It’s always noteworthy when a 2012 Republican presidential candidate decides to deliver a substantive speech instead of simply shoveling out red meat and expressing the radical sentiment that America is great and God is good. Tim Pawlenty, who despite his position as a smart-money favorite for the nomination remains mired in single digits in most polls, gave a Big Economic Speech in Chicago today, and it’s interesting how much sheer silliness was packed into it.
As many progressives are derisively noting, T-Paw tossed out what he called “the Google Test” for determining what government should and shouldn’t do: “If you can find a good or service on the Internet, then the federal government probably doesn’t need to be doing it.”
Taegan Goddard spotted the genesis of this ludicrous “idea” right away:

It’s hardly a new idea, however. Former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith (R) called the same principle a “yellow pages test” more than 15 years ago in the pre-Google era.

T-Paw’s speechwriters might have observed that there is vastly more information on Google than in the Yellow Pages, to the point that there are few government functions other than, say, the firing of intercontinental ballistic missiles, that wouldn’t flunk the test. Updating Goldsmith’s “test” in this manner is really bone-headed.
”
But let’s give Pawlenty a break and write off the “Google Test” as a comic-book illustration of his devotion to privatization that he didn’t mean literally. Elsewhere in the heart of the speech, there stands a contradiction so blatantly obvious that it’s hard to believe he’s not aware of it. He goes on at some length promising to return the economy to the growth levels of the early 1980s and late 1990s. He then proposes the usual GOP-favored tax cut program (sharply lower rates on corporations and wealthy individuals and abolition of the capital gains and estate taxes, offset in theory by the elimination of “loopholes”), and then begins assaulting President Obama for wanting to eliminate the Bush tax cuts on high earners:

Regrettably — President Obama is a champion practitioner of class warfare. Elected with a call for unity and hope. He’s spent three years dividing our nation. And fanning the flames of class envy and resentment. To deflect attention from his own failures. And the economic hardship they have visited on America.
But class warfare is not who we are.
I come from a working class background. I didn’t grow up with wealth. But I’ve never resented those who have it.
The top ten percent of income earners already pay more than 70% of income taxes. We could jack that up to 80 or 90% — as President Obama would have us do. But that’s not the point.While it might make the class warfare crusaders feel better. It wouldn’t create a single job in America. And it would destroy many.

Er, say, Tim, weren’t those horribly confiscatory high-end tax rates in place during both of those go-go periods you say you want to bring back? And actually, weren’t top rates a lot higher during the early 80s, even after Reagan’s tax cuts?
As often as Democrats make this simple point, and Republicans just ignore it, it appears the latter have decided to just brazen it out on sheer assertion that the 80s and 90s were some sort of low-tax paradise that Obama is determined to destroy.
I wish I could say this, or the Google Test, is the silliest thing in Pawlenty’s deep, deep speech, but it’s not: he also announces he will demand the Fed take a hard-money policy aimed at coping with that great contemporary economic emergency, runaway inflation. To the extent that rising prices are a problem, it’s associated mostly with energy prices, which operate independently of general price levels. If the Fed is going to try to combat that, it would have to be through deliberately deflationary policies, which is the dumbest thing imaginable given the current state of the economy.
It says a lot about today’s GOP that the purveyor of this economic nonsense is usually regarded as a safe, semi-moderate, and above all tediously conventional pol. Just wait until Michele Bachmann delivers her Big Economic Speech!

