In all the brouhaha over the president’s remarks at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast, the intra-Christian dynamic was sometimes lost. I tried to explain this at TPMCafe:

[B]eyond the context of Christian-Islamic rivalry and comparative assessments of religious violence, Obama was also quietly but forcefully continuing an intra-Christian argument over clarity of God’s Will and whether those who assert they know it in detail are exhibiting faithful obedience or arrogant self-righteousness. There’s no question where the president stands on the question:

I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt–not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.

For Obama, as for many liberal Protestants, the “fear of God” connotes not only tolerance of other believers (and nonbelievers), but separation of church and state, which he treats as a practical application of the Golden Rule. And that, more than the specific challenge of how to speak about Islamic terrorists, enrages many conservative Christians, both “traditionalist” Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Consider this reaction from conservative blogger, radio talk host and Fox News “personality” Erick Erickson, who is also taking classes at a conservative Calvinist seminary:

Barack Obama is not, in any meaningful way, a Christian and I am not sure he needs to continue the charade. With no more elections for him, he might as well come out as the atheist/agnostic that he is. He took his first step in doing so yesterday in a speech reeking with contempt for faith in general and Christianity in particular…
.
Christ said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” (John 14:6) Christ himself is truth. When we possess Christ, we possess truth. The President is a moral relativist. It was clear in his whole speech…. To suggest that everyone can have some version of God and some version of truth is worldly babbling, not Christianity.

In this respect Obama is, consciously or unconsciously, standing in for liberal Americans–or to some extent, though the overlap is not total, “mainline” Protestants or “modern” Catholics–who do not subscribe to biblical inerrancy, spiritual exclusivity, or the sense that Christians are a besieged or even persecuted community marked by conservative cultural commitments that separate them from a wicked world. Such Christians are quite a large group, even though they are often ignored by secular observers who buy the idea that the only “authentic” Christians (or “Christian music,” or “Christian films”) are conservative. More than 26 million belong to the “mainline” Protestant denominations, and more than 60 percent of American Catholics favor some or a great deal of adjustment to tradition in accordance with “modern needs” (57 percent oppose church teachings on same-sex marriage, to cite one example of the “moral relativism” that involves). And after decades of hearing that liberal Christianity is dying, there’s actually fresh evidence that among millennials the much-discussed trend towards unbelief disguises an even sharper trend towards “moderate” positions among the majority that are believers.

It’s important for both believers and non-believers in the progressive camp to fight the effort to claim Christianity for conservatism, so long as the United States continues to be the most religiously inclined advanced industrial nation in the world. In that respect, even those progressives who are annoyed by Barack Obama’s tendency to lend legitimacy to those who deny the legitimacy of his own faith owe him some support on this point.

We all remember when Mitt Romney outsmarted himself in 2012 by calling his approach to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country as “self-deportation”–a strategy of making life so miserable for the undocumented, via all kinds of petty harassment and denial of hope, that they’d find their way across the border without the messy expedients of police dogs, cattle prods or boxcars.
It worked pretty well for Mitt in the GOP nomination contest, but was a significant part of the reason he lost the Latino vote by 44 points in November and also burnished his reputation for being an unfeeling plutocrat.
If possible, Republicans may make “self-deportation” seem pretty humane by the end of the current presidential cycle. But in the mean time, the term isn’t a bad description of where they are going in their famously new attention to income inequality, as I noted this week at Washington Monthly:

If you read Brian Beutler’s review of Jeb Bush’s “big speech” at the Detroit Economic Club tomorrow, it’s obvious the former Florida’s governor’s idea of squaring conservative orthodoxy with a “right to rise” agenda for social mobility is to double or triple down on the idea that government assistance programs trap people in non-working dependence.

As metaphors for social insurance go, “spider web” sounds disgusting, but beats Paul Ryan’s idyllic “hammock” in that it at least treats beneficiaries as unwitting victims, rather than coddled malingerers. Ultimately, though, they amount to the same critique: When the government intervenes to support the poor and working classes, it captures them and saps them of ambition.

