RyanCare means you get discount coupons for health insurance instead of medicare. The coupons won’t be guaranteed to cover your insurance premiums and they will automatically pay less and less of your medical costs every year.
Do you really want to give up your Medicare for that?

Earlier today J.P. Green offered a balanced assessment of Jon Huntsman’s general election prospects in the unlikely even that he wins the GOP presidential nomination. But it’s hard to imagine Obama’s former ambassador to China ever getting to that point. Here’s Dave Weigel’s brutal take on Hunstman after watching his launch event:

Huntsman 2012 is a joint production of the political media and the fun wing of the GOP’s consultant class. (His chief strategist is McCain veteran John Weaver, who made a hobby of criticizing McCain’s negative turn in 2008; his adman is Fred Davis, who made sure you knew Christine O’Donnell was not a witch.) There is no Huntsman groundswell. There was no Draft Huntsman movement. One metric to show this: He has about 5,000 Facebook fans. A reasonably busy senator has that many. The wildly ignored 2012 contender Gary Johnson, former governor of New Mexico, has more than 120,000 fans. True, Huntsman’s team cleverly secured a second-place showing in the Southern Republican Leadership Conference [straw poll]. When that result came down, my colleague John Dickerson heard only two hands clapping.

As for the positive hype over Huntsman cleverly choosing the same Statue of Liberty site for his launch that Ronald Reagan used in his 1980 general election campaign: Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics points out that it’s the same place where the less-than-immortal 1996 campaign of Pete Wilson started out. Right now Huntsman’s destination looks more likely to resemble Wilson’s than Reagan’s, at least in 2012. His hunch that Republicans are looking for a nominee who is civil towards Barack Obama and even shares some of his views–but who eagerly embraces the least popular recent GOP initiative, the Ryan budget–just seems a bit counter-intuitive.

It’s hardly news that the anti-choice movement has all but conquered the Republican Party. Pro-choice Republicans (or at least pols who call themselves that because they don’t favor complete abolition of abortion rights) still exist, but are few and far between. At the presidential level, the self-described Right to Life Movement has an effective veto on candidates, as was evidenced once again in 2008, when Rudy Giuliani’s campaign crashed and burned and John McCain was prevented from selecting Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge as his running-mate.
But impatient anti-choicers, who have always suspected Republican pols of playing them for suckers by making their concerns a low priority once in office, are ratcheting up the demands in this presidential cycle. The Susan B. Anthony List, a relatively new group modeled on the pro-choice organization Emily’s List, has devised a new and fairly complex pledge that it is urging Republican presidential candidates to take. Here it is:

FIRST, to nominate to the U.S. federal bench judges who are committed to restraint and applying the original meaning of the Constitution, not legislating from the bench;
SECOND, to select only pro-life appointees for relevant Cabinet and Executive Branch positions, in particular the head of National Institutes of Health, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Health & Human Services;
THIRD, to advance pro-life legislation to permanently end all taxpayer funding of abortion in all domestic and international spending programs, and defund Planned Parenthood and all other contractors and recipients of federal funds with affiliates that perform or fund abortions;
FOURTH, advance and sign into law a Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act to protect unborn children who are capable of feeling pain from abortion.

The third and fourth planks represent the latest strategic initiatives of the RTL movement: systematic defunding of institutions providing not only abortions but contraceptive services, and “fetal pain”-rationalized bans on abortions after 20 weeks, which have been enacted in several states (the SBA List wants similar federal legislation, which would, of course, trigger a major constitutional test in the federal courts).
So far five candidates (Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul, Pawlenty and Santorum) have signed the SBA pledge, and two–Cain and Romney–have refused to do so (it doesn’t appear Huntsman has been pushed to pledge just yet; Gary Johnson also wouldn’t sign it). The excuses made by the two non-signatories are a bit weak: Cain objects to the idea that the president would have to “advance” the abortion ban legislation, on grounds that’s the legislative branch’s responsibility. Romney said he had issues with too-broad language on both funding and nominations.
Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann both went after Romney on this incident, using it to remind Republican voters of Mitt’s shaky past on abortion policy.
Will this brouhaha matter over time? Perhaps, but only at the margins. SBA isn’t the only anti-choice group out there, and many conservatives would advance a different strategy on this subject, and/or don’t like public litmus tests.
But it does provide another kernal of doubt that Mitt Romney is “one of us” in the minds of conservative activists, particularly in Iowa and the South, who don’t buy the idea that social issues aren’t significant in this election cycle.

