I wrote last week about the fouled-up legal and political situation in Alabama, where the third-place finisher in the June 1 Republican gubernatorial primary, Tim James, is trying to erase a 167-vote lead for Robert Bentley via a recount, despite an Attorney General’s ruling that challenges to primary results can’t be done until an actual nomination has been made–after the runoff in which James is trying to secure a spot!
So now James is plunging ahead with the recount–done county-by-county by Republican volunteers, with James picking up the tab–and Alabama Republican officials are trying to figure out what to do if he prevails, according to the Birmingham News:

At that point, James could contest the primary vote to the Republican Party senior state leadership. If the party found for James, then it would have to set a second runoff — this one between James and the winner of the Byrne-Bentley July 13 show­down.
That scenario is keeping Republican Party state Chairman Mike Hubbard from getting a good night’s sleep.
“It’s a potential mess,” said Hubbard. “All we can do at this point is follow what the attorney general says is the law and the rec­ommendations of the secre­tary of state and then see what we see. If the recount shows Bentley still in the lead, then I guess this is all over. If the recount shows James pulling ahead, then all I can say is, hold on.”
Bentley’s campaign man­ager, Bryan Sanders, crit­icized the recount but stopped short of saying Bentley planned any legal action to stop it.

So there’s every prospect for a good, mean intraparty political battle, perhaps drifting into litigation (always fun when it involves those trial-lawyer-hating Republicans), and then maybe culminating in a round-robin second runoff.
It’s got to make Democratic gubernatorial nominee Ronnie Sparks feel all warm and cuddly inside.

In his Oval Office address tonight, President Obama has a sadly familiar task: to apportion responsibility for errors he had little to do with without himself looking like a buck-passer, and to connect discrete events and policies to the bigger picture.
It’s reasonably clear by now that by sheer repetition, the claim that the president has fumbled the BP oil spill in some significant way has sunk into media and public perceptions. Some of this, of course, is coming from people who are lifelong cheerleaders for offshore oil drilling, and who idolize Dick Cheney, who is probably more responsible for the policies that enabled this disaster than anyone else. But presidents do get blamed for things they didn’t do, so appearing large and in charge in the present and future must accompany any Obama effort to assign responsibility for why this happened in the first place.
Aside from that difficult task, the president must also connect the dots between the disaster and the path he wants the country to take on energy policy. While it may seem obvious to some of us why a carbon cap or tax of some sort is an appropriate response to yet another calamity associated with fossil fuel production, it’s not at all obvious to the public generally. And this is the same public, moreover, that never much bought the president’s arguments that health care reform was essential to the country’s economic future. So while it might not be that hard for Obama to rally support for tougher regulation of offshore drilling, it will be a much heavier lift to connect the disaster to the need for climate change legislation.
Fortunately, Obama has a booming twenty minutes to pull off this complex task, all the while appearing as “presidential” as possible. He will have no time to waste.

It is often argued that the contemporary conservative movement possesses a laser-like focus on a “smaller government” agenda at the expense of the Cultural Right’s longstanding support for government intervention in private sexual and reproductive matters. You might even think the Cultural Right is in retreat, and on a few issues, like DADT, it certainly is.
But on core issues of reproductive rights, social conservatives are as aggressive as ever, and in some respects, more radical. A good example of that little-discussed phenomenon is the renewed drive of the Right-to-Life movement to go beyond tactical efforts to impose marginal limits on late-term abortions or harrass abortion providers, or even to reverse Roe v. Wade, and instead demand legal recognition of its conviction that protection of human life should begin at the moment of fertilization.
This is the conviction that has always been at the root of hostility to embryonic stem cell research, nothwithstanding scare-talk about human cloning. But more recently, many right-to-life activists have taken the logical next step by pursuing restrictions on in vitro fertilization insofar is it involves creation of “surplus” embryos (echoing developments in Europe, notably Italy).
The shift towards what might be called “zygote politics”–which extends anti-abortion politics into the politically treacherous area of infertility treatments and even efforts to ban oral contraceptives (on grounds that they are actually abortifacients), has popped up this year in the highly competitive Republican gubernatorial primary in Georgia. Georgia RTL, the state’s premier anti-abortion group and a major player in GOP politics, endorsed all but one of the Republican gubernatorial candidates, and then went out of its way to attack the exception, Secretary of State Karen Handel. Here’s how Handel’s campaign described the conflict:

GRTL’s real problem with Karen is twofold: First, they disagree with her stance regarding exceptions to an abortion ban in cases of rape and incest.
Secondly, Karen opposes the group’s push to ban invitro fertilization, which has helped so many couples realize their dream of having children. The group has proposed legislation to virtually eliminate invitro.
In a meeting with Karen, the group’s leadership told her directly that fertility treatments are immoral and that their goal is to completely ban the procedure.

This was a rather pointed and potentially counter-productive personal rebuke, since Handel and her husband are childless, and might have some natural allies among couples resorting to IV clinics to have children.
What makes this contretemps especially interesting is that Handel occupies very much the same ideological turf as Nikki Haley in next-door SC: a “conservative reformer” determined to take on the “good ol’ boys” whose power lust has overriden their alleged right-wing principles. Handel hasn’t been endorsed by Sarah Palin yet, but she’s a natural Mama Grizzly, or at least was until she got cross-ways with the right-to-life movement, which is Palin’s original base in the GOP. Palin has already made some of her old allies mad by endorsing Terry Branstad over Bob Vander Plaats in Iowa; a second gesture against RTL orthodoxy would really raise eyebrows.
But conversely, anti-abortion activists are in serious danger of getting cross-ways with middle-class conservative voters who don’t mind shutting down abortion clinics but are likely to be less than enthusiastic about doing the same with IV clinics, much less banning the Pill. It’s all well worth watching in the future.

One of the more pernicious if deeply entrenched constitutional doctrines in this country is the idea that spending money on political campaigns is inherently an exercise of first amendment free speech rights whose regulation requires the strictest judicial scrutiny. It’s why we do not have any effective national system for campaign finance limitations, and indirectly why at any given time about half the country thinks our politicians have been bought and sold for campaign contributions. Most fundamentally, self-funding candidates can pretty much do whatever they want, and despite the hard economic times, we are seeing self-funders arise this year in extraordinary numbers, particularly on the GOP side of the battlelines.
Unfortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court seems determined to undo every effort to provide candidates who face self-funders with anything like an equalizer. In 2007, in Davis v.F.E.C., a 5-4 majority of the Court struck down the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” to the Feingold-McCain campaign finance law on grounds, basically, that it discriminated against millionaires by allowing the opponents of self-funders higher contribution and spending limits.
By the same dubious logic, as National Journal‘s Eliza Newlin Carney explains, the Court may be about to strike down “equalizer” provisions in six state public financing systems (Arizona, Connecticut, Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina and Wisconsin). In a case involving Arizona, the Court has issued a stay on the collection of “extra” public money from candidates facing self-funders until it can hear a constitutional challege to the system. Given the Davis precedent, campaign reform advocates are bracing for a bad result.

At a time when the Gulf Oil Spill is becoming a virtually unprecendented environmental disaster, while the main point of contention about the Great Recession is whether it’s about to recur or hasn’t yet ended, it’s worth wondering if the apocalyptic tone of American politics these days isn’t in large part just a reaction to extended trauma.
Mark Schmitt of The American Prospect makes that case:

In the 12 years since the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, being interested in politics or lucky enough to write about it has been an endless, often terrifying thrill. We’ve witnessed a series of high-stakes gambles, all-or-nothing showdowns, frauds, and schemes for total power that look a lot like some of Wall Street’s more hare-brained high-flying plays. There was Bush v. Gore, Karl Rove’s plan for 30 years of Republican rule, Dick Cheney’s hidden government, and the “nuclear option” — not to mention the deceptions of the rush to war in Iraq, the endless state of emergency, and the wiretapping and other abuses of civil liberties after September 11. These schemes, like those of the bankers’, created huge systemic risks to democratic government.
All those moves were by Republicans, but in response, progressives and Democrats developed their own sense of urgency and total commitment to victory in the 2006 congressional elections, and then again in the huge crusade that elected Barack Obama by a wide margin, the most fascinating electoral drama of my lifetime. Since the election, we’ve returned to winner-take-all battles: Legislative fights — notably on health care — quickly become showdowns over the very legitimacy of the administration and the Democratic majority. The Tea Party movement demands, “Give us our country back.” Arthur Brooks, the mild-mannered academic who runs the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote a book called The Battle in which he invites a “culture war” between the 70 percent of the country that loves free enterprise and the 30 percent that is socialist, hates free enterprise, and yet has somehow usurped power.