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
It was serendipitous: The day after Mitt Romney announced his presidential candidacy in a speech that focused heavily on claims that he’s the guy to turn around the economy, a jobs report came out that threw cold water on earlier optimistic sentiments about the prospects of the unemployed and of those threatened by depressed wages and unemployment. On the heels of lower growth estimates for the economy as a whole, this development creates a news context for the early phases of the 2012 election cycle that seems to be, as veteran Democratic pundit Mark Shields put it, “tailor-made for Romney.” And you can understand the argument. Romney has an extensive corporate background, looks the part of a CEO, and without question, he would prefer an issues environment focused on anything other than health care reform or the cultural issues on which he’s never inspired trust among conservatives.
If Romney wins the Republican presidential nomination, bad economic news will, of course, help him against Barack Obama, though that would be true of any GOP nominee. Perhaps it would help Romney even more, however, because his background makes him a plausible economic “pragmatist” who takes ideological oaths with a wink and crossed fingers. But will bad economic news help Romney win the Republican nomination? Don’t count on it.
While Romney’s business background endears him to pro-Republican business elites, it’s worth noting that such a personal history has rarely been a boon to Republican candidates in the past. Despite the GOP’s ancient pedigree as the party of business, being a successful corporate or entrepreneurial figure has never been treated as a prerequisite for a presidential nomination. With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, whose early adventures in the Texas oil industry were a less than prominent feature in his resume, there hasn’t been a Republican presidential nominee known mainly for his business experience since Wendell Willkie in 1940. Steve Forbes in 1996 and 2000, and Mitt himself in 2008, are among the few major candidates who could even make business experience a major calling card, and both these men campaigned more as ideologues–True Conservative alternatives to more moderate front-runners–than as job creators. Moreover, Romney’s background as a corporate “turnaround” (often a euphemism for downsizing) consultant makes his resume a mixed blessing. He’s identified more commonly with the Wall Street, not the Main Street, segment of the American business community, and that’s a problem for him in both the GOP primaries and any hypothetical general election.
Moreover, when you consider the state of contemporary conservative economic philosophy, it’s by no means clear that Republicans are looking for a highly competent, hands-on manager of the federal government’s economic development efforts. Indeed, the whole point of the current conservative push is to keep hands off the economy on the grounds that the federal government can’t make any meaningful positive contribution to economic growth, other than perhaps by opening trading relationships with other countries. And when it comes to reducing unemployment, most Republicans claim to believe that a Republican administration sworn to oppose tax increases and hell-bent on wholesale deregulation and major federal spending cuts will have an immediate positive effect on job growth, presumably by reassuring lenders and employers that uncertainty about future tax and regulatory trends is no longer warranted. Others, meanwhile, are candid in rejecting short-term economic trends–and particularly high unemployment–as top concerns, other than as the unfortunate price that some Americans must pay for past fiscal profligacy.
In this environment, it’s not clear what advantage Romney would have; his own economic message for 2012 is almost entirely negative, and it differs in no important respect from that of the other candidates. Indeed, Romney might even come off as lacking when compared to Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann, who have been consistently more extreme in their demands that congressional Republicans threaten economic havoc if their desired spending cuts or entitlement reforms aren’t enacted. And it should be obvious, in a party that equates economic growth with limited government, that Romney’s huge problem–the Massachusetts health reform plan he championed and still defends–is by no means eliminated by an increased focus on the economy. Romney himself, in his presidential announcement speech, knelt before the altar of small government by saying: “We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy.” ObamaCare, and its close relative, RomneyCare, is without a doubt the preeminent symbol to conservatives of that alleged lurch into socialism.
