I’m not a big fan of Michael Barone after his long drift into predictable conservative punditry, but the man does still know a lot about politics. And in a column earlier this week, he conducts an interesting analysis of the strategic deficits that afflicted the entire Republican presidential field in 2008.
He concludes that all of them, including the ultimate nominee, John McCain, had flawed strategies that either defeated them or (in McCain’s case) nearly did. And he suggests that none of the currently-named Republican candidates for 2012 looks to be in any better a position.
I won’t go through the whole analysis, but Barone seems to think that Mitt Romney made the most avoidable mistakes: flip-flopping conspicuously on cultural issues to make himself the Iowa front-runner, at the expense of his image of “authenticity” and the resources he might have devoted to croaking McCain in New Hampshire and beyond.
But in mocking McCain’s “next-in-line” strategy, Barone also implicitly mocks the widespread belief that Republican nominations sort of just happen, as “disciplined” conservative voters wait to be told who has earned the nod via long and loyal service to the party. I’ve examined that myth at some length over at fivethirtyeight.com, and found it less than persuasive.
So while we are a long way from 2012, it does matter how Republican candidates prepare themselves for the contest. And right now, there’s no one with anything like a big strategic advantage.
Ed Kilgore
In a Financial Times column that congeals a number of complaints heard in various quarters of late, Clive Crook blasted Barack Obama for “choosing to be weak” on climate change and health care legislation.
Some progressives who are upset by the watered-down contents of the House climate change bill, or worried about where the Senate’s going on health care, might scan Crook’s column and nod their heads in agreement. Actually, though, Crook seems less concerned about the precise nature of climate change and health care provisions than about Obama’s refusal to flat out defy not only Congress but public opinion:
Congress offers change without change – a green economy built on cheap coal and petrol; a healthcare transformation that asks nobody to pay more taxes or behave any differently – because that is what voters want. Is it too much to ask that Mr Obama should tell voters the truth? I think he could do it. He has everything it takes to be a strong president. He is choosing to be a weak one.
While political leadership does generally require the shaping of public opinion, few successful leaders “tell the truth” to constituents in the form of telling them they are ignorant louts who are either too stupid to understand the choices involved in big challenges, or too selfish to make sacrifices in the national interest. That seems to be what Crook would have Obama do to look “strong.”
In terms of dealing with Congress, moreover, Obama has simply learned from the lessons of past presidents (particularly Bill Clinton) that success almost never involves my-way-or-the-highway presidential edicts, and that choosing the right moment for presidential interventions is as important as how much pressure is exerted. In other words, “strength” is no substitute for “strategy.”
Like most supporters of climate change legislation, I’m not happy with the compromises that were made to get the Waxman-Markey bill out of the House. But instead of despairing like Crook, I’d listen to another unhappy camper, Bradford Plumer, who has a good column that details all the reasons that passage of a bill like this is worthwhile and perhaps crucial (one of them being the disastrous effect that a failure to enact anything might have on the international climate change negotiations this December). And I might listen to Al Gore, hardly a man adverse to telling “inconvenient truths,” who worked the phones to keep progressive Democrats on board in the House when many were tempted to bolt over their disappointment in the final product.
As for health care, it’s entirely too early to make any real judgment on Obama’s congressional and public-opinion strategy. Yes, the president will need to strongly deploy the bully pulpit, probably more than once. But Crook’s assertion that Obama is abandoning the idea of health care cost-control or major changes in the incentive system for health services because he’s not out there right now demanding big public sacrifices in the middle of a recession either an overstatement of the facts or an impolitic demand that health reform be made as unsavory as possible.
Even by Crook’s standards, Obama would obviously be “stronger” if the financial system and then the economy hadn’t melted down just before he took office. But that’s the hand he was dealt, and he should be allowed to play it.
With a certain governor of South Carolina off the boards as a national spokesman for hard-core fiscal conservatism, not to mention a potential presidential candidate, you can expect more attention to be paid to another of the Palmetto State’s right-wing firebrands, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint. You may recognize his name from his frequent votes (sometimes with his fellow “true conservative” Tom Coburn of OK) against consensus positions in both parties, particularly on confirmations (e.g., he was one of two senators to vote against confirmation of their colleague Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State).