Now Mark seems to think these ferocious outbreaks of total-war politics are in part cyclical, and he believes a disappointing GOP performance in the fall elections and the natural ebbing of the Tea Party will help create a politics that is refreshingly boring. And he points to the period between Bill Clinton’s re-election and his impeachment as the last model era of undramatic but productive governance.
If so, that’s pretty sad, since the Lewinsky scandal first broke just one year and one day after the beginning of Clinton’s second term. If and when the next era of good feelings arrives, we’d better enjoy it while it lasts.

I don’t have a lot of use for Tim James, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in Alabama who cynically tried to inflame xenophobic passions in his state in the wake of national controversy over the Arizona immigration law with his viral “Language” ad. For that matter, I’m not a fan of James’ role back in 2003 in the defeat of a tax reform initiative that would have helped fix one of the world’s most regressive tax structures.
Still, you have to feel for James’ efforts to get a recount of Robert Bentley’s 167-vote margin over him for second place and a runoff spot in the June 1 primary, which would have happened automatically at public expense in many states. Instead, in Alabama, counts have to be challenged in individual counties, with the challenger bearing the entire cost (in this case several hundred thousand smackeroos). James fished in, but just as the recount was about to begin, lame-duck Republican Attorney General Troy King (who was trounced on June 1 in a renomination bid) weighed in with an opinion saying that candidates can’t get a recount until a nomination is final, and that won’t happen until the runoff is over.
So Tim James can’t spend his own money to find out if he really made the runoff until the runoff’s already happened. Catch-22.
Alabama GOP leaders are apparently mulling over what to do during the weekend, and James says he’s hasn’t given up. But sounds like a simple English-language interpretation of his situation would be: “Just fergit’ it.”

If you want to hear how loudly money can talk in politics, check out the new Quinnipiac survey in Florida. Two very rich men who leapt into statewide contests very late are doing very well.
One of them is Republican Rick Scott, a former for-profit hospital exec who was forced from his job amidst a massive fraud investigation, and then won fame by putting together national-level anti-health-reform ads. He leapt into the governor’s race very late, and now, after a $7 million barrage of ads that mostly express his support for Arizona’s immigration law, he’s leading conservative warhorse Bill McCollum–whose time finally seemed to have come this year after two unsuccessful U.S. Senate races–by a 44-31 margin.
Meanwhile, in the Democratic contest for the U.S. Senate, already roiled by the independent candidacy of Gov. Charlies Crist, billionarire real estate investor Jeff Greene, who got into the race right before the end of qualifying just over a month ago, has moved into a statistical tie with congressman Kendrick Meek. Advised by Democratic bad boys Joe Trippi and Doug Schoen, Greene is playing the outsider card as hard as he can.
Neither of these guys has held public office or has any deep roots in Florida. Both have been questioned about their business ethics. But they’ve got the loot, and while political history is littered with the wreckage of ego-driven campaigns by rich people, more than a few have succeeded. And if you are Bill McCollum or Kendrick Meek, who were both focused on the general election until their rich challengers came out of the woodwork, it’s got to feel like Sisyphus watching that rock roll back to the bottom of the hill.

