Sarah Palin’s selective intervention in Republican primaries this year reached a new level today, as she endorsed another female “conservative reformer” in Georgia’s highly competitive Republican gubernatorial contest.
Former Secretary of State Karen Handel, who recently surged into second place in one recent poll of Georgia Republicans, was the beneficiary of Palin’s gesture.
It was fairly predictable, given Palin’s clear-cut desire to be closely associated with the election of conservative women around the country. Indeed, Handel’s overall profile and message–the brave conservative reformer taking on the corrupt good ol’ boys–has been remarkably similar to that of SC’s Nikki Haley before the SC contest was taken over by hamhanded attacks on Haley’s morals and background.
There is one, difference, however, that made the Handel endorsement a bit less of a slam dunk for Palin: she’s not necessarily the favorite candidate of social conservatives, Palin’s most reliable base. Handel’s been at odds with Georgia’s premier anti-abortion group over her refusal to back a ban on IV fertility treatments, and has also been attacked for a friendly attitude towards the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay GOP group.
The campaign of former Congressman Nathan Deal, whose struggle to edge Handel for a runoff spot has been significantly endangered by Palin’s embrace of Handel, pushed back hard, in a statement reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution‘s Jim Galloway today:

It’s disappointing that Sarah Palin has chosen to back the most liberal Republican in this race.
In past races, Karen Handel endorsed taxpayer-funded domestic partner benefits and gay adoption — and she’s been caught lying about it. Just last night, Handel finally admitted she’d written a check to a gay rights group — when previously she said the check was a forgery and she never lived at that address.
As Fulton Commission chair, Handel voted to give taxpayer dollars to “Youth Pride” which did outreach to gay and “questioning” kids as young as 13 and funded seminars such as “Unsung Heroes of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Community” – this was during a budget crisis.
We do hope that the former governor will look at the record and reconsider, or explain to conservative Georgia Republican primary voters why she’s endorsing Handel in light of these well-documented facts and Handel’s clumsy effort to cover them up.

Georgia Right-to-Life officials are said to be “shocked” by Palin’s endorsement, and like Deal, can be expected to try to discourage her from personally campaigning for Handel.
It will be interesting to see what happens during the last week of this primary. Palin got a lot of credit–probably too much credit–for Haley’s ascent to the top of the primary pile, and then her landslide runoff victory. The long-time front-runner in the Georgia race, insurance commissioner John Oxendine, has long been considered vulnerable to a late surge from one of the other candidates. Handel, whose big handicap has been a lack of funds to run ads, will get a lot of free media, and maybe some last-minute cash, from the bear hug by the mother of the Mama Grizzlies.

Seyward Darby has an amusing piece at the New Republic‘s site with some of the loonier provisions found in state Republican Party platform documents.
It’s all good clean fun, but does this craziness matter? No, suggests the CW; party platform committees these days, at any level, are a sandbox dominated by ideological activists, producing turgid documents that candidates feel free to ignore.
Fair enough, I guess, but what about those states where ideological activists have an unusually important role? How about, say, Iowa, whose caucuses often all but dictate one or the other party’s nominating process?
I strongly suggest a reading of the Iowa Republican Party Platform by anyone who accuses “liberals” or “the media” of exaggerating the extremism of today’s conservatives.
This 367-plank, 12,000-word document, adopted just last month at the Iowa State Republican Convention, is relentlessly kooky. Right up top, before the “statement of principles,” the platform features a long, ominous quote from Cicero about “traitors.” It’s not made clear whether said traitors are Democrats, RINOs, or Muslims, but treason sure seems to be a major preoccupation for Iowa Republicans.
Once you get to the “statement of principles,” it’s hard to miss principle number seven, which would have satisfied Ayn Rand even on one of her crankier days:

The individual works hard for what is his/hers. Therefore, the individual will determine with whom he/she will share it, not the government. No more legal plunder. Legal plunder is defined as using the law to take from one person what belongs to them, and giving it to others to whom it does not belong. It is plunder if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what that citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.

