This item, a response to the Demos-TDS forum on Restoring Trust in Government, is by Eric Schnurer, president of Public Works LLC, a policy consulting firm specializing in state and local governments.
As Bill Galston notes in this forum’s lead-off essay, “The public’s evaluation of both competence and integrity are shaped to some degree by its perception of government as steward of public institutions and public funds.” Patrick Bresette presents this problem as almost a Catch-22, in that progressive attempts to root out waste only reinforce public perceptions of government as wasteful. Writing of the Clinton-Gore National Performance Review (NPR), he bemoans that “[t]he media’s attention to the efforts of the initiative – and thus the public’s attention – focused on all the most egregious examples of wasteful spending that were being uncovered – from outrageously overpriced ashtrays, toilet seats and hammers to overlapping and duplicative governmental agencies and processes.”
Nevertheless, as Bresette observes, the NPR was part of an overall revival in Clinton Administration fortunes – and public trust in government – during the final six years of the Clinton presidency. I have seen similar results at the state and local levels, where I have overseen comprehensive performance reviews of government spending modeled on the NPR in seven states and helped governors in a half-dozen others to develop budget plans based on the principles discussed in this article.
This is not as dichotomous as it might seem: Revealing waste in government might increase public cynicism, but doing so also increases public confidence in the politician doing so, especially if that politician is a Democrat. The opinion research by John Halpin and Ruy Teixiera supports this argument, finding extremely high public responsiveness to an agenda of “[e]liminating inefficient programs and redirecting support to the most cost-effective programs” and like initiatives as a prelude to further progressive policies.
As both Galston and Bresette observe, Clinton and Obama rose in public esteem when they were able to convey the message that they were centrists or a “different kind of Democrat” and sank when they appeared otherwise. Clinton, according to Galston, floundered when he became embroiled in the flap over gays in the military – and, I would argue, when he decided to pursue health care reform before welfare reform – and Obama lost ground when he shifted his focus from economic recovery to the health care issue. This makes clear that the effect of fiscal responsibility on faith in government – and in those governing – also is closely related to Galston’s “third key determinant of trust in government”: responsiveness. “If people feel that the government is listening to them and working on the problems they think are most important, trust tends to rise. In recent decades, the public has come to view the federal government as much less responsive to their needs and preferences than it should be.” Conservatives have exploited the perception that Obama hasn’t been working on the right problems, focusing, instead, on bailing out banks and pursuing a health care reform that liberals cooperated in presenting as primarily transferring huge subsidies to the poor rather than lowering costs for all. As Thomas Edsall argues, this critique has fed on voter fears that limited resources were being taken from them and given unfairly to others.
Whether that constitutes a politics of selfishness, defined largely by racial and generational warfare, as Edsall warns, is debatable, however. In polling and focus group research throughout the 1990s in which I was able to participate as an advisor to various gubernatorial and Senate candidates, I found Americans amazingly receptive to paying for government programs to help needy Americans – such as education, job training, family counseling, child support, and transportation – if and when convinced of their effectiveness and efficiency.
A related concern is decline in the ideal of a shared social fate, as cited, for instance, by Bresette. It is often argued that shared commitment died when Ronald Reagan encouraged Americans to ask not what they could do for their country, but rather, “Am I better off today than I was four years ago?” It is again debatable whether Americans have been this incorrigibly self-centered for the last 30 years; in 2008, Barack Obama seemed to tap successfully into a majority yearning for some sense of community. While public attitudes on this issue may shift in a complex relationship with the competence and integrity of political leadership, as Galston discusses, or the economic vicissitudes that preoccupy Edsall, one thing has remained constant since Reagan: The willingness of political leaders, both left and right, to indulge the notion that we can have it all and not pay for it.
It is tempting to see in this our political “leaders” simply catering to the public’s own immature desire to have things both ways. But it’s also just possible that the public is making a much more sophisticated demand – to have things a different way. Might it possibly be that the public expects its leaders to figure out how the public sector can actually deliver more in services, with more customer choice, and do it for less? Preposterous, except that the technological advances of the last few decades have allowed consumers to demand that the private sector do exactly that. Politicians’ failure to respond to the same imperatives with anything more than demagoguery or transparently vapid “reforms” might actually be a cause of public dissatisfaction, rather than simply the most advantageous political response to it. Perhaps a more honest and sophisticated approach to these issues might engender public support.

