Tennessee’s primary yesterday featured a bunch of wild Republican primaries in which the accustomed dominance of the hard-core Right wasn’t always confirmed. In the gubernatorial contest, Knoxville mayor Bill Haslam smoked two rivals, congressman Zach Wamp and Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey, who constantly warned he wasn’t conservative enough. Wamp tried to mobilize the Christian Right behind his candidacy, while Ramsey spent much of drive stretch on gun ranges.
In Wamp’s district, the endorsee of both the Club for Growth and the Family Research Council, former state GOP chair Robin Smith, lost narrowly to talk-show host Chuck Fleischmann.
In the open 6th District, perhaps the state’s most hateful contest, conservative activist Lou Ann Zelenik tried to make the race about the awful specter of Sharia Law being imposed on the good Christian folk of Tennessee via a proposed mosque in Murfreesboro. But she would up running a close second to state senator Diane Black in a result largely dictated by geography.
And in Jim Cooper’s 5th district, candidates endorsed by Sarah Palin (CeCe Heil) and Mike Huckabee (Jeff Hartline) lost to businessman David Hall.
To be very clear, it’s not as though moderation is breaking out in TN GOP circles. The 8th district landslide winner, Stephen Fincher, was endorsed by right-to-life and gun rights groups. Black’s campaign web page includes a long paen to constitutional literalism and the 10th amendment. Hall’s talks about his determination to fight “socialistic” government. And Fleischmann benefitted from a Huckabee endorsement and the services of Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, Chip Saltsman.
Haslam’s a big-time right-to-lifer who spent a good part of the campaign denying he had any interest in creating an income tax and trying to prove his gun-nut bona fides (he got into trouble in Knoxville once by supporting a gun buy-back program).
But all in all, it wasn’t the best week for those who think the GOP is a dangerously liberal institution that needs a hard shove to the Right, what with Mike Cox and Pete Hoekstra losing in MI, Todd Tiahrt losing in KS, and now Wamp, Ramsey, Smith, Zelenik, Hartline and Heil all bombing in TN. The Republican Party remains right-bent, but it’s good to know that its primary voters don’t always pull the lever for the shrillest, angriest candidate available.

Yesterday J.P. Green did a post on the Missouri “ObamaCare referendum,” noting its rather tilted character and echoing Jon Chait’s endorsement of a progressive way around the unpopularity of an individual mandate for the purchase of health insurance, as designed by Paul Starr.
But there’s another aspect of the Missouri vote that ought to be mentioned: the individual mandate that was the target of the the state law ratified by Proposition C wasn’t just a feature of “ObamaCare.” It was also a central element in RomneyCare, Massachusetts’ pioneer health reform effort. And amidst all the rationalizations that Romney has offered in an effort to distinguish RomneyCare from ObamaCare, he hasn’t repudiated his support for an individual mandate.
Even if you don’t think the Missouri vote was a fair representation of overall public opinion in the Show-Me State (and it’s dubious on that front, given the low turnout and the 2-1 Republican tilt among priimary voters), it was sure a good measure of how politically active Republicans feel. And a shudder had to shake Romney when he heard about it, since it’s very unlikely the 2012 Caucus-goers in next-door Iowa are going to feel any warmer towards the individual mandate seventeen months from now, when they once again pass judgment on Mitt’s presidential ambitions.

