Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.
This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.
Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.
Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).
There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.
The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.
The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation reallly will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
An explosive political scandal in my home state of Georgia serves as a reminder that in state elections in 2010, there are many Republicans who are currently in control of statehouses, and could suffer the vicissitudes associated with malfeasance in office and a surly, wrong-track-dominated electorate.
Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned yesterday, a few days after his ex-wife in a television interview said she knew for a fact that the conservative solon had conducted an extramarital affair with a utilities lobbyist even as he championed legislation highly beneficial to the lobbyist’s employer. What made this charge political dynamite is that House Democrats had filed an ethics complaint against Richardson in 2007 making that exact charge, which was briskly dismissed by Republicans.
The story was made more lurid by the fact that Richardson had obtained considerable public sympathy last month by disclosing he had attempted suicide out of depression over the dissolution of his marriage. His ex-wife took to the airwaves in part to charge that the “suicide attempt” was in fact no more than an act of manipulation aimed at controlling her–and presumably, her mouth.
Georgia Republicans, of course, quickly handed Richardson an anvil, but it may not be so easy for them to avoid collateral damage; the scandal is already bleeding over into the borderline-vicious GOP gubernatorial primary for 2010. One candidate, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has already reminded Georgians that one of her rivals, former state senator Eric Johnson, chaired the ethics panel that peremptorily dismissed the Democratic complaint against Richardson, which now appears to have been entirely legitimate. Another of her rivals, state Rep. Austin Scott, was one of Richardson’s strongest allies in the legislature. Moreover, the blame-game over Richardson’s sex-and-corruption scandal can’t help but remind voters of the cozy relationship between the GOP and corporate influence-peddlers.
With two Democratic candidates for governor, former Gov. Roy Barnes and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, both looking reasonably competitive against the fractious GOP field, Republicans may not have much of a margin for error, even in this conservative state. Power has its privileges, but in this particular day and age, being the incumbent party comes with handicaps as well.

As the White House and the Democratic Senate leadership continues health care negotiations with Democratic “centrists” and a Republican or two, with a nervous eye cast towards what House Democrats can tolerate, the intra-progressive dispute over the indispensibility of the public option has erupted once again.
The ever-estimable Paul Starr, who’s been beating this drum virtually all year, fired the first shot in the latest debate on Monday in the New York Times, arguing explicitly that the public option as it has evolved in Congress is not worth fighting for:

An earlier version of the public option, available to the entire public, might have realized progressive hopes and conservative fears. By paying doctors and hospitals at Medicare rates (which are 20 percent to 30 percent below those paid by private insurers), the public option would have had a distinct price advantage. But by severely cutting revenue to health-care providers, it would also have set off such a political crisis that Congress would never have passed it.
Instead, the bills in Congress now call for the government plan to negotiate rates with providers, as private insurers do. That limitation exposes a defect in the idea. The government plan may well have to charge higher premiums because it is likely to attract more than its share of the chronically ill and other high-cost subscribers. It could go into a death spiral of mounting costs.
But giving the exchanges the necessary authority to regulate private insurers could solve many of the problems that motivated the public option in the first place. Strengthening that authority and accelerating the timetable for reform are what liberals in Congress should be looking for in a deal.

Two days later, the influential Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein echoed Starr’s argument, suggesting that larger subsidies for insurance purchases and tighter regulation of private insurers would accomplish more than a largely symbolic rearguard fight to preserve an already-watered-down public option.
Another influential online voice, Hullabaloo’s Digby, took up the challenge with an eye-catching post:

Ezra believes that if the votes aren’t there for a decent public option then the horse trading should be around getting something good in return for giving up the public option rather than negotiating the terms of the public option. That would make sense if the public option were just another feature of the health care bill. But it is not. It is the central demand of the liberal base of the Democratic Party in this rube goldberg health care plan and has long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.
Perhaps that is wrong on policy grounds. People will argue about that forever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no longer a matter of policy but rather a matter of political power. And to that extent it cannot be “bargained away” for something like better subsidies, even if it made sense. “Bargaining away” the Public Option is also the bargaining away of liberal influence and strength.