Read more…

Most Americans remember the date April 4 as the anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., a day of commemorating the courage, vision and contributions of one of America’s greatest leaders. It is a measure of King’s legacy that he is honored in observance programs across the nation, not only on his birthday, a national holiday, but also on the anniversary of his death.
The 2011 anniversary of MLK’s death, however, will have added poignancy, since it will be observed in the context of the historic protest demonstrations in Madison resisting the attack on public workers’ collective bargaining rights. King was martyred in 1968 while leading a protest campaign supporting the rights of striking sanitation workers in Memphis. When the new monument honoring Dr. King is unveiled at the Great Mall in Washington, D.C. this summer, America will have our first major memorial honoring a leader of the struggle for worker rights, as well as for racial equality.
Organized labor will mark the anniversary of the assassination of Dr. King with a mass mobilization, including rallies, marches and other activities to defend workers’ rights in cities and towns across the nation. For a partial listing of events (more being added continually) check here, and for assistance with event ideas and resources, click here. (Facebook page here)
In addition to labor unions, the ‘We Are One’ MLK commemorations are expected to draw a significant turnout of African Americans and students, because both have been targeted by GOP disenfranchisement campaigns. April 4 could well mark a rekindling of King’s ‘Coalition of Conscience,’ a new 21st century movement for social and economic justice.
For an inspiring and informative read on the topic of MLK and worker rights leading up to April 4, you can’t do much better than “All Labor Has Dignity,” a new collection of King’s writings, edited by Michael Honey.
Mark it on your calendar, Monday, April 4th — We Are One.

Andy Kroll has a good MoJo article, “Inside Labor’s Epic Battle in Wisconsin: How big labor and progressive groups pulled off the biggest protests in 40 years,” featuring a dramatically told account of the protests.The lede:

They piled off of buses and out of cars, filling the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, and surrounding the towering Capitol. Thousands crowded inside the building’s beautiful rotunda, their cheers echoing throughout the domed structure. An estimated 100,000 people had descended on frigid Madison to protest Republican Governor Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill,” a sweeping piece of legislation that would strip 170,000 public-sector workers of their right to collectively bargain.
Last Saturday’s “Rally to Save the American Dream” was the culmination of two weeks of protests and a 24-7 sit-in inside the Capitol. Not for 30 or 40 years have unions and progressive groups come together in such an outpouring of support for workers’ rights. What makes the Madison protests even more incredible is how spontaneous they have been: There has been no master plan, no long-anticipated strategy to turn Madison into ground zero for a reenergized labor movement.

Kroll explains how Wisconsin progressives rose up and got organized in the wake of the hideous beating Dems took there in November, after losing both chambers of the state legislature and watching the governorship be taken over by a union-hating ideologue. It’s an inspiring and instructive case study, one which provides hope and guidance for Dems across the nation.

Read more…

Expect the debate about the importance of new media in the nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt to continue for years, although I’m satisfied that facebook, twitter and cell phones were highly significant tactical tools in both countries.
In terms of strategy, however, give due credit to a central idea in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions — the unique power of organized nonviolence to topple entrenched totalitarian regimes. For a good read on the topic, see “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History” by New York Times reporters David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger. As part of their investigation, the authors note the influence on both uprisings of a new England scholar who has dedicated his life to the study and advocacy of nonviolence as a potent political strategy:

Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they…were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.
The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist–after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.
Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

Sharp is the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, an important, though underfunded organization dedicated to the study and promotion of nonviolent action. The author of ground-breaking scholarly works, including “Making Europe Unconquerable” and “Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System,” Sharp has long insisted that his key writings, available on the Einstein Institution’s web pages be translated into Arabic and numerous other languages. He is undoubtedly the foremost expert on nonviolence, in both theory and application, and has been called the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare” — although neither designation does justice to his progressive outlook.
One shudders to consider the countless billions of dollars Sharp could have saved taxpayers, had a long line of U.S. presidents consulted with him before launching expensive nation-building schemes and other military initiatives. In a saner world, he would be a top national security advisor to the President.
Sharp isn’t the only nonviolence advocate being consulted by the young revolutionaries of Egypt. The American Islamic Congress re-published (in Arabic) and distributed in Egypt a 50-year old comic book about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. You and anyone else in the world with internet access can read the entire comic book in English, Arabic and Farsi right here.
Comforting, that along with all of the blundering disasters of U.S. foreign policy over the years, two humble but dedicated Americans could have such a constructive influence on the freedom struggles of oppressed people in the Middle East.