Finally, continued bad economic news could undermine Romney’s most important asset (aside from money) in the nomination contest: the possibility that early caucuses and primaries could create a fight between Romney and one or two opponents perceived as being “unelectable” against Barack Obama (e.g., Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or Herman Cain). To put it bluntly, any development–including a struggling economy–that weakens Barack Obama’s standing going into 2012 also reduces the willingness of conservatives to accept a nominee they really don’t like in the name of electability. Romney will do best if Republicans think they must have him to win. In a worsening economy, it will be much easier for them to vote with their hearts, none of which belong to Mitt.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Friday’s job growth numbers, reported by the Labor Department, present a sobering picture for President Obama and the Democrats. With the pace of hiring down and the unemployment rate above 9 percent, the report suggests that the nation’s recovery is once again faltering. These numbers only underscore our continuing economic difficulties. And for a mix of political and policy reasons, the federal government has no significant new fiscal or monetary weapons left to deploy. As they head into an election that is certain to focus on the economy, the administration and congressional Democrats have no choice but to put the best face on a bad situation. What can they do?
As it happens, two recently released reports have explored public attitudes on the economy. Taken together, they illuminate the challenges Democrats will face in framing a credible and effective economic message. But they also shed light on surprising opportunities and, read closely, they just might point to the best way forward.
On Thursday, Andrew Levison published a memo asking “Why Can’t the Dems Make Jobs a Winning Political Issue?” His answer: While Democrats’ default response to high unemployment and slow growth is Keynesian, “a very strong anti-Keynesian perspective on job creation is extraordinarily widespread among American voters.” Large numbers of voters don’t think they have to choose between spending reductions and job creation because they see the former as one of the keys to the latter. Not only is government spending seen as a drag on the private sector, but also the most prominent Keynesian stimulus in recent years–the 2009 stimulus package–is widely regarded as a failure. Although a large majority of economists have concluded that it prevented a bad situation from becoming much worse, a majority of the American people believe that it failed. From their standpoint, the fact that unemployment continues to stagnate near 9 percent is proof enough that we can’t spend our way to prosperity. And the Obama administration helped to undermine the credibility of the stimulus early on by issuing an overly optimistic assessment of its likely effects.
To be sure, there are many “ambivalent” voters who are neither Keynesians nor supply-siders but rather are cross-pressured by these competing narratives, and each party needs to win them over. For Democrats to appeal successfully to the ambivalents, Levison contends, they must grapple with four realities:
1. “Simply repeating the traditional Democratic narrative–regardless of how frequently or emphatically–will not produce significant attitude change.”
2. “Doubts about the ability of government to create jobs reflect not only a disbelief in Keynesian remedies for unemployment but also the profound doubts many Americans have about government in general.”
3. “Attempts to convince the critical group of ambivalent voters have to be based on those voters’ distinct way of thinking about political issues–the desire to find a ‘common-sense’ middle ground.”
4. “The widespread progressive assumption that job creation should necessarily be just as popular today as it was in the 1950s and 1960s is simply wrong.”
Levison concludes that any effective Democratic message must tackle the public’s deep skepticism about government and convince the ambivalent portion of the electorate that the party’s economic prescription reflects common sense rather than obsolete assumptions.
Also on Thursday, a second report was unveiled, this time from Democracy Corps, a group headed by long-time Democratic survey researcher Stan Greenberg and party stalwart James Carville. Based on a new survey, it reaches conclusions that are broadly consistent with Levison’s. The report documents a substantial fall in public confidence that Republicans have the right approach to fiscal and economic policy. But Republican losses have not translated into Democratic gains, either for the party or for President Obama. The mood of the public with regard to the economy is pretty close to “a plague on both your houses.” Neither party has an approach to recovery and growth that the public regards as inspiring or even credible.
A majority of Americans continues to believe that the economy is either stagnating or getting worse, and only 44 percent overall (and 34 percent of Independents) approves of Obama’s handling of that issue. Core economic realities shape these attitudes. Forty-three percent of respondents have experienced reduced wages and benefits; 35 percent have actually lost a job; and 27 percent have lost health insurance for some period of time. Fully 20 percent have fallen behind on their mortgage. For these reasons, talking about progress on the economy–either actual or impending–only weakens the credibility of the speaker.
The public has clear views about the major economic problems that public policy needs to address. Thirty-seven percent named “high government spending, the budget deficit, and taxes.” The same percentage cited “the middle class and working people facing rising costs and declining income.” Close behind with 32 percent was the “outsourcing of American jobs and China creating rules that block American exports,” followed by a wasteful government dominated by special interests and not accountable to the people (26 percent), falling behind India and China in education and innovation (22 percent), and taxes and regulations that prevent businesses from hiring people and expanding (19 percent).

