Clare Malone and Jamelle Bouie have “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Super Tuesday” up at The American Prospect. Frank James of NPR.org weighs in with “Super Tuesday: What to Look For.”
The Nation’s Ben Adler elaborates on “Rick Santorum’s Elite background” in stark contrast to his working-class pretensions, first noted at TDS by James Vega. As Adler notes, “His fraudulence as a working class candidate, both biographically and substantively, hasn’t stopped him from making reactionary appeals to anti-elite resentment…There’s no doubt that Santorum is more adept at appealing to cultural and class resentments of working class voters than Romney. But that doesn’t mean he is actually working class himself, and the media should not indulge this fantasy any more than they should have let George W. Bush pretend he was a brush-clearing cowboy.”
Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland has some interesting advice for President Obama in his Ohio campaign. As Pete Hamby writes at CNN’s Political Ticker: “If I were the president, I would talk about the Cayman Islands, I would talk about Swiss bank accounts. What could persuade a man running for president to have Swiss bank account?
Sue, Sandra sue!
Turns out Rush Limbaugh’s oft-cited ratings are a lot of baloney, alleges Cenk Uygur. Writing in HuffPo, Uygur says: How many listeners does Rush Limbaugh have? Well, in the press there are only two numbers you’ll ever see — 20 million or 15 million. Those are large numbers, so that is why Limbaugh is taken seriously and is believed to be influential…I’ve got news for you — those numbers are a total fabrication. They’re made up out of whole cloth…” Uygur explains how listener ‘ratings’ are determined and concludes “Rush’s audience is a myth. He is a paper tiger. Do some people listen to him? Of course. Is it anywhere near the hype? Not remotely. Talk radio is a dying business. I wouldn’t be surprised if his daily listeners didn’t even reach a million…”
Looks like Dems’ initial optimism about taking Snowe’s Senate seat was a little premature, reports Steve Kornacki at Salon.com. A popular former Governor Angus King, is now preparing to run as an independent. King is one of two Maine Governors who have been elected as Independents.
A new CNN/ORC poll has President Obama tied with a generic GOP nominee — in Georgia, reports Atlanta Journal Constitution Political Insider Jim Galloway.
Dems, don’t even think about tilting toward a little austerity, now that the recovery seems on track, argues Nobel laureate Paul Krugman in his ‘Conscience of a Liberal’ blog entitled ‘Not Again With The Pivot.’ Krugman offers five compelling reasons, including: “…it just isn’t true that structural adjustment, to the extent that we do need it, proceeds faster and more easily when the economy is depressed. Workers won’t leave jobs if they aren’t reasonably sure of finding others; firms won’t invest even in useful new technologies unless there’s adequate demand. Keeping the economy weak is a way to postpone good changes, not accelerate them…”
Women trending blue, says NBC’s Chuck Todd.
Ambreen Ali has a post up at Roll Call Politics, “GOTV a Mission of Hispanic Media,” which ought to chill Republican leaders. According to Ali, “Last month, Univision partnered with Hispanic advocacy groups and smaller media outlets in a campaign called “Ya Es Hora,” or “It Is Time,” to broadcast information on how to register to vote, comprehensive campaign coverage and news segments on issues such as immigration and jobs…A similar campaign ahead of the 2008 elections helped naturalize more than 1.4 million people, according to the network…Telemundo launched its own campaign with advocacy groups in November, called “Vota por Tu Futuro,” or “Vote for Your Future,” and has even worked political plots into its steamy soap operas…Univision and Telemundo both reach more than 90 percent of Hispanic households, giving them access to a much-coveted bloc of swing voters.”

If there is anything more disgusting than Rush Limbaugh’s revolting misogynist diatribe and his ‘apology,’ it would have to be the weasel word responses of Republican and conservative ‘leaders.’ For example:

Mitt Romney said Limbaugh’s remarks were “not the language I would have used.”
