As noted the other day, the British party leaders (PM Gordon Brown for Labour, David Cameron for the Conservatives, and Nick Clegg for the LibDems) has their first-ever televised debate yesterday, and it was a pretty good show. I was asked to write up a reaction for Newsweek.com, and here’s the link.
As you can read there, I thought they did a pretty good job for beginners at this sort of thing. The bottom line politically is that Nick Clegg was the runaway “leader,” which is particularly bad news for Cameron’s Tories, who are desperately trying to boost their vote above 40% or so to win a parliamentary majority, and need every “change” vote they can get.

Having been repulsed rather decisively in their efforts to get Democrats to oppose health reform, pollster Doug Schoen and all-purpose svengali Pat Caddell return to the op-ed pages of the Washington Post with even worse advice for Democrats, if that’s possible.
You can trudge through their pastiche of Rasmussen poll findings about the terrible political shape of the Democratic Party, if you have the stomach for that. I don’t think any Democrats are laboring under the misimpressin that everything’s fine right now, and I really don’t see the point of Schoen and Caddell’s triumphant conclusion that Obama and Democrats got no big bounce out of enacting health reform; nobody’s claiming they did.
But it’s the strategic path they lay out for Democrats that’s really astounding. They think Dems should shift to an “agenda aimed at reducing the debt, with an emphasis on tax cuts.” Aside from not explaining how, exactly, that differs from the approach of the Republican Party, Schoen and Caddell suggest this vast shift to the right in order to–get a load of this–win over the “swing voters” of the Tea Party movement. They base the swing voter attribution on an out-of-context finding by the Winston Group that 28% of tea partiers call themselves independents and 13% call themselves Democrats. That means, of course, that 57% self-identify as Republicans (compared to less than a third of the general public), and two-thirds self-identify as conservatives. But none of this self-identification data matters nearly as much as the actual views of the tea partiers, which, as was demonstrated once again by yesterday’s very detailed NYT/CBS survey, place them in the conservative base of the Republican Party.
These “swing voters,” by over 90%, dislike anything and everything about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party. Their only unhappiness with the GOP is that it isn’t always conservative enough to suit them. They are predominately faithful Fox viewers. They exhibit considerable nostalgia for George W. Bush, and almost unanimously absolve him of any responsibility for either the economy or budget deficits. There is no “agenda” that can bring them around to supporting Obama or his party short of total surrender to the GOP, or in effect a reversal of the last general election, which, believe it or not, has as much authority as a single special election in Massachusetts or this week’s Rasmussen polls.
Democrats don’t need to hate or fear the tea partiers; they reflect a strain in the population, and particularly in the GOP, that’s always been there (a majority of them, after all, are over 45) , and that’s been radicalized by various events of the last couple of years. But lusting after them as “swing voters” would be the height of folly.
Schoen and Caddell need to give it a rest, lest Democrats begin to wonder why they don’t just go ahead and join the party that’s already committed to the spending cut/tax cut agenda they consider the ticket to political paradise.

Embattled Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, already being bludgeoned to near political death by fellow Republicans backing his Senate rival, Marco Rubio, took a step today that probably ended his career in GOP politics. He vetoed legislation that would have made placed Florida on the far frontier of experiments in test-based “merit pay” for teachers, while also phasing out teacher tenure. Backed by most Florida GOPers, the bill was considered something of a pet project for former Gov. Jeb Bush (generally considered the power behind Rubio), and had bitterly polarized the state, generating mass protests by teachers and students on the one hand, and angry GOP attacks on teachers unions on the other. Indeed, Republicans sometimes seemed to describe the bill as less about education than about union-busting. It would certainly do more to link teacher pay and job retention to students’ standardized tests results than most proponents of “pay for performance” are comfortable with.
Crist had often hinted he would sign the bill, but then engineered a week of suspense over his intentions, capped by a dramatic announcement one day before the bill would have become law without his signature.
His action will immediately revive rumors (which Crist and his Senate campaign have constantly denied) that he will fold his primary campaign and file for candidacy as an independent. As fate would have it, a new Quinnipiac poll just out today shows Crist narrowly ahead in a three-way general election race with Rubio and likely Democratic nominee Kendrick Meek. Earlier polls hadn’t made the indie route look very promising for Crist.
In any event, whether he refiles as an indie or just decides not to run at all, today’s veto is going to make him even more of a pariah in Republican circles, and an unlikely hero to teachers.

