This item by James Vega was first published on March 23, 2010.
In the last days before the HCR bill passed the house last Sunday several influential progressive bloggers put forth a rather startling thesis — that although the health care bill was still worth passing, the compromises that were required to enact it actually made the bill a setback or defeat for progressives rather than a victory. For example:

• Jeff Greenwald in Salon – “…this process highlighted – and worsened – the virtually complete powerlessness of the left and progressives generally in Washington.…no one will ever take progressive threats seriously again in the future”
• Jane Hamsher in Firedoglake- “nobody will take progressives in Congress seriously, nor should they…Whatever Barack Obama wants to do will be the farthest left any piece of legislation gets.”
• McJoan in DailyKos – “Trying to argue that the provisions in this bill signify a progressive victory is from my perspective a negotiating mistake…I’d argue that it’s bad politically and for future policy for progressives to lose sight of the fact that we had some pretty big losses in this one. Who lost? Labor…Women…Latinos.”

To be very clear, unlike some other, more extreme critics, all three of these commentators did indeed agree that the bill needed to be passed and none advocated its rejection. But, as the quotes show, they were also united in the view that the compromises embodied in the final bill made it represent a major defeat for progressives.
A progressive Rip Van Winkle from the social movements of the 60’s, suddenly waking up today, would be profoundly bewildered by this perspective. He or she would not be at all surprised to hear that a progressive reform had been “diluted”, “sold-out” “watered down” or “compromised” in the process of passing a bill in Congress. But what he or she would find utterly baffling were the implicit assumptions that underlay the argument.
1. That it was possible to directly identify the broad progressive campaign for universal and affordable health care with the quality of any one specific piece of legislation.
2. That the major measure of progressive “influence” on the struggle for a social reform like universal and affordable health care could properly be defined as how far an initial bill proposed in Congress could be pushed in a progressive direction, a view that essentially identifies all progressive “influence” with bargaining power inside the halls of Congress.
3. That progressives could reasonably expect to achieve a genuinely significant social reform without having first built a vibrant and genuine grass-roots social movement deeply committed to that reform.
In fact, it would actually take the newly awakened 60’s progressive several re-readings of the various commentaries to fully convince himself that these actually were the implicit assumptions underlying the debate. On all three topics, the 60’s movement progressive would start off with almost directly opposite assumptions.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was first published on March 22, 2010
For many months now, we’ve been hearing the GOP threat that Democrats will pay dearly for supporting the health care reform package. Now might be a good time to ask conversely whether any House Dems who voted against the bill will lose support in November.
Most of the 34 Dems who crossed over to support the Republicans in the key vote should be safe, just because of the power of incumbency, which is strong even for members of the party in power in mid-term elections. One exception might be GA Democratic Rep. John Barrow, whose 12th congressional district, which stretches from Savannah to Augusta, includes 44 percent African American voters. Presidential nominee Obama cut an ad for Barrow in his last campaign, so Barrow’s negative HCR vote may alienate some of his district’s stronger supporters of President Obama and/or HCR. Barrow did defeat an African American primary challenger in 2008, but other Black leaders in his district must be wondering if they could unhorse Barrow in the Democratic primary.
Rep. Artur Davis (AL), the only African American congressman to oppose the HCR package, on the other hand, won’t be vulnerable to a primary challenge because he is running for Governor of Alabama. Davis won three of his terms by landslides and one with no opposition. Clearly, he sees his vote against HCR as a net asset for his gubernatorial campaign. He may be right, although even in AL, his HCR vote could hurt with state progressives in a close election.
Race would not be the only consideration, however, in assessing constituent disapproval of the votes against health care reform. A few of the 34 nay voters, including Heath Shuler (NC) and Stephen Lynch (MA) have substantial liberal enclaves/constituencies in their districts, which could make a difference as stay-at-homes in a close election.
Here is The Hill’s list of the 34 Dems who voted no on health care reform:

Rep. John Adler (N.J.)
Rep. Jason Altmire (Pa.)
Rep. Michael Arcuri (N.Y.)
Rep. John Barrow (Ga.)
Rep. Marion Berry (Ark.)
Rep. Dan Boren (Ind.)
Rep. Rick Boucher (Va.)
Rep. Bobby Bright (Ala.)
Rep. Ben Chandler (Ky.)
Rep. Travis Childers (Miss.)
Rep. Artur Davis (Ala.)
Rep. Lincoln Davis (Tenn.)
Rep. Chet Edwards (Texas)
Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (S.D.)
Rep. Tim Holden (Pa.)
Rep. Larry Kissell (N.C.)
Rep. Frank Kratovil (Md.)
Rep. Dan Lipinski (Ill.)
Rep. Stephen Lynch (Mass.)
Rep. Jim Marshall (Ga.)
Rep. Jim Matheson (Utah)
Rep. Mike McIntyre (N.C.)
Rep. Mike McMahon (N.Y.)
Rep. Charlie Melancon (La.)
Rep. Walt Minnick (Idaho)
Rep. Glenn Nye (Va.)
Rep. Collin Peterson (Minn.)
Rep. Mike Ross (Ark.)
Rep. Heath Shuler (N.C.)
Rep. Ike Skelton (Mo.)
Rep. Zack Space (Ohio)
Rep. John Tanner (Tenn.)
Rep. Gene Taylor (Miss.)
Rep. Harry Teague (N.M.)

In addition to the power of incumbency, what these Dems have going for them is that it is late for primary challengers to start new campaigns, if they haven’t already. Some of the 34 will also likely be getting lots of love in the form of dough from insurance companies and the like.
I’m sure that some of the Dem nay voters acted on principle, though all probably saw their votes as a matter of political survival. Sad, however, that they chose to be part of the fear-driven past, rather than the hopeful future. They risked hurting their party, as well as the health of their constituents. As E.J. Dionne, Jr. put it in his WaPo column:

To understand how large a victory this is, consider what defeat would have meant. In light of the president’s decision to gamble all of his standing to get this bill passed, its failure would have crippled his presidency. The Democratic Congress would have become a laughing stock, incapable of winning on an issue that has been central to its identity since the days of Harry Truman.

For Dems there’s always the thorny problem of primary challenges usually helping the Republicans. Of course, Boehner and company will praise the 34 Dems to the hilt, and then do everything they can to replace them with Republicans, where possible. All of those who are running this year are banking to some extent on most HCR supporters forgiving and forgetting by November, which could be a dicey bet. And President Obama may have a Lincolnesque capacity for political forgiveness, but Rahm Emmanuel most emphatically does not.
It may not be fair to pigeon-hole all of these Dems as DINO’s, since they vote with their party most of the time. That’s life in the big tent. Still, progressive Dems can’t be blamed for asking, if they are not with us on such a central legislative reform, one which could save many lives and one which could have decided the President’s re-election chances, then who are they?

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 19, 2010.
As we count down towards the health reform vote(s) in the House, it’s clearer than ever that there are two distinct but mutually reinforcing conservative takes on the bill. The most obvious, of course, is the bizarre construction of “ObamaCare” that the Right has been building for nearly a year now, based on distortions, fear-mongering, a few outright lies, and sweeping smears, all in order to make legislation pretty close to what moderate Republicans have promoted for years seem like a socialist revolution if not a coup d’etat. This is the hard sell, and it will continue up to and well beyond this weekend’s votes.
But then there’s the soft sell, beloved of today’s model of “moderate” Republicans, such as they are, which involves lots of tut-tutting at the unedifying spectacle of the health reform debate, constant if unsupported claims that there are plentiful opportunities for a bipartisan “incremental” approach, and above all, phony concern for what Barack Obama is doing to his party and his country. This approach typically ignores or rationalizes the hard sell that most conservatives have undertaken, and the lockstep obstructionism of the congressional GOP, and blames Obama and Democrats for all the problems they are encountering in getting this legislation done.
A pitch-perfect example of the soft sell is Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, presumably her final pre-vote expression of contempt for the president in the guise of respect for the presidency, which alas, isn’t what it used to be when her mentor, Ronald Reagan, stood astride Washington and the globe like a colossus.
The column begins with an extended expression of horror that Obama would postpone a trip to Indonesia and Australia in order to lobby for this little domestic bill that would deal with the trifle of health coverage for 40 million or so Americans:

And to do this to Australia of all countries, a nation that has always had America’s back and been America’s friend.
How bush league, how undisciplined, how kid’s stuff.