Jon Huntsman announced his campaign for the presidency today, which should enliven the campaign for the GOP nomination and possibly set the stage for deepening ideological divisions within his party.
Matt Bai’s portrait of Huntsman in the Sunday New York Times magazine will not cause a lot of concern in the Obama campaign. True, Huntsman won his re-election (Utah governorship) with 78 percent of the vote and Obama ’08 campaign manager David Plouffe said the possibility of a Huntsman campaign back then made him a “wee bit queasy.”
But Bai’s profile of Huntsman reveals an oddly detached and dispassionate candidate with an upper-class pedigree, as heir to his father’s chemical industry fortune. His mother is the daughter of an LDS apostle. Money won’t be a problem for Huntsman, who expects to raise additional dough from wealthy Republicans who have some moderate ‘social issue’ views, place a premium on lowering the capital gains tax, but can’t get their heads around the Romney thing.
Huntsman’s bet for the Republican nomination has to be that the tea party candidates will cancel each other out, and there will be enough Romney-phobes to give him a real shot. This scenario presupposes more charisma than Huntsman may have, although NYT columnist Frank Rich’s description of Romney as “an otherwordly visitor from an Aqua Velva commercial, circa 1985” is not so far off the mark.
It also assumes, not without some evidence, that Pawlenty may be a non-starter. But there’s always the chance that Huntsman’s campaign might boomerang and divide what’s left of the GOP’s moderate conservatives, end Romney’s hopes and make possible the election of one of the more conservative candidates.
Assuming that Huntsman somehow grabs the GOP nod, he will have a tough trek, make that a gauntlet-run, in the general election if the economy improves significantly in the next year. Without an economic axe to grind, Huntsman’s case weakens considerably and he will likely have some ‘splainin’ to do regarding his increasingly sharp attacks against the guy who gave him his most important job. Hard to see how he gets through it without being branded in the minds of many “character voters” as a disloyal opportunist/hypocrite. That baggage isn’t going to magically disappear.
Then there is the flip-flopping, as described by Wayne Holland, chairman of the Utah Democratic party, in Nia-Malika Henderson’s article on Huntsman’s entry in today’s WaPo:

The Jon Huntsman I know supported Barack Obama and President Obama’s recovery act, but said it should have been larger…The Jon Huntsman I know worked with Democrats to pass the cap-and-trade program and said at the time it was the only alternative to a carbon tax. The Jon Huntsman I know signed into law a health insure exchange and proposed an individual mandate for Utah. It now appears that has all changed.

If the economy tanks further, Huntsman would have a decent chance, as would just about any GOP nominee, north of the lowest tier. Even then, however, Huntsman’s lack of any discernible connection to everyday working people could be a formidable obstacle.
JFK proved that brainy rich guys can connect with the pivotal white working-class. But it does require an ability to project warmth, a good sense of humor, compassion and maybe a bit of a track record. I’m not seeing it in Huntsman’s persona, as viewed through Bai’s profile. Huntsman’s working-class cultural creds are pretty thin — apparently his favorite sports are motocross and bungee-jumping. His handlers and ad-makers will have a tough assignment making him seem like a ‘regular guy.’ All in all, it seems fair to say that the GOP field has not been impressively strengthened by Huntsman’s entry.

On May 29, I commented on an article about the, ahem, fruits of Republican immigration ‘reform,’ which have included labor shortages, rotting crops and pissed-off farmers in Georgia. Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Constitution has an update on the disastrous after-effects of the enactment of the legislation. An excerpt:

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
…Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.
Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.
The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

The solution? Gov. Deal now wants to deploy an estimated 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers who live in s.w. Georgia to pick what’s left of the rotting crops. As Bookman says, “Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.” Bookman adds:

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow…We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

Other possible “solutions” to the farm worker crisis being bandied about include raising wages — and consumer prices — to hopefully attract more workers and weakening enforcement of the new law, which is not likely to impress migrant farm workers much. Can prison labor be far behind?
Latinos are 8.8 percent of Georgia residents, but approximately 3 percent of Georgia’s registered voters, so the Republicans undoubtedly figure they won’t pay too much of a political price for the new law. Harassing the undocumented workers of Georgia’s leading industry may score a few points with wingnut ideologues for the Republican Governor and state legislators. But Dems may just have gained an edge with Georgia’s farmers, who live and work in the real world.

TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira provides a solid analysis at The New Republic today of precisely how well Barack Obama needs to do among white working-class voters to win re-election in 2012:

In 2008, during his otherwise-solid election victory, Obama lost the white working class vote by 18 points. In 2010, however, things got much worse: Congressional Democrats’ experienced a catastrophic 30 point deficit among the same group. While the first number is a figure Obama could live with repeating, the second could very well prove fatal.