Though known for his partisanship and anti-government zealotry, DeMint hasn’t shirked the Cultural Right, either, winning perfect vote ratings from the National Right to Life Committee and zero vote ratings from the Human Rights Campaign. Indeed, Demint gained a lot of notoriety during his 2004 Senate race for arguing that gays and lesbians, and for that matter, unwed pregnant women, shouldn’t be allowed to teach in public schools (a position he retracted because it had become a “distraction,” not because he admitted it was wrong).
So it’s with more than passing interest that I read a recent interview of DeMint in that ancient corner of the conservative fever swamps, Human Events, in connection with his new book, modestly titled Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide Into Socialism. Two remarks by DeMint were particularly striking. First up was this:
Define socialism as a government controlling aspects of the economy. Most members of Congress think that just about every aspect of American society and economy should be regulated, controlled, taxed in some way by the federal government and increasingly so. I think it’s very fair to say that most members of Congress lean socialist on policies.
Notice that DeMint doesn’t say “most Democrats in Congress,” but “most members of Congress.”
Further into the interview, DeMint shares his thoughts about the fundamental “threat to freedom”:
I regret to say that there are two Americas but not the kind John Edwards was talking about. It’s not so much the haves and the have-nots. It’s those who are paying for government and those who are getting government. At this point, the data I’ve seen is 52% of Americans get their income directly or indirectly from a government source. And if you think about how that works in a democracy, why would the voters be concerned about the growth of government if they weren’t paying and they were getting something from it.
Democracy cannot work when you have a majority of people dependent on the government. And this is not just the poor. The way we’ve set up Social Security and Medicare, everyone who retires are dependent, parents are dependent on the government for education of their children and now, if you look at the folks who come through my office — business people, farmers, bankers — everybody is coming to Washington to get their piece of the government because we’re running all this money through here now.
This is interesting for several reasons. It’s not often that you hear a politician come right out and say that making parents “dependent on the government for education of their children”–i.e. public schools–is a form of socialistic welfare-statism. As for Social Security and Medicare, most conservatives have learned to frame their privatization proposals in terms of “solvency” or “entitlement reform” or “letting people control their benefits.” Not since Barry Goldwater’s disastrous 1964 campaign have I heard a major Republican politician attack the wildly popular retirement programs as fundamentally illegitimate, or their beneficiaries as parasitical wards of the state.
DeMint’s “two Americas” rap is also interesting since it exhibits the underpinnings of the kind of rhetoric that even the McCain campaign deployed last year in attacking progressive taxation. Poor people or old people who don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes aren’t just getting off lightly; they are a threat to democracy.
In other words, Jim DeMint seems to be the real deal when it comes to serious “true conservatism,” or at least he is when he’s in the friendly confines of an interview with Human Events. Tuck this away in the memory banks in case the man does decide to run for national office. He’s seriously scary.
UPDATE: When I decided to write about DeMint, I didn’t realize that on this very day, he would help prove my point by coming out in favor of the military coup in Honduras. Looks like he may be determined to become the next Jesse Helms.
One of the most important indicators of the health of a political party or movement is its ability to accept adverse results and learn from them. By that standard, Democrats faced the supreme challenge in 2000, when it took an unprecedented (and almost self-consciously political) intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court to finally deny the presidency to the winner of the popular vote.
Sure, some Democrats never got over what many just referred to, without need of explanation, as “Florida,” but most moved on, and it’s often said that the 2000 experience was–along with technology, and then later, the Iraq War–the prime mover in the creation of the entire netroots phenomenon.
Well, yesterday Republicans experienced a far less momentous and far less controversial setback in a close contest, when Norm Coleman finally conceded to Al Franken. And it’s significant that so many are not at all taking it well.
As Eric Kleefeld explained at TPM, the reaction to Franken’s elevation at Fox was very, very grouchy, perhaps reflecting bad blood going back to News Corp’s lawsuit against Franken in 2003.
Harder to explain on personal terms was the Wall Street Journal editorial that accused Franken of stealing the election, basically on grounds that Coleman had a whopping lead of 725 votes on Election Night and everything that happened subsequently was the devilish work of lawyers.
Such acts of denial are of a piece with the more general determination of conservatives to rationalize every recent political setback as “about” something other than their own leaders, policy positions, and ideological shibboleths. It is by this mental magic that George W. Bush, the hand-picked candidate of the conservative movement in 2000, and a president most conservatives were hailing as a world-historical colossus as late as 2005, becomes some sort of alien presence whose failures have no bearing on the future of “true” conservatism.
Without question, political defeats can make you crazy. But it’s very important to keep that insanity temporary. If I were a Republican, I’d be getting pretty worried by now about the ability of my comrades to perceive political reality without wild distortions.
