This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With Republican prospects for 2010, and just maybe 2012, trending upward, it’s worth noting that Mitt Romney, the insiders’ front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, has announced a publicity tour for his upcoming book, No Apology. He’ll begin with two stops in (surprise!) Iowa in March.
Team Romney has tried to suppress in advance any comparisons between the Mittster’s round of book signings and that of Sarah Palin. “We’re not going to match her crowd size or sales. These are two different people with different ways of expressing themselves,” Eric Fehrnstrom, a Romney spokesman, told the Boston Globe. But, even if he’s no Sarah Palin, putative candidate Romney needs to show with this tour that he’s got his groove back.
After losing the GOP nomination 2008, he dropped below most Americans’ radar screens. Yet he retains most of his original points of appeal: the granite visage, the competent-exec air, the economic policy fluency, and the résumé that includes being governor of blue-state Massachusetts and CEO of the 2002 Winter Olympics, which is sure to make him a regular quote machine during the upcoming Vancouver games. Each day that passes takes him further away from the social policy heresies of his earlier political career. And some Republican insiders really do believe that a prior failed presidential bid is an essential box to check, making him arguably “next in line” for the nomination.
More importantly, the likely GOP field for 2012, in comparison to the 2008 crop, looks a bit easier for Mitt to manage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in a smart piece in October, Mitt didn’t fit in 2008 as the conservative alternative to John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, but he will find it easier in 2012 to be the establishment candidate acceptable to movement conservatives:

Romney seems more naturally an establishmentarian than a conservative insurgent, so this strategy would be a better fit for him than his last one. He is not a man to be swayed by the momentary passions of his party’s base; pretending otherwise adds to his reputation for slickness. If he ran as an establishment candidate, the fact that he used to take less-conservative positions would still matter. But it would not matter as much, because he would no longer have to prove himself as a true-blue conservative.

If either Mike Huckabee (strangely undamaged by the Maurice Clemmons firestorm of late November) or Sarah Palin runs in 2012, much of the oxygen among social conservatives will be bottled up. Since the GOP establishment really dislikes Huck and doesn’t have much faith in Palin, other than as a hobgoblin with which to terrify progressives, Romney would be nicely set up to be the “responsible conservative” in the race, competing for that mantle mainly with Tim Pawlenty, who makes Mitt look like Mr. Excitement.
But there’s one major problem with Romney’s positioning for 2012–and it’s a very big one: He may no longer be “acceptable” to movement conservatives thanks to his sponsorship of a health reform plan in Massachusetts that looks uncomfortably like the legislation that Barack Obama will probably be signing early this year.
In his profile of a possible Romney 2012 run, Ponnuru notes this problem, along with Mitt’s rationalizations for it:

Romney makes three arguments in his defense. The first is that a Democratic legislature and his Democratic successor made the plan worse than his original conception. The second is that he has no intention of pushing the Massachusetts plan on the entire country. Health-care reform, he tells me, “should occur on a state-by-state basis.” The third is that the plan has worked out well for his state. “The plan is well within budget and has accomplished its objectives at a relatively modest cost.”
It’s that third point that could get Romney into trouble. The cost to the state government has indeed been modest. But the plan was designed so that the state picks up only a fifth of the costs the plan generates, with the federal government and the private sector absorbing the rest. Premiums are growing much faster than in the rest of the nation. Waiting times are up, too, which imposes costs on people. The plan is losing popularity in Massachusetts. Ideally, Romney would learn from this experience that a reform centered on state governments’ manipulation of federal dollars is a mistake. At the very least, Romney would be foolish to keep defending the plan.