Though most progressives are rightly very pleased with federal district court Judge Vaughan Walker’s ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a challenge to California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriages, it’s going to be a while before we know the ultimate implications.
Yes, Walker’s ruling was sweeping, and in its Emperor-Has-No-Clothes explosion of the case for marriage inequality, it had the ring of a landmark decision that law students will examine for many years.
But it’s important to remember not only that this is a lower-court ruling subject to appeal, but also that it involved fact-finding in a situation where the defendants (supporters of Prop 8) offered an insufficient and incompetent case for their point of view. Indeed, that’s why Walker felt compelled to say the case for Prop 8, as presented in his courtroom, didn’t meet the lower “rationale basis” standard for discriminatory actions, much less the “strict scrutiny” standard that would be employed if gays and lesbians were recognized as a class of citizens requiring constitutional protection.
So unless opponents of marriage equality continue to do sloppy courtroom work, the battle is far from over, and most observers expect the case to wind up on the docket of the U.S. Supreme Court, with the outcome probably depending on the unpredictable position of swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy (see Nate Silver’s post at FiveThirtyEight for an optimistic assessment of where Kennedy might land).
But judicial proceedings aside, the vast attention accorded this decision will have a more immediate effect in the political arena, with ripples emanating wide and far and into very different contexts. At Politico today, the early banner article, by Josh Gerstein, was a rumination on how the decision might force the president out of his no-to-gay-marriage, no-to-Prop-8 posture. And beyond the White House, the renewed elevation of this issue will create cross-pressures for Democrats in culturally conservative parts of the country.
All that is fairly obvious, but we should also consider the pressure the decision will create for Republicans who have sought to make economic and fiscal issues, not divisive cultural issues, the focus of their 2010 and 2012 campaigns.
The very day after Judge Walker’s decision, Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Nathan Deal, locked in a nasty cage-match runoff fight with Karen Handel, launched a new ad blasting his rival for alleged friendliness to gays and lesbians. Those unaccustomed to the current tone of Republican politics in the South may be shocked at the unabashed homophobia in the ad, which brings back memories of the late Jesse Helms. In fact, it’s a theme Deal has been hitting for some time, and I’m sure the ad was in the can before word came out of San Francisco about the judge’s ruling. But if he indeed makes this his signature attack line in the final push towards next Tuesday’s runoff, it’s probably because Perry v. Schwarzenegger has again made the specter of “activist judges” supporting the “homosexual agenda” a lively concern among conservative Republicans.
Whatever happens in Georgia–where Sarah Palin is riding into town the day before the runoff to campaign with Handel–a renewed focus on fighting marriage equality will have a long-term effect on the nature and appeal of the GOP. It’s interesting in that connection that Deal’s most prominent backer, Newt Gingrich, has recently become one of the most avid supporters of culture-war politics, athough his focus has been on the alleged un-American nature of Democrats–and more recently on Muslims–not gays and lesbians. Still, many voters who are in no particular sense progressives may not be fond of a double-down return to the Days of Rage when many Republicans spent most of their time attacking the Enemies Within, even in their own party.

As viewers of the Daily Show’s occasional “Thank you, South Carolina!” features know, the Palmetto State has continued to burnish its reputation for exceptionally wacky politics this year.
But after writing up a preview of today’s Tennessee primary for FiveThirtyEight yesterday, I’d have to say the Volunteer State is making its own bid for dubious fame:

[Tennessee features] the nation’s most expensive House primary (GOP TN-8), a primary where the Club for Growth accidentally directed readers of a mailer to a phone sex line (GOP TN-3), a primary where a white Jewish incumbent has earned the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus in a campaign against the African-American former mayor of Memphis (Dem TN-9), and a primary where Sarah Palin delved into a crowded GOP field in a staunch Democratic district to endorse her latest “Mama Grizzly” (GOP TN-5). And all that fun doesn’t even include America’s latest viral video sensation, Republican gubernatorial candidate Basil Marceaux.