“…Rick Santorum said Limbaugh’s comments were “absurd,” he said the radio host was an “entertainer” and “an entertainer can be absurd.””
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Limbaugh was “right to apologize,” but still missed the point, blaming the “elite media” for exacerbating the controversy.
“It sounded a little crude the way it came across to me,” Paul said. “I don’t know why it has to be such a political football like this, so you have to ask him about his crudeness.”
Former Republican presidential candidate John McCain says it’s “totally unacceptable” for Rush Limbaugh to call a law student a “slut”
“Republican strategists, speaking anonymously out of fear of Rush’s power, have pointed to how his sexual shaming strategies “hurt Republicans.”

At least one conservative showed some integrity in commenting on the Limbaugh fiasco. As George Stephanopolis writes in his blog at ABC News:

ABC’s George Will told me Sunday on “This Week” that GOP leaders have steered clear of harshly denouncing Limbaugh’s comments because “Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”
“[House Speaker John] Boehner comes out and says Rush’s language was inappropriate. Using the salad fork for your entrée, that’s inappropriate. Not this stuff,” Will said. “And it was depressing because what it indicates is that the Republican leaders are afraid of Rush Limbaugh. They want to bomb Iran, but they’re afraid of Rush Limbaugh.”

I assume the calculation of Republicans in voicing such tepid criticism is about not wanting to alienate the tea party yahoos, coupled with an assumption that all will be forgotten in a couple of months. They may be right. Too many American voters have a short memory about expressions of bigotry, which partly explains the popularity of Ron Paul. But if they are wrong, they will pay a huge price on election day, in which case America will owe a debt of gratitude to women voters.

Democratic strategist Mark Mellman posts on “From a referendum to a choice” at The Hill, noting that the GOP’s original strategy of making the 2012 presidential contest a “referendum on Obama” is rapidly losing viability, with each of the 4 leading GOP candidates making their less-than-impressive track records an unavoidable concern of sensible voters.
Rubio leads in veepstakes poll of Republican voters conducted 2/6-12 by Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind, despite his declaration of non-interest.
If you missed it, like I did, chuckles await you at The Daily Beast in Barbie Latza Nadeau’s “Rick Santorum’s Communist Clan in Italy.” Nadeau writes “On the campaign trail, Santorum often touts his grandfather’s flight from Italy “to escape fascism,” but he has neglected to publicly mention their close ties with the Italian Communist Party…In Riva del Garda his grandfather Pietro and uncles were ‘red communists’ to the core,” writes Oggi journalist Giuseppe Fumagalli…”
It looks like Dems have a good chance to take the U.S. Senate seat now held by Sen. Richard Lugar. Democratic Rep. Joe Donnelly will run against the winner of the Republican primary, in which Sen. Lugar is “being pounded by state Treasurer Richard Mourdock over questions of residency” (Lugar lives in McLean, VA), as Mary Beth Schneider reports in the Indianapolis Star. The Indiana Election Commission will hear challenges Friday to Lugar’s appearance on the ballot.
The Supreme Court may take a case which could reverse Citizens United, taking into account the experience of the two years since the ruling, reports Brenda Wright at Demos.
With low Republican turnout in the primaries, caucuses and beauty contests, the effort to get Dems to cross over and vote in the GOP contests is gathering steam. Kos explains the strategy behind “Operation Hilarity: Let’s keep the GOP clown show going!” Kos challenges Dems “who live in open primary and caucus states–Michigan, North Dakota, Vermont and Tennessee in the next three weeks–to head out and cast a vote for Rick Santorum.” Kos adds, “…If you’re squeamish about this, just remember what’s at stake–not just the White House, but Nancy Pelosi’s gavel and a Senate run by Mitch McConnell. The weaker the GOP standard bearer, the better our chances in November. Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have had no problem meddling in our own contests…The Republicans have offered up this big, slow, juicy softball. Let’s have fun whacking the heck out of it.”