If you really believe people structure their lives around short-term money considerations, then anti-poverty programs, which by definition must phase down benefits as earned income increases, can easily look like traps, and conservative audiences who (a) don’t view the government benefits they receive as morally tainted, (b) resent having to pay taxes to support those people, and (c) bridle at any suggestion they might harbor prejudice, instinctively love this kind of “analysis,” implying as it does that abandonment is a sort of tough love. It’s kind of a general social-policy version of “self-deportation” for undocumented immigrants: make live less tolerable for the poor, and they’ll get themselves out of poverty.

The crocodile tears for those damaged via humane treatment are pretty much the same.

What with Republicans all suddenly talking about wage stagnation and income inequality, it’s very important that Democrats understand how adept the opposition has become in adapting its eternal agenda to changing circumstances. I discussed this at some length at TPMCafe this week:

This is most obvious with economic and fiscal policy, where the conservative movement and the Republican Party have embraced a largely static agenda of deregulation, top-end personal and business tax cuts and sharp reductions in domestic spending, with periodic attacks on New Deal and Great Society entitlement programs, with “devolution” as an instrument for “reform,” for well over thirty years…..There has been a “minority report” on taxes among conservatives favoring a consumption tax–the “Fair Tax” promoted by Mike Huckabee and many others being the most popular contemporary iteration–but the distributional thrust is the same or even more regressive. And there has also been persistent interest among social conservatives in “family-friendly” tax policies, usually a big boost in the child tax credit. But it’s pretty much a regular menu with the occasional refresh.
What’s fascinating, though, is how these policies are offered again and again as an agenda for all seasons and all circumstances–good times (like the late 1990s), bad times (like the last few years), budget surpluses (in 2001, when George W. Bush marketed his huge package of tax cuts as a “rebate”), budget deficits (the 1980s through the early 1990s, and again since 2009), and just about every climate in between the extremes.
Lately we’re getting a slightly remixed version of the same old, same old as the “answer” to wage stagnation and income equality–essential topics for a number of reasons, notably the growth and unemployment indices making it tougher to attack Obama for a slow or nonexistent recovery from the Great Recession. But if you listen closely, there’s not a whole lot we haven’t heard before, as Bloomberg Politics‘ Ben Brody noted recently:

In July, Representative Paul Ryan’s Budget Committee issued a draft anti-poverty plan lamenting that “far too many people are stuck on the lower rungs” of the economy and recommending a combination of reformed social safety nets, state flexibility in education, and decreased regulations. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, meanwhile, has gone even farther, declaring on his website that “the United States is beset by a crisis in inequality” and that “bigger government is not the solution to unequal opportunity–it’s the cause.”

Uh huh: You got your “entitlement reform,” your devolution, your deregulation, and your smaller government. And even more Republicans are eager to throw some tax preferences at the problem. That’s the standard formula from “Reformicon” intellectuals and the handful of Republican pols (notably Marco Rubio) listening to them . But it mostly revolves around the old social conservative indirect method of addressing economic problems by encouraging marriage and children.

So next time you hear of a Republican leader offering a proposal or batch of proposals to address a new national challenge, be sure to look first to see if the “solution” sounds familiar.

The possibility of another Mitt Romney run has generated a new round of speculation about the relevance of presidential candidates’ religious views, particularly since Mitt’s boosters say he will not hide that particular light under a bushel in 2016. But I’d say that in the Republican field, there are quite a few other candidates whose opinions on how their faith affects their politics could use some more scrutiny. I went down that perilous road today at the Washington Monthly:

