In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican United States Senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.
In a long and interesting profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, it was vouchsafed that the senior senator had described the Tea Party Movement as a marginal, passing fad that “will die out.”
Asked about this comment on Fox News yesterday, the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who has been intervening in state after state to support Tea Party-approved candidates against alleged RINOs, had this to say:

“Lindsey’s a great friend, but he’s wrong on this.”
“The tea party is just the tip of the iceberg of an American awakening of people that want to take back their government,” said DeMint, a vocal leader of the tea party movement. “Americans are going to show in November that they aren’t going anywhere.”

Insofar as DeMint appears to think the Tea Party Movement is coextensive with “Americans,” it might be inferred that doesn’t think his “great friend” Lindsey Graham is actually an American, much less right on this subject.
As for Graham’s intentions, the Times profile can be read in two very different ways. Perhaps he’s already decided to pack it in when his current term ends, and thus doesn’t care what he says. On the other hand, given his obvious pride in mastery of public opinion polls, perhaps he thinks he can flip-flop just enough to stay ahead of the conservative mobs back home who are itching for his destruction, and get re-elected anyway. He’s certainly off to a good start with his abandonment of bipartisan negotiations on several key topics, but he might be advised to be a little more circumspect about the political calculations that guide his conduct.

Back in March, I recapitulated the overwhelming evidence that the Tea Party Movement, for all the hype treating it as a new or as an independent phenomenon, was actually just a radicalized subset (a large subset, to be sure) of the conservative GOP base.
Apparently the venerable Gallup organization has gotten tired of hearing the same hype, because now it’s releasing an analysis of data collected for several months showing, in its understated way of saying it, that “Tea Party Supporters Overlap Republican Base.”
By just about any measurement you care to use, the two voter segments do indeed “overlap,” with the attitudes of the Tea Party Folk and those of self-identified “conservative Republicans” differing very little, perhaps because they are largely the same people.
Here’s how Gallup puts it:

The Tea Party movement has received considerable news coverage this year, in large part because it appears to represent a new and potentially powerful force on the American political scene. Whether Tea Party supporters are a voting segment that is unique and distinct from the more traditional Republican conservative base, however, appears questionable. There is significant overlap between Tea Party supporters and conservative Republicans, both groups are highly enthusiastic about voting, and both are heavily skewed toward Republican candidates — although the latter somewhat more so than the former.
Republican leaders who worry about the Tea Party’s impact on their races may in fact (and more simply) be defined as largely worrying about their party’s core base. Additionally, GOP leaders eager to maximize turnout this fall may do just as well by targeting the more traditional voting category of conservative Republicans as by expending energy and effort to target those who identify with the Tea Party movement.

So how does one explain this persistent misapprehension of the Tea Party as something entirely new under the sun? I think there are three factors:
(1) Tea Party types are constantly proclaiming their independence, for the simple reason that it increases their leverage over the GOP and also encourages media coverage of the phenomenon.
(2) The Tea Party Movement does indeed have a radical rhetoric that sounds new, though it’s reasonably clear that this simply reflects a radicalization of the Republican Right because of the “betrayals” of the conservative cause it perceives in the “GOP establishment,” and because of the trauma inflicted by recent Democratic victories and also by the economic meltdown and the disappointments associated with Bush-era military crusades in the Middle East.
(3) Many observers do not seem aware of the long history of movement-conservative hostility to the “Republican establishment,” which stretches back to its very beginnings, and indeed, beyond that, if you consider the ancient hostility of heartland “Taft Republicans” to the GOP’s “Eastern Seaboard Establishment,” which predated World War II. To put it another way, many non-conservatives think of the conquest of the Republican Party by the conservative movement as being a long-accomplished fact, dating back to 1994 or even to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980. But to movement conservatives, the struggle is an ongoing effort that will not be complete until every “RINO,” defined ever-more-expansively as anyone resisting the latest conservative line, is driven out of the party or cowed into silence.
The bottom line is that no one should be fooled into thinking that by putting on revolutionary war garb or brandishing well-thumbed copies of the Constitution, conservative activists have changed their basic attitudes or found a large number of new adherents. They’ve always been willing, periodically, to pressure the GOP with threats to stay at home on election day or even occasionally vote for a Democrat; it’s no accident that one of the spiritual fathers of the conservative movement and the Tea Party Movement, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie, celebrated the prospect of a Republican defeat in 2006 in hopes that the party would turn decisively to the right in the wake of voter repudiation. And that’s precisely what it’s done.

