With the obvious, yawning gap between the deficit-reduction and corporate-lobby impulses of the GOP, it’s equally obvious that progressives benefit from promoting deficit-reducing measures that are progressive but that threaten corporate interests.
It appears that the soon-to-expire batch of subsidies for the ethanol industry could meet those criteria handily.
The immediate impetus for this opportunity is actually coming from two right-wing Republican senators, Tom Coburn of OK and Jim DeMint of SC, who are arguing for letting the subsidies (mainly provided through a tax credit aimed at a few Big Dog suppliers) expire on deficit-reduction and market-neutrality grounds. The reason this idea has traction, of course, is that environmentalists have long disliked ethanol subsidies, creating the rare possibility of a left-right coalition.
The money we are talking about–$5 billion, or about a third of the amount involved in the appropriations earmarks that conservatives have been obsessing about for the last couple of years, if you take seriously the dubious idea that banning earmarks will reduce appropriations–is serious enough to make this of interest to Tea Party folk.
But the ethanol lobby spends some pretty serious money of its own backing Republican candidates. And its defenders include the likely incoming chairman of the tax-writing House Ways & Means Committee, Dave Camp (Coburn’s OK colleague) and the ranking Republican on the tax-writing Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley of IA.
Steve Benen was right to identify this issue earlier in the month as a potentially big deal:

If Dems play this right, the subsidies could be a carefully-applied wedge, driving divisions between the party’s activists and the party’s corporate benefactors.

Moreover, I’d add, ethanol is a particularly excrutiating issue for Republicans who want to run for president in 2012 and beyond, given the iconic status of the subsidy in First-in-the-Nation-Caucus-State Iowa.
It’s no accident that George W. Bush’s first policy statement upon officially running for president in 2000 was to pledge his support of ethanol subsidies. And it’s no accident that John McCain, an unrepetetant ethanol subsidy detractor, skipped Iowa in 2000 and skirted it in 2008.
In pushing the issue now, progressives not only help expose some internal rifts in the GOP in the lame duck session of Congress, while showing that good environmental policies can be appealing to Tea Party Folk. They also create some very uncomfortable moments for Republicans who are facing the prospect of spending many months barnstorming amongst the corn stalks in Iowa.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
How will the Republican primary election of 2012 unfold? It’s impossible to predict the exact result, but now that the midterms are over, we are in a position to make some educated guesses. Below is a state-by-state analysis of the early Republican primary contests, and a look at how Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and the whole presidential field will fare in a landscape altered by the Tea Party wars and the Democratic Shellacking of 2010.
Nobody ‘Won’ the Midterms
One determining feature of the 2012 field is that no potential candidate so distinguished him or herself on the midterm campaign trail as to vault–as Richard Nixon famously did back in 1966–into a front-running position. And despite talk about the midterms producing a fresh new batch of presidential timber, the reality is that no one first gets elected to major office and then runs for president the very next minute. (Barack Obama had four years to make the switch, and was already a national celebrity before he was elected to the Senate.) The unquestioned new GOP superstar, Marco Rubio, is already being fitted for the vice presidential nomination in 2012, but no one thinks he’s moving to Des Moines or Manchester to campaign a few days after he’s sworn in.
Tea Party State of Mind
The key effect of the midterm campaign was psychological. The conservative base of the Republican Party, which now calls itself the Tea Party movement, is fully convinced that the conventional wisdom holding that trans-partisan appeal and “moderation” are the keys to electability is a total crock. After all, the Republican Party just moved aggressively to the right after two straight defeats, and proceeded to rack up a historic victory. This is precisely the formula conservative activists have been touting for over four decades. Now that they’ve been vindicated, it’s most unlikely they’ll want anything less than a fire-eating conservative as their presidential nominee in 2012. In particular, those polls showing that a candidate like Sarah Palin is a sure loser in a general election will be dismissed as elitist BS designed to keep the RINO establishment in the driver’s seat.
For the same reason, the GOP establishment has almost surely lost its alleged power to dictate a presidential nominee. The idea that Republicans are sheep-like “hierarchical” voters who will always go for the presidential candidate that is “next in line,” or favored by national party bosses, isn’t terribly compelling in a climate where members of the establishment are visibly struggling to keep up with their followers’ demands. Indeed, according to a much-discussed Politico piece that appeared just before the midterm elections, party insiders are pretty much focused on the more limited task of keeping St. Joan of the Tundra from the nomination.
They have their work cut out for them. No politician in recent memory–or maybe ever–has her ability to channel the deepest resentments, and most vengeful hopes, of her fans. And that makes her remarkably immune to criticism, and even to self-inflicted political damage. Who else could have survived a fiasco like her baffling resignation as governor of Alaska? And why would anyone who has experienced her rapid rise from obscurity to almost limitless celebrity–she’s even capable of making her teenage daughter a major global entertainment figure by mere association–exhibit modesty or “wait her turn”?
So Much Depends Upon the Iowa Caucus
But the story doesn’t end there. At first glance, the Iowa Caucus appears to be friendly territory for a candidate like Palin. Republican caucuses are dominated by conservative activists, and Iowa is especially partial to social conservatives, including Palin’s old comrades in the Right-to-Life movement. Yet the way endorsements shook out during the 2010 election, a different candidate may have the advantage: Mike Huckabee.
Huckabee is the unquestioned organizational kingpin of Republican Iowa. He humiliated Mitt Romney there in 2008, and his Iowa chairman that year, Bob Vander Plaats, has maintained his status as the most important right-wing figure in the state. During the 2010 election, when Vander Plaats was running for governor, both Romney and Palin endorsed his opponent Terry Branstad (a bit of a RINO), who ended up eking out a win by a surprisingly narrow margin. Yet Vander Plaats then rebounded by heading up a successful ballot effort to deny “retention” in office to three members of the Iowa Supreme Court who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
These dynamics may seriously affect the way the campaign unfolds. Even though Vander Plaats lost his bid for statewide office, he walks tall in the activist-controlled Iowa Caucuses. So, if Huckabee decides to run, he’ll probably control the strongest organization against a divided field of opponents, and he would have to be considered the Iowa frontrunner. If he doesn’t run, his base of support could be up for grabs.
For his part, Mitt Romney will face a painful choice about whether to compete in Iowa. Like Hillary Clinton in 2008, he may think it necessary to go all-out in the state because he is the frontrunner; and like Clinton, that could be a choice he comes to regret. Other candidates will see Iowa as do-or-die: Nobody will take Tim Pawlenty seriously if he doesn’t run, and run well, in the state next door to his own Minnesota. And potential “dark horse” candidates like Hoosiers Mitch Daniels and Mike Pence, who have no obvious early-primary base, are in a similar situation.