Brian Beutler has a short post up at Talking Points Memo about House Dems use of the “motion to commit” procedural vote to compell Republicans to publicly announce whether they will be accepting the government health care plan provided to members of congress. Beutler quotes the text of the motion:

“Not later than 15 days after taking the oath of office, a Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner shall notify the Clerk of whether that Member, Delegate, or Resident Commissioner elects to participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.”

As you might imagine, the Republicans voted the motion down in lockstep unity. A tell-it-like-it-is translation of their responses to the motion would be something like “How dare those dastardly Dems require us to divulge whether we accept government-provided health care benefits for ourselves, even as we deny it to the American people.”
There will undoubtedly be more such procedural votes from Dems as the House minority, as Beutler points out. Good. They should seize every opportunity to make the Republican account for their hypocrisy in taking government health care, while calling similar coverage for their constituents ‘socialism.”
Democratic members of congress are doing their part to publicize GOP hypocrisy about their health benfits. Now it’s up to Democratic activists, bloggers and rank and file to hound and badger Republicans wherever they make public appearances, for as long as they try to destroy HCR. Make them explain their double standard, as they hem and haw, stutter, dodge and prevaricate — there is no way for them to look good, no credible response they can make in defending ‘coverage for me, but not for thee.’ Always, always use the word ‘hypocrisy’ in confronting them, until it becomes a boilerplate question, even in the MSM.
But don’t stop there. Republican members of congress can only make so many appearances. Democratic activists should raise the hypocritical double standard on call-in shows, in letters to the editor, flyers in the community, emails to friends, facebook, twitter — all the digital platforms. This should not be a hard meme to propagate, because it’s embarrassingly true and easy to understand. Make their hypocrisy resonate until the last attempt to withhold funding for HCR has failed.
A couple of Republican congressmen have mumbled something about how they are “considering” declining the government health care plan. I think one or two has actually done so. Fine. They make the others look even worse, and themselves look like jailhouse converts.
Nailing the Republicans collectively and individually for their personal hypocrisy on HCR is not a substitute for making them explain their opposition to a bill that has several very popular provisions. Thus far, their explanations about how they would put the good stuff in a brand new bill have also been tortured, unconvincing and raise the dreaded spectre of reopening the whole interminable HCR debate. It’s a tough sell, especially if Dems play a strong hand in making them account for their hypocrisy at every opportunity.

It’s become fairly commonplace to observe that Sarah Palin’s political influence is based on a mastery of contemporary media, from Fox to Facebook, or that her celebrity is more akin to that of a television star than a garden-variety pol. But who knew we’d see such a literal validation of these judgements so soon?
Sarah Palin’s new reality show on TLC is a ratings phenomenon for the basic cable channel. Meanwhile, her daughter Bristol has made the finals of the major network favorite, Dancing With the Stars, despite relatively poor marks from the professional judges on the show. Bristol has not only learned to dance this year; she’s also picked up some of her mother’s talent for turning criticism into populist resentment, viz. her bitter complaints about suggestions that her mother’s fans are stuffing the ballot box to keep her on the show.
Meanwhile, we hear the first credible report that Palin (mother, not daughter) is seriously considering a presidential run for 2012.
Well, why wouldn’t she? She’s already broken all the rules for advancement in politics by resigning her one major office in order to focus on her television and personal appearances career, without consequences. A significant minority of Americans (including perhaps a majority of very active conservative Republicans) appear to identify with her so viscerally that every mistep she makes becomes just another opportunity to shake a fist at her detractors. A presidential run, if it failed, would provide material for books, movies and testimonials lasting for decades (tales of the disrespect she had to put up with in 2008 are getting a little stale, after all).
I can’t imagine what it’s like in the media celebrity bubble where Palin now resides, but it doesn’t strike me as a place where a decent sense of proportion or gritty political realism is very prevelant. So yes, she’ll probably run, and those who can’t bear the sight and sound of her had better settle down for a long and painful ride.

If the campaigns of 2010 seem more intense than usual, one reason may be early voting. So note Carolyn Crist and Melissa Weinman in their article “Early Voting Is a Game-Changer: Campaigns react to 45-day stretch of casting ballots” in the Gainesville (GA) Times.
The authors cite a huge uptick in early voting in the Peach State:

In the 2008 general election, more than half of voters came in early, about 2 million of the 3.9 million total in Georgia. That showed a large jump from the 2004 election, in which early voting was only allowed for specific reasons. In that election 387,596 voted early of the 3.2 million voters, or about 9 percent.
…Heath Garrett, a Republican political strategist, said early voting has caused a “monumental shift” in the way political campaigns operate. Because the early voting period is so new, there is still a lot to learn.
“Most of the campaigns in Georgia are learning from the 2008 election. 2008 showed that most campaigns, other than the presidential campaigns were not prepared for the impact of early voting,” Garrett said.