When House Republican leader (and would-be Speaker) John Boehner claimed the other day that Democrats were “snuffing out the America I grew up in,” it didn’t cause much reaction (or at least far less than his remarks on Social Security and on financial regulation), since it’s the kind of thing conservatives say all the time. But as Mike Tomasky quickly noted, it was a very strange statement if you actually think the problem with Democrats is their addiction to big government and their subservience to unions:

Boehner was born in November 1949. Let’s take a look at the America he grew up in.
In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.
In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

That’s all very true. But as Matt Yglesias observes, the country was in fact a lot more conservative back then on the cultural front:

[In] many other respects the America of John Boehner’s youth was a much more right-wing country. Gays and lesbians were stuffed deep into the closet, and there was no suggestion that they should be allowed to serve openly in the military or in any other role. African-Americans were subjected to pervasive discrimination in housing and employment, and in the southern states they couldn’t vote or exercise any basic rights–all this backed by the state, and also by collusion between state authorities and ad hoc terrorist groups. It was a whiter country with dramatically fewer residents of Asian or Latin American descent. It was a more religiously observant country, and it was a country in which Jews were far from fully accepted into American life.
I’m not nostalgic for that era at all. There are a few areas of policy in which I think we’ve moved backwards since the mid-sixties, but I wouldn’t want to return to an America with almost no immigrants or to an America with a single monopoly provider of telecom services. I’m glad airlines can set their own ticket prices and I’m glad black people can sit in the front of the bus. What is it that Boehner misses?

What indeed? Let’s all remember Boehner’s regret for the passing of the good ol’ days of high taxes, strong unions, Jim Crow and homophobia next time we are told that the GOP wants to declare a truce in the culture wars, or only cares about economic or fiscal issues.

As you may have noticed, there’s a big brouhaha brewing with respect to polls conducted by the Research 2000 firm for Daily Kos. Long story short, Markos Moulitsas, who fired the firm for alleged inaccuracy not long ago, is now alleging that some serious book-cooking may have transpired, after reviewing an analysis of some strange and hard-to-explain anomalies in R2K findings. Both sides have lawyered up, and the whole thing may be resolved in court, though R2K could do itself some good by releasing its raw data or at least responding in specificity to the allegations.
Though it’s too early for anyone to start apologizing for reliance on R2K polls, I think I speak for most analysts in saying that we all sort of got in the habit recently of treating R2K’s apparent pro-Democratic “house effect” as a counter-weight to the apparent pro-Republican “house effect” of the Rasmussen firm (though I am not, repeat not, suggesting that Rasmussen is doing anything unethical, there is clearly something about the firm’s technique that tends to produce more robust Republican performance findings than is the case without other pollsters, a concern exacerbated by Rasmussen’s “flood the zone” domination of state polling). In states where both firms released polls, we all kinda figured the truth lied somewhere in between.
One big exception was a much-cited (by me among many others) R2K poll of Republicans which suggested that rank-and-file GOPers had some mighty strange views. But as Tom Jensen of PPP noted the other day, his firm did its own poll of Republicans and reached similar findings. In other words, even if a poll is marred by faulty methodology or worse, the conclusions it supports are not necessarily wrong.
And that leads me to the inevitable fallout from this furor: the perennial complaints that will soon be revived about reliance on polling data generally.
Without question, even in the best of circumstances, there are limits to the utility of polling data, and heavy reliance on any one poll or pollster is generally a mistake. But the answer to insufficient or faulty data is more data and better data, not a refusal to collect or look at it. And that’s why any know-nothing overreaction to the R2K controversy could be its most damaging consequence.