Ayn Randite Rep. Paul Ryan gets a richly-deserved pummeling by The Economist for his sneering at Europe as a supposed exemplar of debt burden: The Economist responds: “The European Union has lower government debt levels than America. Gross government debt in the 27 nations of the EU was 80% of the region’s GDP at the end of 2010; in America gross federal debt at the end of 2010 was 94% of GDP. Furthermore, government debt is growing more slowly as a percentage of GDP in the EU than in America, because pretty much every nation in the EU is implementing austerity measures. The general government deficit in the EU-27 in 2010 was 6.6% of GDP. In America the federal deficit in 2010 was 9% of GDP..”
Just what Romney needed to reclaim his creds with Michigan workers —Trump to the rescue.
Meanwhile, Andrew Romano reports at The Daily Beast: “For much of his presidency, Barack Obama has struggled with working-class whites. But Michigan is providing him with some signs of hope. Thanks in large part to the Obama-Bush auto-bailout package, the state’s unemployment rate has plummeted to 9.3 percent from a recent high of 14.1 percent–the swiftest, sharpest improvement in the country. Obama’s local numbers have followed suit: his approval rating is now well above water, and he leads Romney by double digits after trailing as recently as November, partly because he has gained ground in Macomb County, the original home of the Reagan Democrats. To win nationally, Obama needs to crack 40 percent (his number in 2008) among non-college-educated whites. If Michigan is a preview of things to come, he stands a good chance of pulling it off.”

The Republican primary campaign has provided a foretaste of the bitter and divisive super-PAC driven media tactics that will be used against Obama in the fall. The fundamental and inescapable fact is that Democrats will be on the receiving end of a propaganda campaign of a scope and ferocity unparalleled in American history. Democrats must begin planning now how they will respond.
The attack will be three pronged:
First, there will be a “high road” attack directly sponsored by the Republican presidential candidate – now almost certainly Romney – and the RNC. It will be based on sanctimoniously accusing Obama of having “failed” — that he has not fulfilled his campaign promises and that his policies have proved ineffective. The media has already reported on this planned campaign and how it will reduce the need for Romney to attack Obama personally by using Obama’s own words against him.
This part of the three-pronged approach does not represent any major departure from the practices of past campaigns. Where it will significantly differ is in the use of bogus “facts” and statistics on a scale that would have been previously unacceptable. Years ago statements such as “the stimulus did not create any jobs” and “unemployment has risen under Obama” would have been dismissed as simply false by the media as soon as “mainstream” economists objected. In the modern “post-truth” Fox News world, on the other hand, even the most unambiguously false charges will be described as “debatable” rather than nonsense.
The second prong of the strategy will be a feverish invocation of the culture war narrative — one that will far excel Sarah Palin’s sneering and divisive “we’re the real, the good America; they are the degenerate coastal elites” framework that she used in the 2008 campaign.
The ads – which will come from Super-PAC’s more than official sources — will be ugly and distasteful: they will portray Obama as deeply “un-American” – foreign and alien to the heartland values and daily life of the “real” America. Romney and the Republicans have already made this the centerpiece of their “hardball” attack. Obama “goes around the world apologizing for America.” “He wants to turn America into France.” “He is a socialist who hates free enterprise.” The third-party ads will repeat these same accusations but with an overt appeal to prejudices that will be more accurately described as xenophobic rather than racial. The ads will identify Obama not with ghetto hoodlums or Black Panthers but rather with foreign ideas and ethnicities — “commies”, “America-hating Muslims” and “illegal aliens and foreigners,” all of whom support his goal of undermining America.
The most important and destructive change in 2012, however, will be in the vastly expanded dissemination of a third, flagrantly dishonest and utterly propagandistic “low road” attack – one that will be conducted both above and below the radar.
