This item is cross-posted from ProgressiveFix.
A variety of luminaries representing various “wings” of the conservative movement joined together today near George Washington’s Mount Vernon home to sign—with appropriately atavistic flourishes—a manifesto they are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. The allusion made in the title is to the 50-year-old founding statement of the long-forgotten ‘60s right-wing youth group Young Americans for Freedom, the Sharon Statement (so named because it was worked out at William F. Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut). And that best illustrates the insider nature of the whole exercise, since most rank-and-file conservatives have probably never heard of YAF and don’t much need manifestos to go about their political business.
Three things immediately strike the reader about the document itself: (1) it’s very abstract, with no policy content at all; (2) it’s overtly aimed at reviving the old-time “fusionism” of economic, cultural, and national-security conservatives; and (3) it’s overlaid with Tea Party-esque rhetoric about terrible and longstanding threats to the Constitution. It’s sort of like a 50-year high school reunion at a homecoming game (which fits, because the statement was released on the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington).
It’s the third aspect of the document that’s most peculiar. Consider this passage:
In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.
Hmmm. This has happened in “recent decades,” not just during the Obama administration. And ‘smatter of fact, that’s true: the landmark Supreme Court cases that paved the way for the expansion of the federal government to its current scope of responsibilities date back at least to the civil rights era, and in some respects, to the New Deal and even earlier.
That’s interesting in no small part because most of the original signatories of this document were powerful and enthusiastic participants in the political and policy enterprises of several Republican administrations that made robust use of expanded federal power—most notably the administration of George W. Bush, which championed virtually unlimited executive powers, aggressive preemption of states laws that were thought to hamper businesses, and extensive limitations on individual liberty. In addition, the choice of the estate of the notorious isolationist George Washington to issue a manifesto that endorses a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” is a mite strange, as Daniel Larison has pointed out.
Still another anomaly is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins signature on a document that does not mention the rights of the “unborn” or “marriage” or “traditional families.” But you figure he was bought off by the reference to the Declaration of Independence as virtually coequal to the Constitution as a founding document, and presenting “self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God.” This is Christian Right code for suggesting that natural law and biblical principles, which conservatives interpret to mean things like bans on abortion and homosexual behavior, have been incorporated into the Constitution.
All in all, this statement represents an effort by yesterday’s and today’s hard-core conservative establishment to stay together and try to be relevant to the political discourse in an era in which the Republican Party is considered dangerously liberal, and the Constitution is thought to clearly ban everything “liberals” espouse. We’ll see how this works out for them.

Looking for a “wedge issue” that will separate Republican politicians and interest groups from their rank-and-file, and from independents?
Check out this newly released finding from the most recent ABC/WaPo poll:

Americans of both parties overwhelmingly oppose a Supreme Court ruling that allows corporations and unions to spend as much as they want on political campaigns, and most favor new limits on such spending, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
Eight in 10 poll respondents say they oppose the high court’s Jan. 21 decision to allow unfettered corporate political spending, with 65 percent “strongly” opposed. Nearly as many backed congressional action to curb the ruling, with 72 percent in favor of reinstating limits.
The poll reveals relatively little difference of opinion on the issue among Democrats (85 percent opposed to the ruling), Republicans (76 percent) and independents (81 percent). …
Nearly three-quarters of self-identified conservative Republicans say they oppose the Supreme Court ruling, with most of them strongly opposed. Some two-thirds of conservative Republicans favor congressional efforts to limit corporate and union spending, though with less enthusiasm than liberal Democrats.

What makes this finding so interesting, of course, is that Republican politicians and conservative intellectuals have fallen over themselves praising the Citizens United decision not just as a Good Thing, but as a heaven-sent vindication of First Amendment free speech rights. This is particularly true of the solon who is supposedly well on his way to becoming Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said of the decision:

Any proponent of free speech should applaud this decision. Citizens United is and will be a First Amendment triumph of enduring significance.