One of the more interesting developments on the June 8 “Super Tuesday Primary” day was the approval of a ballot initiative (Prop 14) by California voters creating a “top two” voting system. Similar to the process already used in Washington State, it essentially abolishes party primaries and provides that the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary will proceed to the general election.
Over at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has examined the claims of Prop 14 backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger that the new system will reduce ideological and partisan polarization in California, and concludes it’s pretty much a nothing-burger. He takes on two particular illusions associated with Prop 14: the idea that party primaries and gerrymandering are responsible for political polarization in California, and the idea that abolishing party primaries will prevent ideologues from winning elections.
On the first topic, his reseach shows:

The most important source of polarization in California politics is the ideological divide between supporters of the two major parties….In both California and the nation, ideological polarization increased considerably over this time period, but it has always been greater in California. That’s because while California Republicans are as conservative as Republicans in the rest of the country, California Democrats are considerably more liberal than Democrats in the rest of the country.

And on the second topic:

In Washington, which began using the new system in 2008, the electoral consequences were minimal. In all 9 of the state’s congressional districts the open primary produced a general election runoff between the Democratic or Republican incumbent and a challenger from the opposing party and in all 9 general election contests the incumbent was victorious. And based on the winners’ voting records in the 111th Congress, the new primary system has had no effect on partisan polarization–the gap between the state’s Democratic and Republican representatives was just as large in the current Congress as it was in the previous one. Expect the same results in California.

So can we just forget about Prop 14? That’s not quite clear just yet. The new system could produce some strange and unintended consequences.
For one thing, making the primary non-partisan could be a major boon to self-funders, who may simply need high name ID to win a general election spot, particularly in California statewide races where the cost of television advertising will be prohibitive for many candidates. For another, the system could theoretically increase partisan polarization. The “top two” system does not provide any particular incentive for winning an actual majority of votes in a primary; the top finisher still must face the runner-up in the general election, where turnout is very likely to be much higher. So the safe thing to do is to nail down a general election spot by appealing to partisans (Prop 14 does not repeal party registration, which means that candidates will know exactly whom to contact with partisan messages), while beginning the general election campaign by going after the other party’s preferred candidate.
Consider this year’s governor’s race. If Meg Whitman were running with her vast fortune in a “top two” system, perhaps she would not have spent quite so much time attacking Steve Poizner for alleged ideological heresy. But on the other hand, she would have had every incentive to go after Democrat Jerry Brown (whom she largely ignored) hammer and tongs to drive up his negatives in preparation for November.
In effect, Prop 14 makes the general election cycle a lot longer. That does not seem to be a particularly smart way to reduce partisan polarization.

One of the more interesting byproducts of the Tea Party Movement and the ideological battles going on within the Republican Party is that the tolerance of “movement conservatives” for dissent is really reaching a low level. This was made most painfully evident during the recent Utah Senate Primary, when Tim Bridgewater, whose issue positions would have placed him on the far right fringe of the GOP as recently as a couple of years ago, was regularly denounced by supporters of Mike Lee as a RINO, mainly for supporting in the past Republican initiatives that a majority of Republican officeholders also supported.
Now the litmus-testers seem to be training their sights on the GOP’s leadership in the House. Check out the language of this post today from right-wing opinion-leader Erick Erickson of RedState:

Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives and, more troubling, do not have any intention of trying to win at the polls by forcing Democrat hands on Obamacare….
Last week and on Monday I mentioned Rep. Steve King’s effort to repeal Obamacare and start over. He’s filed a discharge petition. If he gets 218 signatures, Nancy Pelosi must hold a vote.
At the time, I was hearing that Eric Cantor was desperate to undermine Steve King’s efforts and, sure enough, he’s trying. Worse, he has John Boehner helping him….
Today, Eric Cantor and John Boehner are announcing that they’ll sign King’s discharge petition, but they’re also going to go with one by Congressman Wally Herger that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with a Republican alternative….
Tea Party activists and others should pay attention here: Eric Cantor and John Boehner are implementing a strategy that makes it look like they are on your side, but are in fact stabbing you in the back.
Cantor and Boehner are spinning this as a good thing. But it is not. It muddies the water and gives Democrats an escape from being forced to take action.
Any Republican who signs on to the Herger discharge petition should be driven from office for betraying the “repeal” cause. This does nothing but provide cover to people who don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, just nibble at the edges.
And should the GOP take back Congress in November, we should remember this betrayal and the lies that go with it.

