Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has done a very irresponsible thing that nonetheless offers Democrats a classic “teachable moment” about the true fidelity of Republicans to fiscal discipline. Shelby put a hold on all presidential appointments (70 are pending at present ) until he gets his way on a couple of big projects–one involving a Shelby appropriations “earmark”–benefiting Alabama.
Some may recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans talked as though earmarks were the primary cause of the federal government’s budget problems. And here’s one of their own gumming up the entire executive branch over one of them, while also trying to control the exact language of a federal contract on another project to steer money to his own state.
Shelby’s action could also help draw attention to the disgraceful pattern of Republican obstruction of presidential appointments, which has left dozens of federal agencies without key personnel.
“Holds” by senators are an atavistic tradition in the first place. Democrats should not let Shelby get away with the unprecedented step of a “blanket” hold, in order to shake down the administration for earmarked money, even as his party demagogues endlessly about runaway spending. Congressional Republicans should finally begin to pay a political price for their hypocrisy and cynicism on fiscal issues.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein provides a clear explanation of what a senatorial “hold” involves, and also explains why Shelby’s gambit should backfire, comparing it to Ben Nelson’s infamous health care “deal”:

The reason holds work is that they’re small enough, and rare enough, that they never rise to the level of something the majority can’t live with. Shelby, in putting a hold on all pending nominations, just made holds very big indeed. And he did it for the most pathetic and parochial of reasons: pork for his state. If the Democrats have any sense at all, Shelby’s hold is about to become as famous as Nelson’s deal.

It’s never a good sign when a news report on your freshly-annointed statewide candidate appears on a network “true crime” site. Nor is it helpful when the report contains the words “criminal charges,” “pawnbroker,” “domestic battery,” “knife,” “prostitute,” and “massage parlor.”:
But that’s the reality facing Illinois Democrats today–a day that was supposed to feature a concession by Dan Hynes that he had narrowly lost the gubernatorial nomination to Pat Quinn, followed no doubt by unity gestures.
Instead, the big political news (broken by the Chicago Tribune) is that Scott Lee Cohen, a previously obscure Chicago pawnbroker who won the nomination for Lieutenant Governor over a scattered field in a low-turnout primary this week (after running millions of dollars in ads touting his support for Job Fairs), got arrested in 2005 for allegedly attacking his girl friend with a knife. The charges were dropped when the alleged victim failed to show up in court, but that hardly matters politically. Cohen admits they had a drunken fight (though without knifeplay), and while he protests he didn’t know the girl friend had earlier been arrested for prostitution in connection with her work at a massage parlor (he said he thought she was a “massage therapist”), the whole thing is obviously maximum tabloid-and-talk-show bait of the worst sort.
The sad thing is that the job Cohen’s running for is largely ceremonial, and few people care who occupies it so long as the governor is hale and hearty. But even though candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run independently in the primary, the nominees form a joint ticket (i.e., if you vote for Pat Quinn, you automatically vote for Cohen as well).
Politically aware people over a certain age were immediately reminded of the disaster that struck Illinois Democrats back in 1986, when low-turnout primaries for Lt. Governor and Secretary of State were won by Lyndon Larouche disciples. Gubernatorial nominee Adlai Stevenson III, who started the year as the favorite to win the office, spent much of his campaign trying to disassociate himself from his deranged ticket-mates, and what should have been a great Democratic year turned out very poorly.
Word on the street is that Gov. Pat Quinn is moving immediately to organize Democratic elected officials to pressure Cohen into dropping out of the campaign. If he succeeds quickly, he should convince all Illinois Democrats that he has the chops to manage the publicity surrounding the upcoming trial of his predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, and get through a tough political year.

