Molly Ball of Politico noticed something interesting about the 2012 Republican presidential field: most of them aren’t very popular in their original stomping grounds.

Romney’s not the only presidential hopeful whose home state popularity is lagging. Just about all of the GOP presidential candidates would have a hard time winning their own states if they ended up as the party nominee, which may factor into the thinking among many Republicans that the 2012 field is lackluster.
The phenomenon marks a departure from the campaign days of old when “favorite son” candidates could point to their home-state popularity as a crucial part of their sales pitch.
The 2012 field, by contrast, is largely made up of unfavorite sons.
Tim Pawlenty never received a majority of the vote in Minnesota in his two successful runs for governor. Congresswoman Michele Bachmann almost certainly couldn’t win the state — her high-water mark in her own GOP-friendly district was 53 percent, registered during the Republican landslide year of 2010.
In statewide polls conducted by the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling, both had higher unfavorable ratings than favorable.
It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania, where voters drummed Rick Santorum out of the Senate by 18 percentage points–he was the rare incumbent to lose by a blowout margin. Newt Gingrich, who has yet to set foot in his campaign’s Georgia headquarters, would lose the state to President Barack Obama, according to one recent poll. Fellow Georgian Herman Cain ran once for statewide office and failed to make it out of a Senate primary. Sarah Palin, once an overwhelmingly popular governor of Alaska, saw her statewide approval decline after the 2008 presidential campaign, then crash after she left office in July 2009.

It’s sometimes said that Republicans think they can’t lose in 2012, particularly if the economy doesn’t significantly improve between now and November of next year. Looking at the shelf-value of their presidential field, they’d better hope that is true.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has a post up at his blog, “Why the Republican War on Workers’ Rights Undermines the American Economy,” which does a good job of pinpointing a critical missing element in the economic recovery effort. Lamenting the passing of the era Reich dubs “The Great Prosperity,” the three decades after WW II when “wages rose in tandem with productivity” and “Americans could afford to buy what they produced,” he holds up the example of Europe’s healthiest economy:

…If you want to see the same basic bargain we had then, take a look at Germany now.
Germany is growing much faster than the United States. Its unemployment rate is now only 6.1 percent (we’re now at 9.1 percent).
What’s Germany’s secret? In sharp contrast to the decades of stagnant wages in America, real average hourly pay has risen almost 30 percent there since 1985. Germany has been investing substantially in education and infrastructure.
How did German workers do it? A big part of the story is German labor unions are still powerful enough to insist that German workers get their fair share of the economy’s gains.
That’s why pay at the top in Germany hasn’t risen any faster than pay in the middle. As David Leonhardt reported in the New York Times recently, the top 1 percent of German households earns about 11 percent of all income – a percent that hasn’t changed in four decades.
Contrast this with the United States, where the top 1 percent went from getting 9 percent of total income in the late 1970s to more than 20 percent today.
The only way back toward sustained growth and prosperity in the United States is to remake the basic bargain linking pay to productivity. This would give the American middle class the purchasing power they need to keep the economy going.

Reich credits strong labor unions as a leading cause of both Germany’s economic health and ‘The Great Prosperity’ era in the U.S. noting “In 1955, over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized. Today, fewer than 7 percent are.” Reich adds:

With the decline of unions has come the stagnation of American wages. More and more of the total income and wealth of America has gone to the very top. The middle class’s purchasing power has depended on mothers going into paid work, everyone working longer hours, and, finally, the middle class going deep into debt, using their homes as collateral. But now all these coping mechanisms are exhausted — and we’re living with the consequence.
…The American economy can’t get out of neutral until American workers have more money in their pockets to buy what they produce. And unions are the best way to give them the bargaining power to get better pay.