It’s characteristic that Noonan does not mention that Obama is trying to give Americans the universal health coverage that Australians have and take for granted, or that final passage wouldn’t have been delayed until now if Scott Brown hadn’t come to Washington pledging to kill “ObamaCare.”
Noonan then engages, with the air of someone examining an especially loathsome insect, in a lengthy attack on the procedural issues involved in House passage of health reform, asserting that Obama’s trying to hide something in the legislation via the “deem and pass” (which she suggests sounds tellingly like “demon pass”) mechanism that House Democrats are apparently going to deploy this weekend. She endorses as self-evidently correct the complaint of Fox News’ Bret Bair, in his obnoxious interview of the president last week, that “deem and pass” means nobody will know what’s in the bill that’s “deemed” and “passed.” Like Bair, Noonan doesn’t seem to understand the simple fact that the underlying bill we are talking about here is exactly the same bill passed by the Senate in December–long enough even for Peggy Noonan to have gotten wind of it. The changes in the bill–namely, the reconciliation measure–were made available, along with a CBO scoring of their impact, before the votes were scheduled, and will be voted on explicitly by the House (and later the Senate). Yes, this is complicated, but you’d think someone with Noonan’s experience and pay grade would be able to figure it out, and again, Democrats would have never resorted to this approach if Republicans weren’t using their 41st Senate vote to thwart the normal process after a majority in the House and a supermajority in the Senate had already passed similar legislation.
But whatever; Republican obstruction is never much mentioned in Noonan’s stuff on health reform. And so it is entirely in character that Noonan concludes her column by blaming Obama for the rudeness exhibited by Bair in last week’s interview, and hence for diminishing the presidency! Ah, if only we had a real president like you-know-who:

[W]e seem to have come a long way since Ronald Reagan was regularly barked at by Sam Donaldson, almost literally, and the president shrugged it off. The president—every president—works for us. We don’t work for him. We sometimes lose track of this, or rather get the balance wrong. Respect is due and must be palpable, but now and then you have to press, to either force them to be forthcoming or force them to reveal that they won’t be. Either way it’s revealing.

I’d say it’s hardly as revealing as Peggy Noonan’s inveterate habit of not only ignoring conservative hubris, but attributing it to its victims.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 19, 2010.
There’s been some interesting talk going on this week involving assessment (in the wake of the collapse of progressive resistance to the final health reform bill) of “the Left’s” strategy on health reform, particularly in terms of the ultimate emptiness of threats from progressive House Democrats that they would vote against any bill that didn’t include a “robust” public option.
Glenn Greenwald argues that progressives have once again exposed–and possibly even increased–their “powerlessness” within the Democratic Party. Chris Bowers challenges the premise by arguing that progressives did secure significant changes in the Senate bill, most notably the agreement to “fix” it, which certainly wasn’t the path of least resistance.
Meanwhile, Armando of Talk Left has compared the lack of leverage of progressives over items like the public option to the success of the labor movement in forcing concessions on the “Cadillac tax.” And Nate Silver has responded by arguing that progressive threats didn’t work because they weren’t credible in the first place.
I think everyone in this debate would agree that it’s generally a bad idea in politics to make threats you are entirely unwilling to carry out, but the real division of opinion on on whether such threats should be tempered or in fact intensified. But Nate makes one point that bears repeating: the political value of aggressiveness and posturing can and often does get exaggerated.