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In his New York Times column today Paul Krugman presents a strikingly clear explanation of the difference between the Democratic and Republican approaches to health care – a distinction between Republican “Vouchercare” and Democratic “Medicare”
Here’s how Krugman explains it:

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved.

Republicans have desperately tried to deny that the Ryan plan would transform Medicare into a radically different voucher system. They say instead that it would create a “new, sustainable version of Medicare”
Krugman replies:

I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program.

The mainstream media, with their characteristic tendency to define editorial “balance” as a point exactly midway between fact and bullshit, dutifully report the Republican spin that if they call their program “new improved Medicare” then the press has an obligation to describe it that way. The Republicans even went so far as to try to block an advertisement that attacked them for planning to “end Medicare” on the grounds that it was unfair to let anyone criticize the program using anything other than their preferred words.
The attempt to block the advertisement indicates how threatened the Republicans feel by the popular reaction to their proposal. There is no doubt they will pour tens of millions of dollars into ads pushing the “new, improved Medicare” spin and hope that that, along with their admirable message discipline, can simply smother the chorus of criticism their plan has unleashed.
Krugman’s devastatingly simple and accurate distinction between “Vouchercare” and “Medicare” provides Democrats with an extraordinarily powerful way to cut through the spin and keep the debate clearly focused on the basic issue.
Dems should use the terms “Republican Vouchercare” and “Democratic Medicare” at every possible opportunity and in every single discussion. This is a case where the most relentless message discipline will not only be extremely effective but fundamentally truthful as well.
“Republican Vouchercare” vs. “Democratic Medicare” – clear, powerful, accurate and compelling. Repeat it until the Republicans start pulling out their hair.

Whatever else you read today, don’t miss the New York Times editorial “They Want to Make Voting Harder?” which provides an excellent update on the GOP’s voter suppression campaign, which certainly appears to be targeting African American voters. It’s hard to select an excerpt, since every sentence of the editorial is substantive, but here goes:

…Early voting, which enables people to skip long lines and vote at more convenient times, has been increasingly popular over the last 15 years. It skyrocketed to a third of the vote in 2008, rising particularly in the South and among black voters supporting Barack Obama.
And that, of course, is why Republican lawmakers in the South are trying desperately to cut it back. Two states in the region have already reduced early-voting periods, and lawmakers in others are considering doing so. It is the latest element of a well-coordinated effort by Republican state legislators across the country to disenfranchise voters who tend to support Democrats, particularly minorities and young people.
Mr. Obama won North Carolina, for example, by less than 15,000 votes. That state has had early voting since 2000, and in 2008, more ballots were cast before Election Day than on it. Mr. Obama won those early votes by a comfortable margin. So it is no coincidence that the North Carolina House passed a measure — along party lines — that would cut the early voting period by a week, reducing it to a week and a half before the election. The Senate is preparing a similar bill, which we hope Gov. Beverly Perdue, a Democrat, will veto if it reaches her.

Racially-motivated? Sure looks like it:

…More than half of the state’s black votes were cast before Election Day, compared with 40 percent of the white votes. A similar trend was evident elsewhere in the South, according to studies by the Early Voting Information Center, a nonpartisan academic center at Reed College in Oregon. Blacks voting early in the South jumped from about 13 percent in 2004 to 33 percent in 2008, according to the studies, significantly outpacing the percentage of whites.
One of the biggest jumps was in Georgia, where, over the objections of several black lawmakers, the Republican-dominated Legislature passed a bill in April that would cut back in-person early voting to 21 days, from 45 days. Florida just cut its early voting period to eight days, from 14. Florida also eliminated the Sunday before Election Day as an early-voting day; election experts note that will eliminate the practice of many African-Americans of voting directly after going to church.