At Open Left, Chris Bowers calls attention to a nifty chart put together by SwingStateProject’s DavidNYC that lists every 2010 House incumbent who has failed to receive over 70% in a primary.
As Chris notes, Republicans are much more likely to have attracted ideologically-motivated primary challenges–about twice as likely, actually–despite the relatively high level of ideological cohesion among House Republicans. In fact, looking at David’s chart, support for TARP seems to be the most common reason that a Republican House member received a viable primary challenge.
Outside the one or two hot-buttons motivating the Tea Party movement, Republicans don’t really have that many issues wiith each other, now that they’ve all agreed that Ronald Reagan is the truth and light on all issues, and that the only deadly sin is to even think about raising taxes. But if any GOPer forgets these guiding principles–or in many parts of the country, takes anything less than full-on Christian Right positions on abortion or same-sex marriage–a primary challenge is right around the corner.

The MSM is having quite a gush-fest about the Fiorina and Whitman primary wins in California. Fresh faces, huge amounts of campaign cash, historic wins for GOP women and all that. Dem nominees Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer begin their races dwarfed by a tidal wave of overwhelmingly favorable coverage for their opponents.
If not for Fiorina’s “so yesterday” gaffe about Senator Boxer’s hairdo, she would have gotten the same free ride that the bedazzled media has given Whitman since Tuesday. Boxer and Brown no doubt write it off as a familiar pattern of media coverage. The new kid usually gets the breathless MSM buzz after primaries, especially in a political year that has been roundly designated as a bummer for incumbents.
But it won’t be long before the sobering demographic realities of the California electorate force a reassessment among the punditry. In his WaPo op-ed, “Calif. GOP Primary Winners Look Headed for Defeat,” Harold Meyerson explains,

…California Republican primaries have a nasty habit of rendering their winners unelectable in November, and this year’s contest looks like it will be no exception. To win, Whitman and Fiorina — conventional conservative business Republicans both — had to take positions so far to the right that their chances of winning a state in which Barack Obama commands a 59 percent approval rating are slim. During one debate with her Republican opponents, Fiorina affirmed the right of suspected terrorists on no-fly lists to buy guns, presumably lest the gods of the National Rifle Association strike her dead on the spot. At a campaign event at Los Angeles International Airport on Saturday, Boxer, never one to let a hanging curveball go unswatted, contrasted Fiorina’s guns-to-terrorists stance with her own co-authorship of a law allowing pilots to carry guns in cockpits.

And then there is the thorniest (for Republicans) of issues:

But the issue most damaging for Whitman and Fiorina is immigration. Pressed by their GOP primary opponents and the Republican electorate to endorse Arizona’s draconian new law, Fiorina proclaimed her support for it while Whitman countered the charges from her right that she was soft on immigration by affirming that she was “100 percent against amnesty” and demanding a huge increase in border enforcement. To bolster her credibility, her ads featured former Republican governor Pete Wilson — champion of 1994’s Proposition 187, which would have denied all public services, including the right to attend primary and secondary schools, to illegal immigrants.
Wilson won reelection in 1994 by backing 187, which the courts subsequently struck down. But his victory was probably the most pyrrhic in modern American politics. Threatened and enraged by 187, California’s Latino immigrants began naturalizing, registering and voting in record numbers. Southern California’s Latino-led labor movement — the most energized and strategically savvy labor movement in the nation — became particularly adept at turning out Latino voters for Democratic candidates and causes.
…the California electorate has been transformed — moving the state decisively into the Democratic column. In the 1994 election, according to the nonprofit William C. Velásquez Institute, which seeks to raise minorities’ political and economic participation, Latinos counted for 11.4 percent of California voters. By 2008, they comprised 21.4 percent. And particularly when immigration is an issue, theirs is a heavily Democratic vote. “There’s a whole generation of Latino voters who don’t believe the Republicans look out for them,” Maria Elena Durazo, who heads the Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, told me on Election Day. “We ran against Pete Wilson for years after he was out of office. And, voilà! He’s back — he’s vouching for Whitman!” Labor will make sure the Latino community knows it. Already, the California Nurses Association is running an ad on Spanish-language radio that splices in a clip from a Whitman primary commercial in which she and Wilson discuss cracking down on immigration.

Meyerson concludes,

It’s not just that Republican nativism pushes perhaps a fifth of the electorate into the Democratic column. It’s that the state’s Republicans are simply far to the right of the majority of Californians — so much so that they do not have a majority of registered voters in any one of the state’s 53 congressional districts…In winning their nominations, they [Whitman and Fiorina] said things deeply offensive to a fatally large swath of California voters. Their campaigns may be gold-plated, but they have ears of purest tin.