At virtually any given moment, the news-cycle-driven chattering classes of politics have in the background of their computer screens or the pockets of their briefcases a Big Thumbsucking Magazine Article on a political topic that they read during periods of calm. The Big Article du jour is Todd Purdum’s massive profile of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair.
Most of the buzz about the piece deals with a variety of off-the-record snarks about Palin from McCain campaign staff. Indeed, conservative columnist Bill Kristol and McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt have engaged in a public exchange of insults over alleged leaks to Purdham.
Personally, I thought Purdum’s best insight was about the exceptionally exotic nature of Palin’s home state of Alaska, which he thinks the McCain campaign never understood:
The first thing McCain could have learned about Palin is what it means that she is from Alaska. More than 30 years ago, John McPhee wrote, “Alaska is a foreign country significantly populated with Americans. Its languages extend to English. Its nature is its own. Nothing seems so unexpected as the boxes marked ‘U.S. Mail.’” That description still fits. The state capital, Juneau, is 600 miles from the principal city, Anchorage, and is reachable only by air or sea. Alaskan politicians list the length of their residency in the state (if they were not born there) at the top of their biographies, and are careful to specify whether they like hunting, fishing, or both. There is little sense of government as an enduring institution: when the annual 90-day legislative session is over, the legislators pack up their offices, files, and computers, and take everything home. Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, maintains no full-time bureau in Juneau to cover the statehouse. As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.
But what bothered me most about the profile was that with so many words to work with, and for all his focus on why McCain was a fool to put her on the ticket, Purdum never gets around to examining in any detail why the Conservative Base loves her so. That’s a strange omission, particularly since the whole piece begins with Palin’s speech earlier this year at an Indiana Right-to-Life event–significantly, her first public appearance outside Alaska in 2009.
In all the hype and buzz about Palin when she first joined the ticket, and all the silly talk about her potential appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters, the ecstatic reaction to her choice on the Cultural Right didn’t get much attention. She wasn’t an “unknown” or a “fresh face” to those folks. They knew her not only as a truly hard-line anti-abortionist, but as a politician who had uniquely “walked the walk” by carrying a pregnancy to term despite knowing the child would have a severe disability. And all the personality traits she later exhibited–the folksiness, the abrasive partisanship, the hostility towards the “media” and “elites,” the resentment of the establishment Republicans who tried to “manage” her, and the constant complaints of persecution–almost perfectly embodied the world-view, and the hopes and fears, of the grassroots Cultural Right. (This was particularly and understandably true of women, who have always played an outsized role in grassroots conservative activism.) Sarah Palin was the projection of these activists onto the national political scene, and exhibited the defiant pride and ill-disguised vulnerability that they would have felt in the same place.
This base of support for Palin–maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses–isn’t going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly “electable” figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar. And that’s why Sarah Palin isn’t going to go away as a national political figure unless it is by her own choice, or that of the people of her own state.
Having presented and then already violated a pledge to avoid further posts about the Governor of South Carolina, I don’t quite know what to do when the man provides irresistible provocation that has nothing to do with his sex life.
Maybe I should emulate the great college football blog, everydayshouldbesaturday, which for obscure reasons insists on references to Illinois (and former Florida) coach Ron Zook as “NAME REDACTED.”
My own political NAME REDACTED sent an email out to his key supporters yesterday that basically said he’s determined to stay in office because governing is the most painful punishment for his sins he can imagine. After mentioning the option of resignation, NAME REDACTED said this:
A long list of close friends have suggested otherwise – that for God to really work in my life I shouldn’t be getting off so lightly. While it would be personally easier to exit stage left, their point has been that my larger sin was the sin of pride.
They contended that in many instances I may well have held the right position on limited government, spending or taxes – but that if my spirit wasn’t right in the presentation of those ideas to people in the General Assembly, or elsewhere, I could elicit the response that I had at many times indeed gotten from other state leaders.
In other words, NAME REDACTED feels that governing is the best penance, and that opposing effective governing–my own gloss on the ideology this man embraces–is how he can best make things up to God and others for his personal failings.
To sum it up: South Carolinians are expected to do penance for NAME REDACTED’s sins. And that ain’t right. Let him do penance with his own business, which needs tending.
This item by J.P. Green was first published on June 29, 2009.