As you might imagine, early voting has created a bit of an earthquake in political advertising, sort of a ‘twin peaks’ phenomenon, as Crist and Weinman explain:

Now that voters head to the polls early, campaigns have to catch them early as well. Garrett said campaigning has become more expensive as a result.
“It’s almost like you have to have the same resources you had in the last week to 10 days in a campaign before early voting, but then you have to add onto that the resources to allow you to advertise and engage the electorate in the weeks leading up to early voting,” Garrett said.
“With your paid advertising, you have to peak just before and right around the beginning of early voting, which is 45 days prior to Election Day. And then you have to sustain some kind of paid advertising now for that entire period of time. Then you have to repeak as you get into the week of what we call advance voting heading right into Election Day.”
Garrett said there is a big difference between what the gubernatorial and Senate campaigns can do and how the down-ticket races cope with the costs of early voting.
In a state with a population of 10 million, the cost of advertising and direct mail in Georgia is expensive…”Those campaigns don’t have the budget to do television or radio so they really have to rely on good, old-fashioned grass-roots campaigning,” Garrett said.

The authors add:

[Republican] Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle’s campaign officials said volunteer efforts have been prolonged.
“With an increasing number of early voters casting their ballots before TV commercials air and mail arrives, it’s more important than ever to establish a grass-roots organization that can build support for a candidate prior to early voting,” said Ryan Cassin, Cagle’s campaign manager. “This is why the lieutenant governor has worked so hard to cultivate an aggressive grassroots network in all 159 counties, and grow his team of supporters on social media like Facebook.”…Cagle still plans traditional forms of outreach, such as TV and mail ads, during the latter stages of the campaign. But the grass-roots effort has played a large part of the early campaign, Cassin said.

There are concerns about how early voting affects the overall quality of campaigns, explain Weinman and Crist:

Douglas Young, a political science professor at Gainesville State College, isn’t so sure the 45-day time frame is a good idea…”On one hand, I respect the desire to try to help more people vote because things can always come up unexpectedly on Election Day with the weather or car trouble,” he said. “However, I’m troubled by the fact that Georgians can vote so early. If you look at American history, so often in the last six weeks of campaigning is when important debates occur. So many other events can take place after people have voted.”
This includes news media uncovering new information, candidates disclosing each other’s potential weaknesses and the release of financial information, he said…”A good survey might poll those who voted several weeks early before more information came out and how many regret having voted early,” Young said. “I think a week or two weeks is gracious time to get your act together and get to the polls. Six weeks out is long before relevant information may come out.”

Go negative early seems to be the new political mantra:

Garrett said the effect of such prolonged negative campaigning has yet to be seen…”If you’re in a competitive race, the negative attacks all start earlier,” Garrett said. “I think we’re going to learn a lot this year from that kind of impact.”

Early voting may also amplify the utility of ‘new media,’ especially at local levels, report Crist and Weinman:

Grassroots and social media campaigning is certainly helping Chad Cobb, a Democrat running for Georgia House District 26…”I’m not doing signs because I haven’t had financing as far as getting those, but I do hope to do a radio ad and newspaper ad the week before Election Day,” he said. “Facebook is a gold mine for campaigning. That’s what I started in June knowing I didn’t have a Democrat opponent for the primary. After that, I knew I could reach out and talk to the people in my district. It’s more of a grass-roots campaign.”
For Carol Porter, the Democrat lieutenant governor candidate, social media also is the answer…”Early voting has changed the way we think about campaigns, and the new dynamic is Facebook, Twitter and all the other ways you reach people where they are,” said Liz Flowers, Porter’s press secretary. “Websites are a more prominent campaign tool than in the past, and Carol gets up every morning to post something on Facebook and Twitter. It’s not something the staff does, which happens in other campaigns. She puts down what is on her mind so people can directly connect to her.”

Early voting has apparently added intensity to the traditional ‘boiler room’ GOTV effort, as well, report the authors:

The Democratic Party of Georgia has set up 15 field offices across the state – its most ambitious field program ever – and filled them with people to call registered voters and encourage them to vote early, party spokesman Eric Gray said.
So far, the offices have made more than 100,000 calls statewide. That effort frees up candidates, who are under more strain with the early-voting timetable than the traditional model of nearly everyone voting on the first Tuesday in November.
“This is still pretty new territory we’re trying to navigate,” Gray said. “The candidates have to be everywhere for six weeks before the election instead of one week.”