It feels good to assert that progressives just need to be tougher — perhaps even to the point of feigning irrationality. These arguments are not necessarily wrong — a reputation for being tougher bargainers would help at the margins — but it misdiagnoses the problem on health care. The progressive bloc failed not because of any reputational deficiency on the part of the progressives but because their bluff was too transparent — they claimed to be willing to wager enormous stakes (health care reform) to win a relatively small pot (the public option). That would have been beyond the capacity of any poker player — or activist — to pull off.

I’ve never much liked the strain of progressive analysis that endlessly promotes “fighting” and “spine” and “cojones” as the answers to every Democratic political problem. Sometimes “brains” or “heart” are more important, and moreover, if politics is reduced to a willingness to project brute force, the bad guys are going to win every time; it’s like getting into a selfishness competition with the Right–we’ll never win. But in any event, however you feel about the Will to Power theory of politics, Nate’s right, people aren’t all stupid, and macho posturing by progressives when it doesn’t make sense isn’t going to convince anybody. Poker playing is a relatively small and overrated part of politics. Real conviction and strategies based on conveying those convictions to friends and potential friends are the best building blocks for successful strategy.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 12, 2010.
One of the fundamental reasons for the kind of strategic analysis that TDS encourages and sponsors is that it’s sometimes easy to conflate strategy and tactics, and more basically, means and ends. Indeed, I’d contend that most of the major disagreements among Democrats are attributable to this problem of arguing past each other because one side or the other is thinking in different terms about where a particular political or policy decision lies on the continuum that extends from day-to-day tactics all the way over to grand strategy. And that has certainly been true in the health care reform debate.
But we should all be able to agree on one thing: the ultimate objective in politics–particularly progressive politics–is to make changes in public policy that have a real, beneficient impact on the real-life experiences of the American people. When that opportunity presents itself on one of the major challenges facing this country, taking advantage of it trumps a lot of otherwise valid considerations.
And so, in all the back-and-forth this week about polling on health reform, and the possible consequences to the Democratic Party this November of enacting or failing to enact legislation, it is important not to forget the big picture here: the responsibility that most Democrats would accept for meeting the challenge of changing the health care system in a positive direction.
Matt Yglesias offers a good analogy to keep in mind in weighing the political risks involved in enacting health care reform this year:

[T]he measure of a political coalition isn’t how long it lasted, but what it achieved. From the tone of a lot of present-day political commentary you’d think that the big mistake Lyndon Johnson made during his tenure in the White House was that by passing the Civil Rights Act he wound up damaging the Democratic Party politically by opening the South up to the GOP. Back on planet normal, that’s the crowning achievement of his presidency.