And that’s just scratching the surface, since Tennessee’s primary field also includes one major Republican gubernatorial candidate (a resident, BTW, of the famous C Street complex run by the secretive theocratic group The Family) who’s been threatening secession, and another who wondered out loud if Islam was not an actual religion but a “cult.” There’s one House candidate under attack because the radio station he owns plays hip-hop music, and another who is battling to protect the citizens of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from the awful specter of Sharia law.
The sheer nastiness of the Tennessee primaries led one congressional candidate to put out a press release observing: “We’re not picking someone to represent us at the next World Wrestling Federation SummerSlam.”
That’s debatable, I guess. But aficionados of the absurd (and for that matter, Democrats, since most of the fireworks are in GOP primaries) can only regret that Tennessee is the rare southern state without a majority-vote requirement, which means we won’t have the spectacle of runoffs to continue the craziness for another few weeks.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
So let’s say you’re a Republican politician who’s been working the far right side of the political highway for years, getting little national attention other than the occasional shout-out in Human Events. Or let’s say you’re a sketchy business buccaneer with a few million smackers burning a hole in your pocket, and you’ve decided that you’d like to live in the governor’s mansion for a while, but you can’t get the local GOP to see you as anything more than a walking checkbook who funds other people’s dreams.
What do you do? That’s easy: Get yourself in front of the loudest parade in town by becoming a Tea Party Activist!
There has been incessant discussion over the last year about the size, character, and intentions of the Tea Party rank-and-file. But, by and large, the political discussion has passed over another defining phenomenon: The beatific capacity of Tea Party membership, which enables virtually anyone with ambition to whitewash his hackishness–and transform from a has-been or huckster into an idealist on a crusade.
After all, to become a “Tea Party favorite” or a “Tea Party loyalist,” all a politician has to do is say that he or she is one–and maybe grab an endorsement from one of many hundreds of local groups around the country. It’s even possible to become indentified as the “Tea Party” candidate simply by entering a primary against a Republican who voted for TARP, the Medicare Prescription Drug bill, or No Child Left Behind. It’s not like there’s much upside to distancing oneself from the movement. Most Republican pols are as friendly as can be to the Tea Party; and it’s a rare, self-destructive elephant who would emulate Lindsey Graham’s dismissal of it all as a passing fad (in public at least).
Here, we’ll take a look at two specific types of politicians who have been especially eager to embrace the Tea Party movement: the fringier of conservative ideologues, for one, and also the self-funded ego freaks who can easily pose as “outsiders,” because no “insiders” would take them seriously. Let’s call these, respectively, the windbags and the moneybags.
By “fringier” conservative ideologues, I mean those who have argued, year in and year out, sometimes for decades, that even the conservative Republican Party simply is not conservative enough. Many of these politicians would be considered washed-up and isolated, or at least eccentric, in an era when “Party Wrecking” was still treated as a cardinal GOP sin. But now it’s as if they’ve been granted a license to kill. One classic example of this type is South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who was considered such a crank in the Senate that he was often stuck eating lunch alone as recently as 2008. His views, for example that Social Security and public schools are symbols of the seduction of Americans by socialism, were not long ago considered far outside the GOP mainstream. Now, in no small part because of his identification with the Tea Party Movement, DeMint has become an avenging angel roaming across the country to smite RINOs in Republican primaries, his imprimatur sought by candidates far from the Palmetto State.
Then there’s the new House Tea Party Caucus, chaired by Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, best known for suggesting that House Democrats be investigated for treason. Its members include a rich assortment of long-time conservative cranks, including Steve (“Racial profiling is an important part of law enforcement”) King, Joe (“You lie!”) Wilson, Paul (“We’ve elected a Marxist to be President of the United States”) Broun, Dan (Vince Foster Was Murdered!) Burton, and Phil (National Journal’s Most Conservative House Member in 2007) Gingrey. The key here is that these are not freshly minted “outsiders”: Burton has been in Congress for 28 years, Wilson for ten, King and Gingrey for eight. The oldest member of the House, Ralph Hall of Texas, who has been around for 30 years, is also a member of the caucus.
Even some of the younger Tea Party firebrands didn’t exactly emerge from their living rooms on April 15, 2009, to battle the stimulus legislation and Obamacare. Marco Rubio of Florida, after all, was first elected to the state legislature ten years ago and served as House Speaker under the protective wing of his political godfather, Jeb Bush. Sharron Angle first ran for office 20 years ago, and was elected to the Nevada legislature twelve years back. And of course the Pauls, father and son, are hardly political neophytes–they have just begun to look relevant again because the Tea Party movement has shifted the GOP in their direction
And, in addition to the hard-right pols who’ve emerged into the sunshine of GOP respectability, the “outsider” meme surrounding the Tea Party movement has also created running room for well-funded opportunists–the “moneybags.”

