Most people outside New York have probably never heard of Betsy McCaughey, and even New Yorkers would mainly remember her bizarre one-term stint as Lieutenant Governor of the Empire State in the 1990s, characterized by constant friction with her supposed boss and running-mate, Gov. George Pataki.
But in the world of policy wonks, McCaughey is notorious for a studious-sounding 1994 piece published by The New Republic that is frequently blamed for undermining support for the Clinton health plan at a crucial moment, via fundamental mistatements of its impact on people who already had health insurance. Indeed, her role in derailing universal health coverage led directly to her short career in Republican politics.
Current TNR editor Franklin Foer apologized for the magazine’s publication of McCaughey’s piece in his first signed editorial. Now that she is back on the same scene spreading disinformation about the current health reform effort, that apology has undoubtedly been made manifest in Michelle Cottle’s definitive smackdown of McCaughey in an article with the same title–“No Exit”–as the 1994 essay.
After listing a variety of highly negative characterizations of McCaughey’s veracity as a policy thinker by other wonks, including many conservatives, Cottle makes this provocative judgment:

What kind of person drives normally staid wonks, including her own ideological teammates, to such stinging public reproof? Part of it is obviously the nature of her commentary. But beyond that, there is something about McCaughey herself that drives her critics wild–and has throughout much of her career. Friends posit it’s her disconcerting blend of brains, beauty, and confidence. Detractors chalk it up to her rank dishonesty, narcissism, and lack of shame. Whatever the cause, the passion McCaughey inflames is familiar. Looking over the sweep of McCaughey’s life, from her swift political rise (and fall) to her humble roots, from her straight-talking persona, fierce will, and blinding confidence to her gift for self-dramatization, head-turning looks, and embrace of the gender card, one sees precursors of a more recent conservative phenom. Replace the East Coast researcher’s political-outsider, stats-wielding, pointy-head shtick with a political-outsider, gun-toting, populist one, and a striking parallel emerges: Betsy McCaughey is, in essence, the blue-state Sarah Palin.

The comparison to Palin is inevitable, since it was McCaughey’s “research” on current Democratic health reform efforts that inspired Palin’s infamous claim that they would lead to government “death panels” withholding health care from seniors and people with disabilities. The big difference between McCaughey’s destructive role on health reform in 1994 and now is, of course, the rise of hyper-ideological media eager to take her think tank credentials at face value and give her a big and continuous platform for her views.
But as Cottle argues, there’s a more direct parallel between McCaughey and Palin: an uncanny knack for turning any and all criticism into an indictment of the alleged biases of critics, a tactic that perpetually evades basic questions of fact and fiction:

[McCaughey] has proved devastatingly adept at manipulating charts and stats to suit her ideological (and personal) ambitions. It is this proud piety concerning her own straight-shooting integrity combined with her willingness to peddle outrageous fictions–and her complete inability to recognize, much less be shamed by, this behavior–that makes McCaughey so infuriating. In this way, perhaps most of all, she resembles the tell-it-like-it-is good ol’ girl Palin, whose scorching self-regard and ostentatious disdain for politics-as-usual infuse even her most self-serving fabulisms. Palin, of course, hawks homespun wisdom, faith, and common sense, in contrast to McCaughey’s figures and footnotes. But both women have an uncanny ability to shovel their toxic nonsense with nary a blink, tremor, or break in those dazzling smiles. People of goodwill and honest counsel don’t stand a chance.

You have to guess that Michelle Cottle will soon experience McCaughey’s tactics first-hand.

Like a lot of folks, I’ve expressed worries about the likelihood that older white voters will represent a disproportionate share of the electorate in the 2010 midterm elections, creating an unearned GOP advantage. In his latest column, Ron Brownstein meditates on that possibility, but also points out that a Republican message tailored to older white voters could come back to haunt the GOP in 2012.

In midterm elections, the electorate tends to be whiter and older than in presidential elections. ABC polling director Gary Langer has calculated that since 1992 seniors have cast 19 percent of the vote in midterm elections, compared with just 15 percent in presidential years. That difference contributed to the 1994 landslide that swept the GOP into control of both the House and Senate. Seniors had cast just 13 percent of the vote in Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, but that figure spiked to nearly 19 percent two years later, with voting by the young people who had bolstered Clinton falling off sharply….
In 2008, Obama won the votes of just 40 percent of whites over age 65 (compared with 54 percent of whites under 30). All surveys show that white seniors remain the most resistant to Obama’s health care agenda and the most skeptical of him overall. In the nonpartisan Pew Research Center’s most recent poll, Obama’s approval rating among elderly whites stood at just 39 percent. Surveying all of these numbers, veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that the Republican margin among white seniors could “easily expand to 25 points” in 2010.

Brownstein also notes, however, that the general assumption of low voting in midterms by minorities is based on mixed evidence. Minority voters actually represented a higher share of the electorate in 1994 and 1998 than in the presidential years of 1992 and 1996. These voters did, however, decline slightly as a percentage of the electorate in 2002 and 2006 as compared to 2000 and 2004. Moreover, the bar is higher in 2010 given the strong minority turnout in 2008. A lot will depend on what happens between now and then, and perhaps on the extent to which Republicans are perceived as playing on white racial or cultural fears.
After 2010, though, any Republican focus on older white voters isn’t likely to pay dividends:

In the 2012 presidential election, the young and minority voters central to Obama’s coalition are likely to return in large numbers. The risk to the GOP is that a strong 2010 showing based on a conservative appeal to apprehensive older whites will discourage it from reconsidering whether its message is too narrow to attract those rapidly growing groups.