Given that principle, it’s not surprising that elsewhere the platform flatly calls for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (along with minimum wage laws), and of the federal departments of Agriculture (!), Education and Energy. It also appears to oppose any anti-discrimination laws of any sort.
Beyond such basics, the Iowa GOP Platform is essentially a compilation of every right-wing consipracy theory-based preoccupation known to man. In a nod to Glenn Beck, the statement of principles mentions “Progressivism” along with “Collectivism, Socialism, Fascism, [and] Communism” as ideologies incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ design. There’s a birther plank. There’s a plank about the “NAFTA Superhighway.” There’s a plank about ACORN. There’s a plank about the “fairness doctrine.” There’s plank after plank after plank opposing the nefarious activities of the United Nations. There’s a plank calling for abolition of the Federal Reserve System. Needless to say, there are many, many planks spelling out total opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage in excrutiating detail, and attacking any limitation on campaign activities or use of tax dollars by religious organizations.
The very end of the platform holds that Republican candidates should be denied party funds if they don’t agree with at least 80% of the platform, as determined by questionnaires asking about every single crazy plank. This is something we should all be able to get behind; I’d love to see not only Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad, a notorious fence-straddler on many issues, but the entire 2012 GOP presidential field, have to check boxes next to solemn items like:

We oppose any effort to implement Islamic Shariah law in this country.

If all this madness is really out of the mainstream of Republican thinking, then perhaps the adults of the GOP should expend the minimum effort necessary to say so very explicitly.

For non-Californians interested in Golden State elections, there’s probably a tendency to lump together the campaigns of the Republican nominees for governor (Meg Whitman) and senator (Carly Fiorina). After all, both are women; both are former corporate executives; both came to national political prominence during John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign; and both are facing very well-known Democratic pols (gubernatorial candidate and former Gov. Jerry Brown and Sen. Barbara Boxer).
Moreover, both these races are very competitive, as indicated by new Field Polls over the last two days. Brown leads Whitman 44-43 (Whitman was up 46-43 in the last Field Poll back in March), while Boxer leads Fiorina 47-44 (she was up 45-44 in March).
But there are some pretty important differences between the Whitman and Fiorina campaigns. Most obviously, Meg’s a billionaire while Carly’s a mere multi-millionaire, and Whtiman’s already spent $100 million in this cycle, far more than Fiorina. Beyond that, though, the two Republicans differ on two highly inflammatory issues. One is immigration, where Whitman, while doing some pretty heavy illegal-immigrant-bashing during her primary, stopped short of endorsing Arizona’s new show-your-papers law; Fiorina did endorse it. According to Field, Whitman trails Brown among Latinos by a relatively small 50-39 margin, while Fiorina trails Boxer 55-32.
The other issue is abortion, where Whitman is basically pro-choice, while Fiorina is the darling of right-to-life organizations (and their closest national political ally, Sarah Palin). Here’s how the excellent California political site Calbuzz analyzes the potential impact of the abortion issue:

No pro-life candidate has won at the top of the ticket in California in a race for governor or Senate in more than two decades. And the new [Field] poll shows a considerable gender gap which suggests that Boxer may be benefiting from her stand on choice compared to Fiorina’s, even before the issue is driven home to voters.

Indeed, it’s interesting that Boxer still holds a lead over Fiorina despite discouraging approval/disapproval ratings (41-52, compared to 34-29 for Fiorina), and you can bet Boxer will fan doubts about her opponent on abortion is what has become a strong pro-choice state.