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it’s not fluid at all–that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.
Tuesday night, you just knew that Mark Kirk’s U.S. Senate primary victory in Illinois would be interpreted in some circles as proving that the much-discussed rightward trend in the Republican Party, sped along by pressure from the Tea Party Movement, was actually a mirage. And sure enough, Politico‘s Jonathan Martin published an article today entitled: “Tea Leaves: the Republican Establishment Still Rules.”
Aside from Kirk’s win (more about that in a moment), Martin’s main bits of evidence for his hypothesis are that the Republican National Committee recently rejected an effort to impose an ideological “purity test” on candidates seeking party financial support, and that recent GOP winners like Scott Brown and Bob McDonnell didn’t campaign on divisive cultural issues.
The “purity test” argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that many hard-core conservatives opposed it as insufficiently rigid, ham-handed, or unnecessary. Nobody, but nobody, in the conservative movement is more preoccupied with driving RINOs and “squishes” out of the Republican Party like whipped curs than Red State proprietor Erick Erickson. Yet he opposed the “purity test” as offering ideological heretics a phony seal of approval:

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s [Americans for Tax Reform] no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.
Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.
While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative.

Plenty of other conservatives opposed the “purity test” on grounds that “grassroots Republicans” were best equipped to police candidates. Some interpreted such rhetoric as indicating a big-tent willingness to tolerate regionally important ideological variations. But as the recent DK/R2K survey of self-identified Republicans illustrated, “regional differences” in the GOP are pretty much a relic of the past in a monolithically conservative party. And nowadays the “grassroots” means conservative activists, who are indeed avid to conduct ideological purification rituals. If there is a significant body of “grassroots activists” fighting to protect the interests of Republican “moderates,” it’s an awfully quiet group.
In general, the “purity test” furor reminds me of a quip I heard during the Jim Crow era about the relative weakness of the John Birch Society in the South: “Nobody sees the point in joining an organization standing for things everybody already agrees with.”
The argument that the success of hyper-opportunist Scott Brown and stealth theocrat Bob McDonnell “proves” the ideologues don’t have much real power in the GOP strikes me as almost self-refuting. Sure, Brown had a “moderate” reputation in the MA legislature, but that’s not why he became the maximum hero of the Tea Party Movement, whose themes he adopted wholesale. By contrast, McDonnell didn’t need to reassure social conservatives of his bona fides by campaigning on “their” issues; he had proven himself to be “one of them” for many years.
As for Mark Kirk, it’s true that conservative activists don’t like him, and there’s even a chance his Senate campaign will be immensely complicated by a Tea Party inspired third-party effort. But it’s also true he spent much of the primary campaign tacking steadily to the right, flip-flopping on the Gitmo detainee issue, and more dramatically, promising to vote in the Senate against the climate change legislation he voted for in the House. He’s hardly a good example of the weakness of conservatives in the GOP nationally.
More generally, it’s increasingly obvious that what passes for a “Republican Establishment” these days is focused heavily on surrendering to the most immediate ideological impulses of Tea Party and conservative movement activists (who are in fact the very same people in many places) and then coopting them for the 2010 and 2012 campaign cycles. In attempting a takeover of the GOP, the hard right is in many respects pushing on an open door. The RNC chairman, supposedly a “moderate” of sorts, never misses an opportunity to identify himself with the Tea Party Movement. Sarah Palin, who was the party’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, has called for a merger of the Movement and the GOP. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has argued that they have already more or less merged.
In his piece Martin suggests that the longstanding Republican pedigree of Florida Tea Party hero Marco Rubio somehow proves the “establishment” is still in charge. I’d say it shows that “establishment” is in the process of rapidly surrendering to the “conservative coup” that Martin scoffs at. Charlie Crist, whom Rubio seems certain to trounce in a Republican Senate primary later this year, was without question a major “GOP establishment” figure just months ago, and Rubio was considered a nuisance candidate. Now he’s the living symbol of a “purity test” being applied to Republicans by the “grassroots” to dramatic effect.
Yes, many Tea Party activists continue to shake their fists at the “Republican establishment,” just like unambiguously Republican conservative activists have done for many decades, dating back to the Willkie Convention of 1940. But with some exceptions, they are choosing to operate politically almost exclusively through the GOP, to the “establishment’s” delight.
The emerging reality is that the Tea Party activists are the shock troops in the final conquest of the Republican Party by the most hard-core elements of the conservative movement. It’s apparent not just in Republican primaries, but in the remarkable ability of Republican politicians to repudiate as “socialism” many policy positions their party first developed and quite recently embraced (Mark Kirk’s support for cap-and-trade would have been considered relatively uncontroversial just a few years ago). You can certainly root around and find a few exceptions to this trend, but they are few and far between. And the implicit assumption of Martin’s piece–that the “adults” of the Republican “establishment” will once again tame the wild ideological beasts of their party–is actually dangerous.