And that led my Progressive Policy Institute colleague Elbert Ventura at ProgressiveFix to charge that Digby had “given the game away” by admitting the public option was about symbolism, not substance:

Digby argues that the implications of the public option extend far beyond health care, that “powerful people” are “desperate that the liberals are not seen to win this battle.” Funny, because I thought the way that progressives win this battle is by making health care accessible and affordable to millions of Americans who currently don’t have it. According to some very smart people, the public option is playing a steadily diminishing role in achieving that goal. But don’t tell that to Digby, whose position now boils down to: Why bother with policy advances when we can have symbolic victories (or, heck, defeats)?

While personally, I ultimately come down on the side of Starr, Klein and Ventura in this debate, and have felt the public option has been overemphasized by both sides of the health care battle for a good while, I think Digby’s critics are missing something important that has implications for the endgame of health care reform and other issues as well. She speaks for a considerable number of progressives who basically despaired of a good health reform bill the moment the House eliminated the linkage of the public option from Medicare payment rates–the “robust” public option that so many Progressive Caucus members had pledged to demand at the risk of their votes on final passage. Unlike the public option as it exists in the Senate debate, that “robust” PO wasn’t a matter of symbolism; it reflected the views of millions of single-payer advocates on whose behalf the PO was devised in the first place. These are folks who believe the existence of a for-profit health insurance industry in this country is a moral calamity, and supported a “robust” public option in order to demonstrate that private insurers could not compete with a properly constituted public system. Moreover, they believed, and still believe, that a “reformed” system that includes an individual mandate and public subsidies for private insurance purchases, without a “robust” public option, represents a massive taxpayer subvention of for-profit companies that is arguably worse than the status quo.
From this perspective, what’s strange is that defenders of private health insurance–or what Digby calls “Republicans and corporate centrists”–are still fighting the largely symbolic public option as it exists in the Senate today. She interprets that as a matter of pure power politics, and as an effort to crush progressive liberalism. Naturally, she thinks the Left should respond in kind–not out of indifference to “substance,” but as a recognition that the real substantive fight has largely been lost, and as a demonstration of the Left’s own power, backed up in this case, she argues, by public opinion.
If my interpretation of the dynamics here are right, then ironically, there may be less intra-progressive fighting over the endgame of health care reform that one would initially expect. The underlying contempt of capital-P Progressives for the weak public option at stake in the Senate may mean that if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the “robust” PO’s strongest supporters. Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, not only a “robust” PO champion, but someone extremely interested in the ability of the Left to flex its muscles on this and every other issue, created another stir this week by concluding that he supported final passage of a health reform bill on the limited grounds that even access to bad, immoral health insurance policies would save lives. Others will probably reach the same conclusion, though not happily.
But what this debate illustrates is a broad and pre-existing gulf between Democrats on a pretty fundamental issue. Those of the Clintonian, “New Democrat” tendency have long argued for the use of “market means” to implement progressive “public goals.” In the context of health care, that’s always meant support for what used to be called “managed competition,” and more recently, “premium support”: a private health insurance system regulated and subsidized by government to provide universal coverage. On much of the Left, as noted earlier, “market means” are considered inherently illegitimate when it comes to health care. In the end, the “public option” didn’t serve to bridge that gap. But we all need to be honest about the gap itself, and aware of its possible existence in other areas of public policy.