Gabriel Schoenfeld’s article in today’s Wall St. Journal, “What If Obama Did Want to Help Iran’s Democrats?” argues that the Obama Administration may be crippling its Iran policy by not recognizing the efficacy of “covert political action.” As Schoenfeld, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. and a resident scholar at Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute explains Obama’s problem:
In a better world, toppling this vicious regime and altering the tide of history would be a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy. Yet even if President Obama miraculously came to that conclusion, how could he realize such an objective? This is a useful question to ask because it reveals how much the United States has disarmed itself in the vital realm of intelligence.
…Harsh criticism of such operations — beginning in the 1970s when all the CIA’s secrets spilled out — is what prompted the U.S. to dismantle its capabilities in covert political action. Interfering in the internal affairs of other countries, legions of agency critics said, was both immoral and illegal.
As a matter of law, the critics are right. Such covert action is indeed illegal. But legality is beside the point. Espionage is by definition illegal and yet all countries engage in it. This is what the Soviet Union did in Italy, and it is what Iran, by organizing terrorist structures in the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, has been doing intensively for 30 years.
Schoenfeld’s article, subtitled “The CIA is no longer in the business of influencing politics abroad,” credits CIA funding of centrist political parties in Italy during the 1950’s as an effective strategy to counter the rapid growth of Italy’s Communist Party, thereby helping Italy to remain a “stable democracy today.” But Shoenfeld’s characterization of Italy’s Communist Party as undemocratic is unfair, since they did participate in elections.
If covert ops have any legitimacy, they should be narrowly focused on supporting pro-democratic, not exclusively “centrist”, forces in dictatorships and in nations at risk of becomming dictatorships. Using U.S. resources to oppose democratically-elected governments, as we did in Chile, or to influence elections in other nations, is immoral, unwise and can easily backfire.
But if Schoenfeld is right that U.S. support of centrist political parties was the pivotal element in achieving our foreign policy objectives in Italy, however misguided, without expensive military action, then perhaps there is an instructive strategic lesson for our policy toward Iran.
The debate over U.S. policy toward Iran is usually cast in terms of military vs. diplomatic action, with very little discussion about the possibilities of covert political operations, or even expanding our propaganda outreach in Iran. The latter wouldn’t be hard since our current effort is so weak. The current issue of The New Yorker for example, features an eyewitness report on the June 15th protest against the stolen election, in which the author notes,
…the government tries to jam all foreign TV stations—in particular, the BBC’s Persian-language channel. This channel, beaming images and reports sent by normal Iranian citizens back into the country, has been hugely influential in spreading news of the protests to Iranians who would otherwise have relied on state television or the inferior American-based Persian-language channels.
Peruse recent public opinion polls on the topic of U.S. policy toward Iran going back 5 years or more, and you won’t find any mention of enhancing intelligence, propaganda or covert ops as a choice in polling questions. (A CBS News/New York Times poll conducted 9/21-24, 2008 indicates the public favored “diplomacy now” over “military action now” in Iraq by a margin of 61 to 10 percent)
Perhaps the pollsters assume the public has a “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude regarding covert ops, or they include it conceptually as an intelligence function under the rubric of “diplomacy.” But if the U.S. becomes more vigorously engaged in the struggle to win hearts and minds as a third option, it could prove to be a highly effective use of our resources in achieving foreign policy objectives in trouble spots like Iran. (More on this topic here)
According to Schoenfeld, the U.S. is not getting much credit for our disengagement from Iranian politics:
The great irony in all this is that even as the U.S. seeks to claim the moral high ground by not “meddling” — to use Mr. Obama’s term — we and our allies are getting blamed all the same. “There are riots and attacks in the streets that are orchestrated from the outside in a bid to destabilize the country’s Islamic regime,” says Sheikh Naim Qassem, a ranking figure of Hezbollah, Iran’s obedient instrument in Lebanon.
A fair point, Perhaps some thoughtful “meddling,” if not by the CIA, then by other U.S. agencies concerned with foreign policy could help encourage a stable democracy in Iran. Diplomacy is almost always a better choice than military action. But strengthening our on-the-ground intelligence in Iran and in other Arab nations and using it to promote the spread of democracy, instead of U.S. military dominance, should become a leading strategic objective.
This Staff post was first published on June 26, 2009.
Democracy Corps is out with a new analysis of public opinion on health care reform, based on extensive polling and focus group work. Much of it reflects the advice that TDS Co-Editor Stan Greenberg has been offering on how to succeed where President Clinton failed in securing universal health coverage.
