Chris Bowers one of the most consistently insightful progressive electoral strategists. In a June 19th Kos post he put forward a provocative thesis – that progressives should concentrate their resources on elections where a win is clearly recognized as a victory for progressive ideas.
You should read the whole piece but here is the gist of his argument:

We have to start winning elections in ways so that the majority of political observers believe the defeated candidate lost because s/he opposed one or more progressive legislative priorities. Just defeating someone who opposes progressive legislation with someone who supports it is not enough. A wide array of pundits, candidates and political professionals must believe that opposition to progressive policies was the primary reason an elected official was removed from office. That is the only way we are going to start convincing people that opposing progressive legislation is truly bad idea for someone’s political career. As such, it’s also the only way we’re going to start getting progressive legislation passed on a regular basis.
If political observers think we won an election because our opponent had corruption issues, it won’t build progressive power. If political observers think we won because the other side had crazy candidates, it won’t change legislative outcomes. If people think we won because we were well-organized or because we used clever new tactics, then they will come to our seminars about how to run a campaign-but they will not pass our desired public policy into law. Hell, even if we win because the country is in the dumps and we get a wave election, that will give us a brief shot at power but nothing over the long-term (see 1977-1980, 1993-1994, and 2009-2010).
Right now, there are at least two fights that fit this mold:
• The first is the recall campaign in Wisconsin. The vast majority of political observers know and admit that this campaign is about Republicans stripping collective bargaining rights. As such, winning the recalls has real potential to strike a blow against the idea that pissing off the left has no electoral consequences. We can show that stripping collective bargaining rights can and will result in the people supporting it being removed from office. This will have a major impact on other states.
• The second campaign that currently fits this model is the battle over Medicare. This is because it isn’t really that hard to get candidates, pundits and political professionals to believe campaigns can be lost for favoring cuts to Medicare and/or Social Security. …the NY-26 special election, even though it featured a semi-major third party candidate, was an important step in cementing that belief. Imagine how deeply ingrained that belief will become if we retake in the House in 2012 while defeating Paul Ryan!
If tactics are how you fight a battle, but strategy is the rationale behind what battles you choose to fight, then the strategy to building lasting progressive power is to choose to fight battles like Lamont vs. Lieberman, the Wisconsin recall elections, and going explicitly after Republicans–or anyone–on Medicare and Social Security. We can’t just win elections, and we can’t just win elections with Better Democrats. We have to win elections in which people believe the outcome was determined by popular support for progressive policies, and a backlash against those who opposed them. That’s the only way politicians will believe they have to support progressive policies in order to stay in office, and thus the only way progressives are going to stop being thwarted and disappointed even when Democrats are the party in power

Republicans still want to slash Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security benefits to reduce the debt, but the latest public opinion data indicates they will be facing overwhelming public opposition in doing so. TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in this week’s ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…A just-released Pew poll documents the extent of public opposition. The poll asked respondents what is more important, reducing the budget deficit or keeping Medicare and Social Security benefits as they are. By an overwhelming 60-32 margin the public prefers to keep Medicare and Social Security as they are.

The same opposition applies to GOP proposals to make people pay more for their Medicare benefits:

The public is also opposed to increasing the health care costs Medicare recipients are responsible for. By 61-31, the public believes people on Medicare are already paying enough of their health care costs.

Nor is there much public support for reducing medical benefits for low-income Americans:

…By 58-37, they say that low-income people should not have their benefits taken away, rather than agreeing that states should be able to cut back on Medicaid eligibility to deal with budget problems.