But, given the hopped-up rhetoric among Republicans about “Obamacare” since Ponnuru wrote these words, it may not be enough for Romney to “stop defending” his health care plan. For one thing, right-wing hysteria is now increasingly centered on the supposed tyranny imposed by the individual mandate, which Romney has always championed. But, were he to flatly repudiate his own record, the “flip-flop” attacks on his character would resume with a real vengeance.
Put simply, Romney can’t just recalibrate his 2008 race based on the 2012 landscape and expect to win. This isn’t the Republican Party of two or three years ago; it’s moved palpably to the right. While Romney’s 2008 rivals took some shots at his health care record, it wasn’t that big a deal in the contest. But, at that point in history, conservatives weren’t in the habit of using Slavedrivers-of-Collectivism rhetoric about individual mandates or other features of the Massachusetts system.
With health care policy certain to remain front-and-center in Republican politics for the foreseeable future, the supposed front-runner for the 2012 GOP nomination may face an impossible, disqualifying problem. And, given the choices Republicans look likely to have (any “fresh faces” emerging in 2010 won’t be ready for an immediate presidential race), that’s a very big problem for a party that considers itself on the brink of a return to power in the next few years.

Anyone paying attention to political discourse during the last two or three months is aware of an acute unhappiness with the Obama administration among a goodly number of self-conscious progressives, sometimes expressed in terms of the president’s “betrayal” of “the Democratic base,” which may not turn out to support the party in November.
But is “the Democratic base” really as upset with Obama as elements of the progressive commentariat?
Mark Blumenthal looks at the numbers over at pollster.com, and concludes there’s not much evidence of displeasure with the president among rank-and-file Democrats, particularly those of a more progressive bent. Using Gallup’s weekly tracking poll of presidential approval ratings as a benchmark, Blumenthal notes:

Obama’s rating among liberal Democrats the week before Christmas (89 percent) was just a single percentage point lower than in the first week of his presidency (90 percent). None of this suggests a full revolt.

Approval ratings, of course, don’t get at intensity of support or disdain, which could have an impact on voting participation, particularly in midterm elections. So Blumenthal goes on to look at more nuanced measurements:

Between late February and mid-December, the ABC/Post survey shows an overall decline in Obama’s strongly favorable rating from 43 percent to 31 percent. Among liberal Democrats, strong approval started out at 77 percent in February and varied between a low of 72 percent and a high of 81 percent through mid-September. It fell in October (65 percent) and November (67 percent) before rebounding in December (76 percent).

So that’s a one point drop in Obama’s high “strong approval” rating from self-identified liberals between February and December.
Now everyone doesn’t mean “self-identified liberal Democrats” when they refer to the “party base.” As Blumenthal notes, Bob Brigham, among others, has suggested that “base” really refers to smaller communities like activists or donors. But it is fair to say that the political relevance of any particular community is somewhat limited if its views are sharply at odds with those of rank-and-file voters who say they share the same ideology.
Remember that next time anyone presumes to speak exclusively for “the base.”

I don’t know exactly what it is about being a “conservative columnist” at The New York Times, but now the young-un on that beat, Ross Douthat, is exhibiting the same habits as his older colleague, David Brooks. Brooks, of course, has mastered the art of looking down at the squabbling major parties from a great height, condemning them both, and somehow always coming down in the conclusion with recommendations that coincide with the short-term positioning of the Republican Party.
In his first column of the new year yesterday, Douthat performs a similar pirouette, with some interesting twists. His own skywalk begins with an Olympian view of America’s position in the world after the aughts–we’re now just a superpower, not a “hyperpower”–then predictably cites political polarization as one of the threats to our competitive position.
Warming to his task, Ross criticizes conservatives of the Bush era for a failed experiment in reduplicating Reaganomics, but then equals the score by accusing “Obama Democrats” of “returning to their party’s long-running pursuit of European-style social democracy — by micromanaging industry, pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs, and binding the economy in a web of new taxes and regulations.”
Aside from that very questionable characterization of the Democratic agenda, you will note that Douthat does not observe any causal relationship between one party’s “sins” and the other’s. Any “micromanaging industry” that’s going on presently is, rather obviously, the result of an economic calamity introduced under the previous national management. I don’t know if by “pouring money into entitlement and welfare programs” Douthat is referring to stimulus legislation used to counteract the disastrous effects of the economic calamity, or to the resolutely centrist health care reform proposal that is struggling through Congress after being signficantly compromised along the way. Any “new taxes” in prospect are part of said centrist plan, or part of the broader Democratic objective, announced not this year but as early as 2002, of reconfiguring the tax system to resemble what it looked like before the failed Republican exercise in Reaganomics that Douthat denounced earlier in his column.
All this is rather ho-hum High Broderism, but then Douthat gets more interesting when he proposes his own “center-right agenda” to replace the horrific move to the left essayed by Democrats. He begins with a tout court endorsement of the agenda recently laid out by Manhattan Institute wonk Jim Manzi, which is all the rage right now in what’s left of the non-Tea Party conservative commentariat:

Manzi’s National Affairs essay, a tour d’horizon of our socioeconomic situation, provides a solid place to start. He proposes a fourfold agenda: Unwind the partnerships forged between Big Business and Big Government in the wake of the 2008 crash; seek financial regulations that “contain busts,” by segregating high-risk transactions from lower-risk enterprises; deregulate the public school system, to let a thousand charter schools and start-ups bloom; and shift our immigration policy away from low-skilled immigration, and toward the recruitment of high-skilled émigrés from around the globe.
To this list, I would add tax reform and entitlement reform. The former should broaden the tax base while cutting taxes on work, childrearing and investment. The latter should means-test both Social Security and Medicare, reducing both programs’ spending on well-off retirees rather than questing fruitlessly for their privatization.

Now Manzi’s agenda has some virtues, but not so much as a Republican agenda. The Obama administration hopes to “unwind the partnerships” between government and business as fast as it can, and it, too, seeks to re-regulate the financial system in order to “segregate” high-risk transactions. For all the perennial conservative caterwauling about teachers’ unions holding a veto over good education policy, Obama, too, is a big fan of charter schools. This only looks like a “center-right agenda” if you buy the earlier Douthat premise that Obama is hell-bent on Swedenizing America.
Shifting the immigration system to favor higher skills (a very old “idea” also embraced today by Michael Barone) is not, as Douthat seems to think, a way to buy off conservative hatred of high levels of immigration; it may make the corporate community happy, but won’t do a thing for rank-and-file conservatives who dislike any wage competition from immigrants, and who want not a calibration of policies but wholesale expulsion of immigrants already in the country.
As for Douthat’s own supplementary ideas for a “center-right agenda,” he offers “tax reform” and means-testing Medicare and Social Security. Now “tax reform” as he is apparently discussing it is either one of two things: a continuation of the Bush-era failed experiment in Reaganomics involving deficit-financed tax cuts, however well-targeted they happen to be to workers and families, or a redesign of the system involving tax increases on some to pay for tax cuts for others. As Douthat knows, the constituency within the Republican Party for any tax increases on anybody could be comfortably accomodated in his own office.
Moroever, at a time when Republicans are shrieking about mean old Obama’s euthanasia-inspired efforts to cut Medicare benefits, Douthat is proposing the one “entitlement reform”–mean-testing–that’s even less popular than privatization. It ain’t happening, and thus, like most of the rest of Ross’s “center-right agenda,” it’s not a serious contribution to the actual debate.
Now you could give Ross Douthat credit for thinking outside the box and proposing things that his own party would never embrace, which is tempting since he is a decent, thoughtful man. Or you could conclude, as many of us have simiilarly concluded about David Brooks’ MO, that by condemning Democratic policies without offering anything realistic to replace them, he’s simply ratifying the “Party of No” agenda of killing Obama’s policy intiatives and then figuring out later what to do once Republicans are back in the saddle again. It all adds up to an endorsement of Republican victory in 2010 and 2012, even if that would predictably return the country to the conservative policies that so distressed Ross Douthat, in retrospect of course, over the last ten years.