Reich is well-aware of the enormous difficulties of meeting this challenge, particularly the “Republican War on Workers,” which includes eviscerating collective bargaining rights for public workers and “open shop” initiatives to prevent unions from collecting dues, along with attacking the National Labor Relations Board.
Clearly, Reich is not talking about a quick fix in time for next year’s elections. Rather, this is a long haul struggle that will require sustained commitment from both unions and progressives. There are critical reforms, like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) which could help strengthen unions. But it these reforms will require restoring strong Democratic majorities in congress.
The outpouring of protests against public worker union busting in Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana offer the hope that the public is waking up to the dangers of weakening unions further. Organized labor’s embrace of new organizing tactics, such as those being used to recruit Wal-mart workers into a union-like organization called “OUR Walmart” may open up new directions for union growth.
The image of unions is in need of a make-over, since anti-labor propaganda has been relentless and it looks like its going to get worse. Senator Rand Paul has apparently been appointed the new poster-boy for union bashing. In response, the labor movement could use a major Ken Burns-style prime-time documentary series showing how much unions have done to help American families have a better quality of life. Unions have also got to do a better job of tooting their own horn, not just in the shops they hope to organize, but throughout American society.
Like every Democrat, I’m hoping economic recovery will soon kick in strong enough to do some good for Dems in ’12. But if we want to create a sound foundation for a more enduring recovery benefiting American workers — call it “The Great Prosperity 2.0,” Democrats will have to focus more on supporting unions.

August is looking to be a hot month for politically-tinged mega-events. There is, of course, the Iowa State GOP Straw Poll on August 13, which is likely to winnow the Republican presidential field and perhaps produce the long-awaited “conservative alternative to Mitt Romney.”
But there’s big fun elsewhere. Glenn Beck is planning a sequel to last year’s “Restoring Honor” event–not in DC, but in Jerusalem, on August 24. It’s dubbed “Restoring Courage,” and best as I can tell, its aim is to oppose a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There will apparently be rock bands and other pyrotechnics, and as many Israeli and American politicians as Beck can rope in to the event. There have been conflicting reports about which American pols are likely to show up, but so far, it looks like Beck can probably count on Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Joe Lieberman if no one else.
A bit closer to home, and earlier in the month (August 6), in Austin, Texas, Gov. Rick Perry, who may be an announced candidate for president by then, is hosting a mega-rally of right-wing religious figures called “The Response”. It’s a follow-on to Perry’s famous “pray for rain” event in April, but with much, much bigger ambitions for divine intervention in American affairs. And it’s attracting practically every well-known theocrat in the country.
Here’s the indispensable Sarah Posner on the nature of “The Response”:

I’ve reported on, and experienced, the very type of rally Perry is planning…. They are indeed intended to convert new followers to Christ. But they really are about something much, much more: purging America of non-believers, LGBT people, and perceived political enemies, depicted as satanic…..
So while Rick Perry is out to pander for votes, he’s pandering to people who believe in signs and wonders and spiritual warfare; who care nothing for policy or respecting other people’s faith beliefs; who disdain other people’s reproductive choices and gender identities; and who believe that God is calling them to engage in a bloodless (although apocalyptic) battle with political enemies. If Perry runs for president, it won’t be for the United States of America. It will be for a new Zion whose followers believe God will smite their enemies and declare a new Kingdom on earth, and in America, one that is ruled by their singular version of Jesus Christ.

If Perry is a candidate by then, it sure looks like “The Response” could position him to decisively outflank his rivals–perhaps even Michele Bachmann–among the hard-core conservative evangelical faithful. I guess they’ll first have to forgive him for endorsing that sodomite-loving, adulterous baby-killer-enabler Rudy Giuliani for president in 2008, but repentance is always welcomed by these folk.