All of the media hype about debt reduction notwithstanding, the public remains unconvinced that “slashing Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security has to be part of any such deal,” says Teixeira. “Conservatives, if they have any sense, will back off on this one.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
According to received wisdom, the Christian Right is engaged in a tactical alliance with more secular-minded conservatives in the Republican Party. The pairing was established as far back as 1980, when Ronald Reagan made unambiguous support for social-conservative priorities (especially the abolition of abortion rights) GOP orthodoxy and earned the support of conservative evangelicals who had been politically mobilized and then bitterly disappointed by Jimmy Carter. The relationship has sometimes been compared to a “marriage of convenience,” and indeed, Christian Right leaders have never been reluctant to complain that they are being taken for granted and underserved by their political partners.
Given this background, one might assume that Christian Right leaders would be exceptionally nervous about the ascendancy of the Tea Party Movement, with its libertarian streak and its fixation on fiscal issues. But as it turns out, Christian Right elites, for their own peculiar reasons, have become enthusiastic participants in the drive to combat Big Government and its enablers in both parties. It’s no accident that one red-hot candidate for president, Michele Bachmann, and a much-discussed likely candidate, Rick Perry, each have one foot planted in the Christian Right and another in the Tea Party Movement. To a remarkable extent, today’s theocrats have stopped thinking of “social issues” like abortion or gay marriage as isolated from or in competition with fiscal or economic issues, and started thinking of them as part and parcel of a broader challenge that requires the radical transformation of government itself.
On an institutional level, the merger of Christian Right and Tea Party interests is remarkably advanced. The alliance has served as the very foundation stone of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the latest venture of that intrepid politico-religious entrepreneur, Ralph Reed, which has sprouted chapters in many states, most prominently Iowa, where it sponsored the first candidate forum of the 2012 cycle. There is even a term to describe this new strain of conservatism: the “Teavangelicals,” a subject of a recent broadcast by Christian Right journalist David Brody, which, among other things, examined the conservative evangelical roots of major Tea Party leaders. Most recently, a host of organizations closely connected with the Christian Right and “social issues” causes have signed onto the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge,” the Tea Party-inspired oath that demands a position on the debt limit vote that is incompatible with any bipartisan negotiations.
But this convergence between the two groups goes well beyond coalition politics and reflects a radicalization of conservative evangelical elites that is just as striking as the rise of the Tea Party itself. Indeed, the worldview of many Christian Right leaders has evolved into an understanding of government (at least under secularist management) as a satanic presence that seeks to displace God and the churches through social programs, to practice infanticide and euthanasia, to destroy parental control of children, to reward vice and punish virtue, and to thwart America’s divinely appointed destiny as a redeemer nation fighting for Christ against the world’s many infidels.
As an illustration of this phenomenon, it’s worth unpacking a few lines from a recent missive by televangelist James Robison, the convener of two recent meetings of Christian Right leaders in Texas to ponder their role in 2012, and also of a similar session back in 1979 that helped pave the way for Reagan’s conquest of conservative evangelicals. Says Robison:

There are moral absolutes. No person’s failure reduces or redefines the standards carved in stone by the finger of God and revealed in His Word. We must find a way to stop judges and courts from misinterpreting the Constitution and writing their own laws.

“Activist judges” who have developed and applied protections for abortion rights, non-discrimination, and church-state separation have long been a bugaboo for the Christian Right. But Robison appears to be extending this traditional list of evangelical grievances, adding his blessing to the Tea Party’s objection to the string of Supreme Court decisions that enabled the federal government to enact New Deal programs like Social Security that protect people afflicted by personal “failure” from the consequences of their actions. He continues:

Success and prosperity may be mishandled by some, but the potential for success that produces opportunity for all and prosperity at different levels is not the problem. Those we elect must keep the free market free, healthy and under the influence of people who understand the importance of personal responsibility.