Ah, another Tax Day, another Tea Party poll! This one, from CBS/New York Times, is probably the most extensive we’ve seen. But the findings are only surprising to people who haven’t been paying close attention to the Tea Party Movement.
Tea Partiers are, in almost every significant respect, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans. Two-thirds say they always or usually vote Republican. Two-thirds are regular Fox viewers. 57% have a favorable view of George W. Bush, and tea partiers, unlike their fellow-citizens, almost entirely absolve the Bush administration from responsibility for either the economic situation or current budget deficits. Over 90% of them disapprove of Barack Obama’s job performance in every area they were asked about, and in another sharp difference from everyone else, 84% disapprove of him personally. 92% think Obama’s moving the country “in the direction of socialism.” Nearly a third think he was born in another country. Three-fourths think government aid to poor people keeps the poor instead of helping them. Over half think too much has been made of the problems facing black people. Well over half think the Obama administration has favored the poor over the rich and the middle class (only 15% of Americans generally feel that way).
Interestingly, tea partiers are less likely than the public as a whole to think we need a third political party. That shouldn’t be surprising in a cohort that basically thinks the Bush administration was hunky-dory, but you’d never guess it from all the talk about the “threat” of a Tea Party-based third party.
So these are basically older (32% are retired) white conservative Republicans whose main goal, they overwhelmingly say, is to “reduce government.” But two-thirds think Social Security and Medicare are a good bargain for the country. And they certainly won’t support higher taxes.
Here’s a revealing glimpse into the older-white-conservative psychology from the Times write-up of the poll:

[N]early three-quarters of those who favor smaller government said they would prefer it even if it meant spending on domestic programs would be cut.
But in follow-up interviews, Tea Party supporters said they did not want to cut Medicare or Social Security — the biggest domestic programs, suggesting instead a focus on “waste.”
Some defended being on Social Security while fighting big government by saying that since they had paid into the system, they deserved the benefits.
Others could not explain the contradiction.
“That’s a conundrum, isn’t it?” asked Jodine White, 62, of Rocklin, Calif. “I don’t know what to say. Maybe I don’t want smaller government. I guess I want smaller government and my Social Security.” She added, “I didn’t look at it from the perspective of losing things I need. I think I’ve changed my mind.”

And that’s the conundrum facing the Republican Party going forward. Having created a fiscal time bomb during the Bush administration, they are now born-again deficit hawks, and moreover, profess to think today’s federal government represents a socialist tyranny. But they are even more adamantly opposed to higher taxes, and their base doesn’t want them to touch “their” Social Security and Medicare, which they figure they’ve earned.
Barring a major retraction of America’s active role in the world, which would enable big reductions in defense spending (and we know few conservative Republicans favor that), the only thing left to do is the sort of wholesale elimination of federal functions last attempted by Republicans in 1995, which failed miserably, or an all-out attack on means-tested programs benefitting the poor. By all evidence, this last approach may please many Tea Partiers, but justice and efficacy aside, there is no approach more guaranteed to ensure that the Republican Party’s base gets even older and whiter than it already is.
At some point, the famous “anger” of the Tea Partiers will have to be propitiated by GOP leaders, but there’s no obvious way out of the dilemma Republicans have created for themselves.

As the British general election campaign races towards its culmination on May 6, it’s increasingly obvious that the U.S. is hardly the only place where voters are in a bad mood. Virtually all of the polls show the Tories falling short of the 40% or so of the popular vote that would probably give them a parliamentary majority. And in a “hung parliament” scenario, the most likely result would be a coalition government involving Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Dysfunctional as it sounds, the “hung parliament” scenario seems to be one that an awful lot of Britons prefer, according to a poll from Populus commissioned by the Times of London:

The poll shows that 32 per cent of the public hope for a hung Parliament, against 28 per cent who want a Tory majority and 22 per cent a Labour one. Lib Dem voters prefer a deal with Labour in a hung Parliament.
Populus also underlines the extent of disenchantment: a mere 4 per cent think that the parties are being completely honest with voters about their tax plans and only 6 per cent about their approaches to cutting the deficit.
Twenty-five per cent said that they thought that the Tories had put across the most convincing case so far, and 18 per cent said Labour. However, 43 per cent were unconvinced by any party.