As regular readers might recall, back in May I did an analysis which predicted that the furor over immigration policy touched off in Arizona would have its greatest political impact not in the southwest or west coast, but in the Deep South, where a combination of new and highly visible Hispanic populations, low Hispanic voting levels, and red-hot Republican primaries would likely bring the issue to the forefront.
Nothing that’s happened since then has made me change my mind about that, though southern Republican unanimity on backing the Arizona law and replicating it everywhere has reduced the salience of immigration as a differentiator in some GOP primaries, most notably in South Carolina (where in any event the Nikki Haley saga eclipsed everything else).
But in Georgia, whose primary is on July 20, immigration is indeed a big issue in the gubernatorial contest, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway:

For the next 13 days, all stops are off when it comes to debating the issue of illegal immigration.
The Obama administration’s court challenge to the Arizona law that gives its peace officers the authority to stop and impound undocumented residents is already serving as a stick to a wasp nest in Georgia’s race for governor.
Former congressman Nathan Deal’s first TV ad of the primary season on Wednesday focused on illegal immigration and a promise that Georgia would soon have an Arizona-style law.
On the answering machines of tens of thousands of GOP voters, former secretary of state Karen Handel left a message of endorsement from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Expect to see Brewer at Handel’s side before the July 20 vote.
The climate doesn’t brook dissent. Democrats have been uniformly silent on the Arizona issue.

As it happens, Deal and Handel are battling for a runoff spot. Handel and long-time Republican front-runner John Oxendine are also proposing radical changes in the state tax code, abolishing income taxes entirely, but so far that momentous issue is not getting the kind of attention generated by the action of another state on immigration three time zones away.

When a presidential hopeful like Mitt Romney signs a Washington Post op-ed attacking the president for an arms agreement with Russia, there’s a tendency among Democrats to shrug and ignore it. Mitt, we all understand, is a former governor with no foreign policy experience who needs to burnish his credentials in this area, even if it’s only by bloviating. And Mitt, we know, is vulnerable on his right flank, partially because the GOP has decisively moved in a more conservative direction since Romney posed as the “true conservative” candidate in 2008, and partially because his sponsorship of a Massachusetts health reform initiative that’s hard to distinguish from the hated ObamaCare is going to be a constant problem for him in 2012.
So you read Mitt’s op-ed and maybe laugh at the extraordinary retro feeling of it all–you know, all the Cold War hostility to the godless Russkies–and note the many right-wing boxes he checked off, from the ancient conservative pet rock of missile defense, to the ill-repressed desire for war with North Korea and Iran, to the ritual denunciations of Obama for his alleged fecklessness in negotiating with bad people. But initially, few if any Democrats had anything to say about it.
That certainly changed today, when Sen. John Kerry took to the same WaPo pages to pen a devastating riposte to Romney for getting, well, just about all the facts wrong. After tearing Romney apart on missile defense, on MIRVs, on what the treaty would and wouldn’t let the Russians do, and on the bipartisan support for what Obama’s done, Kerry concluded with this well-placed jab:

I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.

As it turns out, Kerry was nicer to Romney than was foreign policy wonk Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:

In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.

Whether or not Romney’s efforts to display conservative ferocity on foreign policy work with the GOP base, he could pay a price down the road in terms of the impact on people who aren’t hard-core conservative ideologues. Talking to progressives, you generally get the sense that while they would fight Mitt Romney like sin itself if he’s the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, they basically think the man’s sane and relatively competent, and wouldn’t threaten the foundations of the Republic like some possibilities they could name. But a few more rabid op-eds on world affairs like Romney’s latest effort will definitely undermine any latent tolerance for Romney in center-left precincts, and will also provide some target practice in case the endlessly flip-flopping former governor’s act gets him to a general election.