Gallup put out an analysis of daily tracking data this week that was designed to establish that Asian-Americans are the most liberal U.S. ethnic group. But as Matt Yglesias immediately noted, what the analysis really does is to call into question the entire “liberal-moderate-conservative” self-identification spectrum in public opinion research.
Gallup’s numbers for African-Americans show this rather emphatically: 24% call themselves liberals, 42% call themselves moderates, and 29% call themselves conservatives. By this measurement, African-Americans are a “center-right” bloc of voters. Yet the same survey notes that African-Americans self-identify as Democrats (or as Democratic “leaners”) by a margin of 83% to 8%. And despite many years of conservative hopes and dreams for a rightward trend among African-Americans, they consistently represent the most solidly “liberal” category of voters by any measurement other than ideological self-identification.
In other words, as many of us have been saying for years, the L-M-C typology for ideological self-identification is deeply flawed and of limited utility. Yet an astonishing edifice of “analysis,” commentary, and political rhetoric has been built on this shaky foundation, most recently the claim that Barack Obama is defying a “center-right nation” by trying to implement his campaign platform. It’s time to retire it or replace it.

With yesterday’s easy primary victory by Mark Kirk in IL, and with the news that former Sen. Dan Coats will leave his lobbying gig to take on Evan Bayh in IN, Republicans are now getting excited about the possibility of retaking the Senate this November.
They should probably chill a bit. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post breaks down the ten Democratic seats Republicans would have to win–without losing any of their own–to regain control of the Senate. And while anything’s possible if this turns out to be a “wave” election, running this particular table will be very difficult.
To start with the least likely Republican victories, Chris Dodd’s retirement makes Democratic attorney general Richard Blumenthal a solid front-runner in CT. Republicans must negotiate a difficult primary and then take on one of the most popular politicians in recent Nutmeg State history. Similarly, CA Republicans must get through a tough primary before taking on Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the more popular politicians in a state that really hates its politicians (in both parties) these days.
Bayh will hardly be an easy mark The never-defeated former Boy Wonder of Hoosier politics, he’s sitting on $13 million in campaign cash, and has a history of winning big in good Republican years. Meanwhile, Coats has to deal with bad publicity over his ten years of DC lobbying work, including representation of banks and equity firms. And he’s been voting in Virginia, not Indiana, all that time.
A lot of Republicans seem to be assuming that Mark Kirk will win easily in IL. Only problem is: he’s currently trailing Democratic nominee Alexi Giannoulias in early polls, and will also have to explain some major flip-flops he executed to survive his primary.
I’m probably not the only observer in either party who remains skeptical that former Club for Growth chieftain Pat Toomey is going to win in PA against the eventual winner of the Sestak-Specter primary. Toomey is certainly the kind of guy who will make sure that intra-Democratic wounds heal quickly.
And then there are states which are absolute crapshoots at this point, such as CO, where either appointed Senator Michael Bennet or former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff will probably face former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. The same is true of an open Republican seat in MO, where Democrat Robin Carnahan has been running essentially even with Roy Blunt.
Republican open seats in NH, OH, and KY are hardly safe for the GOP, either.
All in all, it would take a odds-defying “wave” indeed to deliver the Senate to Republicans. And by the very nature of Senate races, which match high-profile politicians usually well known to voters, “waves” are less likely to control outcomes than in House races. The only real precedent for what GOPers are dreaming of came in 1980, with Republicans improbably won every single close race.
In many respects, the Senate landscape will be much improved for Republicans in 2012. But then we will be dealing with a presidential year, different (and more favorable for Democrats) turnout patterns, and the little problem that the Republican presidential field doesn’t look that exciting (with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, who’s a little too exciting).