Read more…

MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews wondered aloud on Sunday if perhaps President Obama was starting to look like “the adult in the room” with respect to the struggle over raising the debt ceiling.
It’s a damn good question. The Republicans have been so rigidly infantile in their cut taxes and spending monomania that it seems likely an increasing proportion of swing voters have to be thinking “I don’t like all this talk about default and screwing up the world economy even more to make a point. Boehner, Bachmann and the Republicans seem more like angry children than grown-ups who are serious about compromise and governing sensibly.”
Speaker Boehner is still insisting on a $2.4 trillion deal, linked to a “dollar-to-dollar” ratio of spending cuts to debt ceiling increase. But President Obama wants a bigger, more flexible deal, and is holding out for $4 trillion package with a debt ceiling extension until at least Jan. 1, 2013. Negotiations resume today, with an 11:00 am press conference featuring the President’s update.
Ideologues, left and right want what they want. Middle of the road voters want to see policy compromises that guard against extremes and move the economy forward in a way that doesn’t penalize everyone but the rich. A common sense compromise might include a $3 trillion package with very modest, way-down-the-road entitlement cuts allowing the Republicans to save a little face, but significant tax hikes on the rich to give Dems some buy-in.
Progressive Dems fault President Obama for giving too much away up front. The frequently-heard meme is that he usually starts negotiating with the compromise position. There is merit in this critique. But the upside is that he is being seen as the only one who is willing to compromise with respect to just about all the debates over economic policy. This may help him get re-elected, argue progressives, but at what price?
Opinion data indicates that Dems may have an edge with voters in the debt ceiling debate. Asked in a Pew Research Center poll 6/16-19, “As you may know, unless Congress and the president can agree to raise the federal debt limit soon, the government will not be able to borrow more money to fund its operations and pay its debts. If the limit is not raised, who do you think would mainly be responsible for this: the Obama Administration or the Republicans in Congress?,” 33 percent said the Obama Administration would be responsible, compared with 42 percent who put it on “Republicans in congress.” (12 percent said both).
It’s hard to imagine how Republicans could have gained any advantage in the 3+ weeks since that poll. My guess is that the GOP’s zero-taxes-on-the-rich position has not served them well in recent weeks, and the Dem’s “shared sacrifice” sound-bite is beginning to resonate with crisis-weary voters as a sound principle of any reasonable compromise. A little amplification of it from the MSM, as well as Dems, could help — perhaps a lot.

Princeton historian Julian E. Zelizer has an insightful post up at CNN Opinion, “President’s Bully Pulpit Is Not What It Used to Be,” which should be of interest to political junkies across the left-right spectrum. As President Obama takes to the bully pulpit today to win public support for his debt ceiling and budget plans, Zelizer provides an excellent mini-history of the use of the bully pulpit and then explains its limitations in 2011:

…The current structure of the media has emasculated the bully pulpit. Regardless of how good a president is on the stump, it is almost impossible for him to command public attention, because there is no singular “media” to speak of. Instead, Americans receive their media through countless television stations and websites.
During the 1960s, when Presidents Kennedy, Johnson or Nixon spoke, the choice was to hear them or turn off the television and radio. Today, if President Obama wanted to conduct a fireside chat, it is doubtful that many people would be listening.
With the end of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, the media were also able to shed the appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Every perspective did not have to receive equal time. On many television and radio stations, objective reporters have been replaced with openly partisan commentators. Any presidential message is quickly surrounded by polemical instant commentary that diminishes the power of what he says.
Making matters worse, on the Internet, presidents can’t even fully control the time they have as they must compete with live blogs and video commentary as they try to share their message. Even within most households, the era of the single family television is gone. Now in many middle-class families everyone has their own media and is watching their own thing.

Zelizer may be overstating his case a bit — free live television time is nothing to be sniffed at, since most people still get their political information from TV. But there is no question that Zelizer is right about the multiplicity of options diluting the bully pulpit in recent decades. Nonetheless, a president who learns how to leverage multimedia tools to project a single message will gain an edge unavailable to his predecessors.