Teixeira goes on to explain that white working class voters, which have been trending Republican heavily in presidential contests since 1996, are particularly important in key swing states:

White working class voters could end up representing as much as 56 percent of Ohio voters in 2012, judging from Census voter supplement data. Anything close to a 30 point deficit in 2012 will almost definitely sink Obama in this state, no matter what happens with the friendlier portions of the Ohio electorate….
Contested states with high proportions of white working class voters like Minnesota (60 percent white working class in 2012), Wisconsin (58 percent), Pennsylvania (55 percent), and Michigan (53 percent) could easily be flipped if this group flees from Obama.

In the long run, of course, white working class voters represent a shrinking percentage of the electorate. But this one-time bulwark of the Democratic Party can still decide elections.

[T]he good news for Obama is that the level of support he needs from this group of voters is not terribly high. While a 30 point deficit might sink him, he could survive pretty easily on a 23 point deficit, John Kerry’s margin in 2004. That Obama would likely win with this very large deficit, while Kerry lost, indicates just how much the demographics of the country have changed in the 8 years since Kerry’s defeat. But while the bar for Obama may be lower, he still needs to clear it, and at the moment, that’s looking like a real challenge.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
With the first major 2012 Republican presidential candidates’ debate over with, and the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll less than two months away, the window for additional candidates to emerge and strengthen a shallow field is rapidly narrowing. But there’s still one proto-candidate, due to announce a decision by the end of the month, who’s piquing the interest of many a Republican: the ever-colorful, if somewhat erratic, governor of Texas, Rick Perry.
On paper, Perry’s got a lot of plus-marks for a Republican Party that currently values three qualities that are difficult to combine: extensive executive experience, an economic success story to tell, and anti-Washington Tea Party cred. He’s also gives good (if not terribly substantive) speeches, loves to campaign, and has access to deep pockets via his Texas background and his Republican Governors’ Association rolodex. And as an ally of the hard-core Christian Right, he would become immediately viable in Iowa, as well as having a step up in South Carolina.
Moreover, Perry’s peculiar credentials make him a problematic rival for virtually everyone already in the field. Texas’ strong economy (whether or not he had much to do with it) gives him economic and fiscal talking points easily rivaling Romney’s. He’s as popular in both Tea Party and Christian Right circles as Bachmann or Cain. And he would immediately double the number of electable-true-conservative-alternatives-to-Romney in the race, which isn’t good news for the other one, Tim Pawlenty.
So what’s not to like? In short, every one of the enigmatic governor’s supposed strengths turns out to be yoked to a big, potentially damaging weakness.
To begin, Texas’ economy may have done well during most of his ten-year-plus tenure as governor, but it’s done so at the price of very low levels of public services, high rates of poverty, and a long line of sweetheart corporate deals, not all of them successful, between Perry and some of his friends and allies, which could prove to be an opposition researcher’s playground. (His pet plan for a privately operated mega-highway through the state, the Trans-Texas Corridor, which has never reached fruition, is a good example). Moreover, his budgetary record has also depended on some questionable accounting measures (e.g., temporarily delayed payments to schools) and a willingness to rely on the federal government he purports to loath (stimulus dollars played a big role in propping up the most recent Texas budget).
Second, while Perry has become a Tea Party favorite, he has done so in part by making inflammatory statements that may trouble even a healthy number of Republican primary voters, the most famous of which was his suggestion that secession might be on the table for Texas. In addition, he’s also made threats to withdraw the state from the Medicaid program–with only the vaguest suggestion of how or whether poor families would receive medical treatment–and even sought the power to opt Texas out of Social Security, a rather egregious stomping on the third rail of politics.
And finally, Perry is close to the Christian Right, but the fact of the matter is that he hasn’t chosen the most seemly of allies in that camp. As a follow-on to his famous “Pray for Rain” rally in April, he’s now planning an evangelical hoedown in August, called “The Response,” that features a sort of who’s who of radical theocrats, including John Hagee, the Christian Zionist leader whose support John McCain felt constrained to repudiate in 2008 after Hagee called Adolf Hitler an agent of God’s plans to return the Jews to their biblical homeland. The expressed purpose of the upcoming event is to seek divine intervention to fix America, apparently via the propitiation of an angry God by the abandonment of such abominations as legalized abortion, same-sex relationships, and church-state separation. If the Texas governor is by then running for president, it won’t be much of a mystery who might be called upon by the assembled divines to restore righteousness in Washington: Perry himself, once again in the right place at the right time.