It’s been apparent for years now that increasingly large elements of the conservative movement in this country have been building a parallel universe with its own facts, its own rules, and its own drama of good versus evil. It’s largely impervious to empirical data, and relies heavily on assertion and reassertion of key claims that flow from ever-more-lurid (and thus inherently unverifiable) conspiracy theories.
One key claim that’s grown to truly monstrous proportions is that the U.S. Constitution is being perpetually threatened by “voter fraud”–vast numbers of unqualified voters drawn from minority groups, herded to the polls to support Democratic candidates who in turn promise the loot the virtuous law-abiding white majority to pay off miscreants with “welfare.” This claim has been around for decades, but used to be little more than a cynical effort to find some rebuttal to better documented Democratic claims that the Republican Party routinely sought to intimidate or disenfranchise minority voters (a practice that came to especially bright light during the 2000 election crisis).
The growing importance of voter fraud allegations to the GOP in recent years was made evident by the U.S. Attorneys scandal of the Bush administration, in which failure to produce such allegations was the rationale for several politically motivated firings.
But it’s during the last year-and-a-half that the same old undocumented claims of voter fraud have become linked to a broad right-wing narrative of vote-buying and election-stealing on a massive scale that supposedly explains both the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, and that centers on the activities of a previously obscure and marginal grassroots organizing group named ACORN.
Regular readers of this site know the narrative by now: engorged with federal grants, ACORN engineered the housing and financial crises by intimidating lenders into offering mortgages to poor and minority families with no means or intentions of making their payments, and then when the chickens came home to roost, gambled everything on an illegal effort to secure bailouts and a general “socialist” takeover of the country by stealing the White House for its long-time associate and radical community organizer, Barack Obama.
The extraordinary strength of this crazy theory, which has the particular advantage of absolving the Bush administration and Wall Street of responsibility for the financial crisis and the current recession, was astonishingly demonstrated by a recent poll showing that an actual majority of self-identified Republican voters believe that ACORN stole the 2008 elections.
Any narrative this powerful has to be fed continuously, which is why the recent congressional vote stripping ACORN of nearly all access to federal grants was a pyrrhic victory for conservatives. How could they keep fear of ACORN alive?
That necessity led to yesterday’s strange event in the U.S. House, a partisan “forum” on ACORN that was sort of a parody of a congressional hearing, based on the circular reasoning that the refusal of the House itself to launch an wide-ranging investigation of ACORN was proof of the conspiracy’s power.
You can read Dave Weigel’s detailed account of the “forum” by following the link above, but the main claim yesterday (specifically by Rep. Darrell Issa of CA) was that the White House serves as a “war room” for ACORN, as “proved” by Obama’s tangential relationship with ACORN years ago in Chicago, and more recently, by the hiring of Democratic election law wizard Bob Bauer as White House Counsel. Bauer’s smoking gun, it seems, is that he once wrote a memo dismissing broad-based GOP election fraud claims, and warning (accurately) that they would be retailed by the McCain-Palin campaign. Anyone denying the conspiracy, you see, is obviously a party to it.
Personally, I hope yesterday’s “forum” is the first of many such events. The centrality of the ACORN Derangement Syndrome to the contemporary Right’s world-view–along with the opportunity for more responsible conservatives to repudiate it–needs to be right out there in the open, and not secluded in viral emails or segregated at Fox News. It helps explain not only the virulence of conservative passion against the Obama administration, but the rat’s nest of self-exculpation, paranoia, and yes, racism that too often underlies it.

It’s reasonably well understood that this year’s federal economic stimulus legislation helped (though not as much as it might have) cushion state and local governments from a fiscal disaster attributable to falling revenues, automatically increasing entitlement expenditures, and balanced budget requirements. The rationale for this federal aid–to keep states and localities from counteracting the stimulative effect of federal spending via tax increases and spending cuts–is less well understood. So, too, is the fact that the continuing fiscal crisis around the country continues to undermine the impact of federal stimulus.
That’s the departure point for an important new article by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Aggregating the numbers, Meyerson reaches a startling but entirely justified conclusion:

[H]ow much does the government’s stimulus come to when we subtract the amount the states and localities are taking out of the economy from the amount the feds are putting in? The two-year Obama stimulus amounted to $787 billion, of which $70 billion was really just the usual taxpayers’ annual exemption from the alternative minimum tax, and $146 billion was actually appropriated for the years 2011 to 2019. That leaves $571 billion that the federal government is pumping into the economy during 2009 and 2010. Subtract the amount that state and local governments are withdrawing from the economy (they have a combined shortfall of around $365 billion, but let’s say they do enough fiscal finagling so that the total of their cutbacks and tax hikes is just $325 billion), and we’re left with $246 billion.
At $787 billion, the stimulus came to 2.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for 2009 and 2010 — not big enough, but a respectable figure. At $246 billion — the net of the federal stimulus minus the state and local anti-stimulus — it comes to just 0.8 percent of GDP, a level lower than those of many of the nations that the U.S. chastised for failing to stimulate their economies sufficiently.

In other words, most of the debates we’ve heard about the size and impact of the federal stimulus effort have ignored the actual net spending once you aggregate federal, state and local government actions. That’s a pretty big ommission, and that’s why the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack and I argued earlier this year that we need to start thinking comprehensively about intergovernmental coordination:

[F]ederal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.