So a strategic difference of opinion in which Boehner and Cantor, who are slavishly deferential to the conservative movement, chose not to go along with the routinely demented Steve King, becomes a “betrayal” rationalized by “lies” that reveal the two top House GOP leaders as secret allies of the satanic socialists.
Granted, Erickson likes to play the bully-boy and go rhetorically over the top as an intimidation tactic, but this is still pretty amazing stuff. Looks like by November the RINO line will have shifted so far that even Steve King will need to watch his back.

Many people have already made pertinent comments on the insider brouhaha over the resignation of Dave Weigel from the Washington Post for off-the-record comments at a left/center-left listserve called the JournoList. But they mainly focused (see Nate Silver’s post on the subject) on the implications of the incident for prevailing definitions of journalistic (or blogger-journalistic) objectivity. All I’d add on that topic is an objection to the premise that one must be a member of a political community to report fairly and competently on that community, which is an insult to, among others, the long line of conservatives (does anyone remember William F. Buckley?) who have made acute observations about the Left over the years. Personally, I got in the habit of reading Dave Weigel because he was one of the few people writing on the Tea Party phenomenon, particularly in its early days, who didn’t have a tendency to either celebrate it or dismiss it. I didn’t really know or care what his personal ideology happened to be.
But there’s another aspect of the JournoList controversy that needs to be addressed: the prevalent assumption in some conservative circles that it existed in order to coordinate or enforce some sort of ideological or party line among its participants. This premise is the basis of Andew Breitbart’s bizarre offer of a $100,000 bounty to anyone who can turn over the entire archive of the listserve so that he can publish tidbits from it:

Dave Weigel is a portal into the dark world of hardcore liberal bias in the media. This opening gives us a deeper insight into the insidious relationship between liberal think tanks, academics and their mouthpieces in the media.
As we already uncovered in our expose on the “Cry Wolf” project, members of academia and think tanks are actively working to form the narrative used by the press to thwart conservative messages. Like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the reporters on the listserv mimicked the talking points invented and agreed upon by the intellectuals who were invited to the virtual cocktail party that was Klein’s “JournoList.”

As a reasonably active, and not always orthodox liberal, member of the group, I have to say that this whole coordination conspiracy theory about JournoList is dead wrong.
I say “dead wrong” for two reasons: first, anyone looking for a party line does not need to belong to some off-the-record listserve to find it; it’s a whole lot easier to select a reliable opinion-leader for one’s “team” and simply follow it. And second, speaking for myself (and doubtless many others), I consulted JournoList more often than not to make sure I wasn’t being redundant in my own writing. If someone else had said what needed to be said on a given topic, I would generally leave it alone, or at most link to it in passing if I thought it was particularly well-stated. And I think this was true for most JournoList participants, few of whom were, in any event, in the business of distributing talking points to “the troops.”
In any event, JournoList fostered too much disagreement to serve as any sort of “echo chamber,” much less a commissariat, as has been attested by one of its least orthodox members, former TDS managing editor Scott Winship. I can only hope that conservatives (who I gather have a lot more off-the-record listserves than do liberals) have as much diversity in their own private discussions.
So what was the purpose of this “secretive” listserve, if not to influence the ideological direction of journalism and blogging and journo-blogging? I always thought of it as a virtual water-cooler of particular value to people like me who have escaped from Washington but are still trying to make a living writing about politics (a point Matt Yglesias has made). But it worked both ways: I’d like to think that those of us who don’t live in a place where today’s mark-up in Senate Finance is a common lunch-table topic had a salutory effect on residents of the Emerald City who participated in JournoList.
And it’s precisely that horizon-broadening effect that seemed to be Ezra Klein’s main focus in starting the thing to begin with; not so much in terms of geography, but as a way to bring together political writers with subject-matter experts, including social scientists, policy wonks, and also folks with a political speciality. For example, as a confirmed Cracker I was often consulted on southern political topics. And I also had more than one occasion to set the record straight on the history and influence of the Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrat tendency in recent political history, since I spent a long time working for the DLC. Since most political writers have some sort of specialty, everyone’s work benefitted from the opportunity to avoid, or at least reduce, uninformed bloviation.
By definition, it’s impossible to prove conspiracies don’t exist, and it’s understandable that people excluded from a private listserve tend to assume the worst about its membership and purpose. But if it has any impact at all, the demise of JournoList will probably make the DC-based center-left a bit more insular, a lot more paranoid about private communications, and in small but tangible ways, less informed and interesting. Sadly, Ezra’s hope of creating a bipartisan and trans-ideological version of JournoList will likely expire as well, since leaks would be virtually guaranteed. Anyone who thinks “there’s no such thing as off-the-record!” will be pleased. But until such time as we have 24/7 surveillance and brain monitoring of everyone who writes about politics, there will be private opinions and private communications, just in a smaller and truly secretive circle.