On top of it all, persistent doubts about Perry’s competence (and in some quarters, honesty) have made him less than a political powerhouse in his home state of Texas, even as the state’s powerful Republican trend in the last decade, along with an energy-industry-boom, have given him enormous advantages. In 2006, for instance, he only won 39 percent of the general election vote in a peculiar, four-way gubernatorial race (with one independent candidate, the comedic musician and novelist Kinky Friedman, probably taking most of his double-digit-percentage vote from Perry’s Democratic opponent). In 2010, meanwhile, he won by solid margins against his primary challenger, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and his general election opponent, Houston Mayor Bill White–but this was right at the peak of the Tea Party uprising, which Perry very successfully exploited, and the fact remains that he was vulnerable enough to draw these legitimate challenges in the first place. His relationship with Texas Republicans, moreover, has always been somewhat shaky, as evidenced by the revolt of GOP legislators against a business tax plan Perry pushed through a few years ago, and his rumored frosty relations with his great benefactors, the Bush family. And even his friends in the social conservative wing of the Texas GOP were appalled by his 2007 proposal to require that every sixth-grade girl in Texas be vaccinated for the HPV virus.
All in all, you have to wonder why Texans, including hard-core conservatives, seem less impressed than people in other states with the prospect of a Perry presidential run. Some appear to be stunned at the very idea, treating him as a sort of Chauncey Gardiner figure who has stumbled, through remarkable luck, into the national spotlight. But Perry’s ultimate stroke of luck could be in appearing on the scene at a time when the Republican Party considers the power of its ideology, not the brains or accomplishments of its leaders, its trump card in 2012.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
I’ve spent the past week in Israel listening to as many voices as I could. Based on what I’ve heard, a rough summary of the situation is this: Benjamin Netanyahu offers no viable alternative to the status quo, and the opposition offers no viable alternative to Netanyahu. Until Mahmoud Abbas recognizes Israel as a Jewish state, the prime minister says, serious talks are impossible. And besides, negotiating with a coalition that includes Hamas is unthinkable. For their part, the Palestinians are insisting that serious talks can’t begin until the Israelis endorse the “1967 borders with agreed-on swaps” principle that President Obama articulated last month. Meanwhile, the once-dominant Labor Party is all but defunct, and Kadima is riven by debates over such momentous matters as their leader Tsipi Livni’s alleged mismanagement of party funds. While Netanyahu is hardly a giant, he bestrides the Israeli political scene like a colossus. The near-certain consequence of these realities is continuing stagnation.
The skeptics, of course, love to object that “the status quo is unsustainable.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve encountered that phrase over the past 44 years, I could retire tomorrow. The majority of Israelis actually seem comfortable to the point of complacency with today’s de facto truce and limited Palestinian autonomy. The Palestinians are anything but comfortable, of course, but what can they do? If they choose to take their case to the United Nations General Assembly this fall, they’ll get a symbolic vote of support that changes nothing on the ground. To be sure, non-violent demonstrations could mobilize sympathizers around the world while further isolating Israel. But the Israelis are working quickly to deploy more effective crowd control weapons and tactics and to create a more seamless allocation of responsibilities between the IDF and the police. Unless they drop the ball, they should be able to avert a repetition of the army’s heavy-handed and needlessly lethal response to recent breaches of the line of demarcation between Syria and the Israeli-held Golan.
Many retired generals and former intelligence officials, for their part, regard Netanyahu as a reckless adventurer guided more by dogma and short-term political calculations than by a sober analysis of long-term national interests. They may well be right. But Netanyahu clearly thinks of himself as a principled visionary with time on his side. In a recent interview, he referred to the decades it took for the conflict over Northern Ireland to yield to fruitful negotiations. He’s waiting for the Palestinian equivalent of Sinn Fein’s abandonment of armed struggle and willingness to accept a divided Ireland. The Palestinians believe they’ve made that transition without getting much in return; Netanyahu disagrees. Some worried Israelis think that it’s stupid to antagonize the government of the United States; Netanyahu thinks that his current strategy will enable him to dominate American as well as Israeli politics. And there matters stand.
I wish I had more confidence that the United States can make things better. But our influence in the region is at a very low ebb, and even supporters of the Obama administration concede that its efforts to date have been counterproductive. Each time the administration enunciates more “even-handed” policies, the Palestinians adopt them as preconditions for renewed talks while the Israelis dig in their heels. I would have thought that the art of diplomacy is not to say what you think to be true, but rather to use all instruments of national power, including verbal evasion, to get the parties themselves to act in accordance with that truth. Speeches can be tools of diplomacy; they are not substitutes for it. The administration is running out of time–may already have run out of time–to get it right.