Now and then it occurs to Republicans that there are limits to what a “Party of No” message can achieve for them in 2010 and 2012. It’s entertaining to watch them furrow brows and try to come up with a “positive agenda” that’s not a rehash of “ideas” from the past forty years.
Today conservative columnist Michael Barone takes on the “positive agenda” challenge, and it’s sadly hilarious to watch. After wandering around for several hundred words and then discovering economic inequality, Barone allows as how private school vouchers might be a good idea, or maybe larger tax deductions for having kids. And oh, yeah, why not limit immigration to people with high skills? That’s a really new idea, right?
Now to be fair, there are plenty of conservative policy ideas kicking around, from invading Yemen, to privatizing Medicare and Medicaid, to radically restricting not only the right to choose abortion, but the right to choose divorce. They just aren’t very popular ideas. And on big, vague themes like “fiscal discipline,” it’s becoming harder for Republicans to simultaneously shriek about the budget deficits they were defending two years ago, and the new tax cuts that are their default-drive policy approach for every conceivable domestic problem.
At a time when sizable majorities of Americans are pretty unhappy with conditions in general, maybe Party of No is as good as it gets for the GOP. If they have to resort to Barone’s Bargain Basement for Ideas, then ideas really don’t matter after all.

Though he called it “unlikely,” the New York Times Magazine‘s Matt Bai unleashed the idea this weekend that disgruntled progressives might support a primary challenge to President Barack Obama in 2012, even suggesting that Dr. Howard Dean could be positioning himself to make the challenge himself.
It’s natural for pro-Obama Democrats to recoil from even discussing the possibility of the President being “primaried,” but I’d argue it’s healthier for everyone to pull the idea right out of the closet and examine it closely, beginning with the recent history of such challenges.
* Four of the last eight presidents (Bush 41, Carter, Ford and Johnson) prior to Obama faced serious primary challenges in their re-election campaigns.
* In all four cases, the challengers (McCarthy in 1968, Reagan in 1976, Kennedy in 1980 and Buchanan in 1992) ran on the implicit or explicit message that the incumbent had betrayed his party base. In all four cases, the incumbent was struggling in the polls to some extent, amidst shaky economic conditions (less LBJ than the others, though inflation was a big concern in 1968).
* In three of the four cases (all but Bush 41), the incumbent’s party had done very poorly in the prior midterm election.
* All four challenges ultimately failed to secure the party nomination.
* The opposition party–twice Democrats, twice Republicans–won all four general elections.
Suffice it to say that primary challenges to sitting presidents are more common than many people realize, but never, in recent history, successful in any way other than chastening party leaders via general election defeat.
There is a fifth president whose re-election campaign might well be examined in this context: one Richard M. Nixon. He, too was having some trouble in the polls going into 1972. He rather notably was presiding over a very unpopular war, and the economy was sufficiently troubled that he actually imposed wage and price controls. His party had a very disappointing showing in the 1970 midterms. And he faced intraparty insurgencies coming from two different directions: antiwar Republicans (yes, there were some back then) who ultimately produced a candidate, Rep. Pete McCloskey of CA; and conservatives, some of whose leaders (including William F. Buckley, Jr.) signed a statement “suspending” their support for Nixon in 1971. Conservatives, too, produced a sittling member of Congress willing to take on the incumbent, Rep. John Ashbrook of OH.
Ultimately, of course, Nixon brushed aside these intraparty challenges with ease, and won the general election by a huge 49-state landslide, in no small part because of divisions and weaknesses in the Democratic party. (Yes, the excesses of his reelection campaign contributed to his rapid fall from grace and forced resignation in 1974, but no one really thinks that the crimes and misdemeanors we now know collectively as “Watergate” won him re-election.)
My point in mentioning Nixon is to note that primary challenges don’t necessarily doom incumbents, and that developments in the opposing party can have a very large impact on the fate of struggling incumbents.
Now, I personally doubt that any serious primary challenge to Barack Obama will ultimately develop, if only because it would be exceptionally difficult to mobilize a revolt of “the party base” against the first African-American president. Obama will also likely benefit from the same phenomenon that kept Bill Clinton from being challenge for re-election in 1996: the desire for a united front against a militantly vicious GOP. And lest we forget, there’s always the strong possibility that by this time two years from now, the war in Afghanistan could be winding down, the economy could be reviving, health care reforms could be very popular, and Republicans could be gearing up for a fratricidal nomination battle of their own.
But Democrats might as well talk through the consequences of a primary challenge to Obama while it’s an abstract proposition rather than an imminent threat. The precedents for potential insurgents aren’t very encouraging.