Add to that the fact that Jerry Brown may be one of the most battle-seasoned candidates in history, having won grueling campaigns for Governor of California, Mayor of Oakland, CA Attorney-General and having won and lost presidential primaries. The media didn’t cover his comments well, but Brown will not be giving Whitman an easy time of it. He has already blasted Whitman for spending $71 million on her primary campaign, and added in his recent press conference,

“She paid herself $120 million, and then EBay had to lay off 10 percent of its workforce. Now, is that waste and abuse? Is that what you want?”

In stark contrast, Brown had an impressive record of budget management and job creation during his stint as governor, while living a life of unprecedented austerity for the chief executive of the nation’s largest state. As Brown noted in his news conference,

When I was governor of California, we built up the largest surplus in history — $4.5 billion. We created 1.9 million jobs. We reduced taxes by billions

Whitman has already gone into handler-imposed seclusion, issuing lame statements about Brown’s website not being up to snuff and bragging about her issues brochure, which Brown derided for being lavishly illustrated with photos, but way short on substance. Californians worried about their job security, pensions and education of their children are not likely to prefer Whitman’s track record to Brown’s.
As for Fiorina, last year the biz rag web site ‘Condé Nast Portfolio’ designated Fiorina as one of “The 20 Worst American CEOs of All Time“, noting also,

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005…HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.

Not a track record to inspire working people to vote for her, either.
If Whitman and Fiorina had been business leaders who had track records of living modestly while keeping concerns for their employees front and center, maybe Brown and Boxer would have more to worry about. As Republicans, however, both Fiorina and Whitman have more in common with Gordon Gekko than Abe Lincoln. The guess here is that the working people of California ain’t having it.

The big development in non-election news from Washington this week has been the collapse of bipartisan negotiations for cap-and-trade legislation, caused by Sen. Lindsey Graham’s defection. Said defection has been a long time in the making; earlier Graham broke off longstanding negotiations with Sens. Kerry and Lieberman on climate change, allegedly because he was angry with Harry Reid for hinting that immigration reform might come first in the Senate. Now that Reid’s backed off that idea, Graham’s been forced to more or less flip-flop entirely on climate change, and is now backing a far less ambitious bill introduced by Richard Lugar that would have no cap on carbon emissions.
The CW has suggested that Graham’s happy feet on climate change is the product of pressure from his Republican colleagues in Congress who don’t want any “cap-and-tax” bill and basically don’t want any cooperation with the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. But I think the problem may be a little closer to home for Graham.
Earlier this year, a couple of Republican county committees down in South Carolina raised eyebrows with censure resolutions aimed at Graham for his support for cap-and-trade, comprehensive immigration reform, and TARP. One of those committees was from Lexington County, which happens to be the residence of Nikki Haley, who then became the only gubernatorial candidate to embrace Graham’s censure for ideological heresy.
Now maybe it’s a coincidence that Graham threw in the towel on cap-and-trade the day after Haley became a national political rock star in the wake of her strong (49%) performance in the SC Republican gubernatorial primary, but maybe it’s not. Graham won’t be up for re-election until 2014, but as Bob Dylan once said (though not in the context of climate change): “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
I bring this up in part as a reminder to progressives who are naturally sympathetic to Haley as a woman and as a minority member who has been accused without much evidence of being a cheat and a liar, and called a “raghead” to boot. That’s all well and good, but don’t forget she is also a serious hard-core conservative who eagerly identifies herself with the Jim DeMint, take-no-prisoners wing of her party, and who may have just played a role in blowing up what was once a promising effort to deal with one of the most important challenges facing the country and the world. To be sure, she should be judged on her ideas and record and not subjected to gender-based double standards or sexual innuendo. But make no mistake, her “ideas” are really bad from any progressive point of view. She’s only a breath of fresh air in SC politics if you think, like she does, that the good ol’ boys who’ve been running things are dangerously liberal.