So I guess Mitch is saying that 80% of Americans don’t care much for free speech. And that may even be true if you think money talks.
The good news in this poll is that it shows a very strong base of bipartisan popular support for the legislative efforts of Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Chris Van Hollen to fence off some of the more deplorable implications of Citizens United. But unfortunately, “fencing off” is about all Congress can do in the way of “reinstating limits” on political spending, which is what Americans manifestly want to happen. Unless Citizens United is actually overturned by a future Court (possible if Democrats hang onto the White House for a while) or a constitutional amendment (rarely a real option), the only practical counterweight to massive corporate political spending would be a system of public financing for congressional campaigns. It would have been nice if the ABC/WaPo pollsters had asked about that option. But I strongly suspect this isn’t exactly the best political environment for politicians to ask taxpayers to cover their campaign costs.
Still, the yawning gap between public opinion and the GOP on Citizens United should draw immediate and sustained attention from Democrats. And particularly at a time when the advantages of power in Washington have been so visibly minimized by structural obstacles, Democrats should open up a broader front in supporting political reforms. The status quo isn’t working for anyone other than those who don’t want government to work at all.

Today brings still another bushel-basket of earnest if not angry commentary on the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh. Sigh. But the best single quote was supplied by Tom Schaller at FiveThirtyEight, aimed at Bayh’s nostalgia for the good old days:

[T]he notion of a government run based on bi-partisan cooperation among moderates from each party is a fictional fairyland that never existed in the first place, and split-party governance is hardly better. Listening to Bayh wax poetically about the past is like hearing a lecture from your dad (or Bayh’s, since his father was senator, too) about how morally superior America was 50 years ago, and then flipping on an episode of Mad Men to see dad’s generation drunk by lunch and patting their secretaries’ bottoms.

Schaller goes on, however, to offer his own sense of what self-conscious “moderates” can and cannot constructively accomplish, and it’s pretty well-reasoned:

1. They should lay down markers now and again, and occasionally be a holdout when the policy process is insufficiently transparent or the national deliberation insufficiently substantive. Majority-party moderates needn’t rubberstamp every item of their majority’s agenda, nor should minority-party moderates be co-opted tools. However, they shouldn’t expect their ideal policy preference to be the outcome produced by the majority party caucus for which they serve as either an in-party outlier or an out-party critic. This is policy hostage-taking, and it is more dangerous and corrosive to democracy than the ideological, one-party rule moderates so often carp about.
2. Then, after they have negotiated for some concessions or refinements, and precisely because those concessions and refinements were made to accommodate their rhetorical or literal opposition, their role at that point is to wholeheartedly back the compromise. They are fully entitled to clarify their vote for the constituents, saying something like, “Look, this is not the legislation that a chamber full of people like me would produce, but this is a good and good-faith effort by the majority party to solve this national problem.” But what they shouldn’t be allowed to do is hold the process hostage and extract certain policy concessions and still complain about both the process and the outcome. It would be more intellectually honest to just vote against the legislation and criticize it–or even vote for it and criticize it.

My main objection to Tom’s formulation–and for that matter, to how Evan Bayh seems to think–is that being a “moderate” isn’t always must a matter of favoring compromise and bipartisanship, or positioning oneself between wrangling factions or parties. “Moderate” policy positions can reflect matters of principles just as strongly held as those of more conventionally ideological politicians. A good example is the cap-and-trade approach to reducing carbon emissions, which used to be a “moderate” position until Republicans abruptly abandoned it and then began denouncing it as the work of Satan. “Moderates” developed and then supported cap-and-trade not just because it had features attractive to both progressives and conservatives, though it did, but because they thought it would work in the real world.
Personally, I’d say that’s the sort of “moderation”–focused on innovative real-life solutions–that both parties need more than they need old-school wheeler-dealers who are good at forging legislative coalitions based on personal relationships and palm-greasing, which seems to be the object of so much of the misplaced nostalgia surrounding Bayh’s retirement.