One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and–in some cases–charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.
We’re seeing this phenomenon re-emerge with the implementation of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a competition to reward states for educational innovations including higher academic standards, more openness to public school choice, and stronger performance indicators for teachers. Unsurprisingly, many on the left dislike charter schools, pay-for-performance, and “teaching to the test.” Many of the right are hostile to the very idea of federal involvement in education, and particularly to national standards of any sort; others are lukewarm to charter schools because they are public, and instead favor private-school vouchers and/or oppose “government schools” altogether.
Liberal hostility to Race to the Top was reflected in this recent effort by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to shift emergency funds out of RTT and into teacher layoff prevention. More broadly, there’s notable tension between teachers unions (particularly the NEA) and the administration on education policy.
One of the most interesting examples of conservative infighting on education policy is in Georgia, where lame duck Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has made his state’s RTT application the centerpiece of his administration’s education program, and also a major part of its strategy to balance the state budget. But when Republican State School Superintendent Kathy Cox abruptly resigned to take a Washington think tank post, after the filing deadline for the post, the GOP was left with two candidates who opposed RTT because they oppose federal involvement in education altogether. So Perdue is backing an independent bid for the post by the career educator he appointed to replace Cox, which has made conservatives quite unhappy.
This is one major policy area where the differences within and between the two major parties are playing out at every level of government. It could be a very rocky ride just ahead for anyone longing for consistency in how our public schools are run.

If you are at all interested in journalism, you should check out this New York magazine profile of New York Times columnist David Brooks, and then Jonathan Chait’s comment on the subject.
I couldn’t agree more with Chait’s observation that Brooks is now operating in a format, the op-ed column, that just isn’t suited for him:

Brooks used to be known mainly for his long-form journalism. I doubt anybody read his work and thought, “This man should be writing an op-ed column.” But what happened is that the New York Times needed a conservative who liberals would find amenable, and there were few candidates other than Brooks. The role of New York Times columnist is very prestigious and lucrative, so Brooks obviously felt he couldn’t turn it down. From the perspective of the Times, he’s quite valuable, even though he’s in a role that misuses his considerable talents.

Some of Brooks’ long-form pieces at The Weekly Standard were not only insightful, but very entertaining (my favorite, a piece entitled “How to Become Henry Kissinger,” a hilarious send-up of Washington chattering class culture, has unfortunately vanished from the internet). But that approach is very difficult to pull off in 800-word bursts, much less the television punditry that Brooks engages in. So he’s kind of like a great athlete playing out of position; his mistakes and misperceptions (and I’ve gone after them more than a few times) are all the more maddening because you know he could do better.

It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal asked 109 Republican “insiders” to rank possible nominees in terms of likelihood, Daniels finished fifth, tied with Sarah Palin and well ahead of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And at the same time, 111 Democratic “insiders” ranked Daniels fourth when asked about the most formidable prospective GOP candidate. And that was all before a slow but steady drumbeat of interest in the Hoosier, culminating in one of those long, hagiographical magazine profiles that often serve as the informal launching pad of presidential runs, this one by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard.
You can see the logic behind the Daniels-for-president enthusiasm. Virtually unknown among voters outside Indiana, Daniels has none of the baggage accompanying retreads like Gingrich, Huckabee and Mitt Romney, or even fellow-insider-favorite Haley Barbour, much less the lightning-rod Palin. He’s a state official who has never had to cast a controversial vote in Congress, but also has DC street cred from his work in the Reagan White House and his stint as George W. Bush’s first OMB director (where he exited before the inevitable gusher of red ink really exploded). He’s very popular in a state carried by Barack Obama in 2008, and his state’s positive fiscal record stands out sharply against a national landscape of state fiscal disaster. Moreover, as Ferguson’s profile illustrates, Daniels has a moderately quirky but folksy personality that seems a lot more appealing than those of other, dark horses like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or John Thune of South Dakota.
Given the newly rediscovered monomania for deficit hawkery among Republicans, buttressed by Tea Party demands for smaller government now, Daniels looks like someone who can credibly wear a green eyeshade at a time when that’s the sexiest look around.
But in the self-same Ferguson profile that exemplified the emergence of Daniels ’12 buzz, the putative candidate himself (who has mastered a stance of disinterested availability for a White House run) tossed a little hand grenade into his own camp:

And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.