Read more…

Yesterday’s primaries in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri didn’t get a whole lot of national attention, but they produced some interesting results.
As I mentioned yesterday, MI gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder ran a campaign very much at odds with the CW that the only way to win a GOP primary is to loudly and repeatedly proclaim one’s fidelity to conservative principles and policy positions. The self-proclaimed “nerd” won handily, with 36% of the vote as compared to 27% for congressman Pete Hoekstra and a very disappointing 23% for Attorney General Mike Cox.
Since Snyder explicitly appealed for crossover votes, political detectives (myself included) will try to figure out if that was a big factor in his victory. It was rather interesting that turnout tilted 2-1 Republican in a state that hasn’t gone Republican in a presidential contest since 1988. Certainly the idea that Democrats got involved in a Republican primary will be a source of consolation to conservatives who are none too happy with the results.
Meanwhile, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate known for “centrism,” House Speaker Andy Dillon, didn’t do so well, losing to labor-backed Lansing mayor Virg Bernero by a 59-41 margin. Bernero edged Dillon in his Detroit-area base and then waxed him in heavily unionized areas elsewhere.
The other big Democratic news from Michigan was the defeat of Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick by state senator Hansen Clarke, a development generally attributed to the disastrous decline and fall of her son, former Detroit mayor and current prison inmate Kwame Kilpatrick.
Elsewhere Republicans made the most news and the CW pretty much held. In KS, in a contest dominated by conflicting claims of superior conservatism, Rep. Jerry Moran defeated Rep. Todd Tiahrt by a 50-45 margin, mainly by running up a bigger vote in his own House district. In terms of national endorsements, it was a win for Jim DeMint and a loss for Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo.
In House races, the big winner on the night was probably the Club for Growth, which backed winning candidates in three crowded GOP primaries (MI-3, KS-1 and KS-4). In MI-1, Bart Stupak’s district, where a competitive race is expected in November, add another data point to the Every Vote Counts argument, as exactly one vote separated the two leading Republican candidates (a recount is pending).
And offsetting their bad news from the Michigan governor’s race, conservatives today are crowing about the results of a referendum in Missouri over a proposed state law aimed at blocking implementation of federal health reform legislation. Proposition C, which essentially challenges the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause by outlawing mandated health insurance, won by a 71-29 margin, which is very impressive until you realize that primary turnout in Missouri was 2-1 Republican. In any event, the referendum will have no practical effect, but that won’t keep conservatives from bragging about it.

Today voters (20-25% of them, anyway) will trudge to the polls in Kansas, Michigan and Missouri to choose candidates for the November ballot. I’ve done a comprehensive preview over at FiveThirtyEight, and another at Progressive Fix will go up later today, but have a few additional thoughts here.
First of all, in terms of Republican primaries, it’s interesting that the main ideological contention in most races isn’t supposed affiliation with the Tea Party movement, but more traditional conservative preoccupations like abortion. This seems to be a midwestern thing to some extent (though the fine gradations of anti-abortion politics are also a big deal in the Republican gubernatorial runoff in Georgia), but it shows that the “uprising” associated with the Tea Party movement has meshed with the traditional agenda of the conservative movement, regardless of what we read about the laser-like focus of the Tea Folk on fiscal issues.
In at least one case, the Kansas Republican Senate primary, both candidates (Todd Tiahrt and Jerry Moran) have pretty much checked each other on association with the Tea Party movement, both having become charter members of Michele Bachmann’s House Tea Party Caucus, and both enjoying endorsements from Tea Folk heroes (Tiahrt’s been endorsed by Sarah Palin and Tom Tancredo, while Moran’s gotten the nod from Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn). So as a fascinating post from National Review’s Kathryn Lopez indicates, those looking for the “true conservative” in the race are getting really down in the weeds of discerning relative levels of commitment to the anti-abortion cause.
Second of all, today’s GOP primaries have an assortment of congressional contests with extremely crowded fields, in states that do not have a 50% requirement. So it’s possible we are going to see some really eccentric nominees who win with relatively small percentages of the vote.
And third of all, as noted in a separate FiveThirtyEight post, we are witnessing a very rare phenomenon in the Michigan governor’s race: a Republican candidate, Rick Snyder, who doesn’t seem to be competing for the True Conservative mantle, and in fact, has pursued endorsements from the state’s two most infamous RINOs, former Gov. Bill Milliken (who in turn endorsed John Kerry and Barack Obama for president), and former congressman Joe Schwarz, who’s set up an operation for Snyder aimed at attracting Democratic and independent crossover votes.
If Snyder wins–and he actually ran first in a recent EPIC-MRA poll of likely Republican primary voters–we could either see emulators of this strategy emerge elsewhere, or, more likely, some seriously angry talk among conservatives about how to make sure it doesn’t.
In any event, the results today will be interesting, and not just to the citizens of the three states directly involved.