Daily Kos has just released a large Research 2000 poll it commissioned to test the views of just over 2000 self-identified Republicans. Here’s Markos’ analysis of the findings, and here are the crosstabs so you can slice and dice the results yourself.
Markos calls the poll’s results “startling,” but I guess that depends on your expectations. Seems to me that it confirms the strong rightward trend in the GOP that its leaders have been signaling now for the last two years. Some of this actually represents a long-term trend that ‘s been underway since the early 1960s; some of it involves the shrinkage of the Republican “base” to a seriously conservative core from the party’s identification peak around 2004; and some is attributable to a conscious or subconscious effort to absolve the party from the sins of the Bush administration by treating it as too “moderate.”
In any event, aside from a general and rigorous conservatism, the two findings that are probably most relevant to the immediate political future, and to the relationship between Republicans and independents, are the GOPers’ exceptionally hateful attitude towards Barack Obama, and their unregenerated cultural extremism. The first factor will complicate any efforts in 2010 to go after congressional Democrats as a bad influence on the well-meaning president (who remains more popular among voters outside the GOP than either party in Congress). And the second undermines the media narrative that today’s Republicans are semi-libertarians who have finally sloughed off all that crazy Christian Right stuff and are focused like a laser beam on the economy and fiscal issues.
How much do self-identified Republicans hate Barack Obama? Well, this is hardly news, but in the DK/R2K poll they favor Obama’s impeachment by a 39/32 margin (the rest are “not sure”). Only a narrow plurality (42/36) believes he was born in the United States. By a 63/21 margin, they believe he is a “socialist” (tell that to his progressive critics!). Only 24% say Obama “wants the terrorists to win,” but with 33% being “not sure” about it, only a minority (43%) seem convinced he’s not an actual traitor. Only 36% disagree with the proposition that Obama is a “racist who hates white people” (31% agree with the proposition, and the rest are not sure). And only 24% seem to be willing to concede he actually won the 2008 election (12% think “ACORN stole it,” and 55% aren’t sure either way).
On the cultural-issues front, self-identified Republicans are divided only between the very conservative and the very very conservative. The number that jumps off the page is that 31% want to outlaw contraceptives (56% are opposed). But that’s not too surprising since 34% believe “the birth control pill is abortion,” and 76% (with only 8% opposed) agree that “abortion is murder.”
But it’s the homophobia of GOPers that’s really striking, considering the steady national trend away from such a posture, particularly among younger voters. It extends beyond familiar controversial issues like gay marriage (opposed 77/7) and gays-in-the-military (opposed 55/26) to exceptionally unambiguous statements of equality like the ability of openly gay people to teach in public schools (opposed 73/8). This last finding really is amazing, since St. Ronald Reagan himself famously opposed a California ballot initiative banning gay and lesbian public school teachers, way back in 1978.
The crosstabs for the poll break down the results on regional lines, and there are some variations; most notably, southerners are marginally more conservative on most questions, and really stand out in their incredible levels of support for their own state’s secession from the United States (fully 33% favor a return to 1861, as opposed to only 10% in the northeast). But by and large, the regional splits aren’t that massive; the old idea of the GOP as a coalition of conservatives based in the south and west and moderates in the midwest and northeast is totally obsolete.
The poll finds no real front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination. Given eight options (about the only plausible candidate not mentioned is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels), Sarah Palin tops the list at 16%, with Romney at 11%, Dick Cheney (!) at 10%, and everyone else in single digits. Fully 42% are undecided. Given the overall results of the poll, that almost certainly means the 2012 nomination process will exert a powerful pull to the right for all the candidates. I mean, really, in a scattered field, is it at all unlikely that someone will focus on that one-third of southern Republicans pining for secession and start channeling John C. Calhoun before the early South Carolina primary? Or might not a candidate seeking traction in the Iowa Caucuses, a low-turnout affair typically dominated by Right-to-Life activists, maybe call for banning those “murderous” birth control pills?
We’ll know soon enough how crazy the GOP crazy-train will get in 2012, I suppose. But it’s a lead-pipe certainty that the dominant right wing of the Republican Party won’t find any reason to moderate itself if the GOP makes serious gains in November.