Read more…

I don’t think much of anybody in the Democratic Party is more dedicated to the principles of open and civil intraparty debate than us folks at TDS. We go out of our way to avoid favoring factions (if the facts allow it!) and actively want a big-tent party where dissent is welcome as much as common values are cherished.
But sometimes there are self-identified Democrats who clearly are anything but that, and use this identity to gain money and fame eagerly participating in every right-wing attack on the Donkey Party. Two who have taken this masquerade beyond the point of self-parody are Pat Caddell and Doug Schoen.
These two characters, regulars on Fox News who also enjoy some peculiar access to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post, do nothing, so far as I can tell, other than degrade Democrats. They have no policy ideas, no fresh takes on public opinion, no strategic insights, and indeed, no advice for Democrats other than “surrender.” That was particularly the message of their last WaPo piece, which in a tone of more sadness than anger, called on President Obama to end his political career and invite Republicans into his administration to help run the country. They didn’t ask the president and vice president to resign right away; presumably that advice will be held in reserve until Speaker Boehner is in place to accept the transfer of power.
Dave Weigel, who is no Democrat, reacted this way to the Caddell-Schoen “One and Done” column:

On Friday, the Washington Post published the worst column of the year. It’s been a long year, and a stupid year, so this is no light accusation. And pollster-pundits Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell write a lot of bad columns–they are good ways to spend the slow hours between Fox and Friends and Hannity, more productive than knitting or Sudoku. Still, the hackwork in their call for President Obama to retire after one term was something special.