Just the other day I was wondering if it was a sign of hard times that movies and television shows seem to be featuring obscenely wealthy people, even more than is usually the case. Similarly, it seems like there are an awful lot of people running for office this year who have personal money to burn, having clearly done very well financially even as their fellow-citizens suffered.
I still can’t prove my theory about movies and television, but according to a well-researched Jeanne Cummings article in Politico, this is indeed a very big year for self-funding candidates:

About 11 percent of the combined $657 million raised by all 2010 candidates has come in the way of self-financing — nearly double the 6 percent measured at the same juncture in the 2006 midterm, according to the Campaign Finance Institute.
Of the $134 million raised by all Republican House challengers as of June 30, a whopping 35 percent of the cash came from the candidates’ own bank accounts, the analysis found. Among Democrats, the percentage of self-made donations was just 18 percent.
If such spending stays on course, the Institute’s Executive Director Michael Malbin expects the GOP challengers’ field to eclipse the 38 percent self-financing high-water mark set by Democrats in 2002. “This is or is near a record,” he said.

Much of Cummings’ article focuses on the relatively low success rate of self-funded candidates in prior elections, and explores different reasons for that phenomenon, from lack of self-discipline to specific issues over how the candidate got rich to begin with. Several well-known candidates this year could have some of those issues:

Ohio businessman Jim Renacci, who is challenging freshman Democratic Rep. John Boccieri, for example, is expected to be attacked for going to court to avoid paying taxes on $13.7 million in income.
In the California Senate race, Republican Carly Fiorina, former head of Hewlett-Packard, is being criticized for laying off thousands of workers and taking a $42 million golden parachute.
[Florida Senate candidate Jeff] Greene is coming under fire for the way he made millions off the subprime mortgage meltdown. Those criticisms could be especially powerful in a state hit hard by foreclosures. And his relatively thin connections to Florida and prior celebrity lifestyle in Los Angeles — Mike Tyson was the best man at his wedding — are also expected to be used to paint him as an unsuitable senator for the Sunshine State.
And in Connecticut, [Senate candidate Linda] McMahon is trying to finesse using the wealth from her WWE enterprise while still distancing herself from the scandals — from steroids to sexual harassment — that have plagued the professional wrestling industry.

But as Cummings makes plain, rich candidates invariably claim they’ll be independent because they aren’t spending anybody else’s money, and a lot of voters buy it. It’s another good argument for public financing of campaigns, but until such time as that reform is enacted, there will be plenty of people who look in the mirror one fine morning, see a future governor, congressman, senator or president, and decide to share their resplendence with the rest of us.

Anyone who has been active in politics since the prediluvian era of the 1990s can probably remember a time when a central event of every weekday was the arrival on the fax machine of The Hotline, once the Daily Bread of the chattering classes.
You can revisit those days–or, if you are younger, discover them–via a long article at Politico by Keach Hagey that examines The Hotline’s past, present and future in some detail. It certainly does bring back memories:

Howard Mortman, a former columnist and editor at The Hotline, remembers the first time he saw the process — a blinking frenzy of subscribers dialing in by modem, one by one, to get their pre-lunch politics fix.
“We would publish at 11:30, and you could go downstairs and see the lights flicker as people downloaded The Hotline from the telephone bulletin board,” he said. “At that time, in 1995, that was cutting-edge technology.”
Today, The Hotline is still putting out its exhaustive aggregation of cleverly titled political tidbits at 11:30 a.m., though subscribers hit a refresh button instead of a fax number to get it. But the sense of cutting-edge technology and unique content is gone, eclipsed by an exponentially expanding universe of political websites, blogs, Twitter feeds, Google alerts and mobile apps that offer much of what a $15,000 annual office membership to The Hotline offers — but faster and for free.