In 2008 the low road attack on Obama was conducted largely outside the official candidate and Republican party media or the major PAC’-s (one clumsy ad by the McCain campaign that attempted to make a “dog-whistle” suggestion that Obama was the anti-Christ was a notable exception). Most of the 2008 low road attacks circulated under the radar – through distribution to informal e-mail lists and comment threads, through micro-targeted direct mail, through robo-calls and through phone banks run by shadowy outside firms. Within these closed communication channels the claims were widely circulated that Obama was a secret Muslim, a radical/communist, a sympathizer with domestic terrorist bombers, and that he was behind a range of “Birtherist” and other conspiracies. Media Matters for America made pioneering attempt to map these “below the radar” attacks during the 2008 campaign and to outline how they were circulated and amplified within the various conservative communication networks, but the study was discontinued after the elections.
Observers were at first uncertain how important these sub-rosa attacks would be in the 2008 election but the absolutely pivotal role they played became very clear as the passion and enthusiasm of the Republican base became largely driven by these “disreputable” views rather than the more policy-based attack made by McCain himself. The real energy of the Republican base in 2008 was reflected in the almost fanatical Sarah Palin supporters whose enthusiasm vastly exceeded any support for McCain himself and whose signs and shouted slogans reflected the “disreputable” rumor-based views rather than opposition to Obama’s actual platform or priorities.
(The influence of the rumor-based attacks reached a dramatic climax when McCain – in the most honorable single action of his campaign – explicitly rejected the claim of a woman who asked why he didn’t tell voters “the truth” – that Obama was a Muslim terrorist and a traitor during one rally in September. McCain tried to reason with the woman, arguing that Obama was not a terrorist but simply an American with whom he disagreed but the crowd howled its fierce disapproval of his conciliatory remarks.)
Democrats should not assume that Romney will behave as honorably in 2012 as did McCain in 2008. While Romney will hold himself personally aloof, there is little or no chance that he will explicitly disavow the massive low road campaign that will be launched on his behalf.
In 2012 this low road attack – which will once again circulate in large part “under the radar” by e-mail, phone, mail and social media –will have three key characteristics:

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This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
This weekend’s “Thanksgiving Family Forum” at a Des Moines megachurch probably seemed like a great idea to Iowa social conservatives when it was first developed. You’d have the presidential candidates arrayed around a “Thanksgiving table,” obediently waiting for a symbolic serving of activist support. In the pews would be thousands of stolid Iowans of the sort most likely to show up at the January 3 caucuses. Wielding the microphone would be focus-group king Frank Luntz, probing the worldviews of the candidates to determine their fidelity to a teavangelical, big-God, small-government creed. And at the head of the table, in spirit at least, would be Iowa right-wing kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, ready to crown one of the candidates as the Mike Huckabee of 2012.
It could still play out that way, of course, but the political context surrounding the Thanksgiving Family Forum, cosponsored by Vander Plaats’ FAMiLY Leader group, the National Organization for Marriage, and Focus on the Family’s CitizenLink affiliate, suggests the effort to unite Christian Right voters around a single candidate in Iowa could prove too little and too late. Mitt Romney isn’t even bothering to show up for Vander Plaats’s intended display of power, which may be a shrewd estimate of its futility. And with CSPAN pulling its cameras, the event won’t even be televised (though it will be live-streamed by CitizenLink). Indeed, Iowa’s social conservatives, long used to enjoying a remarkable degree of fealty from any GOP candidate hoping to catch fire as a result of a strong caucus showing, are facing an incredibly frightening prospect: their own irrelevance.
Until very recently, Bob Vander Plaats, a perennial statewide candidate who made his mark on the Iowa political landscape with his co-chairmanship of Huck’s 2008 upset win and his role in the successful 2010 purge of three of the Iowa Supreme Court judges who issued the decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2009, had enjoyed outsize political influence over the Republican Party. And with the 2012 GOP presidential cycle looming, most pundits assumed his Iowa-based group would only garner an even greater status within the party. But FAMiLY Leader quickly stumbled in its first big bid for relevance with its sponsorship in July of a pledge document, entitled “The Marriage Vow,” which was intended to mousetrap candidates lusting for a victory in the August Iowa GOP Straw Poll into a litany of very specific right-wing positions on “family issues” (e.g., same-sex relationships, abortion, and even contraception and divorce). The group’s Vow was so clumsily drafted (implying, for example, that African-American families were better off as slaves than they are today) that all the candidates other than Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum felt free to give it a pass, even though Vander Plaats warned it was a precondition to receiving the group’s endorsement.
