-alone vote. Prospects for ratification of START are less robust, but there’s still a chance a vote could be held in time to coincide with commemoration of the birth of the Prince of Peace.
The tax deal vote (see the roll call results here) went pretty much as expected; the key political factor was that a narrow majority of Democrats (139-112) voted “aye,” which means the White House is not openly aligned against the president’s own party (contrast that with key votes of the Clinton administration, including NAFTA and welfare reform, where a majority of House Democrats split with the president).
“No” Democratic votes were mostly from the more liberal wing of the party (including, interestingly, quite a few folks in leadership), but with a decent sprinkling of deficit hawks. Lame ducks mostly voted “aye.”
The appropriations vote was notable for the defection of nine Republican senators who had earlier supported (and in some cases helped write) the omnibus bill. But that outcome became virtually certain when it became obvious earmarks were the glue used to put together the legislation. Tea Party types led by Jim DeMint succeeded in creating a virtual litmus test against earmarks, so the bill was sure to go down. This also means House Republicans will be responsible for writing appropriations measures of their upon taking over the chamber next month; that will force some interesting decisions and expose some important intra-GOP rifts.
If DADT and START get Senate votes, it will represent a pretty impressive win by Harry Reid in overcoming Republican dilatory tactics, and a pretty strong finish for this Congress.

If you needed any additional confirmation about how congressional Republicans will get around the massive contradiction between their deficit-hawk rhetoric and their tax-cuts-uber-alles ideology, it’s now very clear they’ll just deny it all by claiming tax cuts don’t increase the deficit.
That’s the only logical interpretation to make of the House Republicans’ new draft budget rule, which they are calling “cut/go” (as opposed to the longstanding if often ignored “paygo” rules). Here’s the simple bottom line from CQ (subscription-only, via Pat Garofalo of ThinkProgress):

The budgetary mechanism, which Republicans refer to as a “cut-go” rule, will mandate that lawmakers pay for any new spending program by eliminating an existing program of equal or greater value. It is similar to the pay-as-you-go rule previously introduced by House Democrats except that it does not allow spending increases to be offset with new taxes or fees. Also, tax cuts would not have to be offset with spending reductions.

Now there’s only two ways this approach does not amount to a blatant admission that deficits don’t matter at all, Tea Party rhetoric aside. The first, of course, is to adopt the amazingly threadbare, totally discredited supply-side theory whereby tax cuts pay for themselves. Garafolo quotes Mike Pence blithely embracing that chesnut.
The other approach, that of Orwellian redefinition of plain words, is nicely and appropriately presented by Michele Bachman:

I don’t think letting people keep their own money should be considered a deficit.

By this fine theory, if you abolished taxes altogether, the federal budget deficit would vanish.
Cut-go deserves as much mockery as can be mustered against it. It’s the most craven response possibe to the deficit fears Republicans have done so much to stimulate over the last two years, and they shouldn’t get away with cutting-and-running from the challenge.

Despite the persistent myth that the Republican rank-and-file are all patiently waiting to be told by Great Big Grownups which leader to follow in 2012 (you know, a Great Big Grownup candidate like Mitch Daniels or Haley Barbour or John Thune) there’s remarkably little evidence that conservative activists, the true rulers of the GOP, are converging behind any particular candidate.
For a good indication of the landscape, check out the reader poll recently conducted at the highy influential right-wing site RedState. It was set up like a sports playoff, with sixteen possible candidates being matched up one-on-one in a series of rounds. It’s interesting that three of the four candidates with regular double-digit support levels in state and national polls got knocked out in the first round: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich. The current DC Establishment heartthrob, John Thune, was also retired in the first round, by none other than John Bolton (!). The poll ultimately came down to Sarah Palin and radio talk host Herman Cain, with the latter narrowly winning among more than 18,000 ballots cast.
Now I don’t mean to suggest this result means a whole lot in itself, as is made obvious by the stellar showing of Cain, who is not that well known outside Georgia (significantly, Erickson’s home state). But this is a pretty good indicator that serious activists are still looking around for a champion, and may not agree on one before the actual contest gets underway.