[T]here are proto-candidates who say with some credibility that their religion has a big impact on their political views and/or their sense of mission, including Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Chris Christie and John Kasich. Ben Carson, like Mitt Romney, belongs to a church most Americans would consider exotic, the Seventh Day Adventists, and he talks a lot about faith. Carly Fiorina doesn’t go to church a lot, but says she used to read a lot of St. Thomas Aquinas. John Bolton, a member of the mainline Evangelical Lutheran Church, doesn’t much mention it. And I’d say it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton is a reasonably serious Methodist.
But then you have some other candidates who have more or less made it clear they view themselves (sincerely or not) as spiritual warriors who are in politics in no small part to vindicate a faith threatened by unbelievers and false believers. They would include Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz. Scott Walker, a conservative evangelical who’s said on occasion that he’s on a divine mission, is a borderline case; we’ll see how he behaves among the very explicitly theocratic conservative clergy and laity of Iowa in the months just ahead. And then there’s Bobby Jindal, the self-described “evangelical Catholic” who seems to want to make his campaign a religious crusade, but doesn’t appear to know the words or the music to that particular hymn.
The point here is that the instinctive antipathy towards talking about the religion of political candidates goes from being a small to a big mistake when said candidates are explicitly making religious appeals, not just in the generic “God Bless America” sense but by telling certain kinds of believers they’d better get on board the bandwagon or they’ll wind up nailed to a cross, which is more or less what Mike Huckabee’s been saying lately. Personally, Mitt Romney’s religion is pretty far down my list of concerns.

As a matter of fact, it bugs me that some of the same candidates we are talking about here–Huckabee, Perry, Cruz and Jindal–have an especially close relationship with the Christian Right group the American Family Association, which today sought to disassociate itself from its longtime mouthpiece Bryan Fischer because his long history of racist and homophobic commentary was endangering an AFA-financed trip to Israel for a large number of RNC members. No, this is not a good time to declare discussion of presidential candidates’ religious opinions off-limits–unless they’re willing to stop invoking divine favor themselves.

As you probably know, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was the star of the Iowa Freedom Summit in Iowa last weekend, the first “cattle call” of the 2016 Republican presidential contest. A lot of accounts focused on his speaking style, or his recitation of “accomplishments” in Wisconsin. But at TPMCafe I pointed to something else that was going on:

For my money, what most makes Scott Walker attractive to the kind of people who attended the Iowa Freedom Summit is his perceived electability: As he mentioned in his speech, and nearly every commenter duly repeated, he’s won three elections in four years in a state carried twice by Barack Obama and governed by a Democrat right before him. Yes, two of those elections were in relatively-low-turnout midterms, and his defeat of a recall effort in 2012 was a special election where he also benefited from the reluctance of some swing voters to remove a duly elected governor from office in the middle of a term. But it’s a better record of electability than other candidates can boast of, unless John Kasich or Rick Snyder run. (Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney won in competitive states, but not since 2002).
There’s a bonus, though, that may make Walker’s pitch especially seductive: He won over and over again in Wisconsin without compromising with conservatism’s enemies. Indeed, he behaved almost like a liberal caricature of a conservative villain. And it was deliberate. In 2013, after his recall victory, Walker published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering the novel theory that his aggressive conservatism gave him a leg up with swing voters:

Polls show that about 11% of the people in Wisconsin today support both me and the president. There are probably no two people in public life who are more philosophically opposite–yet more than one in 10 approve of us both.
To make a conservative comeback, Republicans need to win these Obama-Walker voters and their equivalents across the country. In the Wisconsin recall election, we mobilized conservative voters by standing up for conservative principles against enormous pressure. But we also persuaded at least some of President Obama’s supporters to support us, too…
The way Republicans can win those in the middle is not by abandoning their principles. To the contrary, the courage to stand on principle is what these voters respect. The way to win the center is to lead.
That’s why those arguing that conservatives have to “moderate” their views if they want to appeal to the country are so wrong.

This is catnip to conservatives. They’re being endlessly lectured by mainstream media pundits and political professionals in their own camp that they need to “compromise” with Democrats or “reach out” to new constituencies beyond their base if they are to win presidential elections. That’s almost exactly what Jeb Bush is saying in announcing he’s willing to take some hits in the primaries if it enables him to win a general election. But conservatives naturally resist this kind of tradeoff, which they believe they’ve been asked to make far too often with far too little payoff. Walker tells them they do not have to choose. They can win by confrontation, not compromise or outreach, and his three victories are the proof.