I’m surely not alone in thinking today about New Year’s Eve, 1999, when everyone had at least a small nagging fear, and many people were in abject terror, about the possibility of a technological or even economic meltdown associated with the advent of the third millenium.
In a very real way, the Y2K experience was emblematic of the decade that ensued in the United States, characterized by fear, mistrust, disinformation and a growing awareness of the downside of technology-driven globalization. The word “catastrophe” reintered the vocabulary in a big way, whether the subject was the threat of a “dirty bomb,” climate change, or global economic collapse. The upbeat, almost-triumphalist spirit that sometimes accompanied public life in the late 1990s died a slow, noisy death, and pre-existing discontents with the entire Clintonian “New Democrat” mindset on the progressive Left solidified into demands for a very different party structure and message.
Among progressives, at least, the upbeat spirit re-emerged temporarily in 2008, with momentary hopes that a new and enduring political coalition was finally arriving on the scene. While the demographic trends that nourished these hopes were very real, and aren’t going away, the short-term political landscape is obviously more difficult than many expected.
Conservatives, meanwhile, had a very strange and psychologically volatile, decade in almost every respect. They began it with the failed and folly-filled effort to impeach Bill Clinton and got deviously lucky with the sort-of election of George W. Bush. What ensued was a sustained effort to turn back the clock to the economic and social policies of the 1980s (or earlier), accompanied, of course, by a new Cold War frenzy aimed at a new global enemy. The reigning political strategy of the Republican Party in the ‘aughts was Karl Rove’s base-plus gambit that used aggressive polarization to keep his party’s conservative base happy and energized, along with highly targeted swing voter appeals to married white women, Hispanics and seniors. When this strategy failed decisively prior to the 2006 elections, the GOP took a counter-intuitive but very powerful turn to the right, which accelerated notably during and after the 2009 elections, partly as an effort to disassociate conservatism from the record of the Bush administration.
So here we all are, ten years after the night of Y2K, still in fear and uncertainty about the future and even about the facts of our present existence, and still maintaining a deeply ambivalent attitude towards technology and globalization in their many forms. I sincerely hope it’s the end, not a continuation, of an era.

On a day when it’s customary for the chattering classes to look back over years and decades and discern, or impose, Big Themes, there’s a bit of news that relates to the not-so-immediate future. As Politico reports, a commission set up at the 2008 Democratic National Convention to review the presidential nominating process has decided to recommend that convention “superdelegates” lose their independent voting powers. In other words, they’d still have a ticket to the convention and would still vote, but those votes would be bound by primary and caucus results, just like those of un-superdelegates.
In other words, the Democratic Party’s near-brush with the atavistic specter of a deliberative or “brokered” convention won’t recur barring an actual tie in pledged delegate totals. For those looking forward eagerly to the 2016 presidential cycle, this is an important development.
UDATE: The Change Commission did not really take on the state-controlled nominating system in any serious way. It ratified the two-stage process used in 2008, with IA, NH, NV and SC having the right to go before March 1 (beginning with a “window” on February 1). It also encouraged states to cooperate towards creating regional primaries, while discouraging them from another “super Tuesday.” There’s a decent news story on the recommendations here, from, naturally, Iowa, where the recommendations are being interpreted as a fresh mandate for the state’s first-in-the-nation status.

Michelle Cottle has a nice holiday diversion post over at The New Republic suggesting that President Obama is embracing the wrong hobby in spending time golfing.
I have to admit I was surprised by the statistics she cited about the decline of interest in golf among Americans over the last decade. With (at least up until the latest bout of local government fiscal crises) public courses now fairly common, and with anecdotal evidence that a significant number of professional women are taking up the game for networking purposes, it’s not clear why the numbers are going down sharply. And while golf remains largely a white folks’ past-time, it’s hardly the preserve of the upper classes anymore (as the pursuit of the game by many of my non-college-educated relatives attests).
As it happens, I personally share Cottle’s old-school populist aversion to golf culture and fashion. I once told an upper-crust acquaintance who asked about my own golf and tennis habits: “I don’t play any of those Republican sports; I bowl.” But then again, I grew up at a time and place where country club membership was largely a prerequisite for hitting golf or tennis balls.
The incongruous thing about this sudden interest in the President’s golf addiction is that it’s happening right in the middle of, well, you know, a certain scandal involving a certain golfer. Maybe America really needs a new half-African-American golfer they can believe in, even if he’s just a duffer.