So in the wake of the “Cut, Cap and Balance Pledge” signed by seven Republican presidential candidates, and the “Pro-Life Presidential Pledge” signed by five, along comes Iowa social conservative kingpin Bob Vander Plaats of the Family Leader organization with a new pledge–actually an oath–it calls “The Marriage Vow.”
You have to read this document to believe it. Styled as a “pro-family” platform, the pledge goes far beyond the usual condemnations of same-sex marriage and abortion and requires support for restrictions on divorce (hardly a federal matter), the firing of military officers who place women in forward combat roles, and “recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, [and] greater financial stability.” If that’s not enough, it also enjoins “recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.” This, in case you are wondering, is a nod to the “Full Quiver (or Quiverfull) Movement” that encourages large families in a patriarchal structure as a religious obligation, not to mention to those anti-choicers who want to ban some of the most popular forms of contraception.
The preamble to the “Marriage Vow” is even weirder, asserting among other things that “faithful monogomy” was a central preoccupation of the Founding Fathers; that slaves benefitted from stronger families than African-Americans have today; and that any claims there is a genetic basis for homosexuality are “anti-scientific.”
The “Marriage Vow” seems tailor-made to feed the backlash against ever-proliferating “pledges” imposed on Republican presidential candidates by the Right. But Vander Plaats and his group cannot be dissed without risk by anyone wanting to win the Iowa Caucuses. A perennial statewide candidate (his 2010 primary challenge to now-Gov. Terry Branstad won a surprising 41% of the vote), Vander Plaats was co-chair of Mike Huckabee’s victorious 2008 Iowa Caucus campaign, and also spearheaded the successful 2010 effort to recall state Supreme Court judges who supported the 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
Kevin Hall of The Iowa Republican suggests that the “Vow” is a power-play by VanderPlaats to influence the outcome of the August 13 Iowa State GOP straw poll, in which The Family Leader has pledged neutrality, by separating candidates deemed acceptable from those who won’t sign the oath. And indeed, Michele Bachmann, rumored to be Vander Plaats’ current favorite, signed it virtually before the ink dried. What will really be interesting is whether Tim Pawlenty, who has been eagerly accepting every ideological demand made of him by the Right, signs this document. It is certainly designed to freak out the more secular-minded Establishment Republicans he will eventually need if he is to put together a winning coalition of everyone in the party who doesn’t like Mitt Romney. But he has to do well in Iowa for that to matter, so my guess is that he will follow Bachmann in kissing Vander Plaats’ ring and associating himself with a fresh batch of extremism.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With Obama set to meet with congressional leaders from both parties on Thursday in the hopes of working out a deal to raise the debt ceiling, it’s a good time to step back from the details of the controversy and assess the bigger picture. My conclusion: We can’t get through the presidential election without addressing the fundamental issues facing the country and dividing the parties–the size of government, the level of taxation, and the future of Medicare and Medicaid. But with Republicans committed to their anti-tax orthodoxy and Democrats unwilling to surrender to it, the possibility of a compromise in the next 27 days seems as remote as the consequences of a failure to raise the ceiling seem dire. In place of both these options there’s a third possibility–an interim agreement, which has many longer-term downsides but may be the best we can do right now. Here’s the analysis that leads to me this conclusion.
The current negotiations can yield three possible outcomes. First, the parties might defy the odds and reach a grand bargain that includes revenues, Medicare, and Medicaid, as well as domestic and defense discretionary spending. According to some reports, before the Biden talks broke down, negotiators had identified possible spending cuts totaling at least $1.9 trillion (excluding interest savings). But as long as Republicans refuse to consider any revenue increases, the grand bargain won’t happen.
Nor should it. Yes, we’re spending too much. But we’re also taxing too little–or, if you prefer, spending too much through the tax code. Writing in the most recent issue of the conservative-leaning journal National Affairs, Donald Marron (a former CEA member and CBO director under George W. Bush) says that “America needs to fix its broken tax system and find additional revenue to help reduce our persistent budget deficits. The best way to achieve both aims is to take a hatchet to the thicket of spending-like tax preference.” He’s absolutely right. Obama and the congressional Democrats should not accept any deal lending credibility to the view that we can stabilize our long-term finances without additional revenues.
A second possible outcome is that the contending parties can’t converge on an interim solution and that we reach August 2nd without an agreement. What then? One possibility might be called “son of TARP”: the markets crash, panic spreads, and those who previously doubted the significance of a default see the error of their ways. Some economists believe that even a very short default would have long-lasting consequences for the perceived credit-worthiness of the United States, and therefore for interest rates. Putting their projection to the test of events strikes me as a reckless risk that no one should choose to run.
Each party has now advanced its favored scenario for avoiding default in the absence of an agreement. Led by Senator Pat Toomey, some Republicans believe that the Secretary of the Treasury could avert default by moving U.S. debt to the head of the line as the first claimant on government revenues. Secretary Geithner denies that he has such authority and insists that the failure to meet our full range of obligations would be perceived as, and have the same effect as, a default on our debt.
An analysis released yesterday by the Bipartisan Policy Center dramatizes this point. The day after the August 2 deadline, the government will have about $12 billion in receipts versus $32 billion in commitments, including a $23 billion Social Security payment. Even if the government reneged on all obligations other than Social Security, it couldn’t send out the checks in full and on time. And that’s just Day 1. By the end of the month, the government would have failed to meet $134 billion in legal obligations.
For their part, some Democrats have urged President Obama to invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which states that “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Doing so would plunge the government into uncharted constitutional waters and all-out partisan warfare. On the one hand, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly vests the power to “borrow Money on the credit of the United States” in the legislative branch, casting doubt on the president’s ability to issue debt in the absence of congressional authorization. On the other hand, the power to borrow money entails the obligation to repay it, and it is up to Congress to meet that obligation–a legal obligation reinforced by the 14th Amendment. While the amendment’s language is rooted in the specific circumstances of the Civil War, the Supreme Court has been inclined to read it more broadly. In Perry v. the United States, one of the Gold Standard cases decided in 1935, the Court declared that:

The Constitution gives to the Congress the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States, an unqualified power, a power vital to the Government, upon which in an extremity its very life may depend. The binding quality of the promise of the United States is of the essence of the credit which is so pledged. Having this power to authorize the issue of definite obligations for the payment of money borrowed, the Congress has not been vested with authority to alter or destroy those obligations.

Read more…

Nate Silver’s well-reasoned analysis, “Why the Republicans Resist Compromise” at his Five Thirty Eight blog at The New York Times affirms the meme that the GOP is pretty much ensnared by its more conservative faction. While this conclusion is no big shocker to most political observers, Silver’s data-driven analysis, as presented in his chart “Ideological Distribution of People Voting Republican for U.S. House,” is impressive and instructive:

The Republican Party is dependent, to an extent unprecedented in recent political history, on a single ideological group. That group, of course, is conservatives. It isn’t a bad thing to be in favor with conservatives: by some definitions they make up about 40 percent of voters. But the terms ‘Republican’ and ‘conservative’ are growing closer and closer to being synonyms; fewer and fewer nonconservatives vote Republican, and fewer and fewer Republican voters are not conservative.
The chart, culled from exit poll data, shows the ideological disposition of those people who voted Republican for the House of Representatives in the elections of 1984 through 2010. Until fairly recently, about half of the people who voted Republican for Congress (not all of whom are registered Republicans) identified themselves as conservative, and the other half as moderate or, less commonly, liberal. But lately the ratio has been skewing: in last year’s elections, 67 percent of those who voted Republican said they were conservative, up from 58 percent two years earlier and 48 percent ten years ago.

Silver notes the pivotal role of disproportionate conservative turnout in last year’s midterms, and the unfortunate consequences for Dems:

This was fortunate for Republicans, because they lost moderate voters to Democrats by 13 percentage points (and liberals by 82 percentage points). Had the ideological composition of the electorate been the same in 2010 as in 2008 or 2006, the Republicans and Democrats would have split the popular vote for the House about evenly — but as it was, Republicans won the popular vote for the House by about 7 percentage points and gained 63 seats.
Many of the G.O.P. victories last year were extremely close. I calculate that, had the national popular vote been divided evenly, Democrats would have lost just 27 seats instead of 63. Put differently, the majority of Republican gains last year were probably due to changes in relative turnout rather than people changing their minds about which party’s approach they preferred.

Addressing “the enthusiasm gap within the Republican party,” Silver cites a Pew Research poll conducted a few days before the election which indicated that,

Among conservatives who are either registered as Republicans or who lean toward the Republican party, about 3 out of 4 were likely to have voted in 2010, the Pew data indicated. The fraction of likely voters was even higher among those who called themselves “very conservative:” 79 percent.
By contrast, only about half of moderate or liberal Republicans were likely voters, according to Pew’s model. That is about the same as the figure for Democrats generally: — about half of them were likely voters, with little difference among conservative, moderate and liberal Democrats.
So the enthusiasm gap did not so much divide Republicans from Democrats; rather, it divided conservative Republicans from everyone else. According to the Pew data, while 64 percent of all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents identify as conservative, the figure rises to 73 percent for those who actually voted in 2010.

Silver cites data indicating that “Republicans are still fairly unpopular,” but adds,

…As long as conservative Republicans are much more likely to vote than anyone else, the party can fare well despite that unpopularity, as it obviously did in 2010. But it means that Republican members of Congress have a mandate to remain steadfast to the conservatives who are responsible for electing them.
Presidential elections are different: they tend to have a more equivocal turnout. The G.O.P. can turn out its base but it has not converted many other voters to its cause, and President Obama’s approval ratings remain passable although not good. The Republicans will need all their voters to turn out — including their moderates — to be an even-money bet to defeat him.