Now that Rep. Michele Bachmann is in the spotlight as a strong performer in Monday’s Republican presidential candidate debate, it’s very helpful to know more about what makes the Minnesota conservative firebrand tick. Right on cue, Michelle Goldberg, an authority on the “Christian nationalist” movement, has written an important backgrounder on Bachmann’s career and ideology for the Daily Beast.
Goldberg makes it crystal clear that Bachmann’s not just some Republican pol who happens to be active in Christian Right causes. She’s the expositor of an ideology that views politics as an arena for the imposition of godly rule as intepreted by a radical strain of conservative evangelicalism. And it comes out in strange but understandable ways, if you have the decoder ring:

On Monday, Bachmann didn’t talk a lot about her religion. She didn’t have to–she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama’s Libya policy, for example, she said, “We are the head and not the tail.” The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: “The Lord will make you the head and not the tail.” As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it’s often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.

To those who wouldn’t normally look to Deuteronomy for guidance on U.S. policy towards Libya, this sort of approach seems bizarre. But once you are inside the crusading worldview of people like Bachmann, it all makes sense.

After carefully watching and writing about last night’s first 2012 GOP presidential candidates’ debate, I woke up this morning and was surprised to hear a lot of talk, much of it from left-of-center observers, suggesting the candidates had shown all sorts of surprising maturity and moderation. This take by Jacob Weisburg of Slate is representative:

The GOP presidential field, while hardly dominated by political giants, appears far less outlandish than one might have predicted. At the first Republican debate in New Hampshire on Monday night, the seven candidates competed not for evangelical or libertarian favor, but for the status of someone plausible to compete with the president for swing voters.
Here are some of the things that did not happen in the debate. No one called Obama a socialist. No one gave ambiguous encouragement to the “birther” faction. While all of the candidates oppose gay marriage, no one bashed homosexuals. With the exception of the marginal former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, no one directly endorsed the Ryan Plan. Two months ago, every Republican in the House backed this plan; now, no one wants to talk about it.