As a resident of Georgia, I’ve been somewhat awed by the ubiquity of former Democratic Governor Roy Barnes’ internet banner attack ads, lambasting his Republican opponent for Governor, Nathan Deal as “too corrupt, even for congress.” I do a good bit of political net-surfing, and I’ve seen his ads, which I assume are keyed to net-surfer’s zip codes, flickering on websites everywhere during the last month or so. Barnes is surging nicely in a major “red south’ race that pundits are rating in toss-up territory.
Deal has responded with a YouTube video, “…If you go early and get the voting out of the way, you can just fast-forward through all of those bad commercials that my opponent is running,” Deal says.
Game-changer that it is in individual campaigns, early voting hasn’t yet translated into a significant expansion in overall voter turnout. In their article, “Reducing the Costs of Participation: Are States Getting a Return on Early Voting?” in the Political Research Quarterly, Joseph D. Giammo and Brian J. Brox cite “the puzzle” of why governments have implemented early voting when it hasn’t had much enduring effect on turnout, and note further, in the article abstract:

…Early voting seems to produce a short-lived increase in turnout that disappears by the second presidential election in which it is available. They also address whether the additional costs to government are worth the negligible increase in participation. They conclude that these reforms merely offer additional convenience for those already likely to vote.

Makes sense. Folks well-organized enough to vote early would likely vote even if the early opportunity isn’t available. We might see some improvement as boomer generations mature. But I don’t think early voting is the “killer app” for overall turnout that internet/cell phone voting or automatic registration might be.
For the campaigns of 2010, however, expect those candidates who have planned well for early voting to have an edge.

As the political ad wars heat up for the Fall stretch of the midterm campaign, television is still regarded as the pivotal media, according to a recent Ad Week report (via Reuters) by Mike Shields. Conversely, spending for digital media has been disappointing this year, as Shields explains:

Following the recent digital-savvy campaigns led by Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown, many expected a slew of imitators to emerge during the 2010 midterms, leading to a surge in online spending. But political ad insiders say that with the exception of a handful of digital-focused campaigns, few candidates are dumping dollars onto the Web, outside of social media and search. And with six weeks or so to go before Election Day, not many watchers are expecting a sudden surge.
According to Borrell & Associates, political spending on digital media should double this year vs. 2008, reaching $44.5 million. Despite that hefty growth rate, “that’s really not much,” said Kip Cassino, Borrell’s vp of research. Some estimates place digital spending at 1 percent of total political media dollars. “There’s more of it, but it’s still a fraction,” said Evan Tracey, president, campaign media analysis group, Kantar Media.
“Spending has just not developed this year,” said Ted Utz, managing director of the local rep firm Petry Digital. Utz said his company works with around 10 top political ad agencies. “They are staffed up and poised to place digital money, and it’s been really anemic…

Rightly or wrongly, it appears most political campaigns, or the ad agencies advising them, believe that television still provides the most powerful message machine, as Shields explains:

Perhaps the biggest factor holding back digital spending is political consultants’ love affair with TV, which, according to Cassino, gets two of every three dollars spent in this arena. TV has a long track record of getting people elected, particularly in local congressional races, where a candidate might be running “for the 10th or 11th term,” said Cassino. “So they hand digital planning to the kid who comes in as a volunteer.”