Keep that in mind next time you hear Walker’s rationale for candidacy is some sort of relatively moderate ideological positioning. He’s found a sweet spot where electability doesn’t mean “moving to the center.”

The painful process of winnowing down a potentially gigantic Republican president field is now officially underway with two events, one yesterday and one tomorrow.
Yesterday Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush got together in Utah to discuss–well, we don’t know exactly what they discussed. But what apparently began as a courtesy call by Bush on the “titular head of the Republican Party” became something else after Romney abruptly put himself back into the Invisible Primary with aggressive moves towards a candidacy. They’re now practically stumbling over each other in the pursuit of donors and perhaps campaign staff. Perhaps they divided them up yesterday; perhaps they just agreed neither of them would make any moves that would wind up representing a murder-suicide for the Establishment wing of the GOP. We’ll have to wait and see.
Tomorrow’s event is public (though it will undoubtedly be accompanied by private meetings and much kissing-of-the-ring of its primary host): the Iowa Freedom Summit being co-hosted by the famous nativist and all-around right-wing bully-boy Rep. Steve King in conjunction with the public-spirited folks at Citizens United. This is the first major “cattle call” of the 2016 cycle, where proto-candidates will give sequential speeches, mixed in with local and national conservative celebrities. The would-be presidents include John Bolton, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Scott Walker. Also there will be Jim DeMint, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, and Iowa’s new conservative heartthrob, Joni Ernst. Bush and Romney won’t be there because of “scheduling conflicts,” which might have been their Utah meet. Rand Paul won’t be there because he doesn’t do cattle calls (other than actual debates). Others (Pence, Kasich, Graham, Rubio) probably haven’t done enough to be counted as being serious about running. I have no idea why Bobby Jindal isn’t going to be there, other than it conflicting with his “trade mission” to Europe wherein he’s insulting Muslims.
In any event, aside from the speakers the event will include a large crowd of conservative activists and a horde of media folk. Both will be watching for several “stories:” (a) 2008 Iowa Caucus winner Mike Huckabee vs. 2012 winner Rick Santorum for Christian Right leadership; (b) Chris Christie dealing with a rare hostile audience; (c) Rick Perry trying to show his “new” slick persona; (d) Glenn Beck faction favorite Ben Carson with his first real spotlight speaking appearance; (e) Scott Walker trying to dispel the “Next Pawlenty” image by showing some fire; and (f) seeing who will do the most to pander publicly to King’s POV on immigration. There’s even a remote possibility someone will try to do a “Sister Souljah” gesture towards King and/or Iowa conservatives, though a tropical hurricane hitting Des Moines may be more likely.
But in any event, by Monday someone will have moved up or down–or maybe out–in the 2016 contest.

I certainly agree with E.J.. Dionne’s contention that the president is discarding most of his lingering illusions about Republicans. But just as importantly, he’s learning to play them like a violin on occasions. I assessed his ability to flummox Republicans in the State of the Union Address over at TPM Cafe yesterday.

Republicans were very much bystanders last night. Obama did not allude to the midterm elections nor acknowledge the GOP takeover of the Senate. He did not treat Republican attacks on his use of executive authority as some sort of clash of the titans, and briskly bundled most of his veto threats into a single paragraph. His specific economic policy proposals (packaged as “middle class economics”) were exceedingly well-tested and very popular, and because Republicans oppose them all, he left them sitting on their hands.
And he managed to diminish recent GOP complaints and demands, dismissing the Keystone XL pipeline as just another infrastructure project, mocking the Cuba policies he is discarding as archaic, and describing his immigration actions as the exasperated expedient of a president tired of Republican divisions. Obama also probably wrong-footed Republicans by giving so little time to the tax proposals that got so much attention in the last few days. There was no hard-edged “populist” appeal to denounce as “class warfare” or “income redistribution.”