In other words, the candidates did not howl at the moon, and did not go out of the way to associate themselves with a dangerously specific and unpopular Medicare proposal.
They did, however, with the exception of Herman Cain’s brief endorsement of food safety inspections, uniformly reject any positive government role in domestic affairs, and more specifically, any legitimate government role in the economy, other than keeping money tight and getting rid of its own regulations. If anyone thought government could do anything at all to help the unemployed other than give more tax dollars and power to the people who had laid them off and/or foreclosed on their mortgages, they kept it to themselves. They engaged in an orgy of angry union-bashing that was entirely unlike anything that’s ever happened in a debate among people running for president. And the sort of reticence Weisberg perceived on cultural issues basically meant that candidates who favor criminalization of abortion and re-stigmatization of gay people say they won’t make it a major campaign issue. And why should they? They all agree on these extremist positions.
And that’s an important thing to keep in mind: When the political center of a party, or a country, is in the process of shifting, there’s a lot of noise and conflict. When it settles in its new place, however, it gets very quiet. To a very great extent, that’s what has happened in the GOP. It is not a sign of “sanity” or “moderation;” simply one of consensus.
I also think a lot of the “how nice they are” assessments of the field after the debate reflect little more than the belief that Mitt Romney did really well and may actually get the nomination. That makes non-hardcore-conservatives feel better, if only because they tend to assume Romney’s own hardcore conservatism is fake.
All the talk about Mitt dodging a bullet could be a mite premature. Yes, Tim Pawlenty passed up a chance to hit Romney at his weakest point, “ObamneyCare.” Politico was so stunned by this turn of events they devoted their top story this morning to endless quotes from pundits and campaign strategists savaging poor T-Paw for cowardice or stupidity. But it’s a long way to the 2012 convention, and the assumption that last night’s scenario will be repeated in future campaign developments is entirely unwarranted. Perhaps Pawlenty thought other candidates would “go negative” in the debate before he had to. Or perhaps he figures he’d better become the “conservative alternative to Romney” before he has to worry about actually beating him. Who knows?
But the bottom line is that the GOP did not suddenly transform itself overnight. The drive to the right in the GOP has been underway for more than four decades. If it seems to have stopped, that’s probably becomes it has arrived at its destination.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The first big GOP candidate debate of the 2012 presidential cycle was from a conventional perspective unexciting. Nobody hit a home run, and nobody made a major gaffe. From a tactical point of view, the most astounding moment was Tim Pawlenty’s refusal to stand behind his “ObamneyCare” sound bite about health reform delivered over Fox News this weekend. T-Paw disingenuously argued the term was simply his gloss on the president’s description of the similarities between the Affordable Care Act and Romney’s Massachusetts health plan–a decision which essentially took the issue off the table for the rest of the debate (if not the rest of the campaign). And whenever RomneyCare is off the table, Mitt Romney has to be judged the winner.
But from a broader perspective, the overriding message of this debate is how thoroughly the conservative movement has conquered the GOP on domestic policy. Like myna birds, the candidates emphatically agreed the economy is the main issue, that radically reducing the power of government to do good or ill is the only thing a president can do to help the economy, and that there is scarcely a problem where the federal government can make a single positive contribution to national life, other than by deploying National Guard troops to the border.
The main differences between the candidates on domestic issues strictly revolved around the precise strategy–mechanical and political–for destroying any vestige of a positive government role in the economy. When former restauranteur Herman Cain was corned by moderator John King into admitting the federal government ought to continue food safety inspections, the candidate rapidly changed the subject into areas where government is doing a terrible job that it ought to abandon. But Cain won the biggest audience reaction of the entire night with his fiery support for state right-to-work laws, including a prospective decision by New Hampshire to join the South in that anti-union policy; Pawlenty tried to trump him by supporting a national right-to-work law.
On the politically sensitive issue of Medicare, Gingrich repeated his critique of Paul Ryan’s voucher proposal on political grounds, a lot more effectively than he did in his disastrous Meet the Press appearance a few weeks ago, and Pawlenty reserved the right to propose his own radical approach to Medicare. Not a soul challenged the idea that Medicare as we know it had to die, sooner rather than later, as rapidly as political markets would accept.
And on the tax front, no one took up King on his open invitation for someone to disagree with Pawlenty’s claim that tax cuts and total deregulation of the private sector could produce never-before-experienced rates of economic growth. Any doubt on this subject, it seems, smacked of dark, decadent Europeanism.
Moreover, none of the candidate gave a single hint of support for the idea that the risk of a fresh financial disaster might trump the demands for radical spending cuts in negotiations with Democrats over the debt limit.
So if the Republican candidates lined right up in favor of the most radically conservative economic positions since Barry Goldwater, did they distinguish themselves elsewhere? Not a lot. Bachmann, who needs no additional credibility among social conservative ultras, said she wouldn’t spend time as president intervening in state debates over same-sex marriage. Cain, who recently endorsed the idea that Planned Parenthood was pursuing a genocidal policy towards African-Americans, also had sufficient Christian Right street cred to say he wouldn’t make restoration of Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell a big priority. Nobody was even vaguely pro-choice or pro-marriage-equality; it was all about tactics for achieving Christian Right goals. It said a lot about the horizons of conservative opinion these days that no one defended church-state separation, and Mitt Romney came across like Thomas Jefferson by demurring in response to the suggestions of Cain and Gingrich that American Muslims posed a risk of subjecting America to Sharia law (crowd-pleasers, by the way).
There was a faint glimmer of potential diversity on foreign policy and national defense, aside from Ron Paul’s predictable heresies: Bachmann attacked the Libyan engagement categorically, and Romney hinted that the Afghanistan war might need to be liquidated.
Insta-reaction to the debate suggested that Romney and Bachmann were the big winners; Romney because no one laid a glove on him, and Bachmann because she fit right into the mainstream of the debate, managing to seem engaging and reasonable. For those who know Bachmann well, that should be a bit scary.
But it’s also fitting. This debate was the most homogeneous discussion among presidential candidates I can remember, the more remarkable because all the candidates were many degrees to the right of where Republican candidates were in 2008 or 2000. For the first and probably last time in this cycle, I yearned for the presence of Rudy Giuliani, who at least would have created a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Throughout the debate, King tried to supply light moments by asking candidates boxers-or-briefs type questions that were unrelated to politics. The closest thing to a decisive answer was Gingrich’s emphatic endorsement of American Idol over Dancing With the Stars. This Republican presidential debate was like an Idol contest where everyone sings the same song, over and over.