From that perspective, there are still important short-term political factors for Democrats to keep in mind: the impact of future Republican gains on other important policy goals, and even the possibility that those gains will be so large that the next Congress or the one after that will repeal health reform legislation. Short of that, though, it’s probably a moment for Democrats to keep their eyes on the prize and let the political chips fall where they may. It’s not as though we haven’t faced and overcome political adversity before, when we didn’t necessarily have the chance to make large progress on one of the enduring policy goals of the party going back more than a half-century.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 10, 2010.
One of the oldest and hoariest debates among pollsters and political scientists is the measurement of public opinion according to likelihood to vote in a particular election. Some polls show results for “all adults,” some for “registered voters,” and some for “likely voters.” This last category is especially useful, if perilous, in projecting election results. It’s useful for the obvious reason that the views of people who don’t wind up voting are irrelevant to actual election results. It’s perilous because determining likelihood to vote is not an exact science, and moreover, can produce some serious distortions. Pollsters typically use two different methods for measuring likelihood to vote: some are subjective, mainly involving poll respondents’ own expressed interest in an election, and some are objective, including past voting behavior, and most controversial, post-survey “adjustments” of raw data to reflect the expected composition of the electorate. “Adjustments,” in fact, are one of those factors (others include question language and question order) the biases of pollsters or their clients can become pretty important, but in general, “tight” likely-voter screens have recently produced results more favorable to Republicans.
Aside from measurement factors, there are two important reasons why going into the November elections, “likely voters” are more likely to lean Republican than “registered voters.” The first is that historically, midterm elections attract an older and whiter electorate than presidential elections; given the weakness of Barack Obama among old white voters even in his 2008 victory, that’s significant. The second is that likelihood to vote measures intensity of political engagement, and right now, there’s little question Republicans are more “energized” than Democrats. So I’m certainly in full agreement that Democrats have what Jonathan Chait recently called (after examining the latest Democracy Corps/Third Way data on “drop-off” voters) a “turnout emergency” in 2010
But it’s a very different matter altogether to use public opinion surveys sifted for likelihood to vote in the next election to measure the current “mood” of the American people on this or that issue–in other words, to treat polls as a sort of plebiscite on the wishes of the electorate as a whole. You see this every day when conservatives argue that “the people” or “America” has rejected health reform because likely 2010 voters in a poll tilt heavily against some formulation of health reform legislation. Such polls may well indicate a possibility that voters in November will react poorly to the enactment of health reform, but do not present a fair representation of public opinion on the subject. No one would seriously argue that only those voting-eligible adults who get through a pollster’s LV screen are “people” or “Americans.” So no one should use LV data to construct some sort of plebiscite. LV’s will have their say in November. Let all Americans have their say when they are asked to express it.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it first appeared on March 9, 2010.
As we all understand, Republicans are about to have a pretty good election in November. Much of the GOP excitement revolves around congressional races that could unseat “red-state” Democrats who won during the 2006 or 2008 cycles, along with a number of incumbents (some of whom have decided to retire) who have been around much longer. Ground zero for the Republican tsunami is, of course, the Deep South, where in some areas John McCain did better in 2008 than George W. Bush did in 2004, and where every available indicator shows the president to be very unpopular among white voters.
But beneath this storyline, some odd and counterintuitive things are going on. In three Deep South states, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina, Democrats have a decent chance of retaking long-lost governorships, in part because of infighting among Republican candidates, and in part because Republican rule in those states has not been terribly successful or popular. It’s far too early to make predictions, but it’s possible that we’re in for a repeat of the astounding gubernatorial Trifecta that Democrats pulled off in those same three states in 1998. That event confounded widespread assessments that the South had become a one-party GOP region, and it could happen again, in even more unlikely circumstances.

Read more…

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 5, 2010.
With Republicans beating the drums incessantly for the proposition that “the American people have rejected health care reform,” it’s probably not a bad time to recall the discussion that broke out late last year over evidence that many people saying they oppose specific proposals do so because they want to take reform much farther.
Exhibit A was an Ipsos-McClatchey poll taken in November. Here was Nate Silver’s take on it:

Ipsos/McClatchy put out a health care poll two weeks ago. The topline results were nothing special: 34 percent favored “the health care reform proposals presently being discussed”, versus 46 percent opposed, and 20 percent undecided. The negative-12 net score is roughly in line with the average of other polls, although the Ipsos poll shows a higher number of undecideds than most others.
Ipsos, however, did something that no other pollster has done. They asked the people who opposed the bill why they opposed it: because they are opposed to health care reform and thought the bill went too far? Or because they support health care reform but thought the bill didn’t go far enough?
It turns out that a significant minority of about 25 percent of the people who opposed the plan — or about 12 of the overall sample — did so from the left; they thought the plan didn’t go far enough.

Well, Ipsos-McClatchey is back with another poll, and it’s shows an even stronger percentage of reform “opponents” thinking current bills don’t go far enough: more than a third of the 47% of respondents opposing “the reforms being discussed” say it’s because “they don’t go far enough.” Added to the 41% of respondents who say they support “the reforms being discussed,” that’s a pretty significant majority favoring strong government action to reform the health care system.
If that’s right, then maybe a majority of Americans technically favor a “no” vote on health care reform. But it’s not at all clear that they’ll be any happier with a perpetuation of the status quo, much less the kind of “reforms” Republicans are talking about. It looks like a significant share of the public wants something with a strong public option, or perhaps a full-blown single-payer system. It’s disengenuous to pretend these are people who have linked arms with Rush Limbaugh and congressional Republican leaders to fight against serious reform.
Bill Galston’s correct: Democrats should do what’s right on health reform regardless of the polls. But if they do, it’s worth noting that they really aren’t necessarily sailing into the wind of public opinion.