Even more importantly, Iowa social conservatives seemed to hurt themselves through their inability to unite behind and stick with a single candidate. Maybe if they’d accepted Tim Pawlenty’s arduous courtship earlier this year, he would have emerged as the “viable conservative alternative” to Mitt Romney. Perhaps if they’d united behind Michele Bachmann the day after her victory in the Iowa Straw Poll, her campaign would have shown more staying power. But instead they hopped over to Rick Perry, only to abandon ship for Herman Cain, who with no end in sight for his sexual harassment/sexual assault scandal is hardly looking like a safe bet for the godly.
This demolition derby of candidates acceptable to people like Vander Plaats has left Iowa’s social conservatives in a highly vulnerable position now. If Mitt Romney manages to win the caucuses with the kind of half-hearted effort he has put into the state so far–all the while ignoring would-be kingmakers–the whole supposition that future candidates must spend every other day in the Hawkeye State for months and years before votes are cast will be significantly undermined. A Ron Paul win, meanwhile, would simply be a testament to his own permanent following, not to any Iowa-specific factor, and would also waste Iowa’s endorsement, since there’s no chance he’ll win the nomination. And even if Cain or Gingrich come out on top, it too will prove the irrelevance of directly courting Iowa’s social conservative leaders: Their surges in state polls are a result of the national appeal they generated through debate performances, not through their practically nonexistent ground-games in Iowa. Indeed, it must be disturbing to all Iowa Republicans to consider the fate of Pawlenty and Bachmann, candidates who “played by the rules” with an intensive focus on personal appearances and organizational efforts in the state only to come away with nothing to show for it.
So to whom can Vander Plaats and his group turn now for redemption? Rick Santorum is the only other candidate who has devoted real time and resources to campaigning around the state, which is why teavangelicals who believe their leverage in Iowa is the most important source of their leverage in the national GOP could give him a good long look at the Thanksgiving Family Forum. Some might find it strange that a Roman Catholic like Santorum could wind up being the last-gasp hope of Vander Plaats and his associates, but only a few cranks among conservative evangelicals still regard Rome as “the whore of Babylon;” most are long used to close cooperation with traditionalist Catholics in the anti-choice and anti-gay rights movements. Moreover, Santorum not only signed the “Marriage Vow,” but has defined his candidacy from the beginning in terms of hard-core, no-compromise social conservatism, even as better-known conservative candidates like Perry and Cain struggled on occasion with their positions on abortion and gay marriage. But in getting behind a candidate as uncharismatic and unrealistic as Santorum, Vander Plaats and his associates would be taking a big risk: If Santorum fails to launch, Iowa’s social conservatives would appear to be paper tigers hardly worth noticing–and that would no doubt be considered the worst fate of all.

It looks like the movement to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has big mo, and the Governor is leveraging his powers to suppress a key constituency — young voters, as John Nichols explains in his Nation post, “As Wisconsin Governor’s Poll Numbers Tank, GOP Moves to ‘Rig’ Recall“:

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s support has collapsed, according to a new poll that shows that 58 percent of voters favor recalling the Republican whose anti-labor initiatives provoked the mass demonstrations that anticipated the Occupy Wall Street movement.