Meyerson goes on to examine other damaging aspects of our federal system with respect to economic policy that are well worth reading. But what’s most interesting and alarming about his analysis is that it’s so unusual. Most policy discussions in Washington either ignore state and local governments, treat them as an unimportant sideshow, or assume that the many parts of the intergovernmental system move roughly in coordination, and in the same direction. Now more than ever, it’s time to understand that the left hand of our system may be working at active cross-purposes with the right.

Two of my favorite online writers, Chris Bowers of OpenLeft and Nate Silver of 538.com, had an interesting exchange that touches on a perennial issue of concern to Democrats: should self-conscious progressives (using the Progressive Caucus definition of that term) care if a bunch of “centrist” or conservative Democrats in the U.S. House lose in 2010?
Chris says, basically, no. His reasoning is that there is already a “non-progressive majority” in the House, and that non-progressive Democratic losses might well strengthen the hand of the Progressive Caucus in the Democratic Caucus at large. He also suggests that some of the seats lost by the kind of Democrats he doesn’t like might be picked up by the kind of Democrats he likes down the road.
Nate offers a rejoinder that looks closely at the 39 most vulnerable House Democrats and argues that Chris’ generalization of them as non-progressive is quite questionable. Choosing the three most difficult (and significant) House votes as a measure, he notes that 18 voted with the leadership and the administration on all three; 27 voted “right” on two out of three; and only two went the wrong way on all three. Since Speaker Pelosi undoubtedly gave some of these Members a “pass” on one or more of these key votes, they seem less than monolithically rebellious, and the idea that replacing them en masse with (typically) right-wing Republicans as a matter of indifference is a dubious proposition.
Neither Chris nor Nate directly addresses the obvious issue that it matters to Democrats if they actually control the House or not, and neither really gets into the question of whether at least some of the endangered Democrats accurately represent the views not only their districts, but of Democrats in their districts. Chris is clearly focused on the relative power of the Progressive Caucus vis a vis the Blue Dogs, but as Nate points out, 39 of the 53 Blue Dogs aren’t endangered at all.
I understand that OpenLeft was founded with the explicit goal of moving the congressional Democratic Caucus to the left, and is determined to get progressives to place a higher premium on ideology (and real-life policy results) than on blind partisanship. But Nate’s right to question the sort of one-step-back, two-step-forward logic that is indifferent to gains by a rabidly conservative GOP so long as it damages ideologically “unsound” Democrats. It’s not clear we as a party or a country can afford that sort of “long view.”

Last night I hung out with my father for a few hours, and as we chatted cable news was on the tube in the background (CNN, as it happens). I don’t watch as much cable news as I probably should to stay in touch with the zeitgeist, but the experience helps explain why the stuff makes me crazy.
On a day when the Senate was beginning a momentous debate on health care reform, and on the eve of the President’s big speech on Afghanistan, what were the gabbers gabbing about? Mainly the White House “party crashers” and Tiger Woods. In other words, two “stories” where nobody currently knows the facts, and everybody probably will know most if not all of the facts in a few days. Even the guests being beamed across the planet to discuss these weighty matters seemed to run out of anything to say within minutes.
There was, on Larry King, a brief discussion of Afghanistan, but only in the context of an “interview” with Jesse Ventura, who bellowed at the camera on this subject along with the Big Two of the party crashers and Tiger.
The only other story I noticed was the death watch for Mike Huckabee’s presidential ambitions in the wake of the killing spree apparently undertaken by the man whose sentence for burglary was commuted by Huck back in the day.
But it got worse. Driving away from my father’s house late last night, I twirled the AM radio guide in search of something innocuous, only to discover that virtually every station I could pick up was sporting right-wing talk. The main subject on Wingnut Radio was Huck, whom nobody defended, though the burial ceremony was made less interesting by the admission of each and every one of these firebreathers that they hated Huckabee as a “bleeding heart” long before this incident (typically because he doesn’t profess to hate immigrants, and because he criticized other Republicans last year for not admitting the economy was in trouble–you know, the same economy that’s now proof that Obama needs to be driven out of office). And to think: before yesterday the Arkansan’s main political problem were the lbs. he’s been putting on, and the distant thunder of a possible Palin run for the White House.
Next time I’m in the car, I’ll just listen to the hockey broadcast. It’s totally inscrutable to me, but far less offensive.