The CW these days is that with Americans having real (i.e., economic) problems to worry about, they’re no longer inclined to engage in “culture wars” over abortion, church-state separation, GLBT issues, etc. Aside from the rather insulting premise that struggles over personal freedom, equality, and for some combatants, the structure of the universe and the definition and meaning of human life are less important to people than real growth percentages, it’s not actually true. Cultural issues are less visible in Washington for the simple reason that Democrats control the congressional agenda (if not always the results), and are generally either uniniterested in or divided over cultural issues. (This doesn’t, of course, keep conservatives from claiming that health care reform legislation is actually designed to promote both abortion and euthanasia).
Outside Washington, however, the culture wars often rage on. For a good example, check out a long, fascinating piece by Russell Shorto that appeared in the the latest New York Times Magazine, on the Texas State School Board’s ongoing struggles over public school curriculum and textbook content.
As you may know, Christian Right leaders in the late 1980s, frustrated by the limited ROI from their involvement in national politics, encouraged their followers to run for local office, particularly school boards, in an effort to promote theocratic thinking from the ground up and from early childhood on. The bitter fruit of this strategy is most on display in Texas, where self-consciously Christian conservatives running as Republicans captured the State Board of Education in the late 1990s.
Shorto explains in detail how the Board’s Christian Right bloc pores over textbook content in periodic reviews, usually offering hundreds of amendments to recommendations made by expert panels (which are themselves being skewed towards theocratic views). He also notes that these activities have an impact far beyond Texas, since the state’s gigantic market heavily influences how textbook companies operate nationally. That the Christian Right bloc is interested in religio-political rather than educational goals is best exemplified by the presence on the Board of Cynthia Dunbar, who commutes once a week from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at the late Jerry Fallwell’s Liberty University School of Law. Among other things, Dunbar has publicly denounced the very existence of public schools, and said sending one’s children to them (she didn’t, of course) is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames, even as the children of Israel threw their children to Moloch.” Just the kind of person you want supervising an entire state’s public schools.
Most interestingly, Shorto demonstrates that the ultimate goal of the Christian Right bloc on the Board goes well beyond such headline issues as the teaching of “scientific creationism” or church-state separation hot buttons. They are mainly, as Dunbar puts it, focused on embuing students’ understanding of American history and law with a “biblical worldview.” That means, in practice, emphatically teaching such distinctly non-biblical principles as “American exceptionalism” (which for these folks means America’s divine mission to Christianize the world, by military means if necessary), limited government, and absolute property rights. It’s a very political–one might even say secular–agenda that happens to coincide nicely with the long-range agenda of the secular as well as the religious Right. And it’s an excellent example of how in Conservativeland cultural and economic issues cannot be neatly separated. If God’s a hard money man, an anti-tax activist, and a neocon, then the whole idea of a “Christian Nation” has implications significantly broader than municipal Christmas creches, or even abortion and LGBT equality.
Shorto suggests that the extremism of the Texas State School Board has been controversial even among conservative Republicans, and points to a Republican primary challenge to Board member Don McLeroy (a dentist whose especially heavy hand with science textbooks led to his removal as Board chairman by the state senate) on March 3 as a bellwether:

If Don McLeroy loses, it could signal that the Christian right’s recent power surge has begun to wane. But it probably won’t affect the next generation of schoolbooks. The current board remains in place until next January. By then, decisions on what goes in the Texas curriculum guidelines will be history.

I’d say McLeroy’s defeat, if it happens, is more likely to produce a shift in Christian Right tactics than any real loss of power. But I’ll probably be watching his numbers on March 3 as avidly as I watch the gubernatorial primary battle between Tea Party favorite Rick Perry and U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchiston. In good times and bad, the culture wars abide.

At first glance, it’s odd that the decision of a single United States senator not to run for re-election is getting the kind of saturation coverage that Evan Bayh is now receiving. It’s not as though Bayh is Jim Jeffords, whose party switch in 2001 instantly changed partisan control of the Senate. He’s not a member of the Senate leadership, and does not chair a major committee. There was once a time when he was considered presidential timber, but having now been passed over at least twice for the vice presidential nomination, his career seems to have already peaked. And his profile in the Senate as someone who generally votes with his party while constantly complaining about it is not designed to win many friends or admirers. Yes, his retirement denies Democrats a well-heeled and popular incumbent candidate for 2010 in a difficult state, but it now appears Indiana Democrats will be able to hand-pick a successor, and it’s Republicans who will have a potentially ruinous primary.
Bayh, however, is seen as a symbol of different things to different observers in the chattering classes, and so his debankment yesterday has set them to chattering about it. “Centrist” media pundits who are obsessed with fiscal issues and believe Democrats have to move towards Republicans to create “bipartisanship” obviously viewed him as an important congressional ally, and now tend to think of his retirement as a brave Cassandra gesture in protest of a “broken” system. Republicans even more obviously are making Bayh the latest and most important example of congressional Democrats “heading for the exits” in anticipation of a 2010 GOP landslide. And on the Left, where Bayh was beginning to rival Joe Lieberman as the Least Favorite Senator, his retirement is being treated as a characteristic abandonment of party by a gutless no-account DINO, and a welcome step towards a more cohesive Democratic Party.
As always, the vagaries of the news cycle boosted the perceived significance of Bayh’s announcement, coming as it did when Washington snowstorms and then the President’s Day/Olympics recess cut off the mother’s milk of national political news. Some observers really had to reach to find something historic about Bayh’s departure; Peter Beinart’s Daily Beast column on the subject suggested that it “matters” because it dashes a dream of Democratic Hoosier success traceable to Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential primary victory there.
You’d figure that when real news arrives–say, today’s revelation that a joint U.S./Pakistani intelligence operation captured the Taliban’s military commander–the political commentariat can begin to put Bayh’s retirement into better perspective. Let’s hope so.