Leaders of the three major parties will hold the first of three televised debates tomorrow night. But it’s unclear how many voters will be watching, or in any meaningful sense, listening.

In a finding that will probably raise more questions about the pollster than about the poll-ees, Rasmussen has a new survey out that shows Ron Paul in a statistical dead heat with Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012, trailing him by one spare point (41/42).
The poll is of 1,000 “likely voters” (presumably likely 2010 voters), which really makes you wonder about Rasmussen’s famously narrow “likely voter” screen. And it shows Paul tying the president even though he has relatively weak support among self-identified Republicans; the eccentric opponent of foreign wars and the Federal Reserve System trounces Obama among “unaffiliated” voters 47/28.
I doubt too many observers will take this poll seriously, though it will be manna from heaven not only for the zealous foot soldiers of the Ron Paul Revolution, but for those who think (including, some might say, Scott Rasmussen) that right-wing libertarian “populism” is the wave of the future.
But the poll did produce one hilarious write-up, at USAToday. After reporting the numbers, the author (with a nod to the high-riding Senate campaign of Ron’s son Rand) says:

This raises the obvious question: will the Pauls be the next political dynasty, like the Kennedys and Bushes?

Now that’s what I call getting way ahead of the curve!

In a staff post the other day, we noted that one big reason Republicans are willing to put up with the scandals and incompetence characterizing Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the RNC is simply that new campaign finance rules have already undermined the party’s once-central role in funding campaigns.
At The American Prospect, Mark Schmitt has some useful if somewhat disturbing observations about the independent, corporate-funded committees that will dominate post-Citizens United Republican campaign financing.
Schmitt is one campaign finance expert who doesn’t think Citizens United has changed the source and direction of political money all that much. But it will affect control of political money, and strengthen an already powerful trend towards pirate independent operations that function on the margins of the political system:

Unlike parties and candidates, independent committees don’t have to worry about their long-term reputations. They are essentially unaccountable. The Republican Party plans to be around for decades into the future. It has to worry about its long-term reputation. But independent committees can be use-once-and-burn vehicles. There’s a reason we haven’t heard recently from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the independent committee formed to take down John Kerry in 2004 — like a basketball player sent in to commit six fouls, such operations have one purpose only and can disappear when they are finished.
Finally, independent committees are likely to play a more polarizing role. While parties can choose an early strategy of mobilizing the ideological base, by Election Day, they have to build majorities that include swing voters and independents. The incentives for independent committees are different — by mobilizing the ideological base, they generate not just votes but more and more donors. Their clout, unlike the party’s, derives only from money.

Republicans these days certainly don’t need any additional incentives to run negative campaigns or to elevate considerations of ideology over those of practical governing. But that’s what Citizens United may have wrought.
In the meantime, the RNC will trudge along, and the reduced actual clout of its chairman will not immediately translate into less media attention, particularly if he continues to serve up a rich diet of personal gaffes and institutional funny business. It would be nice, though, if media observers began to get a better focus on the people who are actually raising and spending the money that drives Republican campaigns. They’re the ones flying the jolly roger and proudly flouting every convention.