The blogosphere is awash with references to Tim Pawlenty’s limp performance in the GOP opening debates, paired with positive spin about Michelle Bachmann’s comparatively strong presentation, prompting considerable snarkage about who really leads the MN GOP (Hint: It ain’t the ex-guv).
The punditariat is a tad mystified as to why Tim-Paw refused to elaborate on his pre-debate “Obamneycare” trial balloon, which many observers thought was a pretty clever zinger against the front-runner. Perhaps Pawlenty figured Romney had an equally-clever counter-punch at the ready, so why blunder into it. But the wide read on Pawlenty’s reluctance, especially after being pressed by CNN moderator John King, is that it did make him look evasive. Here’s how Josh Marshall described it in his post “Pawlenty’s Pitiful Moment” at Talking Points Memo, which also includes the video clip :

…The key moment where Gov. Pawlenty hemmed and hawed and ducked and weaved and wasn’t willing to repeat his criticisms to Romney’s face. Embarrassing. People get that. They have words for it.

Elsewhere at TPM, Marshall adds:

…The big story here was Pawlenty. He choked at a critical moment when he wouldn’t repeat the criticisms he’s made of Romney to his face. That makes him look weak. And more than weak I think it cuts against people’s sense of fair play and just being what we Jews call being a mensch. If you criticize someone when they’re not around. Be ready to stay it to their face. If you’re not, you’re just not for real. That’s elemental and I think people understand and remember that in a way they just don’t with the endless run of policy details candidates toss out.

Well, it wasn’t pretty. But I doubt it will prove fatal just yet, although another such choke would likely do him in as a viable candidate. Marshall is not alone in giving the night to Romney, and others give Bachmann a thumbs up as well, if only because she avoided making any characteristic blunders.
Newt and the others failed to make much of an impression, either way, although Ron Paul was gutsy, in GOP context, about bailing out of Afghanistan. I doubt he’ll get much cross-over support from anti-war moderates as a result, though, owing to his past association with some of the ugliest expressions of racial bigotry in recent times, even though the mainstream media has been too timid to call him on it.
No doubt the Romney camp is all smiles today. It won’t last. The GOP field, such as it is, will soon come after him with well-honed verbal pitchforks. I gather Romney’s nomination strategy includes letting the more conservative candidates divide the wingnut/tea party vote, so he can squeak by with the support of the saner Republicans. It’s not all that bad of a strategy, but the road ahead is increasingly pocked with political landmines bearing his name.

The long-awaited congressional and state legislative maps generated by the new California Citizens Redistricting Commission are now out, and unless public hearings or lawsuits change things, Democrats stand to pick up seats at every level, perhaps even gaining the two-thirds legislative majority that could theoretically break the state’s long-standing budgetary gridlock.
But the party’s gains could come at the expense of some Democratic incumbents, since the maps, drawn up to make more districts competitive, place ten of them in districts with each other, and another four in districts with Republican incumbents.
To understand the heavy turnover likely to ensue, it’s important to know that California is a state where the last two redistricting cycles pursued bipartisan incumbent protection to an extraordinary degree, creating very few marginal districts at the federal or state levels. Some Democrats have long felt this tradition limited Democratic opportunities to exploit big demographic advantages in California, which is why the new maps could help.
According to redistricting wizard Eric McGhee of the Public Policy Institute of California (as reported at CalBuzz):

[T]he number of competitive districts, counting both houses of the Legislature and Congress, increases from 16 to 34 under the draft plan; the total includes 7 additional Assembly districts (9 competitive to 16); 6 additional Senate districts (3 to 9) and 5 additional House districts (4 to 9).