As I noted earlier, a new Washington Post poll of Republicans recorded the remarkable extent to which today’s rank-and-file GOPers can’t identify much in the way of any clear-cut Republican leaders. Having just read Sam Tanenhaus’ meditation on Sarah Palin in the New Yorker, I’m beginning to wonder whether the leaderless nature of the GOP represents a temporary vacuum or something a little more profound.
Here’s Tanenhaus’ kicker:

To judge from [Palin’s] book, the most exciting time in her life was the election of 2008, when she was embraced by the army of “everyday, hardworking Americans,” the “everyday folks,” and “thousands of regular Americans coming out with their signs” who mobbed her tumultuous rallies, thrilling to her odes to the “true America.” She gave them a “magnifying mirror.” They reflected her own image back to her. This adoration is kept alive today by the excited autograph-seekers in Grand Rapids and Fort Wayne, in the audience that gave Oprah Winfrey her best ratings in two years, and in the various advocacy groups that have sprung up to promote Palin for the Presidency: Conservatives 4 Palin, Team Sarah, Vets 4 Sarah, 2012 Draft Sarah Committee, Sarah Palin Radio, SarahPAC. The true meaning of Palinism is Sarah Palin—nothing more and nothing less. She is a party unto herself.

Now it’s hardly novel to observe that the excitement Palin has aroused among (particularly) cultural conservative activists reflects how closely she resembles them, or that her fans celebrate her lack of conventional credentials or policy knowledge as a badge of honor. But it may also reflect a genuine leadership crisis in the conservative movement and the GOP, wherein no one who is not a Palin-style “mirror” of grassroots qualities can be trusted.
It’s not enough to call this sentiment “populist.” Historically, most “populist” leaders have represented a preexisting ideological set of beliefs in one or both major political parties, and a relatively specific set of policy goals. Yes, populists like Tom Watson (with his dirt-farmer persona) and William Jennings Bryan (with an idiom derived largely from the Bible) derived some of their appeal from personal identification with the lives and values of people who felt disenfranchised. But they were also genuine leaders who pulled their followers along to positions on policy matters and political loyalties they might not have embraced on their own.
The history of “right-wing populism” in this country is murkier and more controversial. But by and large, the conservative populist impulse has been one that relatively conventional Republican politicians (notably Nixon and Reagan) or regional reactionaries (George Wallace) have exploited in the pursuit of conventionally conservative ends.
Palin strikes me as more like another famous conservative “populist,” Joseph R. McCarthy. And I don’t say that in order to invoke an invidious identification of the overall political dangers represented by St. Joan of the Tundra and the famously irresponsible red-hunter. What strikes me as similar is the extent to which both politicians were relatively ordinary people who were suddenly swept into vast celebrity by an almost accidental association with grievances poorly advocated by conventional political leaders.
McCarthy stumbled upon the power of many years of accumulated unhappiness–mostly among heartland conservatives, but elsewhere as well–with a bipartisan foreign policy led by northeastern elites that aligned the United States with what many considered historic national enemies–not just the Soviet Union, but “Europe” generally, and for many Irish-Americans, the United Kingdom. It’s sometimes forgotten that many of McCarthy’s red-hunting conservative allies fulminated against the “loss” of China and the “betrayal” of Korea because they deeply resented a Euro-centric foreign policy, as reflected in their general opposition to the establishment of NATO. At a deeper level, many of McCarthy’s supporters (particularly in the midwest) were the very people who were initially opposed to war with Nazi Germany, on the theory that Hitler represented a Western bulwark against Bolshevism; even those who didn’t feel we backed the wrong side in Europe often thought we should have negotiated an armistice with Germany that would have avoided the Soviet conquest of Eastern Europe (an argument still advanced by Pat Buchanan). The eventual consolidation of conservatives in favor of an aggressively internationalist anti-communism was a later development, but it’s obscured the isolationist roots of the McCarthy uprising.
McCarthy eventually came to grief, of course, in part because of his sloppy and reckless tactics, but more immediately because he extended his attacks on Democratic foreign policy “betrayals” to attacks on the Eisenhower administration and even the Army. And thus the leadership class of the Republican Party came together to crush the fiery Wisconsinite, even as they sought to coopt his appeal by their own anticommunist fervor.
Like McCarthy, Palin is appealing to a variety of unredeemed cultural and political discontents, and like McCarthy, she’s gradually extended her liberal-baiting into attacks on conventional Republican pols, most notably the people surrounding the very presidential campaign that made her a celebrity. Unlike McCarthy, however, she’s not taking on a highly popular and newly elected Republican president, but a defeated GOP establishment that millions of conservative activists believe betrayed them through “big government” initiatives, excessive bipartisanship, and the failure to successfully execute a counter-revolution against legalized abortion, legitimized homosexuality, and other forms of cultural pluralism and diversity (or as they would say, “relativism.”). Moreover, said establishment has also been terribly weakened by its association with economic calamity, caused, so thinks the conservative “base,” by the reward-the-crooks-and-welfare-loafers “big government” betrayals of the autumn of 2008.
This doesn’t mean that Palin is destined to fill the leadership vacuum in the Republican Party. Like Joe McCarthy, she’s more suited to act as a vehicle for discontent than as the agent for its vindication. But make no mistake, the contemporary dynamics of the Republican Party and the conservative movement make it very unlikely that anyone from that quarter will curb her as Ike and his allies curbed and then broke McCarthy. If and when Palin succeeds again in creating a national public policy furor via a casual Facebook post, as she did with the famous “death panel” screed (arguably as irresponsible as anything Joe McCarthy said), it’s more likely that Republicans will coopt her than repudiate her. So while Sarah Palin probably won’t become the leader of the GOP, she may well play a major role in setting the terms on which anyone else can command the leaderless masses she represents.
UPDATE: Just discovered that the great historian of populism, Michael Kazin, penned a piece for the Washington Independent right after Palin’s selection as McCain’s running-mate, comparing her to Joe McCarthy. But I’ve made a quite different argument about her–and McCarthy’s–relationship with “elites” in the GOP.