Predictably, Mike Huckabee pounced on the “truce” idea (or gaffe, or whatever it was):

“Apparently, a 2012 Republican presidential prospect in an interview with a reporter has made the suggestion that the next president should call for a ‘truce’ on social issues like abortion and traditional marriage to focus on fiscal problems,” Huckabee said. “In other words, stop fighting to end abortion and don’t make protecting traditional marriage a priority.”
“For those of us who have labored long and hard in the fight to educate the Democrats, voters, the media and even some Republicans on the importance of strong families, traditional marriage and life to our society, this is absolutely heartbreaking. And that one of our Republican ‘leaders’ would suggest this truce, even more so,” said Huckabee, a social conservative who is weighing another presidential run.

Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins chipped in with his own more harshly worded condemnation of Daniels for talk of a culture-war truce:

We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the Establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.

Other, more sympathetic social conservatives, like National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, wondered if Daniels had simply misspoken or overstated his focus on fiscal issues, but also warned him not to get carried away with fiscal-first rhetoric:

A lot of people will cheer [Daniels’] statement: Truces are usually popular, and most people see the economic issues as more important than the social ones at this moment. But I’m not sure how a truce would work. If Justice Kennedy retired on President Daniels’s watch, for example, he would have to pick someone as a replacement. End of truce.
I also can’t help but think of Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. Like Daniels, Gramm was an enthusiastic budget-cutter. Concern about big government was running strong in the years just prior to that election. Gramm had a solid social-conservative record, but consciously chose not to campaign on it; he famously flew out to Colorado Springs to tell James Dobson, “I’m not a preacher.” That approach helped to doom Gramm’s campaign.

Finally, the Washington Post’s resident religious conservative Mike Gerson gave Daniels a chance to backtrack, and the Hoosier allowed as how cultural issues with a fiscal dimension, like the Mexico City rules (and presumably abortion funding generally), would not fall under any “truce.”
Crisis averted? Perhaps; certainly many Republicans will be privately counseling Daniels not to make the same mistake twice, and he’d be smart to take advantage of the Kagan confirmation issue by blowing the dog whistle of determination to appoint “strict constructionist” judges. Meanwhile, he’ll get some credit from the shrinking band of social moderates in the GOP, not to mention libertarians, along with secular MSM types whose skepticism of the Tea Party movement has always been tempered by their obvious relief at the sight of conservatives thumping not Bibles but the Constitution.
But it’s worth noting that Huckabee’s not the only 2012 possibility who is taking a different tack than Daniels on the culture wars. And indeed, the other candidate with a bullet next to his name of late, and in public polls rather than insider buzz (viz. a recent PPP survey of Texas Republicans, which placed him at the top of the 2012 list with or without home-state Gov. Rick Perry), is none other than Newt Gingrich, who seems determined to escalate the culture wars into a full-scale Clash of Civilizations.

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As someone with a particular interest in the power of the immigration issue in the South, where Hispanics are newly visible but don’t vote in large numbers, I’ve been closely watching the impact of Arizona’s round-em-up law on competitive GOP primaries in Dixie. And it was particularly striking to see Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, an accidental governor who was something of a joke in her own state until quite recently, intervene in Georgia’s Republican gubernatorial primary on behalf of former Secretary of State Karen Handel.
Handel’s reaction to the endorsement was almost as excited as it might have been if she had really hit the conservative jackpot and gotten the nod from Sarah Palin. And right on cue, conservative political scientist John Tures, writing in Southern Political Report, called Brewer “the next Sarah Palin,” and credited her intervention for a reported rise in the polls by Handel.
We’ll see in a couple of weeks how this works out for Handel, who has positioned herself in the large Georgia gubernatorial field very much like SC’s Nikki Haley did before sexual allegations and attacks on her ethnicity took over the contest and lifted her to a relatively easy win in the Palmetto State’s GOP primary. But strange as it would have seemed not so very long ago, Brewer has morphed from a doomed and much-mocked candidate for re-election in her own state to a factor in campaigns thousands of miles away.