It’s not only the south, however. The editorial notes that a similar effort is underway in Ohio. No doubt other of the 33 states that allow early voting and have GOP-controlled legislatures will follow suit. Shameless.
For Dems, the challenge is clear — develop programs to mobilize the constituency for early voting to turn out in the shorter time frames.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Among the many striking features of Georgia-based radio talk show host Herman Cain’s presidential announcement speech in Atlanta on May 21, the most surreal was to hear an African-American in front of a heavily white audience of hard-core conservatives, at a site within shouting distance of the Martin Luther King Center, end his remarks by declaring, “When Herman Cain is president, we will finally be able to say, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, America is free at last.'” Cain’s decision to appropriate those famous words from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is in many ways characteristic of the man himself and the kind of campaign he’s been running. But give him credit: Outperforming Tim Pawlenty in many recent polls, running tied for second in Tuesday’s latest PPP poll of Iowa, Cain is surging on the backs of the Tea Party faithful. He is nothing if not audacious, and his popularity is due in large part to the fact that he has come to embody some of the more dubious but emotionally central claims of the Tea Party Movement.
The first thing Cain has going for his fan-base is his biography. He’s a successful business executive who saved at least one company, Godfather’s Pizza. He made his bones on the national political stage by attacking the Clinton Health Reform plan in 1994. And after liquidating his business holdings, he became a motivational speaker and author, with many opportunities to hone his communications skills. Following his one, unsuccessful race for office–a surprisingly strong second-place showing in a primary won by now-Senator Johnny Isakson–Cain worked his way into the world of conservative talk radio under the tutelage of the veteran quasi-libertarian gabber Neal Boortz, who has a big national audience. He soon got his own syndicated show, in which he identified himself with one of the most durable conservative pet rocks, the Fair Tax proposal (a flat consumption tax that would theoretically replace federal income and payroll taxes). And unlike other pols who have since tried to ingratiate themselves with the movement, Cain was a big Tea Party proponent from day one, quickly becoming a fixture at Tea Party events in Georgia.
And then, of course, there’s one other item in Cain’s background that matters politically: his race. Cain’s popularity among conservative activists provides a sort of ongoing inoculation against the charges of racism that have been levied–sometimes speciously, sometimes fairly–against them, and he cleverly cultivates this element of his popularity with the stock-speech line, “People who oppose Obama are said to be racists–so I guess I’m a racist.” Like South Carolina congressman Tim Scott and Florida congressman Allen West, as a hard-core conservative African-American Cain has quickly become one of the most popular pols in the Tea Party universe.
But beyond serving as a counter-race-card, Cain’s rhetoric offers vital ammunition in the fight over the endlessly contested American value of “opportunity.” Indeed, at a time when many white Americans believe that anti-white bias is now a greater social problem than anti-black bias, Cain’s words and deeds coincide nicely with the common conservative belief that minorities who embrace traditional values, work hard, and become entrepreneurs can avoid the liberal “welfare trap” that leads to dependence on government, broken homes, and crime. And Cain’s angry defiance of liberals validates the Tea Party conviction that white liberal elites have corrupted minority Americans by, for instance, encouraging them to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford, thus triggering the recent housing and financial crises. In other words, Cain has become not a role model but an implicit living rebuke to his fellow African-Americans, who have, in the imaginations of many white conservatives, been led like sheep to the slaughter by the shadowy forces who use them as pawns in their socialist schemes.
Nothing illustrates Cain’s ability to turn his race into a weapon against white liberals than the racial spin he has placed on the abortion-as-Holocaust meme of the anti-choice movement (of which he is a long-time champion, at least since he spent most of his 2004 senatorial campaign attacking Johnny Isakson for favoring rape-and-incest exceptions to a hypothetical ban on abortions). Here’s what he told the conservative website CNSNews.com in March of this year regarding his support for congressional Republican efforts to ban any use of public funds by Planned Parenthood:

Here’s why I support de-funding Planned Parenthood, because you don’t hear a lot of people talking about this, when Margaret Sanger–check my history–started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world.
You don’t see that talked that much about … It’s not Planned Parenthood. No, it’s planned genocide. You can quote me on that.