Back in April we published a Strategy Memo suggesting that any Obama Supreme Court appointment would inevitably expose conservative radicalism on constitutional issues. And despite the ho-hum tone of media coverage of the beginning of confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan, that’s exactly what’s happening.
As the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reports, the first day of the hearings revealed a strange Republican preoccupation with Kagan’s mentor, the late Justice Thurgood Marshall:

As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.
“Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, “is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge,” he said.
It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint — literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church’s list of “Holy Women and Holy Men,” which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says “is akin to being granted sainthood.”
With Kagan’s confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the panel, branded Marshall a “well-known activist.” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Marshall’s legal view “does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) pronounced Marshall “a judicial activist” with a “judicial philosophy that concerns me.”
As the Republicans marshaled their anti-Marshall forces, staffers circulated to reporters details of the late justice’s offenses: “Justice Marshall endorsed ‘judicial activism,’ supported abortion rights, and believed the death penalty was unconstitutional.”
The problem with this line of attack is that Marshall was already confirmed by the Senate — in 1967.

Milbank clearly thinks Republicans are just being goofy here, going after Marshall because they have no ammunition against Kagan.
But it’s likely something else is going on: Republicans are blowing major dog whistles to conservatives whose objections to Elena Kagan are actually objections to much of the Supreme Court’s constitutional interpretations since the early New Deal. From that radical point of view, the sainted Thurgood Marshall was one of many villains on the generally villainous Warren Court. Kagan’s connection to him is sufficient evidence to reject her if you happen to think the Constitution should be interpreted literally according to an anti-government “originalist” perspective.
Dana Milbank and others should get over their bored amusement with GOP hijinks and consider the possibility that conservatives are deadly serious in deploring the memory of Thurgood Marshall. It may not matter in terms of Kagan’s confirmation, but could matter a lot if Republicans get a lot stronger in the Senate or retake the White House.

As Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings begin in the Senate, Republican lawmakers–and even conservative interest groups–are under a lot of pressure to make this relatively non-controversial appointment a right-wing jihad.
The hook, ironically, has been a ruling by the existing Court striking down Chicago’s handgun restriction ordinances on grounds that they violate the Second Amendment.
Here is Lyle Denniston’s bottom-line analysis of the significance of this decision:

Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in the Court’s main opinion, did make one thing unmistakably clear to lower court judges: the right to have a gun for self-defense in the home is a “fundamental” constitutional right. That one-word label carries enormous import. Ordinarily, if a right is deemed to be fundamental, any law that seeks to limit it will be judged by the stiffest constitutional test there is: it must satisfy “strict scrutiny,” meaning that it will be struck down if the government’s need for it is not “compelling” and if the approach it takes is not the narrowest possible way to get at the problem. Some laws can survive “strict scrutiny,” but not a great many do.

Because the decision makes gun regulation essentially a matter of judicial fiat rather than legislative or executive policy, it has ratcheted up ideological demands that conservatives, and most especially the gun lobby, make judicial appointments, including the Kagan nomination, a litmus test issue. And believe it or not, the NRA is being attacked from the Right for failing to unleash its hounds on Kagan, and earlier, on Sonia Sotomayor. The claim is that the NRA agreed to tame its activists in exchange for an exemption of the organization from the requirements of the proposed “DISCLOSE Act” requiring public information on on campaign finance activities, which conservative firebreathers violently oppose.
What the NRA has to do to rebuild trust with the Right, we are told, is to go medieval on Kagan.
Don’t be surprised if that’s exactly what happens.