The speed with which the Obama-McConnell tax cut deal swept away the prior Beltway discussion of deficit reduction remains a vastly under-discussed topic. Here’s Matt Yglesias’ summary of the development and its implications for progressives:

The deficit is a problem only in the sense that the short-term deficit is currently too small. But this is one reason I’m surprised so many liberals are being so stinty in their praise of the recent tax deal. We’d just all been spending 12 months arguing that contrary to the conventional wisdom, short-term deficits should be smaller. We also spent a lot of time observing that conservative deficit-talk is fraudulent and all they care about is tax cuts for the rich. Then the Obama administration, after a year of fruitless austerity gambits, finally called their bluff. “Fine, you can have your deficit-increasing tax cut extension, but give me some other deficit-increasing stuff that my economists say has a higher multiplier than your tax cuts for the rich.” Now the deal is done, and for all the panels and commissions and all the money Pete Peterson’s spent the parties are coming together to make the deficit bigger.

I’d add to Matt’s analysis the point that conservative critics of the tax cut deal by and large aren’t opposing it on deficit-reduction grounds, but in fact are demanding permanent tax cuts that will increase deficits still more.
This is going to be worth remembering when Republicans engineer a big phony display over the deficit in connection with current-year appropriations and/or the debt limit.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Republicans are poised to take over the U.S. Senate in 2012. This isn’t contingent on a GOP presidential win, or even a particularly good campaign year, but rather on the extremely tilted Senate playing field created by the 2006 Democratic landslide. Yet, oddly, that is no comfort for many sitting Republican senators, who may face savage primary challenges if they are even perceived to slight the conservative base. Those with bulls-eyes on their backs presently include Dick Lugar of Indiana, Olympia Snowe of Maine, Orrin Hatch of Utah, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and John Ensign of Nevada–exactly half of the Republicans going before voters in 2012.
As we saw with the Tea Party revolt of 2010, this is hardly an idle concern. Conservatives successfully pushed Bob Bennett, Mike Castle, Lisa Murkowski, Arlen Specter, and Charlie Crist out of the party or out of the running–and forced “moderates” such as John McCain and Mark Kirk to flip-flop on issues like climate change and tack hard-right.
This year, the group of endangered senators is quite heterodox. Each can be said to represent a different grievance held by “true conservatives” against the Republican establishment:
The RINO: Olympia Snowe is the only genuine ideological turncoat here. She’s pro-choice, and at least somewhat supportive of gay-rights. She also broke with conservatives to bargain with the Obama administration on the economic stimulus legislation and then voted for it. There is zero question that conservatives, nationally and in her own state, would love to take her out. But do they have the power to do so? A September 2010 Public Policy Polling survey showed Maine Republicans would prefer a more conservative senator by a 63-29 margin, yet no one has yet identified a viable challenger. Snowe has also gained some protection on her right flank, by picking up an early re-election endorsement from Governor Paul LePage, who is close to Maine’s Tea Partiers but is also an old friend of Snowe’s family.
The Mandarin: Richard Lugar of Indiana has never been a favorite of conservatives, but in recent months, he’s really gone out of his way to invite a 2012 primary challenge–by refusing to sign onto an earmark ban; supporting the DREAM Act; and publicly suggesting that the GOP is moving too far to the right. The main reason conservatives would like his head on a pike, though, is that he is the last of the Republican foreign policy mandarins in the Senate. His championing of the new START treaty makes him a major enabler of the Obama administration in the eyes of both the neoconservative and Tea Party factions; and it may well be that the ghost of Jesse Helms returns to torment him. Already, Lugar has almost certainly drawn a 2012 primary opponent in State Senator Mike Delph. This year, conservatives understand they must unite around a single right-wing challenger, since divided opposition allowed another Indiana candidate–Senator Dan Coats–to sail past Tea Party opposition in 2010.
The Democrat-Lover: Utah’s Orrin Hatch was considered a right-wing zealot when he came to the Senate in 1976. Six terms later, conservatives tend to think of Hatch as a Fifth Columnist always ready to sell out “The Cause” if it means a chance to co-sponsor legislation with leading Democrats (his history of collaboration with Ted Kennedy remains a major sore point). Since it’s a taste for bipartisanship that sank Hatch’s Utah colleague Bob Bennett earlier this year, he has reason to worry, particularly given his state’s convention-based nominating process, which gives conservative activists extraordinary power (a poll of delegates to the April 2010 state convention that dumped Bennett showed only 19 percent favoring a seventh term for Hatch). Hatch is also pushing 80 years old, and could face an especially tough challenge from Congressman Jason Chaffetz. But unlike the rest of the names on the bulls-eye list, Hatch may still be able to defend himself by drawing upon his old, semi-dormant relationship with Utah’s hard right.
The Tea Party Crasher: Texas’s Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison has been twisting in the political wind since the end of her disastrous primary challenge to Governor Rick Perry. Never popular with serious conservatives, and an outright enemy to the social conservatives who deplore her stubborn defense of legalized abortion, Hutchison chose the worst year imaginable to take on Perry, who fit easily into the mold of a Tea Party hero. She vacillated on whether she would give up her Senate seat to enter the gubernatorial race, which endeared her to no one, and then ran a bad campaign and lost. The biggest question is whether she decides to run again after a two-year hiatus; one possible challenger, Texas Railroad Commissioner Michael Williams, is a conservative favorite and–incidentally–African American.
The Sinner: John Ensign seemed well on his way to national conservative stardom, and possibly a presidential bid, when his world blew up with disclosure of a lurid and tangled series of misdeeds including an extramarital affair with a staff member, the payment of hush money, and potential violations of ethics rules and criminal statutes. Now that it appears Ensign will escape a trip to the hoosegow, he’s making noises about running for another term. But he doesn’t have the kind of standing–or for that matter, the money–to chase off primary challengers, who might include Congressman Dean Heller.