As an update, Weigel pointed out that Caddell and Schoen are going to be strutting their stuff at David Horowitz’ right-wing “Restoration Weekend” bacchanalia at the swank Breakers resort in Palm Beach that kicks off today:

Sure, we all appear at conference[s] where [we] don’t agree with the content, but what a place to be token liberals-who-hate-liberals! Horowitz, of course, is a former Communist who’s spent the last 20 years trying to prove that modern liberals are as bad as he was. Caddell has definitely appeared before, and is in heated competition with Horowitz to see how long you can use your experience working with Democrats as a chit for bashing liberals. Other speakers: Newt Gingrich, Ann Coulter, Fred Thompson, Geert Wilders, Phyllis Schlafly, Andrew Klavan, George Gilder, Jonah Goldberg, Robert Spencer, Frank Gaffney, Steve Moore, Andrew McCarthy, Bruce Bawer, Congressmen Ed Royce and Thaddeus McCotter, General Paul Vallely, Liz Cheney and Jim DeMint.

In the end, Shoen and Caddell may be doing some good for the Democratic Party by deluding their conservative buddies into thinking they actually represent anyone other than themselves. But they don’t, and while anyone is free to change his or her mind and change political allegiances, they shouldn’t have the privilege to perpetually pose as something they clearly are not. Caddell and Schoen should join another former consultant to a Democratic president, Dick Morris, in letting their Republican freak flag fly.

Here at TDS, we got very focused immediately after the November 2 election on analyzing the alleged impact of self-identified independents, who were widely (and often misleadingly) attributed with a decisive role in the outcome. We’ve published pieces on this subject by Andrew Levision, James Vega and myself (one of them channelling Ruy Teixeira!) just in the last few days.
But for those who have just become aware of the controversy over indies, a good empirically-based starting point might be a piece written by my Progressive Policy Institute colleague, Lee Drutman, which served as part of a PPI post-election forum on independents in which TDS Co-Editors Stan Greenberg and William Galston also participated (an audiotape is available here).

Drutman runs the numbers efficiently, but then gets down to the nub of the matter: defining true independents in a realistic way, as distinguished from Republican-leaning “independents” who’ve shared the GOP’s lurch to the Right; noting the impact of disparate turnout patterns for various demographic groups, which shaped the “independent” electorate as much as any other voting group; and then distinguishing the “performance” concerns (e.g., reaction to the bad economy) from the “policy” concerns that might guide future actions by the Obama administration.
He leaves plenty of room for argument over the exact influence of this or that factor, whether it’s structural, performance-based, or policy-based. But Drutman provides a solid baseline for discussion of this subject among all elements of the progressive coalition.

It’s axiomatic that the bad economic circumstances facing the country elevated economic over “values” concerns in the 2010 midterm elections. And it’s also reasonably clear that for all the talk about the “libertarian” Tea Party Movement, there is considerable overlap between the Tea Folk and what we think of as the Christian Right.
So there wasn’t a lot of talk about the religious views of Americns in the runup to November 2, or since then, aside from the strange alarms sent up here and there about the completely mythological but terrifying prospect of Sharia Law being imposed on non-Muslims.
Fortunately, TDS Co-Editor William Galston and columnist E.J. Dionne have published a paper for the Brookings Institution looking more deeply at the 2010 elections in a religious context, based in part on exit polling from the Public Religion Research Institute.
Much of the paper documents the relative occlusion of religious divisions in an election dominated by secular concerns:

Overwhelmingly, voters cast their ballots on the basis of economic issues, while the religious alignments that took root well before the economic downturn remained intact. Democrats lost votes among religiously conservative constituencies, but also among religious liberals and secular voters. They did not, however, lose ground among African-Americans of various religious creeds and held their own among Latino voters. To see issues related to religious or cultural issues as central to the 2010 outcome is, we believe, a mistake.