According to all the insider accounts, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty was the finalist with Sarah Palin for the 2008 Republican vice presidential nod. He’s now generally considered a major player for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. In both cases, Pawlenty’s major credential is that he doesn’t offend any significant conservative interest groups.
I’ve already written a couple of pieces suggesting that this guy is a less than a political fireball. But he really does seem to be positioning himself as the ultimate lowest-common-denominator candidate. Just today (via Matt Yglesias), I read a Tim Paw op-ed in Politico that was one of the dumbest, paint-by-the-numbers utterances on record.
This was presumably Tim’s response to the Obama budget, but it could have been written twenty or even thirty years ago, for delivery at some midwestern Lincoln Day Dinner that couldn’t attract a better speaker. Entitled “Ponzi Scheme on the Potomac,” the piece never bothers to explain its initial assertion that the federal budget is indeed anything like a “Ponzi Scheme,” and then descends into incoherent banality.
Pawlenty’s Big Idea, you see, is a constitutional amendment to require a balanced federal budget. This was a very popular idea a long, long time ago, until it became apparent that (1) it was a way for politicians to avoid talking about how, actually, the federal budget should be balanced, and (2) such an amendment would never, ever, be enacted, in no small part because it might require spending cuts and/or tax increases that a majority of politicians, and for that matter, a majority of Americans, would oppose.
Within seconds of wheeling out this antediluvian idea, Pawlenty calls for making Bush’s tax cuts permanent, and for additional tax cuts, which shows you why he favors a balanced budget only in the abstract sense of the term.
Tim Paw’s think piece wheezes to the finish line with a recitation of his proud fiscal record in Minnesota, capped by the boast that he “moved the state out of the Top 10 in tax burden.” Too bad that only 37% of Gopher State voters say they’d vote for him for president, according to a recent Rasmussen survey.
All in all, it’s hard to imagine Pawlenty outclassing Republican rivals like Palin or Huckabee, who, whatever their other abundant demerits, are interesting people who can light up rooms full of rabid conservatives. And it’s hard to imagine this plodding pol chasing Barack Obama around the ring in a general election debate. If this is the best the GOP can offer, please bring him on.

Reading Peggy Noonan is emotionally difficult for me. For one thing, she was the first of a breed that I find inherently obnoxious: the Celebrity Speechwriter. Perhaps it’s just envy, since I happened to have labored at that craft in total obscurity for decades. But there’s something, well, unseemly, about a ghost that is so all-pervasively visible, and so willing to take credit for the golden words uttered by employers who, after all, were actually elected to public office and bear responsibility for their deeds as well as their words.
But more importantly, ever since she obtained her own bylines and television gigs, Noonan has steadily “grown” into one of those imperious columnists who express exasperation at the idiocy and small-mindedness of politicians, particularly those who happen to harbor policy views at variance with her own. And that’s especially annoying when, as in her snarky take on the State of the Union Address for the Wall Street Journal, she is offering dubious and partisan “advice” to Barack Obama, designed to attack what he is doing while professing sympathy for his challenges.
There are no less than three such toxic bits of “advice” in the column in question. First, Noonan mocks President Obama for allowing Congress to push him around, unlike, of course, her first Big Boss, Ronald Reagan:

James Baker, that shrewd and knowing man, never, as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, allowed his president to muck about with congressmen, including those of his own party. A president has stature and must be held apart from Congress critters. He can meet with them privately, in the Oval Office. There, once, a Republican senator who’d announced opposition to a bill important to the president tried to claim his overall loyalty: “Mr. President, you know I’d jump out of a plane for you if you asked, but—”
“Jump,” said Reagan. The senator, caught, gave in.
That’s how you treat them. You don’t let them blur your picture and make you more common. You don’t let them call the big shots.