Shields notes that political consultants tend to be skeptical about banner ads, and that there is a dearth of studies assessing the impact of digital ads. Of the spending for digital advertising, most of the growth has been in search ads — Google search ads are up 800 percent over 2008, and there has also been an uptick in “locally targeted Facebook self serve ads,” along with some growing campaign interest in YouTube “promoted videos.”
Shield’s article did not break down the remaining 32 percent of political ad spending in terms of print, telephone, radio, billboards, direct mail and other media, all of which can be useful in “micro-targeting” specific constituencies. But it’s clear that political campaign budget managers and consultants still see television as the best way to reach everyone.
Shields quotes a ‘veteran online political ad operative,’ who says that candidates still treat digital media “as a stepchild. “Look at Meg Whitman in California,” he said of the former eBay CEO. “She’s putting all her money in TV.”
With respect to Democrats in particular, more spending on digital ads might nonetheless be a cost-effective investment, especially given concerns about turning out the progressive base. But it’s not hard to understand the lopsided investment in television in light of internet demographics. according to one demographic analysis, 38 percent of seniors age 65+, who turn out to vote in impressive numbers, are internet-active, vs. 93 percent of 18-29 year-olds, 81 percent of age 30-49 and 70 percent of those 50-64 years of age.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In most of the discussions of why Mike Castle lost the Republican Senate nomination in Delaware to the wacky conservative insurgent Christine O’Donnell, commentators emphasize that Castle crossed conservatives by voting for gun control, climate-change legislation, and TARP … as well as being pro-choice. In none of the analyses I’ve read has this last factor been emphasized, or treated as anything more significant than another indicator of his “moderation.”
Ignoring abortion as an issue is an inveterate habit of the chattering classes, particularly on the progressive side of the aisle. Few people, other than celebrating right-to-lifers, have noted how much the already slim ranks of pro-choice Republicans were thinned this primary season. Aside from Castle, Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison and Lisa Murkowski, and Representative Tom Campbell, have lost in major statewide contests.
This is a persistent blind spot in political commentary. When the 2008 presidential cycle began, Rudy Guiliani was treated often as the front-runner, even though his pro-choice views meant he’d have to skip the Iowa Republican Caucuses, which are beholden to that state’s right-to-life movement. Yet Rudy’s candidacy predictably crashed and burned. When John McCain was mulling his decision about a running-mate, the betting favorites in the commentariat were pro-choice figures Joe Lieberman and Tom Ridge. This simply wasn’t going to happen, because the right-to-life movement has an implicit veto over Republican convention nominees. The proved their power by threatening a convention revolt against a pro-choice running-mate, and a chastened McCain iinstead selected the right-to-lifers’ very favorite politician, an obscure governor whom progressives knew nothing about named Sarah Palin.
I see the same dynamic in political coverage this year. We have been told repeatedly that the Tea Party movement is all about economics and fiscal issues, and other than a couple of articles about how Carly Fiorina’s pro-life position is a problem for her in the general election, I’ve seen zero discussion of abortion this year in non-conservative publications, particularly as it affects the Republican primaries.
Perhaps because the national media tend to be secular, we are persistently underestimating the role that abortion plays in right-wing politics. Yet it is key to understanding some of the zealous opposition that caused GOP primary voters to overthrow Mike Castle. Unless you are an aficionado of conservative blogs, you probably didn’t notice the deep opposition that many on the right were taking to Castle’s pro-choice views. Here’s renowned right-wing activist Ken Blackwell:

In the interests of party unity, the pro-life majority in the GOP has gone along with many a “RINO,” hoping that Republicans like Arlen Specter, Susan Collins, and Olympia Snowe could at least be relied upon to stand with us against abortion funding and in favor of originalist judges. But Mike Castle went far beyond even these liberal Republicans.

Even if, as Jon Chait suggests in his brilliant take on the O’Donnell win, many conservative voters now think of climate change legislation as a serious threat to American freedom, it is worth remembering that the RTL movement considers abortion analogous to the Holocaust, and pro-choice pols to be enablers of monstrous evil–at worst conscious advocates of genocide.
This fact should inform the way we think about this year’s right-wing groundswell, and the role of Sarah Palin in particular. How many pundits recognized that her famous Facebook post, which declared that health care reform would authorize “death panels,” contained a dog whistle to her fellow right-to-lifers? Her statement that Trig Palin would be a likely victim of said death panels was the clear tip-off; the subtext was that godless liberals, frustrated by her refusal to kill Trig in the womb, had figured out an alternative means of finishing him off. This is unfortunately standard reasoning for committed anti-abortion activists, who are enraged by politicians and pundits who refuse to take their cause seriously.
For all the endless and interminable talk about “constitutionalism” on the right, it’s rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade. The same is true with the rage about health care reform; if you read a lot of right-wing blogs, as I do, you’d note that fear about Obamacare producing a massive expansion of publicly-funded abortion was a major motivator of right-wing opposition. House Minority Leader John Boehner knew his constituency when he made this statement just prior to the House vote on health reform:

A ‘yes’ vote for this government takeover of health care is a ‘yes’ vote for sending hard-earned tax dollars to pay for abortions.

More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the “genocide” of legalized abortion, to which the GOP “establishment” has given little more than lip service.
Perhaps I’m overestimating the power of the abortion issue, and Mike Castle lost strictly because of his votes for climate-change legislation and TARP, or because he embodied his state’s establishment. But I’m inclined to think that his pro-choice position contributed mightily to his downfall. The abortion issue didn’t go away for the right the day the Tea Party started.