Galston and Dionne go on to document the low status of traditional faith-based “values” issues like abortion and same-sex marriage today amog conservatives, even conservative white evangelicals, as compared to concerns about the size and role of government. They may not, I would observe, sufficiently recognize the extent to which complaints about “big government” or appeals to constitutonal originalism have long been part of the Christian Right’s rhetorical aresenal, reflecting a strong antagonism to “judicial activism” on behalf of abortion or gay rights. But it’s true that non-economic grounds for anti-government sentiments are generally in the background at present.
But Galston and Dionne provide some fascinating new data and analysis of a growing rift within the ranks of Christian conservatives over what has in the past been called “compassionate conservatism”–a faith-grounded tendency to reconcile conservative views with opennness to racial minorities and particularly immigrants, along with selected government activism in areas like urban social services and education.

Perhaps most revealing is the fact that Tea Party supporters were significantly more likely than either white evangelicals or self-described Christian conservatives to see government as playing too large a role vis-à-vis religious or private charities. Among Tea Party members, 82 percent took this view, but only 64 percent of Christian conservatives did – and, as we have seen, only 60 percent of white evangelicals. It is fair to conclude, we think, that while the ideas that fell under the heading “compassionate conservatism” still have some resonance among white evangelicals and Christian conservatives, such ideas are largely rejected by members of the Tea Party movement.

This shouldn’t come as big surprise to anyone aware that the common accusation that George W. Bush and Karl Rove had “betrayed conservative principles” frequently revolved around opposition to urban do-gooding (including minority homeownership initiatives on which many conservatives now blame the housing meltdown), No Child Left Behind, and comprehensive immigration reform.
In some respects, then, the Tea Party Movement is less a revolt of secular-minded libertarians against the Christian Right than a revolt of a segment of the Christian Right against certain “liberal” applications of faith, most notably a welcoming attitude towards immigrants and a feeling of religious solidarity with Muslims.
The potential size of this rift, Galston and Dionne suggest, is illustrated by PRRI exit poll data from the 2010 Colorado governor’s race, in which anti-immigration ultra Tom Tancredo ran on the Constitution Party ticket after the GOP nominee’s campaign fell apart:

White evangelicals gave Tancredo only 54 percent of their ballots, but strong Tea Party supporters gave him 80 percent of theirs. This 80 percent figure was also substantially larger than the 66 percent he received among self-described conservatives. We believe that what might be called the “Tancredo Difference” has important implications for conservative and religious politics. While many accounts have emphasized the possibility of splits in the Republican Party between its “establishment” and the Tea Party, there is the potential for other divisions between religious conservatives with more moderate views on immigration and more compassionate views on poverty and members of a Tea Party movement still rebelling against certain distinctive aspects of the Bush presidency.

Given the considerable overlap between the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right, another way to put this phenomenon is that the Christian Right itself may be moving away from those irenic tenets associated with “compassionate conservatism,” and towards a hard-core comprehensive conservatism rooted in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant nationalism
In any event, the current dominance of secular issues should not lure progressives into a new decade of happy ignorance about the religious and cultural underpinnings of American politics. They have not gone away.

We’ve been conducting an examination this week of the much-discussed proposition that Democrats got waxed on November 2 because self-identified independents were either “moving to the right” or perceived the Obama administration and the Democratic Party as “moving to the left.”
Yesterday I presented Ruy Teixeira’s analysis of the composition of the 2010 electorate, which showed that the number of true independents was much smaller than often assumed, and that their conservatism has been exaggerated. Today I’d like to point to John Sides’ demonstration at that valuable political science site, The Monkey Cage, which provided a simple alternative explanation of why true indies “flipped” between 2006 and 2010.
Here’s his conclusion:

I’ll state this baldly: voters — independent or otherwise — do not put political process ahead of outcomes. Partnerships with the GOP might be nice if Obama wants to sign a few bills into law, but despite the lip service that voters pay to compromise, bipartisanship is far down their list of priorities.
Here’s a counterfactual to ponder. What if Obama and the Democratic Congress had rammed through a $2 trillion stimulus, failing to garner a single GOP vote, but then the stimulus somehow reduced unemployment to 6%? Do you think independents would be offended by the lack of bipartisanship?
In fact, the relationship between the economy and elections it is stronger among independents than among partisans. Partisans are happy to vote for their party under most any circumstance and often rationalize their view of the economy accordingly.