Even if, says Brownstein, the share of the electorate for minority voters drops from 2008’s twenty-five percent to twenty percent in 2010, it’s like to rise to near thirty percent in 2012. It’s at that point that any Great White Hopes for the GOP could really begin to backfire.

In the ongoing debate over what’s likely to happen in the 2010 elections, a point that I’ve tried to make repeatedly is that the Republican Party is exceptionally weak, and thus not in a great position to harvest discontent with Congress, the Obama administration, or the condition of the economy. A lot of conservatives seem to think the relative unpopularity of the GOP is a temporary “hangover” from the Bush years that will gradually dissipate.
But if you look at the data on party favorability (which can all be found together at PollingReport.com), what’s striking is that the GOP’s bad reputation isn’t getting any better. Pew, which offers respondents a range of options that appears to boost favorability, had the GOP’s total favorables at 40% in August, 40% in April, 40% in January, 39% in May of 2008, and 41% on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections. That’s as flat a line as you will ever see. GOP total unfavorables for that stretch of time oscillated slightly from the high forties to the low fifties; they were at 50% in August. Meanwhile, Fox has Republican favorability actually declining, from a ratio of 45/49 just before the 2008 elections, to 41/50 in April, to 36/53 in July. The same pattern is found by CBS/New York Times, where Republicans had a favorable/unfavorable ratio of 37/54 in October of 2008, then 31-58 in April of this year, and 28/58 in June.
I won’t go through all the polls in terms of Democrats, but unsurprisingly, they show the Democratic Party losing favorability in recent months, but still maintaining significantly more popularity than Republicans. Pew, for example, had the Democratic Party’s total favorables at 49% (versus 41% unfavorable) in August, down from 62% (versus 32% unfavorable) at the beginning of the year.
So you make the case that the recent abrasive behavior of the Republican Party may have helped damage Democrats, but isn’t helping Republicans much, either. Since Republicans have a much tougher climb to make to reach anything like majority status, they are in danger of committing a political murder-suicide.
The current popularity of the GOP, moreover, is low by historical standards, particularly for a party with visions of a big landslide electoral victory just ahead. Both Ezra Klein and Brendan Nyhan have taken a look this week at the favorability ratings of the two parties in 1994, and there’s absolutely no comparison to today’s low ratings for the GOP. As Nyhan summed up the evidence:

Republicans are currently viewed more negatively than any minority party in the previous four midterms in terms of both net favorables and the difference in net favorables between parties:

It’s possible, and perhaps even probable, that the GOP strategy for 2010 is to create a political environment so toxic and voter-alienating that Republicans can win a very low turnout election by whipping their base into a genuine frenzy. That’s obviously not a very good scenario for the country, and it remains to be seen if it’s even good for the GOP.

This item was cross-posted at The New Republic.
Chris Orr’s post at TNR about the early assembly work on Tim Pawlenty’s 2012 presidential bid is interesting in that he handicaps the Minnesotan primarily in terms of who he is not: not the flip-flopping, health-care-reforming Mormon Mitt Romney, not the disorganized and “goofy” Mike Huckabee, not the divisive and erratic Sarah Palin, and not the non-candidate David Petraeus.
Thus Chris captures the basic problem with Pawlenty ’12: what, precisely, is his positive appeal? Yes, he’s a bona fide cultural conservative; that checks an essential box, but you can’t throw a rock at any Republican meeting these days without hitting ten people avid to end legalized abortion and stop gay people from getting married. Yes, he coined a nice phrase–“Sam’s Club Republicans”–to illustrate the need for a broader GOP base. But absent any real agenda for appealing to these folks, it’s nothing but a slogan, and when two young conservatives, Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sought to fill out the phrase with actual policies in a recent book, they were generally hooted off the stage by their ideological brethren. Yes, he’s governed a blue state, but has never been terribly popular in Minnesota or had any real national following.
Pawlenty’s rather bland political profile was probably best reflected by the circumstances under which he was passed over for the 2008 vice-presidential nomination. According to Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson’s recently published book on the 2008 campaign, Pawlenty was a finalist along with Palin in the veep sweepstakes after other candidates were eliminated for a variety of reasons (Lieberman and Ridge because they were pro-choice, Romney because McCain forgot how many houses he owned and couldn’t have a rich running-mate). Fully understanding the riskiness of Palin, McCain went with her anyway after his pollsters told him Pawlenty wouldn’t win him any votes.
In other words, Pawlenty was, and remains, a fine “on-paper” candidate who doesn’t have much else going for him. Yes, he seems to be putting together a pretty good campaign team. And yes, he’s made at least one attempt to get into the manic spirit of today’s conservativism by flirting with “tenther” nullification theories. But unless he undergoes both an ideological and personality change of a major nature, he’s never going to be more than a third or fourth choice among the kind of hard-core conservative activists who dominate the Republican presidential nominating process (particularly in Iowa, where familiarity with Pawlenty as the mild-mannered governor of a neighboring state might actually hurt him).
Probably the best case for Pawlenty ’12 is that he’s the kind of candidate you might want to nominate in one of those years where your party can only lose by taking chances. You know, kind of like Bob Dole just after the 1994 elections.