This sort of talk is immensely useful–and powerful–for conservative activists who have a complicated view of minority Americans as both perpetrators and victims in the ongoing destruction of the country as they know it.
In this as in other areas, the third thing going for Cain is simple: He does not hold back. Indeed, he gives conservative audiences the full, rich, red-meat diet they crave, along with the occasional dog-whistle appeal only they can hear. For example, in his announcement speech, he made a casual reference to the Constitution’s language guaranteeing “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Since the language in question appears in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, Cain was subsequently accused of an ignorant gaffe by observers who themselves did not seem to understand the Christian Right/Tea Party tenet that the former document was incorporated into the latter via the manifest intent of the Founders. This is how God and the idea of divinely derived “natural law” (including protection of the unborn and, for some, absolute property rights) are read into the Constitution by constitutional conservatives who consider twentieth-century social legislation and court rulings un-American.
Add all these factors up, and it’s not that surprising Cain has been wowing audiences in early caucus and primary states and developing the kind of online following that only Ron Paul can typically command among Republicans. He has routinely won audience straw polls after candidate forums–most famously, at the Tea Party Patriots convention in Arizona in February and at Steve King’s Conservative Principles Conference in Iowa in April. He also greatly enthused a focus group convened by conservative pollster Frank Lutz to watch the first televised candidate debate in South Carolina in May. As a result, he’s now surging in the polls (registering 8 percent in the latest Gallup poll of Republican presidential proto-candidates, 10 percent in the latest CNN poll, and 11 percent in a recent Insider Advantage poll), and regularly running ahead of supposedly more serious candidates like Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. And all this is happening, as Nate Silver has pointed out, in spite of the fact that Cain still has low name ID and hasn’t, until now at least, gotten much media attention (in both respects, this is the exact opposite of the context surrounding Donald Trump’s earlier surge in the polls).

Read more…

Nate Silver’s investigation of the relationship of the unemployment rate to presidential re-election prospects will probably become a staple of poly sci courses, with its rigorous analysis of the data and prudent conclusions. It might also be good for Journalism majors to chew on it, especially aspiring political writers, since it provides a good example of why the rag of record hired Silver — to give some data-driven heft to their reportage.
Credit Silver with doing a lot of good work and providing intelligent analysis, such as the following:

…Historically, the relationship between the unemployment rate and a president’s performance at the next election is complicated and tenuous…An article in today’s Times notes, for example, that “no American president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has won a second term in office when the unemployment rate on Election Day topped 7.2 percent.” The 7.2 percent figure refers to Ronald Reagan, who resoundingly won a second term when the unemployment rate was at that number in November 1984.
This type of data may be of limited utility for predictive purposes, however. Reagan won re-election by 18 points in 1984, suggesting that he had quite a bit of slack. An unemployment rate of 7.5 percent would presumably have been good enough to win him another term, as might have one of 8.0 percent, 8.5 percent or even higher.

Silver then speculates that FDR’s experience may be relevant since he won re-election with serious double-digit unemployment (16.6 in ’36 and 14.6 in ’40), but it was headed downward.
Silver argues that “the rate of change over a president’s term — is probably the more worthwhile approach. But it too is not always reliable.” He cites the examples of Nixon, W and Ike, all of whom who got re-elected with rising joblessness, although Ford, Carter and Papa Bush got defeated. Silver crunches the numbers for the last century and demonstrates that there is no positive correlation between “the unemployment rate to the incumbent party’s performance in the popular vote” and only a “weak” correlation between “the change in the unemployment rate over the course of a presidential term” and incumbents’ reelection prospects.
Silver concedes that there may be a predictive formula relating joblessness and other economic statistics to reelection prospects that works, but he cites a host of complicating factors and notes,

Some political scientists prefer other economic indicators to the unemployment rate, and there is evidence that measures like growth in real disposable income do a better job of predicting election results. Here too, however, we ought to be cautious. There are literally thousands of plausible models that one might build, using different economic indicators measured in different ways and over different time periods, taken alone or in combination with one another, and applied to different subsets of elections that are deemed to be relevant.