In other words, true independents tend to vote against the party in power when the economy is bad, regardless of the perceived ideology or partisanship of the party in power. It happened in 2006 and it happened again in 2010. Arguing, as some have done, that the answer for Democrats is to “move to the center” and find some way to work with Republicans makes sense only if such steps contribute to an improvement in the performance of the economy. If they don’t, then it’s not the right direction to take, particularly if you consider the costs in terms of sacrificing progressive policy goals and making the Democratic elements of the electorate unhappy precisely on the eve of the cycle when they can be expected to return to the polls.

It’s become fairly commonplace to observe that Sarah Palin’s political influence is based on a mastery of contemporary media, from Fox to Facebook, or that her celebrity is more akin to that of a television star than a garden-variety pol. But who knew we’d see such a literal validation of these judgements so soon?
Sarah Palin’s new reality show on TLC is a ratings phenomenon for the basic cable channel. Meanwhile, her daughter Bristol has made the finals of the major network favorite, Dancing With the Stars, despite relatively poor marks from the professional judges on the show. Bristol has not only learned to dance this year; she’s also picked up some of her mother’s talent for turning criticism into populist resentment, viz. her bitter complaints about suggestions that her mother’s fans are stuffing the ballot box to keep her on the show.
Meanwhile, we hear the first credible report that Palin (mother, not daughter) is seriously considering a presidential run for 2012.
Well, why wouldn’t she? She’s already broken all the rules for advancement in politics by resigning her one major office in order to focus on her television and personal appearances career, without consequences. A significant minority of Americans (including perhaps a majority of very active conservative Republicans) appear to identify with her so viscerally that every mistep she makes becomes just another opportunity to shake a fist at her detractors. A presidential run, if it failed, would provide material for books, movies and testimonials lasting for decades (tales of the disrespect she had to put up with in 2008 are getting a little stale, after all).
I can’t imagine what it’s like in the media celebrity bubble where Palin now resides, but it doesn’t strike me as a place where a decent sense of proportion or gritty political realism is very prevelant. So yes, she’ll probably run, and those who can’t bear the sight and sound of her had better settle down for a long and painful ride.

It’s becoming more and more obvious that the big dispute at the heart of most arguments about the larger meaning of the 2010 midterms elections is whether the U.S. electorate is moving ideologically to the Right in a way that gives Republicans a natural majority in the future. And the very core of that dispute involves the behavior of self-identified independents, who obviously shifted towards the GOP between 2006-08 and 2010, and who seem to be exhibiting more conservative attitudes generally.
Is this the same electorate across elections? Are these the same indies across elections? Or to put it another way, how much did the 2010 outcome depend on voters changing their minds as opposed to some voters showing up and other voters not showing up? And among independents in particular, is their voting behavior a function of reversible factors (e.g., the performance of the economy) or of new ideological proclivities?
We asked TDS Co-Editor Ruy Texeira, a well-established slicer and dicer of the electorate, these questions, and here is his immediate reaction:

Has the public shifted sharply to the right ideologically? Conservatives say the 2010 election proves this, But careful analysis of available data shows there is far less to this argument than meets the eye. Here’s why:
Conservatives turned out heavily for the 2010 elections but, among registered voters as a whole, the percentage of conservatives only increased by 3% between 2006 and 2010
In the 2006 election 32 of percent of voters were conservatives according to the exit polls. In 2010 42 percent were conservatives. So what explains this 10 point increase?
Have registered voters as a whole become that much more conservative over that time period? No, according to Pew the percent of conservatives only went up 3 points over that time period. So the increase in self-identified conservatives among actual voters is not nearly accounted for by the increase in conservatives among registered voters. This suggests exceptional turnout of conservatives in 2010 even controlling for the increase in their numbers.
The 3% increase in conservatives among registered voters occurred entirely among Republicans and already Republican-leaning independents – not because of increasing conservatism among either Democrats or genuinely non-partisan independents.
But why do we have more conservatives today among registered voters? That is an interesting question with an interesting answer. Working from the Pew data, one part of the answer is that self-identified Republicans have become more conservative (by 4 points).
The other part of the answer is that independent registered voters have become more conservative (by 7 points). But why have they become more conservative? The answer is that Republican-leaning independents, just like ordinary Republicans, have become more conservative (also by 7 points) and that Republican-leaning independents are now a larger part of the independent pool (now 40 percent of independents compared to 30 percent in 2006). As political scientists have noted over and over again independents who lean toward the Republican party act very similar to Republican partisans (and Democratic leaning independents act like Democratic partisans), so this is a hugely important fact in understanding the changing political behavior of independents.
Among the rest of the independent pool, there has either been no change in the number of conservatives (among non-leaning or pure independents) or a slight decrease (among Democratic leaning independents). So the increase in “conservatism” among independents is completely accounted for by the increased conservatism of Republican-leaning independents and the increased weight of Republican-leaning independents among independents as a whole.
There are now more Republican-leaning independents among independents in general than there were in 2006, but the main reason is that the number of actual Republicans has significantly declined.
OK, so why has the weight of Republican-leaning independents among independents increased? This is a tricky question, but possibly the most important single factor is that there has been an actual decrease in the number of straight Republican identifiers among registered voters (down 2 points) which has produced a concomitant increase in the number of Republican-leaning independents over the 2006-2010 time period. It’s also interesting to note that that this switch can account for most of the 3 point overall increase in independents over the time period.