In effect, Hotline was the first “aggregator,” and as a result was an exceptionally efficient and even cost-effective way to obtain political news at a time when clipping services were the main alternative. And for all of The Hotline‘s gossipy Washington insider attitudes, it did cover campaigns exhaustively, from coast to coast, in a way that was virtually unique at the time.
If you are interested in the process whereby The Hotline has struggled to survive in the online era, or in the cast of media celebrities who got their start there, check out the entire article, with the appropriate grain of salt in recognition of the fact that Politico views itself as a successor institution.
The takeaway for me, though, is the reminder that for all the maddening things about blogs and online political coverage generally, it’s really remarkable how much is now available to anyone, for free, 24-7–material that is shared by the DC commentariat and, well, anybody who cares to use it. In The Hotline’s heyday, its subscribers (concentrated in Washington but scattered around the country) really did represent a separate class with specialized access to information that created and sustained a distinct culture.
If you have money to burn, there are still paywalls you can climb to secure a privileged perch from which to observe American politics, just as you can obviously learn things living and working in Washington or frequenting its real or virtual watering holes that wouldn’t be obvious to others. But we have come a long way. And it’s actually wonderful that the entire hep political world no longer comes to a stop shortly before noon, in some sort of secular Hour of Prayer, in anticipation of The Word rolling off the fax machine.

Anyone interested in making the 2010 (and for that matter, 2012) elections revolve around a comparison of Democratic and Republican plans for dealing with the country’s big challenges should read Ezra Klein’s intereview with Rep. Paul Ryan, published in the Washington Post yesterday.
Ryan, as you may recall, is the principal author of the so-called “Republican Road-Map” document that is an extremely rare GOP outline of an agenda that would be implemented through the federal budget process. That agenda, of course, is focused on tax cuts and spending cuts.
But what makes the interview fascinating is Klein’s eventually successful effort to get Ryan to admit that nothing in his or other Republicans’ plans would involve much of anything designed to deal with the immediate jobs crisis and overall economic slump:

Where I come from, I think certainty and long-term solutions are better. Temporary stuff doesn’t work. These short-term stimulative things like rebates don’t work. They’ll pump up some money in the quarter where they occur. You go right back where you were. These short-term stimuli, which Bush and Obama did, don’t change aggregate demand. And that’s why I think we need more of an investment-led recovery. At this point, given the borrowing costs, stimulus is counterproductive.

Ryan’s ideas for an “investment-led recovery” focus on high-end tax cuts, of course, along with an extraordinary faith in the proposition that a shift to smaller-government policies would provide “certainty” to the private sector and “unlock” capital. If that faith turns out to be misplaced, or takes many years to play out, well, too bad; the really important thing is repealing ObamaCare and the just-enacted financial regulatory package.
Now it’s hardly news when a Republican thinks tax cuts are the answer to every conceivable economic question. But it’s the combination of that dogma with the suddenly-critical demand to reduce federal budget deficits that makes it very difficult for Ryan to pretend Americans can expect anything other than continued high unemployment and sluggish growth under GOP policies. When specifically asked by Klein about the recessionary impact of public-sector layoffs, which directly increase unemployment, Ryan retreated into an argument about the need for state and local governments to deal with “structural deficit” issues. In other words, hundreds of thousands of people need to thrown out of work in order to accomplish a long-range shrinkage of the public sector, which is an end in itself with no relationship to any economic recovery. Ryan also calls for an increase in interest rates, which would impose still more short-term pain.
Now this is especially noteworthy because Ryan is at least willing to essay an intellectually defensible position and connect it to a specific agenda. Many Republicans (including would-be House Speaker John Boehner) have backed away from Ryan’s “Road Map” because they understand it includes politically toxic proposals like another run at partial-privatization of Social Security, and a “voucherization” of Medicare. So your standard-brand conservative fulminating for tax cuts and an immediate balancing of the federal budget relies far more than Ryan on vague and magical thinking about the impact on the economy of Republican rule, and offers even less in the way of steps to deal with the economic problems Americans face right now.
So Ryan’s “thinking” is about as good as it gets in the GOP ranks. Democrats definitely need to make voters impatient for strong action on the jobs crisis abundantly aware that Republicans don’t intend to move a muscle, even as they rush to shower tax benefits on the few Americans who are feeling no pain.