Silver believes that, if Romney is nominated, he would have a clear shot at turning out the GOP moderates, while Bachmann could alienate enough of them to give Obama victory.
At his TPM Editors blog, Josh Marshall applauds Silver’s analysis of conservative domination of the GOP, but adds that it shouldn’t let Democrats off the hook for their failure to take advantage of it:

When I castigate the Democrats for not having a clear message or President Obama for not having an “outside game” in the debt fight, readers will often write in to say that I’m ignoring the fact that the modern GOP is a coherent and highly ideological party while the Democrats simply are not. So Republicans are inherently more able to function as a unified force with a unified message than the Dems. In fact, these folks will argue, it’s not even right to talk about “the Dems” because that buys into the illusion that they’re a party like the GOP as opposed to a coalition of constituencies.
For my money, I don’t find this a sufficient explanation. I do think the Dems are consistently guilty of what amounts to a political failure — the failure to devise and push a consistent message and play on the weaknesses of their foes. I’ve made these points so often that there’s no need (and probably appetite) for me to restate them here. However, it is important to note these structural realities that create a genuine tilt in the playing field of our politics, one that makes it easier for 35% to 40% of the electorate to dominate the country by having virtually total control over one of the two parties.

“Still,” Marshall concludes, “…Politics matters. And on that count the Dems continue to be captive and captured by a weakness it is in their collective power — and for a president to a great degree individual power — to change.”

From Daily Kos, Chris Bowers reports that labor unions and small donors have given Democratic challengers a significant edge in fundraising in six campaigns to recall Republican state senators who supported eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public workers:

…Democrats have an edge in cash on hand in four of the six campaigns. It’s pretty unusual for challengers to lead incumbents in cash on hand, much less for the majority of challengers to lead, so this is a very strong showing for the Democratic candidates.
What’s particularly impressive is how the Democratic candidates built this advantage. According to a press release from the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, the average donation to the six candidates ranged from a low of $19.27 for Nancy Nusbaum (who faces Republican Robert Cowles), to a high of $37.14 for Sandy Pasch (who is up against Republican Alberta Darling). Without Pasch, the highest average donation to a Democratic candidate was $23.99 to Jennifer Shilling. Overall, the six Democrats raised $1,556,000 from about 70,000 donors who gave an average of roughly $22.

Bowers quotes from Tom Tolan’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on the unions contribution to recall fund-raising:

political action committee formed by a coalition of unions active in state recall races says it has raised more than $4 million in the past six weeks, and has $2 million on hand to help Democrats.
…In a filing prepared for the state Government Accountability Board, We Are Wisconsin listed more than $3 million in donations from the national AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education. The group also received contributions in the hundreds of thousands of dollars – both cash and in-kind – from units of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees; the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state’s biggest teachers union; and the United Food and Commercial Workers.

Bowers reports that “We Are Wisconsin volunteers have knocked on over 100,000 doors across the state” and more than 100,000 donors “have given to the recall effort in some fashion” and adds,

…It is particularly heartwarming that in the Wisconsin recall elections, the Democratic spearhead is being forged almost entirely by small donors, volunteers on the ground, and unions. Given that this remains, by far, the fight in 2011 with the most potential to build progressive power, perhaps it had to unfold this way or else the fight would not have happened at all.

As Bowers concludes, “We do not fight an infinitely powerful opponent. We really can win if we stick together and push back hard. So far, in Wisconsin we’re doing just that.”