For a fresh perspective on America’s unemployment problem, check out the Wall St. Journal’s post by Sara Murray, “Jobless Rate Lower or Flat in Most States” and accompanying rollover graphic widget. As Murray’s post explains,

Joblessness declined in nearly half of all U.S. states last month, the Labor Department said Friday.
Compared to a month earlier, unemployment fell in 24 states, rose in 13 and Washington, D.C. and was flat in another 13 states.
The unemployment rate has fallen significantly below the national average of 9.1% in May in 25 states. Rates were largely the same as the national average in 20 states and Washington, D.C. But five states — California, Florida, Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island — continued to suffer from double-digit unemployment…For the year, 43 states and Washington, D.C. have seen a drop in their unemployment rates. Just four experienced an increase in joblessness and three states had no change.

The post’s color-coded map provides a visual sense of the geography of American joblessness, and mouse hovering reveals the numbers — which states are suffering the highest rates (NV, CA, FL, MS, SC, MI and RI) and the one state that is doing exceptionally well — ND with 3.2 percent unemployment. Don’t everyone pack for North Dakota just yet, however. Apparently there is a serious housing shortage in the midst of the job-creating oil drilling boom. The map widget also includes back and forward arrow widget that gives a nice visual sense of the monthly trend line, which does suggest a slow recovery in many states.
The map does make you wonder if maybe the recovery could benefit from targeting specific states for job creation.

In a TDS Strategy Memo that got fairly wide attention last week I argued that “a very strong anti-Keynesian perspective on job creation is now widespread among American voters” and that therefore “simply repeating the traditional Democratic narrative — regardless of how frequently or emphatically — will not produce significant attitude change.”
In the process of being paraphrased and restated by other commentators, these two statements became transformed into two quite distinct assertions (a) that a “majority” of American voters no longer accept Keynesian measures and (b) as a result, Dems can no longer win their support for further action to create jobs.
Neither of these revised statements is correct. Let’s take them one at a time.
First, as far as how many Americans actually accept the explicitly anti-Keynesian view that cutting spending would really produce jobs, polling specialist Ruy Teixeira points to the following “forced choice” Washington Post poll as particularly revealing:

Do you think large cuts in federal spending would do more to create jobs or do more to cut jobs in this country?”
More to create jobs – 41%
More to cut jobs – 45%
Neither (vol.) -7%
Unsure — 7%

This is as close as one can come to an absolute, “gun to the head” forced-choice -the wording of the question doesn’t even offer the respondent a “neither” option — and even so 15 percent either said “neither” or that they just didn’t know. So, at the very best, only a minority of 40% of the American people really support the explicitly ideological anti-Keynesian position that cutting spending will create jobs.
On the other hand, however, the textbook Keynesian view that “cutting spending destroys jobs” also falls short of a majority. So, on this poll, Keynesians and anti-Keynesians seem roughly tied and neither has an absolute majority.
But look at what happens when respondents are given a third choice.

“If the government makes major cuts in federal spending this year in an effort to reduce the budget deficit, do you think these cuts will: [randomize] help the job situation/hurt the job situation, or not have much of an effect either way?”
Help – 18%
Hurt – 34%
Not have much of an effect either way — 41%

In this case the explicitly ideological anti-Keynesian view drops very dramatically to 18%. In contrast, a larger group of about a third of the sample takes a “Keynesian” view that spending cuts would hurt job creation while the remainder feels that spending cuts would “not have much of an effect either way”. The number of Americans who genuinely and passionately believe that massive spending cuts would really create millions of new jobs is therefore likely closer to the 20% figure in this poll than the 41% “forced choice” figure in the previous poll.
But what about those 41% in this second survey who say cuts would not have much of an effect either way?
A professor teaching a traditional Economics 101 course would say that people who think cutting spending during a deep recession would not have any effect at all are not only factually wrong but are also technically expressing an “anti-Keynesian” view. But many of the people choosing the “not much effect” option are not really making a serious macroeconomic forecast (i.e. “I predict that the net effect of major spending reductions on the unemployment rate will be zero”) but rather a view that is more accurately viewed as basically “skeptical” or “cynical” as opposed to ideologically anti-Keynesian.

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