At the congressional level, initial estimates are that Democrats are likely to pick up around four new House seats, according to Chris Cillizza:

Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell projects that the proposed map includes 32 Democratic seats and five Democratic-leaning seats, with 13 Republican seats and three seats that lean Republican. If each side won the seats that were solidly or leaning in their favor, Democrats would see a net gain of three seats in the delegation in 2012.
Similarly, Republican consultant Matt Rexroad estimates the Democrats’ advantage at 3-5 seats, though other Republicans place the estimate slightly lower and insist they will also get new opportunities from the map.

The new maps are by no means, however, final: the commission is going through a formal public hearing process next, and perhaps more importantly, the maps could be challenged on Voting Rights Act grounds, either in terms of the effect on incumbents from minority groups, or a failure to achieve optimal minority representation overall.
So far, however, in a redistricting cycle expected to produce a fair amount of bad news for Democrats, California is offering good news, and gains achieved not by gerrymandering but by better representation of this diverse and Democratic-trending state.

Just in time for tonight’s first field-wide candidate debate, Tim Pawlenty has come up with a cute sound-bite for the contention that ObamaCare–the greatest threat to American liberties since the British gun control initiatives that touched off the Revolutionary War–was essentially pioneered in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. It’s “ObamneyCare,” a term I am certain we will hear during the debate.
Romney will presumably try to deflect attention from attacks on his health care record by talking about his obsessive, maniacal, and above all hyper-competent focus on jobs and the economy. This is, after all, the strategy being urged on him by most of the punditocracy, who appear (viz. this counter-counter-CW piece from Alexander Burns at Politico) to assume that jobs and the economy are clearly distinguishable from health care as topics of public debate.
Since I wrote a full column just last week challenging the idea that the sluggish economy could vault Romney to the nomination, I won’t repeat my whole argument. But I will reiterate a point that the MSM seems to be missing entirely: today’s conservatives do not think of the economy and “ObamneyCare” as in any way separate issues. They believe, or at least so they incessantly say, that the sole cause of our economic problems is “big government,” of which health reform is the most notorious recent example, and the only route to economic revival is to disable “big government,” beginning with health reform. So for Romney to essentially say “I don’t want to talk about big government any more, I want to talk about the economy,” translates to conservative audiences as “I don’t want to talk about the causes of or solutions to our economic problems, I just want to talk about what a great manager I am.”
Maybe some Republican primary voters want a presidential nominee who will do a more competent and/or tight-fisted job of managing the satanic enterprise of the federal government than other candidates, but that’s more generally considered a deeply suspect RINO credential. I suspect Romney’s rivals, including T-Paw, are smart enough to figure that out, and we will see it tonight.

There seems to be a disconnect between the deficit reduction views of conservative leaders and the more level-headed views of the public. In his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains:

It really is quite remarkable, even by the standards of today’s conservatives, how far their plans for reducing the deficit are from the public’s. Conservatives don’t want to raise taxes in any way, especially on the rich and corporations. They don’t want to touch the military. And they think it’s a dandy idea to take a meat axe to domestic spending programs and Social Security. The public is exactly the opposite, as a recent Pew Center poll shows.
So what does the public approve of for reducing the deficit? They approve of reducing U.S. assistance to foreign countries (72 percent), raising the cap for Social Security contributions (67 percent), raising income taxes on the rich (66 percent), reducing military commitments overseas (65 percent), and limiting tax deductions for large corporations (62 percent)…

Conservative priorities for deficit-reduction seem tethered to some alternate reality, in stark contrast to the views of the public — “exactly backwards,” as Teixeira says. Democrats, on the other hand, are in the enviable position of being in synch with the views of the public regarding deficit-reduction and need only to stay grounded to benefit from the conservatives’ discrepancy.