The last person we needed to hear from concerning the terrorist incident over Detroit was Conservative of the Year Dick Cheney. But naturally, he’s out now with the most obnoxious statement imaginable about the president’s own reaction:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low-key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of Sept. 11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.
He seems to think if he closes Guantanamo and releases the hard-core Al Qaeda-trained terrorists still there, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gets rid of the words, ‘war on terror,’ we won’t be at war. But we are at war and when President Obama pretends we aren’t, it makes us less safe. Why doesn’t he want to admit we’re at war? It doesn’t fit with the view of the world he brought with him to the Oval Office. It doesn’t fit with what seems to be the goal of his presidency — social transformation — the restructuring of American society. President Obama’s first object and his highest responsibility must be to defend us against an enemy that knows we are at war.

Forget for a moment the stupid little slur at the end about “social transformation,” an obligatory nod to the conservative movement’s bizarre suggestion that Barack Obama is in the process of creating a Soviet America of some sort. What’s amazing about Cheney’s statement is his extraordinary assertion, in the absence of any real evidence on the subject at present, that the attempted bombing was some sort of major act of war like 9/11 warranting a major reaction by the nation and its chief executive.
Has it crossed Cheney’s mind, even once, over the last nine years that routine overreaction by U.S. leaders is one of the most cherished goals of al Qaeda and its alllies? Does Cheney understand that conceding the ability of a scattered band of terrorists to completely control the foreign policy of the world’s great superpower, to dominate its news, to panic it into abandoning its own values and legal system, “emboldens” terrorists more than anything else we could do?
Just wondering.

This item is crossposted from The New Republic.
In response to Ezra Klein’s high-profile campaign to encourage an assault on the filibuster, and the invidious development of a de facto 60-vote requirement for passage of legislation in the Senate, the estimable conservative reporter Byron York comes up with a clever but wrong-headed rationalization for past GOP efforts to kill Democratic filibusters against the Bush administration’s judicial nominees. Republicans were not, claims York, endorsing a general end to the right of a minority to obstruct legislation via filibusters:

The argument was that the judicial filibuster undermined the Senate’s constitutional responsibility to give advice and consent on the president’s judicial nominations. When legislation is filibustered, it’s possible for a bill’s sponsors to make changes that will satisfy opponents. But what happens when a nominee is filibustered? No advice and consent. The Constitution does not require the Senate to pass a national health care bill, but it does require it to confirm or deny the president’s appointees.

This is sophistry. For one thing, Democrats blocking judicial nominations were indeed looking for a “deal” that would have changed procedures for selection, appointment and confirmation of federal judges, not just seeking to block action on particular nominees. For another, it’s hardly evident that today’s GOP wielders of the filibuster weapon are looking for “changes that will satisfy opponents;” simple obstruction is the explicit goal of most conservatives fighting health care reform. And beyond that, Republicans are certainly not eschewing procedural roadblocks to Obama’s presidential appointments.
But the biggest problem with York’s analysis of the “judicial filibuster” issue is that he’s forgets we are talking about lifetime appointments to the higher regions of the federal bench. Legislation can be repealed, as Republicans so avidly say they intend to do with health care reform (if it is enacted) at the earliest opportunity. Barring the exceptionally rare resort to impeachment, federal judges are there as long as they wish.
Personally, I dislike judicial filibusters as much as any others, and would happily abolish the filibuster entirely. And there’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around when it comes to the “right” of a Senate minority to destroy the ability of the majority to govern. But if anything, the case for the GOP’s social-conservative-driven (and unsuccessful) assault on the judicial filibuster was weaker than the case for killing legislative filibusters today.