It’s long been apparent that immigration is an issue that is the political equivalent of unstable nitroglycerine: complex and dangerous. It arguably splits both major parties, although national Democratic politicians generally favor “comprehensive immigration reform” (basically a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers who meet certain conditions and legalize themselves, along with various degrees of restriction on future immigration flows), and with George W. Bush gone, most Republicans oppose it.
It is of most passionate concern, for obvious reasons, to Latino voters, and also to many grass-roots conservatives for which widespread immigration from Mexico into new areas of the country has become a great symbol of an unwelcome change in the nation’s complexion. But the fact remains that perceived hostility to immigrants has become a major stumbling block for Republican recruitment of otherwise-conservative Latino voters, which explains (along with business support for relatively free immigration) the otherwise odd phenomenon that it was a Republican administration that last pursued comprehensive immigration reform. (Some may remember, in fact, that immigration reform was and remains a big part of Karl Rove’s strategy for insuring a long-range Republican majority).
I’m not sure how many progressives understand that immigration policy is a significant part of the narrative of “betrayal” that conservatives have written about the Bush administration–right up there with Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and big budget deficits. And implicitly, at least, when Republicans talk about “returning the GOP to its conservative principles,” many would make repudiation of any interest in comprehensive immigration reform–or as they typically call it, “amnesty for Illegals”–part of the litmus test.
This is one issue of many where professional Republican pols are almost certainly happy that Barack Obama is in office right now–they don’t have to take a definitive position on immigration policy unless the president first pulls the trigger by moving a proposal in Congress, and it’s unlikely he will until other priorities are met.
But at some point, and particularly if Republicans win control of the House in November, and inherit the dubious prize of partial responsibility for governance, they will come under intense pressure to turn the page decisively on the Bush-Rove embrace of comprehensive immigration reform. And no matter what Obama does, immigration will definitely be an issue in the 2012 Republican presidential competition.
So it’s of more than passing interest to note that the pressure on Republicans to take a national position on this issue has been significantly increased by the rise of the Tea Party Movement.
At 538.com today, Tom Schaller writes up a new study of tea partiers and racial-ethnic attitude in seven key states from the University of Washington’s Christopher Parker. While the whole thing is of considerable interest, I can’t tease much of immediate political signficance from the fragmentary findings that Parker has initially released, beyond the unsurprising news that Tea Partiers have general views on race, ethnicity, and GLBT rights that you’d expect from a very conservative portion of the electorate.
But one finding really does just jump off the page: Among the 22% of white voters who say they “strongly support” the Tea Party Movement in the seven states involved in the study, nearly half (45% to be exact) favor the very radical proposition that “all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be deported immediately.” That’s interesting not only because it shows how strong anti-immigrant sentiment is in the Tea Party “base,” but because it embraces a very specific and proactive postion that goes far beyond resistance to comprehensive immigration reform or “amnesty.” The finding is all the more remarkable because it comes from a survey on “racial attitudes;” I don’t know what sorts of controls Parker deployed, but polls that dwell on such issues often elicit less-than-honest answers from respondents who naturally don’t want to sound intolerant.
So if and when push comes to shove for the GOP on immigration, the shove from the Tea Partiers could be especially strong. And that won’t make Republican elites happy: they understand that however bright things look for the GOP this November (in a midterm contest that almost always produces an older-and-whiter-than-average electorate), their party’s base of support is in elements of the population that are steadily losing demographic ground. Beginning in 2012, that will become an enduring and ever-worsening problem for the GOP, and a position on immigration guaranteed to repel Latinos would be a very heavy millstone, just as Karl Rove concluded when he pushed W. to embrace comprehensive immigration reform.
The issue is already becoming a factor in the 2010 cycle. This is most obvious in Arizona, where J.D. Hayworth’s Tea-Party-oriented challenge to John McCain is in part payback for McCain’s longstanding support for comprehensive immigration reform. But it could matter elsewhere as well. You’d think that Cuban-American Senate candidate Marco Rubio would be in a good position to do very well among Florida Latinos. But actually, his potential achilles heel in a likely general election matchup with Democrat Kendrick Meek (who as it happens is an African-American with his own close ties to South Florida’s Cuban-American community) is a weak standing among Latinos, particulary the non-Cuban Latino community in Central Florida, attributable in no small part to his vocal opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Indeed, even if he defeats Meek, if Rubio gets waxed among Florida Latinos, Republicans will have an especially graphic illustration of the continuing political peril of opposing legalization of undocumented workers, even when advanced by a Latino politician.
The real acid test for Republicans on immigration could come in California, the state where in 1994 GOP governor Pete Wilson fatally alienated Latino voters from his party for years to come by championing a cutoff of public benefits for undocumented workers (a far less draconian proposal than immediate deportation, it should be noted). Underdog conservative gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has made his campaign all about reviving Wilson’s proposal. If Republican front-runner Meg Whitman can crush Poizner without any accomodation of his views on immigration, it could help her overcome a problem with Latino voters that emanates not only from Democrat Jerry Brown’s longstanding ties to the Latino community, but from the fact that her campaign chairman is none other than Pete Wilson.
In any event, whether it’s now or later, in 2010 or in 2012 and beyond: the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the political consequences of its base’s hostility to Latino immigration, and to growing demands for steps ranging from benefit cutoffs to deportation of undocumented workers. With the Tea Partiers exemplifying instensely-held grass-roots conservative demands for a more aggressively anti-immigration posture, even as he political costs of obeying these demands continues to rise, Republicans will be juggling explosives on this issue for the foreseeable future.