But the new DCorps memo provides an interesting focus on the “swing vote” for health care reform:
Proponents and opponents of reform will be battling for the 35 percent of the electorate
who are not satisfied with the health insurance system but satisfied with their personal insurance.
Conservatives and some in the media think these voters are not serious about change, but that
misreads them, as we realize from our focus groups last week. They are “satisfied” with their
choice of doctors, that their employer is picking up most of the cost and that they may have
better insurance than others. But, they are not happy about having traded off wages or gotten
locked into a job because of health care or about the fate of a child with a chronic ailment who
may not be able to get insurance in the future. So, they are nervous about change, but they want
it.
The DCorps team goes on to identify five key strategies for appealing to these key voters:
1. Voters need to hear clearly what changes health care reform will bring.
2. Build a narrative around taking power away from the insurance companies and giving it
to people.
3. The president and reform advocates have to explain concretely the changes that will mean
lower costs.
4. Show all voters and seniors that there are benefits for them, including prescription drugs.
5. All of these points should be made with the dominant framework that continuing the status
quo is unacceptable and unsustainable.
This analysis leads to a overarching narrative that DCorps recommends:
Continuing the status quo in health care is not acceptable and not sustainable. Keeping the status quo means the insurance companies are still in charge, jacking up rates and denying coverage. It means more people losing insurance or enslaved to their job, prices skyrocketing for families and businesses and our companies less
competitive. We need change so that people no longer lose coverage or get dropped for a pre-existing condition, and see lower costs.
“Safe change” is always a tricky message to convey, even when people are open to or eager for change. But if DCorps is right, then it will be the key to navigating health care reform through many obstacles.
Note: This is a guest post from Michael A. Cohen, Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of “Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” We welcome it as part of a continuing effort to enlist diverse voices in discussions of Democratic strategy. It was first published on June 25, 2009.
Last week Ed highlighted a post over at TNR by William Galston raising a number of red flags about public opinion and growing doubts about the President’s domestic agenda. One of the points Galston made jumped out at me – and has been further crystallized by Mark Sanford’s painful press conference yesterday:
The best thing Democrats have going for them right now is the public’s near-total withdrawal of confidence from the Republican Party, which now “enjoys” its lowest rating ever recorded in the NYT/CBS survey–a finding that Pew confirms.
Yet even with this good news and additionally positive approval ratings for President Obama, Galston offered some rather timid recommendations for Democrats, arguing that they need to focus on “major legislative initiatives . . . that the public can accept” and to make a priority “their ability to persuade the public that something real is being done to rein in spending and debt.”
But I wonder if Bill is making this a bit too complicated and overemphasizing temporary concerns over spending, the deficit and traditional voter suspicion toward government. Right now it seems the most important two factors in public opinion are that the country trusts Barack Obama to do the right thing and they don’t trust Republicans . . . at all.
Right on cue, this week’s new poll from the Washington Post provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon. At the same time that confidence in the President’s stimulus package is softening his approval ratings remains sky high – at 65%. In addition, Obama is far more trusted that his Republican opponents on a host of issues.
Obama maintains leverage because of the continuing weakness of his opposition. The survey found the favorability ratings of congressional Republicans at their lowest point in more than a decade. Obama also has significant advantages over GOP lawmakers in terms of public trust on dealing with the economy, health care, the deficit and the threat of terrorism, despite broad-based Republican criticism of his early actions on these fronts.
The GOP’s approval rating is at 36% with disapproval at 56% and only 22 percent self-identify as Republicans. After watching Mark Sanford yesterday and considering the public spectacle of another prominent Republican publicly confessing private infidelity, it’s hard to imagine that these numbers are going to see much bump in the near future.
Even on the deficit, an issue that both Republicans and Democrats have trumpeted as being of great concern, the President has a twenty-point advantage over the GOP. Recent polls on health care reform show strong support for a so-called public option even though the idea has near unanimous opposition from Republicans. While it can be dangerous to draw too overly broad conclusion from a handful of polls, it’s hard to see any evidence at all that GOP attacks on the President are having much of an impact. In fact, outside their narrow base of supporters, Republicans seem to have almost no credibility, notwithstanding Jim Vandehei and Jonathan Martin’s threadbare effort to find a sliver of hope for the GOP.
The President – even in the face of worsening economic news – has not only enormous credibility, but is widely trusted. Again, according the Post, a majority of voters see the President as someone “”who will be careful with the public’s money” rather than a tax-and-spend Democrat. Quite simply, with strong majorities in the House and Senate, it’s been a long time since the country has seen a political leader with this type of political capital (whatever George Bush might have said in 2005).