Putting it all together, here’s how Ruy sums it up:

So overall we’re shifting Republicans around between straight identifiers and leaners, both straight Republican identifiers and leaners have become more conservative over time and they turned out at very high levels in 2010.
That’s the basic story. There is no big ideological shift here viewed across registered voters as a whole. It’s overwhelmingly an intra-Republican story.

To put Ruy’s analysis another way, people who are by and large going to vote Republican in most elections have become more conservative, and they did turn out disproportionately in 2010, for all sorts of reasons, including their age and ethnicity. This is not the same as suggesting that “swing voters” are moving to the right. It’s the failure to understand that a majority of independents aren’t really “independent” that sustains the illusion that indies are primarily swing voters who are now swinging hard to the Right and to the GOP.

Of many events these day that make me feel my age, one prominent example is the tenth anniversary of Joshua Micah Marshall’s online enterprise Talking Points Memo.
A quick disclosure: I’ve known Josh since his days of working in the Washington office of The American Prospect; once guest-blogged for the main TPM site; and used to be a pretty regular contributor to one of TPM’s earliest sidelines, TPM Cafe (never got paid a nickel for any of this, but didn’t mind). I’m also very proud that TDS is on the very short list of “TPM Approved Sites.”
You don’t have to personally know Josh to appreciate his accomplishment; it just helps. Josh Green of The Atlantic has provided a fine explanation on the very beginnings of TPM, when the two Joshes were both still at TAP. I remember having lunch with Josh Marshall just down the street from the Dupont Circle Starbucks where TPM was first “housed” right after he left TAP to devote most of his time to the new venture. At that point he still thought of the blog (which is what it was then) in no small part as a way to advertise his writing for free-lance journalism assignments. But even when his hobby turned into his main preoccupation, he never for a moment stopped thinking of himself as a journalist, which was unusual in those early days of blogs as either personal platforms for opinion (e.g., Mickey Kaus’ Kausfiles) or political community sites like My DD and then Daily Kos, or the primitive online operations of more traditional political organizations.
TPM’s first real “score” came in 2002 when Josh managed to take a story the MSM had treated as a one-day amusement–Trent Lott’s suggestion that the world would have been a much better place had Strom Thurmond been elected president in 1948–and wouldn’t let it go until the chattering classes reflected on its significance for a while. Long story short, Trent Lott was forced to step down as Majority Leader of the U.S Senate, and suddenly it was obvious that online political writing could be something more than a vanity medium or an ideological clubhouse.
The rest of TPM’s story is probably too well known to most readers to require any recitation here, but the key thing is that Josh Marshall significantly expanded the possibilities for online political journalism, at a time when the almost universal belief of serious political players was that “blogs” were a May-fly phenomenon enabling puerile cranks to play at being pundits. Those of us who have subsequently found ways to address serious topics online–such as political strategy–owe a big debt of thanks to Josh and to TPM for making online political journalism impossible to dismiss and perilous to ignore.