Sen. Joni Ernst’s official “response” to the SOTU Address wasn’t quite as disastrous as, say, Bobby Jindal’s in 2009. But it was empty and mostly focused on her autobiography, and it played right into Obama’s efforts to suggest that the GOP had nothing to “sell” on the economy beyond a controversial pipeline project (a big chunk of Ernst’s speech was about the Keystone XL).

What the evening indicated is that the GOP that came out of the November midterms so full of confidence and ready to put Barack Obama in his place continues to be off-balance and divided when it’s not simply opposing whatever the president proposes. And as the 2016 Republican presidential nominating process heats up–beginning just a few days from now with Rep. Steve King’s candidate vetting exercise in Des Moines, the so-called Iowa Freedom Summit–the vague pieties of King’s junior U.S. Senator tonight just won’t cut it.

Today the big news is that House Republicans have managed to screw up a one-car funeral by adding provisions to a long-awaited federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy that would limit the rape exception. This produced a revolt among House Republican woman and the handful of remaining “moderates” and forced the leadership to yank the bill–intended as a treat for visiting antichoice protesters in Washington for the annual March for Life–and substitute a less base-satisfying reconfirmation of the ban on federal funding for abortions.
No, the 114th Congress is not off to a real good start for the GOP.

Republicans have announced they will hold their 2016 National Convention from July 18-21 next year. This decision both reflects and creates some significant strategic considerations for both parties, as I discussed at Washington Monthly:

It’ll be the earliest national convention since the Democratic confab that nominated Bill Clinton in 1992, and the earliest Republican convention since you-know-who’s nomination in Detroit in 1980 (don’t imagine we won’t hear a lot about that!).
In announcing the dates, RNC chairman Reince Priebus seemed to suggest the main rationale for the relatively early convention was “access to crucial general election funds.” It’s not clear if he was talking about public matching funds that are only made available once a nominee has been chosen; that seems a bit anachronistic, since both major-party nominees rejected public funding in 2012 and there’s no particular reason to think they’ll accept them along with spending limits this time around. He could, alternatively, be talking about access to privately-raised hard money that are subject to separate primary and general-election contribution limits. Either way, in this post-Citizens United era, it sounds like a blast from 1996.
When it first arose the idea of an early GOP convention seemed linked to a push by the RNC to compress the entire nominating process. Indeed, the talk then was of a June convention, in conjunction with wrapping up the primaries in April or early May. But here’s why June didn’t work out, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

[T]he Republican National Committee’s selection of Cleveland last July came days before NBA star LeBron James announced that he was returning home to Ohio.
James’ Cavaliers play their games at Quicken Loans Arena, which will be the main site for convention programming. His return increased the probability of Cleveland playoff basketball into June — a prospect that made the arena’s pre-convention availability to Republican planners and Secret Service uncertain.

Hah! Can’t imagine the business of nominating The Next President of the United States would trump the NBA playoffs!
In any event, the early speculation has been that Democrats will go the other way and once again hold their convention in late August or early September, creating a large hiatus (filled partially by the Olympics) and also giving Ds a chance to stage-manage a “bounce.” They could even emulate the Republican gambit in 2008 of announcing the nominee’s running-mate well before the convention–say, the day after the GOP confab–to step on any GOP “bounce.” Either way, they’ll have plenty of time to think about it.

I’ve always thought forming the party ticket much earlier than the conventions is a good idea, both for strategic purposes and to avoid what happened to the GOP in 2008.