According to a new St. Norbert College/Wisconsin Public Radio survey of Wisconsin voters, only 38 percent of voters now support retaining Walker as governor. That represents a ten-point drop in support for the governor since last spring, when it was presumed that he had bottomed out. In fact, they have continued to decline, with significant movement of previously undecided voters into the anti-Walker camp. Thirty-seven percent of Wisconsinites now “strongly disapprove” of Walker’s governorship, while 21 percent merely disapprove. Among the most engaged (and presumably likely) voters, the figure rises to a remarkable 61 percent overall disapproval number for the governor. Significantly, while attitudes toward President Obama and the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, have remained relatively steady, Walker’s numbers have tanked. That’s a serious problem for the governor, as it suggests that voters are crossing partisan and even ideological lines to oppose him.

Nichols reports that The Republican-controlled Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules has ordered Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, which oversees state elections, to subject proposed voting-rights rules to a process that gives Governor Walker and Republican legislative leaders authority to reject rule changes. This gives Walker the power to interfere with the recall election by making decisions about student i.d.’s, address verification and electronic circulation of recall documents.
Nichols quotes Rep. Mark Pocan a Democrat from Madison, “Republicans are trying to make it harder for students to vote and they should be ashamed of themselves…Today, Republicans sent a strong signal that Scott Walker wants the fairest election he can rig.”
Other Republican-sponsored voter suppression initiatives were already underway in Wisconsin, and Nichols notes the irony that Walker was first elected in 2002 as a Milwaukee County executive, as part of a recall campaign. Now he is fighting to survive one as the nation’s poster-boy union-basher, pitted against a rapidly-growing coalition of the working people of Wisconsin.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Last week was a difficult week for the Tea Party. Tuesday’s election results firmly rebutted the idea that the movement had touched off an irresistible rightward wave in American politics, one that would not subside until it submerged the Democratic Party and its union/liberal allies once and for all. Meanwhile, the process of choosing a champion to drive Barack Obama out of the White House is not going well at all. With only seven weeks until actual caucus and primary voting begins, how did the movement arrive at this seemingly hopeless state?
Tea folk knew they’d have a fight on their hands, but they weren’t prepared for it. They wanted to fight off the Beltway hacks and RINOs who had so disingenuously sucked up to the movement in its early days; the devious Mitt Romney was these types’ obvious choice, reflecting as he did their own lack of principle, so Tea Partiers would have to come up with their own candidate. Their chosen method for asserting their interests–namely, by ruthlessly enforcing ideologically rigidity–has proven itself flawed, but they have stuck with it regardless. Despite the electoral defeats of Tea Party candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell in 2010, to most Tea Partiers the lesson of the midterm elections was that the only thing keeping the Republican Party from an enduring majority was its lack of ideological rigor and its cowardly refusal to adopt total war tactics. The very concept of political “overreach,” the term most often applied to the losing side in Ohio’s recent Issue 2 battle, is alien to the Tea Party mind, in which extremism in the defense of liberty is never a vice.
As we’ve seen, the movement has enough size and muscle to give its preferred candidates significant national clout. But with its ideological extremism and insularity, it has also been selecting for candidates who are all but guaranteed to succumb to the intense public scrutiny of a presidential race. It’s no accident that we have seen so many Republicans ascend to frontrunner status, only to flame out in glorious balls of fire.
All along, Tea Party supporters have been holding their own mini-primary during the lead-in to actual voting. Initially, their problem seemed to be an embarrassment of riches when it came to candidates seeking their favor. With Sarah Palin on the sidelines, Michele Bachmann was often called the “Queen of the Tea Party.” But despite her win at the Iowa GOP Straw Poll and her frontrunner status in many national polls, Tea Partiers abandoned her for what then looked like a behemoth of a candidate in Rick Perry, who had thrilled hyper-conservatives in Texas with harsh anti-government rhetoric and event hints of secession as a last resort.
But having brushed aside Bachmann and other Tea Party favorites, Perry promptly lost most of his Tea Party admirers when he reiterated and then clumsily defended his support for making the children of undocumented workers eligible for in-state tuition at Texas colleges–a position that Tea Partiers found deeply offensive, especially when he made the supreme mistake of saying those who disagreed with him had “no heart.”