While much of the political world is focused on the health care summit called for February 25 by President Obama, there’s an earlier summit worth watching that will happen tomorrow when RNC chairman Michael Steele meets with about 50 Tea Party leaders from a dozen or so states. Here’s how Kenneth Vogel of Politico describes it:

Steele’s planned Tuesday meeting with tea party leaders from at least a dozen states — a meeting organized by Karin Hoffman, founder of a South Florida tea party group called DC Works For Us — represents something of a breakthrough in the GOP’s courting of the tea party. Though Steele and other GOP leaders have occasionally scored meetings with individual leaders of national groups involved in the tea party movement, Tuesday will mark the first large-scale get-together between the national party and grass-roots activists from a wide array of regional tea party groups.

The meeting will further galvanize disagreements between those Tea Party activists who want to keep their distance from the GOP (many of them Ron Paul disciples and many of them affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots group that was so critical of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville earlier this month), and those who want to work closely with Republicans to defeat GOP “moderates” in primaries and Democrats in the general election.
What makes the intra-Tea Party arguments on this subject potentially misleading is that many of these “independent” activists really want to take over the GOP in conjunction with hard-core Republican conservatives. The proportion of tea partiers who want to remain permanently independent is probably quite small. The disagreement is largely over terms for a Tea Party/Republican fusion, which makes many activists touchy about how it’s described. It’s clear now, for example, that Sarah Palin made a major mistake in Nashville by urging the Republican Party to “absorb” the Tea Party movement. “Surrender to” would have been a much more popular formulation for the crowd at Opryland.
Underlying the tension over “fusion” is the unhappiness of some Tea Party activists–understandably concentrated among self-conscious libertarians and Ron Paul “revolutionaries”–with the cultural conservatism and foreign policy militarism of “movement conservatives” in the GOP. But again, it’s unclear how many activists actually disagree with such conservative views, and how many simply support a focus on fiscal issues for tactical reasons.
in other words, you may need a decoder ring to understand reactions to tomorrow’s Steele-Tea Party summit.

It’s been obvious for a while that in forcing congressional Republicans to attend a presidential summit on health care reform on February 25, the president is trying to place them on the horns of a dilemma: they must either admit they don’t have their own “plan,” or must advance a “plan” that could be very unpopular (viz. vouchering Medicare). More generally, Obama is trying to create a broader political context in which Americans compare the agendas of the two parties, instead of treating the November elections as an up-or-down referendum on the administration’s policies or, worse yet, on feelings about the political and economic condition of the country. The president is also seeking the deepen the growing sentiment that he’s been a lot more “bipartisan” than the opposition.
But it’s also likely that Obama is using the summit to push congressional Democrats to get their own act together before it’s too late. The formal announcement of the summit indicates that the White House will in advance post on the internet a plan that meets the administration’s criteria for reform. Here’s how Jonathan Cohn analyzes the implications of that statement:

That passage seems to suggest one of the following is true:
1) House and Senate leadership have nearly finished negotiating a new compromise version of their legislation. The text the administration plans to post will reflect that compromise.
2) House and Senate leadership are still struggling to come to an agreement, if not over what to pass then in what sequence to pass it. The administration hopes this promise will force them to wrap things up.

In other words, Obama could be engaging in a two-front offensive: forcing action by Democrats to complete or revive their own health reform negotiations, on pain of looking like fools on February 25, while compelling Republicans to choose the path of open obstruction or of perilous conservative ideology.
With the summit being just ten days away, the White House isn’t affording either party a whole lot of time to make these fateful choices. But one thing seems to be sure: by February 25, there will finally be a plan on the table that merits the much-abused term “ObamaCare.”

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party Movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the Movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.
The poll shows 18% of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43% saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55% of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62% of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only 9% have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. 80% have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.
Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).
There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.
But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.