Aside from reflecting the eternal Cult of Reagan, these words certainly distort the actual relationship of the 40th president with Congress. Nothing was more central to the Reagan presidency than his initial budget and tax proposals. His budget director, David Stockman, wrote an entire book on how these proposals were mangled into a fiscal abomination by Members of Congress from both parties. It was entitled, revealingly, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed.
Quite likely Barack Obama erred during his first year by deferring too much to congressional committee barons on health care reform, and on the composition of appropriations bills. But that was a matter of degree, not some fundamental failure to pursue a Fuhrerprinzip that separates the Big Men from the small. Obama’s immediate predecessor was arguably a small man in genuine leadership capacity, but no one since Nixon has demanded more imperial powers. America can do without more of that.
Second, Noonan stipulates that Obama’s anti-Washington rhetoric is laughably in contradiction with his policy agenda:

The central fact of the speech was the contradiction at its heart. It repeatedly asserted that Washington is the answer to everything. At the same time it painted a picture of Washington as a sick and broken place. It was a speech that argued against itself: You need us to heal you. Don’t trust us, we think of no one but ourselves.

Now you don’t have to think too deeply about this to understand that Noonan is saying that “Washington” is “liberalism.” So “anti-Washington” sentiment is conservatism. Thus, presumably, for Obama to redeem the “change Washington” rhetoric of his presidential campaign, he needs to become conservative! What a brilliant idea!
This is all pretty ludicrous, of course, since recent conservative administrations (particularly those following Noonan’s exalted notions of presidential leadership) have been avid to use federal power to wage undeclared wars, usurp civil liberties, and preempt state regulations of corporations. Moreover, you can be angry at “Washington” not just for trying to do too much, but for trying to do too little, or for doing what it does poorly or corruptly. “Change” can be in any sort of direction, not just Peggy Noonan’s direction.
Third, Noonan extends an especially devious back-handed compliment to Obama (employing the hoary device of an anonymous “friendly critic” who seems to resemble Noonan herself) of suggesting that he’s “too honest” to undertake the obvious route of “moving to the center,” by which she means “moving to the right:”

“I don’t think he can do a Bill Clinton pivot, because he’s not a pragmatist, he’s an ideologue. He’s a community organizer. He mixes the discrimination he felt as a young man with the hardship so many feel in this country, and he wants to change it and the way to change that is government programs and not opportunity.”
The great issue, this friendly critic added, is debt. The public knows this; Congress and the White House do not. “To me the Republicans are as rotten as the Democrats” in terms of spending. “Almost.”
“I hope we have big changes in 2010,” the friend said. Only significant loss will force the president to focus on spending. “To heal our country we need to get the arrogance out of the White House and the elitists out of the Congress. We need tough love. We need a real adult in the White House because we don’t have adults in the Congress.”

So Obama can only be saved by a Republican victory in 2010 (the only “big changes” on tap), which will enable him to act as an “adult” on “debt,” which the people–and Peggy Noonan and Obama’s “friend”–understand as “the great issue.” (Never mind that it didn’t seem to be a “great issue” when George W. Bush was running up most of the debt we now face).
What’s really going on in Noonan’s column, beyond a remarkable display both of arrogance and of disjointed, illogical writing, is a theme we will hear a lot of between now and November. Republicans understand that for all his struggles, Barack Obama remains more popular and trusted than they are. Heavy-handed right-wing attacks on the president as some sort of treasonous monster can backfire, and also don’t comport well with the sort of well-bred sophistication that conservatives like Noonan cultivate. So Obama is Gulliver among the Lilliputians, held back from his better impulses by the petty spendthrifts of Congress and the hobgoblins of his own ideological and “community organizer” background.
If and when Republicans make big gains this November and succeed in completely thwarting Obama’s efforts to act as president, “friends” like Noonan will sadly conclude that he couldn’t overcome his shortcomings, and begin calling for a “real adult”–Mitt Romney, anyone?–in 2012. Bet on it.