Read more…

With all the brouhaha over the Obama-McConnell tax deal, it hasn’t been much noticed that all over the country, states are struggling with huge fiscal problems, and the demands of newly empowered Republican governors and legislators to reduce top-end and corporate taxes.
It’s all steadily playing out in my home state of Georgia, as this report from James Salzer of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution indicates:

The head of a task force charged with rewriting the state tax code made it clear Tuesday that his panel will recommend moving toward heavier reliance on state sales taxes, and less on income and corporate taxes.
A.D. Frazier, chairman of the Special Council on Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians, gave state lawmakers and lobbyists few details during an address on the University of Georgia campus. Those, he said, won’t come until the panel releases its final recommendations in January.
But the push to broaden the sales tax base — charging the state’s 4 percent levy on more goods and services — and cut personal and corporate income taxes meshes with the philosophy of the Republican leaders who will have to try to sell the recommendations to the General Assembly.

This isn’t terribly surprising, given the general attitude of Republicans towards corporations and the very wealthy as “job creators” who should get a free ride if not actual government subsidies. But the idea of actually increasing taxes on wage-earning folk remains a bit difficult, particularly in state like Georgia, where tourism isn’t sufficiently robust to justify higher sales taxes as mainly paid by outsiders.
So far, no one in GA Republican circles has gone as far as Gov.-elect Nikki Haley of SC, who during the late campaign came out for eliminating a sales tax exemption for food sales on grounds that such concessions to people with a need to feed children didn’t create any jobs.
But such initiatives are soon to come, and it will be important for Democrats to describe them as what they are: redistribution of income from the working poor and the middle class to the very rich, and class warfare.

As the Obama-McConnell tax deal makes its way through Congress with heavy Republican support, it’s interesting to watch the Republicans who’ve decided to publicly come out against it. Rush Limbaugh seems to oppose it just because it’s a deal with Obama. Similarly, Charles Krauthammer fears it will stimulate the economy and save Obama in 2012. Jim DeMint sticks to the Big Two dogmatic principles of no-tax-increases-ever-ever (he interprets the reduction in the estate tax rate as a “tax increase” because there was no estate tax this year) and no-new- spending-without-offsets. Sarah Palin seems to agree.
Mitt Romney probably gets the most attention for his USAToday op-ed coming out against the deal on grounds that temporary tax rates are a bad idea and that the whole UI system needs to be overhauled.
That’s a lot of heavyweight opinion on the Right opposing this deal, even as rank-and-file Republicans appear to support it (according to new polls from Pew and from WaPo/ABC).
Why the dissenting voices? Well, there’s always an appreciative audience among conservatives for anyone opposing bipartisanship; after all, some of the progressive hostility to the deal is based on a desire to emulate the strategic unreasonableness of the Right. But more importantly, you could call it the TARP Factor: the fear of supporting legislation that might turn into a symbol of the hated status quo. So long as it’s manageable, and there are enough Republicans in Congress to get the deal through, quite a few conservatives will inevitably sneak out of class and avoid the risk of raising a hand in support of it.
The real problem could come, of course, if House Democrats succeed in changing the deal (say, by modifying the estate tax provisions to get a little closer to the rates and exemptions that prevailed before 2001), and there’s a real opportunity for congressional Republicans to get off the bus. Then we would find out which Republicans are standing on principle, and which are simply looking for a way to posture against taxes and spending without accepting the consequences of an expiration of tax cuts, UI benefits, and other goodies extended in this bill.