Today’s Washington Post features a big new poll of self-identified Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Unsurprisingly, these voters don’t like Barack Obama, don’t like the general direction of the country, and don’t want their leaders to help enact health care reform legislation (not that they are in any danger of doing so).
The two findings most worth paying attention to are (1) yet another confirmation that Republicans are undergoing a rightward shift; and (2) the complete lack of a consensus about Republican leadership.
On the ideological front, there’s been a modest but revealing shift in the composition of the Republican rank-and-file since the last time the Post polled them, in 2007. Asked if they regard themselves as liberal, moderate, conservative, or very conservative, GOPers chose this last category, the most extreme available, more than ever. In June of 2007, self-identified liberals (11% of the total) and moderates (24%) together outnumbered those insisting on calling themselves “very conservative” (30%) by five percentage points. Now the “very conservative” are up to 32%, while “moderates” have declined to 22% and “liberals” have been nearly halved, to 6%. Overall, “conservative” GOPers currently overwhelm “moderate” GOPers by nearly a three-to-one margin. This is in sharp contrast to the ideological profile of the Democratic Party, in which the number of “moderates” equals and usually exceeds self-identified “liberals.” The overwhelming ideological impetus in the Republican Party is centrifugal, not centripetal.
The second finding of note is that today’s GOPers have no agreement whatsoever about where to look for leadership. Offered an open-ended question about “the one person [who] best reflects the core values of the Republican Party,” nobody receives over 18%, and 8% insist “there is no leader.” The last presidential nominee, John McCain, does respectfully well at 13%, though nobody really thinks of him as the future of the GOP, and his running-mate, Sarah Palin, runs first at 18%, out of a combination of celebrity and her special appeal to social issue extremists. After that, no one scores in double digits. The congressional leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, each weigh in at a booming one percent.
All this adds up to a situation where the increasingly conservative rank-and-file “base” of the Republican Party is pulling its putative leaders to the right rather than following their direction. Given the traditionally hierarchical nature of the GOP, that may be a refreshing change for its members, but it’s not exactly designed to produce a message or candidates that appeal to the rest of the electorate.