So the time has come to use it. Galston’s advice is an argument for playing defense rather than the right course of action for Democrats: going on the offensive. While Obama obviously should not ignore the deficit, he and the Democrats must avoid overreacting to an issue that is generally a stalking horse for a lousy economy. If the economy shows signs of improvement, as it likely will when the stimulus package begins to kick in, I would be willing to make a small wager today that concerns over the deficit will decline. In the end, Democrats will live or die by not only the strength of the economy, but also by the ambition of their policy goals.
As for the notion that Obama should be tied down by perceptions of what he thinks the country “can accept,” frankly this is even worse advice. As Galston notes, voters “have little confidence in government as an effective instrument of public purpose. Trust in government remains near an historic low and has not improved significantly since the beginning of Obama’s presidency.”
But the way to change that perception is not to nibble around the edges, but instead move forward a piece of legislation that changes the entire political equation for Democrats: something like passing a sweeping health care package. The negative perception that voters continue to have toward government is because, as Obama suggested during the campaign, they don’t see it being responsive to their needs.
Forget the polls for just a second. In November 2008, the electorate voted not only for change, but they voted to send someone to Washington who would change the tone, bring new ideas and get things done. Passing comprehensive health care reform is the best way I can think of to not only fulfill the promise of Obama’s campaign, but also expose the rigidity of Republican opposition. If Democrats are dealing with a down economy in 2010 they will likely pay a price at the polls, but the best response to bad economic news is evidence that Congress and the President have worked to fulfill their campaign promises. As I asked a few days ago at Politico: “Would Democrats prefer to go to the voters and say, ‘I shrunk the deficit’ or would they rather say, ‘I passed health care legislation that improves access and care for 50 million people — and, by the way, my opponent voted against it?”
I can already imagine the likely response to my confidence: 1993 and 1994. The political path I’m advocating, of course, bears striking similarities to President Clinton’s ambitious domestic policy agenda. The critical difference, however, is the lack of confidence voters have not only in the Republican Party, but for conservatism in general. In addition, there is simply no question that the electorate trusts Obama far more than it did Clinton. I understand, Galston’s pleas for caution and no one who lived through 1993 and 1994 would ever question the dangers of overreaching. But if ever there were a time for overreaching it would be right now.
Yesterday I predicted that the Supreme Court’s Ricci decision would quickly move to the center of the Right’s case against the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. That’s already happening today.
Underlying this tactical decision by conservatives is the belief that affirmative action is an wedge issue whose time has finally come back round at last. Check out George Will’s column today on Ricci, in which the imperious High Tory all but stamps his feet in impatience that anybody could still think affirmative action is appropriate:
The nation shall slog on, litigating through a fog of euphemisms and blurry categories (e.g., “race-conscious” actions that somehow are not racial discrimination because they “remedy” discrimination that no one has intended). This is the predictable price of failing to simply insist that government cannot take cognizance of race.
Moreover, conservatives will brandish recent polls showing apparent public rejection of the kind of affirmative action the city of New Haven seems to have been exercising in the Ricci case, here from CNN and here from Quinnipiac.
So: is the affirmative action “wedge issue” back, and does it pose a serious threat to Sotomayor’s confirmation?
I weighed all the evidence at fivethirtyeight.com earlier today, and concluded: no, almost certainly not.
The polling around the Ricci decision shows the same old public attitude towards affirmative action that’s been prevelant since the last excitement over the issue, in the mid-90s. People don’t like quotas and preferences. But they do favor affirmative action, and stubbornly resist efforts to “end” rather than “mend” it. And Barack Obama is very firmly established on the high ground of this subject.
As for Sotomayor, here’s where I come down:
The bottom line is that Ricci shouldn’t be a big factor in the Sotomayor confirmation fight so long as she insists that she was applying well-established precedents in the interpretation of a statute enacted by Congress–i.e., she was far from exerting any sort of “judicial activism” or racial-ethnic point of view, and was just doing her job. President Obama can and should defend her on this point, and both should benefit from his superior positioning on the issue, and the reluctance (political if not ethical) of at least some potential Sotomayor critics to directly attack the first African-American president and the first Latina Justice on baldly racial grounds.
We’ll soon see, but it looks like conservatives are picking up Ricci as just the most convenient stick to hit her with, and it’s not a big stick in the final analysis.
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