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
In the civics-book perspective on the American political system, presidential elections help make government work. They allow nominees to set a national agenda for the two major parties that transcend the regional differences and messy constituency-tending that so often occurs in Congress. And they pull the parties towards the political center, where swing voters live and bipartisanship thrives. This is made even more likely by occasions where you happen to have two candidates–say, an incumbent president and a challenger who is either a consensus nominee or a party leader in Congress–with a stake in successful governance and an eye trained on the general election. But the 2012 Republican presidential nomination contest is showing the flip-side of that proposition: In a highly competitive primary field where most of the candidates are not in federal office, and all are campaigning avidly against “Washington,” they are not exerting pressure on the party and its representatives in Congress to move towards “the center,” and, in many cases, they are pushing in the opposite direction.
The preeminent example of this dangerous feedback loop between the GOP presidential candidates and Republicans in Washington is the ongoing stalemate over the budget and the debt limit. The maximalist conservative position on the issue, called the “cut, cap and balance” pledge, was originally staked out by the House Study Committee and South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint. Designed to create an air-tight formula against any compromise with Democrats on the debt limit, the pledge includes two different methods for permanently limiting federal spending to a drastically lower percentage of GDP than currently prevails, a California-style constitutional provision requiring a super-majority for any tax increases, and a demand for immediate spending cuts beyond anything ever seriously discussed in Congress. Despite the fact that the pledge originated with extremists in Congress, nearly all the presidential candidates rushed to attach their names to it. As it stands, no fewer than six of them, including supposed “moderate” Mitt Romney, have signed on. Other than Jon Huntsman, the only holdout is Michele Bachmann, who is trying to stake out a position to the right of “cut, cap and balance” by making repeal of ObamaCare a precondition for any debt limit increase or budget deal.
What began as a fringe pledge, in other words, was soon elevated to Republican orthodoxy by the embrace it received from GOP presidential candidates competing to claim the “true conservative” mantle. In this way, Republican ultras in Congress are successfully using the presidential field to increase pressure on their own leadership to abandon negotiations with the White House and congressional Democrats. And with the Iowa Caucuses dominated by hard-core conservatives, and Senator DeMint standing astride next year’s all-important South Carolina presidential primary, it’s no surprise the strategy is working.
This upward ratcheting of pressure is also illustrated by yet another “pledge” recently demanded of presidential candidates by the upstart anti-abortion group, the Susan B. Anthony List. Breathtaking in its scope, the SBA pledge involves a commitment to appoint only certified “pro-life” figures to specific federal cabinet and sub-cabinet posts, support for sweeping bans on federal funding for any entity or contractor involved in entirely legal abortion services, and an agreement to promote and sign a federal version of the “fetal pain” bills, which ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy in defiance of past Supreme Court decisions, that are currently being enacted in several states. Confronted by the pledge, all but two presidential candidates–Mitt Romney and Herman Cain–promptly signed it, and the holdouts hastened to express their firm support for the complete abolition of abortion rights. The Republican line on abortion had once again shifted even further right, if possible, from where it had been before.
Finally, the GOP candidates’ reluctant embrace of Paul Ryan’s radical proposals to end Medicare as we know it has ensured that the contours of Ryan’s unpopular plan will continue to hold sway over the Republican Party going into 2012. Initially, the candidates cast a wary eye towards Ryan’s plan, even as nearly all House Republicans (and later Senate Republicans) voted for it. While praising the Wisconsin representative and making vague noises about their own determination to control entitlement spending, the candidates preserved their right to issue their own proposals in good time. But then Newt Gingrich spoiled the game by openly criticizing Ryan’s treatment of Medicare as “right-wing social engineering” that hadn’t a chance at public support, and in the ensuing furor the stampede began. One by one, Republican candidates, including a chastened Gingrich, lined up in support of Ryan’s entire budget, thereby making a virtual abolition of Medicare a party-wide stance that Republicans now cannot possibly hope to live down. (Indeed, the desire to obtain bipartisan cover for radical changes to Medicare is probably the only factor other than Wall Street pressure that is keeping alive congressional Republican interest in a budget deal with Obama).
It’s an open question whether Republican candidates are concerned about, or even aware of, the risks they are running by colluding in their party’s ideological bender, both in terms of their chances in the general election and in seeking to serve as president if elected. Mitt Romney, who is in the anomalous position of being transformed from the true conservative champion of 2008 to today’s moderate establishment candidate, even as he has become tangibly more conservative on the issues, probably understands it. But most conservatives appear convinced that 2012 will be a referendum on Barack Obama and the general direction of the country–one that Republicans can’t lose as long as their base turns out. And in the meantime, the complicity of the GOP presidential candidates in right-wing efforts to “stiffen the spine” of Republican officeholders against the temptations of bipartisan governance is contributing to genuine risks for the country.