When Perry crashed, it was not surprising that Tea Partiers flocked to the banner of Herman Cain, one of the earliest Tea Party boosters as a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The glib former pizza executive seemed the epitome of the citizen-politician, fond of attractively simplistic cure-alls like a modified flat tax plan, long popular in Tea circles.
But just when non-Tea Partiers were coming to grips with the strange possibility that Cain would have to be taken seriously as a candidate, his amateurism, so attractive to his fans, began to undo him. Even if he forges his way through the current sexual harassment allegations without being proved a predator and a liar, the bloom is off his rose. The days when Cain could count on universally positive feelings from Republican voters are long gone, and there is a palpable fear (nicely reflected by Michelle Bachmann’s comment that the GOP couldn’t afford any “surprises” from its nominee) that he is one press conference away from complete, final disaster. Any chance that Rick Perry could quickly ride back into contention, meanwhile, probably expired during the November 9 debate in Michigan. Questions about Perry’s debating skills aside, any Tea Party champion worth his salt can list the federal agencies he’d shut down in his sleep.
Which brings us to the movement’s current, desperate state. As ace political analyst Ron Brownstein recently noted, there are virtually no signs of growing Tea Party acceptance of Mitt Romney as the “inevitable” nominee; instead, there is incipient panic that the inability of the right to settle on a competent candidate could let Romney win by default. Brownstein quotes FreedomWorks spokesperson Adam Brandon as saying his group may decide to endorse someone–anyone–in order to stop Romney and avoid a division of the Tea Party vote. But who?
Some Tea Party supporters greatly admire Ron Paul as a prophet whose cranky monetary theories and cheerful support for a return to Coolidge administration levels of taxation and spending have now become mainstream. But as a battery of four late-October state polls conducted by CNN illustrated, Paul actually draws a majority of his support from non-Tea Party Republicans and Independents, and it’s implausible in any event that super-patriots will rally around a candidate who defends Iran’s right to pursue nuclear weapons. Michelle Bachmann, for her part, hasn’t had a good week on the campaign trail since August.
It is possible that the lightly regarded Rick Santorum, who is slavishly reduplicating Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign strategy in Iowa, could pull off a surprise in the first caucus state by finishing ahead of a collapsing Perry and Cain. If that were to happen, the Pennsylvanian could become a Christian Right/Tea Party lighting rod, and his views are more acceptable to right-wing power centers like the Club for Growth than were Huck’s four years ago.
The only non-Romney candidate with positive momentum in the polls, however, is Newt Gingrich. He’s certainly among the last candidates you’d figure to become a vehicle for the Tea Party Movement. He is, after all, the consummate career politician, someone who by his own admission began fantasizing about political power from a very early age. Conservatives graphically recall how Bill Clinton ran circles around Gingrich during their period of shared power in the late 1990s. His horrific mistake last May of dismissing Paul Ryan’s budget proposal as unrealistic was precisely the kind of Beltway thinking Tea Party activists hate, and hurt him as much in Tea circles as Perry’s later heresies on immigration. And for those worried about Cain’s history with women, is Gingrich-the-admitted-adulterer, whose campaign earlier imploded because he’d rather cruise the Mediterranean with his third wife than attend to his campaign, a better bet?
The very fact that it’s possible to discuss Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum as practical options for the once-invincible right-wing movement shows how rapidly it has lost its way. If you were to script the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest according to the most lurid Tea Party conspiracy theories of secret Establishment manipulation of events, the results would look a lot like what we are seeing right now.
But no elaborate conspiracy theories are needed to explain the collapse of all the movement’s various champions. They wanted hard-core ideologues who scorned experience, conventional political skills, and any hint of sweet reasonableness, and that’s what they got: candidates likely to crumble under the glare of a national spotlight or be torn down for insufficient orthodoxy by the movement’s very supporters–or, in the case of most figures who have already risen and fallen during this election cycle, both.