This item by Ed Kilgore was first published on March 4, 2010.
This week’s big preoccupation in the chattering classes is about White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Is he in danger of being fired? Should he be? Is he engaged in a death struggle with David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs? Is he leaking his side of the story to the press? And on and on it goes.
Without question, internecine strife in the White House is a perpetual favorite of the beltway media. But the important thing for Democrats is to avoid the mistake of feeding this dangerous beast by making administration personalities proxies in fights over ideology, strategy or tactics, or scapegoats for disappointments and frustrations.
Unfortunately, such proxy wars are in great danger of getting out of control. Some progressives, with honest and sincere objections to various policies and rhetoric of the Obama administration, have seized on Emanuel as a Rasputin figure: he’s the key player in a “centrist” Clintonian clique that’s ruining the promise of Obama’s presidency; he’s an unprincipled tactician who sells out progressive policies; he bears responsibility for recruiting “conservatives” to run for office as Democrats when he chaired the DCCC; his friends are a bunch of corporate whores. Some “centrists” return the favor by creating a distorted caricature of Emanuel as the sole heroic realist in the White House fighting a lonely battle against impractical ideologues who’d prefer Republican victory to any accommodation of public opinion on their pet issues. Republicans themselves, of course, are gleefully piling on, agreeing with every available attack on every figure in the administration, while the political gossip columnists of the media exploit the opportunity to keep the daily debate as lurid and superficial as possible.
Democrats can’t stop the gossip columnists or the Republicans, both of whom have their own distasteful ulterior motives for promoting this divisive narrative, but they can firmly and emphatically refuse to participate in this profoundly destructive game – and they better start doing so right now. Barack Obama is the president, and there’s nothing in his background or present behavior to suggest that he’s the passive tool of his own staff or disengaged from the decisions that bear his name. In this White House as in any other, there is a place for strategists and for tacticians, for visionaries and for pragmatists, for people who are protecting the presidential “brand” and for people who don’t think much beyond this November. This White House, like every other, has made, and will continue to make, mistakes—some big, some little, some whose consequences nobody is in a position to calculate. At this exceptionally complicated moment in political history, there’s rarely any blindingly obvious course of action for the administration that only a fool or a knave would fail to undertake. We all have our opinions about what’s gone right or wrong on issues ranging from the minutiae of health care policy to the broad outlines of the Democratic Party’s message, and second-guessing is inherent to human nature. But converting our necessary disagreements over substantive issues into personality-based political soap opera represents an act of foolish self-indulgence that no successful political enterprise can endure for long.
At some point—at this point—it really is time to stop pointing fingers and focus on the political tasks just ahead. Encouraging “internecine war” narratives in the media is never a good idea, and it’s a particularly bad idea when it tends to make the president look weak and manipulated, and make his advisors look petty and divided. The president is the only one in a position to completely understand how his team functions, and how their strengths and weaknesses can best be managed.
So please, fellow Democrats, let’s not join our opponents in trashing Rahm or Ax or Robert or Valerie or any other satellite in the presidential orbit, and stop projecting our worries and hopes onto people who are invariably more complex than the cartoon caricatures that are imposed on them by observers with personal agendas. The late musician George Harrison once called gossip “the devil’s radio.” Democrats ought to avoid joining in political insider gossip of the type we are hearing right now like it’s the devil himself.