One of the meta-messaging challenges of our age is to defend the idea that key government programs do indeed represent “public investments” that produce tangible outcomes worth measuring–for good or for ill. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

Conservatives have for years mocked the use of the term “investment” for public expenditures, arguing that it’s just a cosmetic code word for “spending,” and an effort to borrow on the respectability of entirely non-germane business practices. But to the extent that public spending is explicitly aimed at producing non-immediate payoffs, it is ridiculous not to view–and then to measure–the future return on “investment.”
So even as Republicans perpetually seek to deride, devolve, or demolish Medicaid as ineffective welfare for those people, along comes a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research evaluating the long-term impact of covering children under Medicaid. And as reported by The Upshot‘s Margot Sanger-Katz, the results are impressive even if you limit the “payback” to measurable contributions to the beneficiaries’ earning power and subsequent tax payments:

The study used newly available tax records measured over decades to examine the effects of providing Medicaid insurance to children. Instead of looking at the program’s immediate impact on those children and their families, it followed them once they became adults and began paying federal taxes.
People who had been eligible for Medicaid as children, as a group, earned higher wages and paid higher federal taxes than their peers who were not eligible for the federal-state health insurance program. And the more years they were eligible for the program, the larger the difference in earnings.
“If we examine kids that were eligible for different amounts of Medicaid over the course of their childhood, we see that the ones that were eligible for more Medicaid ended up paying more taxes through income and payroll taxes later in life,” said Amanda Kowalski, an assistant professor of economics at Yale and one of the study’s authors.
The results mean that the government’s investment in the children’s health care may not have cost as much as budget analysts expected. The study, by a team that included economists from the Treasury Department, was able to calculate a return on investment in the form of tax revenue.
The return wasn’t high enough to pay the government back for its investment in health insurance by the time the children reached age 28, when the researchers stopped tracking the subjects. By that age, the Treasury had earned back about 14 cents for every dollar that the federal and state governments had spent on insurance. But it did suggest that, if the subjects’ wages continued to follow typical trajectories as they aged, the federal government would earn back about what it spent on its half of the program by the time the children reached 60 — about 56 cents on the dollar, calculated using a formula that took into account the time value of money.

These calculations do not, of course, include the ROI of healthier, happier lives.
Paul Krugman looks at this study and relates it to the Republican drive for “dynamic scoring” of tax measures in Congress–which means including estimates of the economic activity they believe tax cuts will produce along with their positive affect on revenues.

While Krugman is right to suggest the “dynamic scoring” fight provides a good opportunity to counter-punch with the “public investment” argument, that argument is important to progressives on its own. Instead of accepting the false premise of an irrepressible conflict between government as inherently good and government as inherently bad, Democrats should be prepared to argue that key investments are indeed effective by any honest accounting, and are irreplaceable by the invisible hand of markets or any other substitutes.

We’re all accustomed to the reality that demographic changes are occurring that all in all are friendly to the prospects of the Democratic Party, at least as they have been manifested in recent elections. There’s plenty of argument over how fast these changes are occurring; whether they are at least partially reversible; and the wisdom or folly of relying on them. But they’re real.
Now the Center for American Progress is first out of the box with a study of how demographic changes could affect the 2016 elections. I wrote about this today at the Washington Monthly:

The write-up from CAP’s Patrick Oakford notes that two scenarios were analyzed: what would happen in 2016 if the party preferences of 2012 are projected four years down the line, and what would happen if the party preferences of 2004 are assumed to reassert themselves. This second scenario reflects the theory–understandably popular among Republicans–that not having Barack Obama on the ballot would cause the Democratic vote share to relapse to pre-Obama “normal” levels.
Obviously the first scenario would produce a larger Democratic victory than in 2012, with North Carolina rejoining the blue state ranks. I find the second scenario more interesting:

In some states, such as Florida, restoring party preferences to their 2004 levels would enable the GOP to narrowly win back states they lost in 2012 but had won in previous elections. However, in order to win back other key states that the GOP won in 2004, such as Ohio and Nevada, the GOP would need to exceed the share of support it received from voters of color in 2004.

This last observation is interesting insofar as George W. Bush won an impressive 16% of the African-American vote in Ohio in 2004. Does anyone see that performance being exceeded in 2016? I sure don’t.

Overall, the numbers suggest Democrats have a bit of a margin of error in battleground states even if percentages of minority voters drop a bit. But the turnout needs to stay up, and the whole proposition would look a lot stronger if Democrats cut into Bush04 levels among older and whiter voters.