Lord knows I’m not averse to early coverage of the 2012 presidential cycle, but there’s coverage based on reasonable speculation, and then there’s speculation based on…well…insider fantasies and thin air.
Politico supplied a spectacular example of the latter today with an unintentionally hilarious piece entitled “John Thune looms over Tim Pawlenty’s Iowa plan.”
Now insofar as Sen. Thune has not taken a single real step towards running for president, and specifically has not been spending time in Iowa, it’s a bit hard to suggest that he’s “looming” over much of anything in that state. Yes, Beltway GOP Establishment types love him dearly, apparently because he is considered very pretty. But as the Politico article notes, a Des Moines Register survey earlier this year showed that 71% of self-identified Republicans in Iowa had no opinion of the guy whatsoever. Now “looming” is, I suppose, a relative term, but even Tim Pawlenty registered a bit more in the survey than Thune, since only 53% of self-identified Republicans in Iowa drew a blank on him, after his eight years as governor of neighboring Minnesota.
At this point, careful readers of the Politico piece might well wonder why its authors are paying so much attention to two guys who don’t seem to be going anywhere without so much as a mention of Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich–you know, people Iowa Republicans do know something about, and who also have national followings. The planted axiom appears to be that Thune and Pawlenty have a big advantage over the field due to physical proximity to Iowa; indeed, the article goes to some length to document the rather obvious fact that it doesn’t hurt to be within a short commute of Des Moines or the Quad Cities.
And yes, there have been cases of candidates who won the Iowa Caucuses in part because of friends-and-neighbors factor: notably Dick Gephardt in 1988 and Bob Dole in 1988 and 1996. But both these gents were very major national politicians when they campaigned in Iowa, and those who weren’t, such as Paul Simon of Illinois in 1988, or Sam Brownback of Kansas in 2008, didn’t get that far on proximity (not to mention Iowa’s own Tom Vilsack in 2008, who dropped out after regularly finishing fourth in Iowa polls). Indeed, Iowans are acutely conscious of their role in national presidential politics, and will go a long way to show they are not provincial: that, far more than home-state proximity to Iowa, had a lot to do with Obama’s 2008 Caucus win.
Now perhaps TimPaw should be worried about possible rivals like Thune on grounds that his very slim hopes depend on a relatively limited field heavily dominated by retreads, with no other “dark horse” prospects to divvy up the votes of those looking for something new. But I’d say John Thune is very far down the list of problems “looming” over the Minnesotan’s campaign.
I mention (and mock) this piece because it exemplifies a type of horse-race coverage based not so much on facts and logic and precedent than on sorting through insider rumors and buzz and spin and implicitly telling Beltway genuises their own internal primary is the one that matters most: the primary in which Haley Barbour is a potential front-runner because he’s good at shaking down donors and gives a good interview, even though his national voter appeal is dubious by any standard.
Both Thune and Tim Paw have a long way to go before they should be considered serious presidential candidates. Until then, their position is best described by the old saying: “If I had some ham, I could make a ham sandwich, if I had some bread.”

You will be hearing a cacaphony of conservative talk over the holidays and beyond about today’s ruling by District Court Judge Henry Hudson that the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate for health insurance purchasing violates the U.S. Constitution.
Two other district judges, of course (one in Hudson’s own Virginia) have already ruled otherwise, and it’s obvious the issue will ultimately be resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court. But it’s important for progressives to understand that if five votes on the High Court are found for Hudson’s point of view, it will represent a major counter-revolution in Constitutional law, back towards the early 1930s jurisprudence that once threatened to thwart the entire New Deal.
Thus, today’s conservative celebration of the alleged triumph of constitutionalism against the grasping big government expansionism of Obama and Pelosi is a deliberate distortion of the historical record, much like claims that contemporary conservatives are just common-sense centrists fighting the sudden and dangerous socialist radicalism of a Democratic Party gone wild.
Conservatives have every right to articulate their own views on the Constitution and every other topic. But they need to own up to–or be exposed for–the not-so-traditional conservatism they represent: a revolt against the regulated capitalism and mild welfare-state practices of the last 75 years, which few Republicans other than a radical fringe have challenged in the recent past.