In recent days the mainstream media has been rapidly converging on a new common wisdom — a set of clichés that they will use to frame the rest of the campaign for the Republican nomination and the election of 2012. This new common wisdom portrays the intra-Republican struggle as one between more moderate and extreme wings of the party, with “pragmatic” Republican elites seeking a candidate who can beat Obama in opposition to the more “extremist” fringe elements and candidates of the grass-roots Tea Party.
It is inevitable that the mainstream media will find this image utterly irresistible. It not only serves their personal and professional needs but also reinforces their ideological preconceptions.
The image of “Republican elites as pragmatic, the tea party fringe as extreme” suits commentators’ personal and professional needs because it allows them to be publically disdainful of “extremism” without ever having to actually use the term to describe any powerful and significant figure in the Republican coalition who might be in a position to retaliate. A suggestion of “extremism” directed against anyone in this latter group is a social – and possibly career-damaging – faux pas that mainstream journalists will take every imaginable step to avoid.
At the same time, the “Elites as pragmatic, grass roots as extreme” image also validates mainstream commentators’ essentially condescending view of political life, in which “extremists” are always scruffy, largely disreputable individuals on the lower rungs of society – the kind of people who live in trailer parks and rant incoherently about the second amendment. Wealthy, powerful and influential “movers and shakers” within the Republican world, on the other hand, regardless of their actual views, are still invariably accorded respect as essentially serious and sensible individuals.
There is nothing new about this pattern of behavior among the mainstream media. It follows the same pattern as the “both sides are equally to blame” clichés about partisan gridlock and “dysfunctional government.” Writers and commentators who, in private, will cheerfully concede that, of course, the crisis is fundamentally the fault of Republican intransigence will then fall back on “both sides are equally to blame” clichés in their public writing — not only to avoid charges of liberal bias but also to portray themselves as impartial and intellectually superior observers of all career politicians.
There is, unfortunately, one major problem with this “elites as pragmatic, fringe as extreme” view: it is deeply, profoundly and fundamentally wrong. The most dangerous group of political extremists today is not the grass roots supporters of the Tea Party. It is the major sector of the Republican financial and ideological elite who have embraced the philosophy of “politics as warfare.”
To see why this is so, it is necessary to very clearly distinguish between two entirely distinct meanings of the term “extremism.” On the one hand, it is possible for a person or political party to hold a wide variety of very “extreme” opinions on issues. These views may be crackpot (e.g. “abolish paper money) or repugnant (“deny non-insured children medical care”). But as long as the individual or political party that holds these views conducts itself within the norms and rules of a democratic society, this, in itself, does not lead such groups or individuals to be described as “political extremists” by the media or society in general.
Libertarians and the Libertarian Party offer the best illustration. Vast numbers of Americans consider many libertarian views “extreme.” But, because the libertarians conduct themselves within the norms and rules of a democratic society, they are virtually never described by the media as “political extremists.”
The alternative definition of the term “political extremists” refers to political parties or individuals who do not accept the norms, rules and constraints of democratic society. They embrace a view of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as literal “enemies” who must be crushed. Extremist political parties based on the politics as warfare philosophy emerged on both the political left and right at various times in the 20th century in many different countries and circumstances.
Despite their ideological diversity, extremist political parties share a large number of common characteristics, one critical trait being a radically different conception of the role and purpose of the political party itself in a democratic society.
In the politics as warfare perspective a political party’s objective is defined as the conquest and seizure of power and not sincere collaboration in democratic governance. The party is viewed as a combat organization whose goal is to defeat an enemy, not a governing organization whose job is to faithfully represent the people who voted for it. Political debate and legislative maneuvering are seen not as the means to achieve ultimate compromise, but as forms of combat whose objective is total victory.
This basic conception of the role of political parties leads to the justification and use of two profoundly anti-democratic strategies.

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