This item by Ed Kilgore is cross-posted from The New Republic, where it was first published on March 2, 2010.
All across the country, Republicans are fantasizing about a gigantic electoral tide that will sweep out deeply entrenched Democratic incumbents this November. In their telling, this deep-red surge will be so forceful as to dislodge even legislators who don’t look vulnerable now, securing GOP control of both houses of Congress.
But could this scenario really come to pass? That will depend, in part, on what type of Republican Party the Democrats are running against in the fall.
Hence the importance of this year’s Republican civil war. In a string of GOP primary elections stretching from now until September, the future ideological composition of the elephant party hangs in the balance. Many of these primaries pit self-consciously hard-core conservatives, often aligned with the Tea Party movement, against “establishment” candidates—some who are incumbents, and some who are simply vulnerable to being labeled “RINOs” or “squishes” for expressing insufficiently ferocious conservative views.
Below is your guide to this year’s most important ideologically-freighted GOP primaries and their consequences. Confining ourselves just to statewide races, let’s take them in chronological order:
TEXAS, MARCH 2: Today’s showdown is in Texas, where “establishment” Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison is challenging conservative incumbent Governor Rick Perry. Perry, who won only 39 percent of the vote in a four-candidate race in 2006, spent much of the last year cozying up to Tea Party activists and occasionally going over the brink into talk of secession. He seemed to have the race against the Washington-tainted Hutchinson well in hand, until a third GOP candidate, libertarian/Tea Party favorite Debra Medina, started to surge in the polls early this year.
Medina’s candidacy once threatened to knock Perry into a runoff or even displace Hutchison from the second spot. But then Medina went on the Glenn Beck Program and expressed openness to the possibility that the federal government was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Still, it’s not clear Perry will clear 50 percent. An expensive and potentially divisive runoff would weaken him against the Democratic candidate, Houston Mayor Bill White, who looks quite competitive in early polling.
INDIANA, MAY 4: In the Hoosier State, right-wingers are flaying each other. Former Senator Dan Coats, a relatively conservative figure with strong “establishment” support, faces three even more conservative rivals in the race to succeed Evan Bayh. Coats is a longtime favorite of religious conservatives and an early member of the evangelical conservative network which author Jeff Sharlet dubs “The Family.” He’s secured early endorsements from D.C.-based conservative leaders Mike Pence and James Bopp (an RNC member who authored both the “Socialist Democrat Party” and “litmus test” resolutions). But his Beltway support has created a backlash in Indiana, and some Second Amendment fans recall that Coats voted for the Brady Bill and the assault-weapons ban. Coats is also smarting from revelations that he’s been registered to vote in Virginia since leaving the Senate, and working in Washington as a lobbyist for banks, equity firms, and even foreign governments (his firm represented—yikes—Yemen).
With the vote coming so soon, hard-core conservatives probably won’t have time to unite behind an alternative; some favor Tea Party-oriented state senator Marlin Stutzman, while others are sticking with a old-timey right-wing warhorse, former Representative John Hostetler. But if they do, and Coats loses, it will probably spur a headlong national panic among “establishment” Republicans, even well-credentialed conservatives who haven’t quite joined the tea partiers. Indiana Democrats have managed to recruit a strong Senate nominee in Congressman Brad Ellsworth, who might hold onto Bayh’s Senate seat.
UTAH, MAY 8: Utah Senator Bob Bennett, the bipartisan dealmaker, is in trouble. He voted for TARP, he has been a high-visibility user of earmarks, and, worse yet, he co-sponsored a universal health-reform bill with Democratic Senator Ron Wyden. So right-wingers want his head. Bennett’s defeat has become an obsession of influential conservative blogger Erick Erickson of Red State, and the Club for Growth, the big bully of economic conservatism, has attacked Newt Gingrich for speaking on his behalf.
Bennett’s first test will come on May 8, when delegates to Utah’s state GOP convention will vote on a Senate nominee. If he fails to get 60 percent, he’ll be pushed into a June 22 primary. Bennett faces three potentially credible right-wing challengers, but the “comer” seems to be Mike Lee, a former law clerk to Justice Samuel Alito, who has been endorsed by Dick Armey’s powerful FreedomWorks organization. Since this is Utah, there is no Democrat in sight who is strong enough to exploit such a right-wing “purge.” Bennett’s defeat would only make the Republican Party more conservative, and provide another object lesson to any GOP-er thinking about cosponsoring major legislation with a Democrat.

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