In the comments following Silver’s post, various responders suggest factoring in underemployment, “the change in unemployment during the final 12 to 24 months of a presidency,” gas prices, The CPI etc. It’s possible that there may be some formula that does a credible job of predicting electoral outcomes. Perhaps another stat wizard, like Alan I. Abramowitz could ferret it out.
As Silver acknowledges, however, the common sense argument for reducing unemployment is strong enough, even without statistical verification. For Dems, job-creation must remain a critical priority, the daunting difficulties of doing so cited by Andrew Levison in his recent TDS Strategy Memo notwithstanding. As Levison shows, Keynesian job-creation remains a tough sell with a significant segment of the public. Same goes for encouraging the private sector to invest in jobs when consumer demand is limp. Fresh ideas to break these two logjams are urgently needed.

Mitt Romney’s formal announcement of a 2012 presidential candidacy today, perhaps because it is hardly an unexpected event, is spurring some deeper thinking about the chimera of a successful blue-state Republican governor who can hardly be called a liberal struggling to obscure his own record to run for president. Jon Cohn and Jon Chait are conducting a colloquoy at The New Republic to debate whether Romney’s past dooms his future. But also at TNR, Mark Schmitt has penned a valuable rumination on Romney’s status as among the last in a wave of successful Republican governors who have now been replaced by highly controversial confrontationists like Scott Walker, Rick Scott and John Kasich.
I’ve always thought the rave national media reviews of the Republican governors of the late 1990s–people like Tommy Thompson, John Engler, and yes, George W. Bush–underestimated the extent to which the Clinton-era economic boom made it easy to cut taxes without significantly reducing services, making everyone happy. But as Schmitt notes, the style of these governors, depending on at least some cooperation across party lines, now seems completely alien to the national GOP mood. In any event, Schmitt is spot-on in his assessment of Romney’s plight:

With that golden-era model of Republican governors so thoroughly rejected, Mitt Romney looks like a relic from a long-forgotten time–like his father’s actual moderate Republicanism–even though it’s only been five years. Were Romney trying to check off the “served in government” box on his resumé today, he’d probably pick a different state and adopt a showdown style more in keeping with the times. But it’s too late for that. The shape-shifting Romney will surely adapt to whatever he’s required to say, but, in doing so, he will have to renounce not only his governorship–his own principal credential for the presidency–but also his party’s most important political triumph in recent memory.

It’s one thing for a presidential candidate to be forced to reshape his or her record to fit a new environment or a national as opposed to a local or regional context. That happens all the time. But it’s another thing altogether to be forced to deny the very accomplishments that made the candidate noteworthy in the first place. And that’s Mitt Romney’s main problem today.

By now, almost everyone is aware that Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to privatize Medicare is a disaster in terms of public opinion. But, as TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira explains in his latest ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’:

…The Ryan budget’s commitment to dismantle Medicare is by no means the only unpopular part. Consider a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll that asked about ending Medicaid as we know it, which is also part of the Ryan budget.
First, the poll asked whether respondents supported major reductions in Medicaid spending (as the Ryan budget does), minor reductions, or no reductions. Only 13 percent supported major reductions. Thirty percent supported minor reductions, and a majority (53 percent) supported no reductions.

As unpopular as Medicaid reductions are with the public, delegating administration of the program to the states is even more of a loser with the public, as Teixeira explains:

Then the poll directly asked about Rep. Ryan’s proposal to change Medicaid fundamentally by “giving each state a fixed amount of money and eliminating federal minimum standards for Medicaid.” This would replace the current arrangement where “the federal government guarantees health care coverage and long term care for certain low income people” and “each state administers its own Medicaid program … but all states are required to provide coverage to anyone who meets minimum criteria set by the federal government.” The Ryan proposal, which truly would end Medicaid as we know it, was rejected by a thumping 60-35 margin.

If Republicans were hoping that changing the topic from screwing the elderly out of their health security to ripping off health care services for the neediest Americans would give them some breathing space, they were clearly mistaken.

During a rumination on the proposition that a slow-to-develop presidential campaign cycle could reduce opportunities for the thorough media vetting of candidates, Jonathan Bernstein makes this simple but important observation:

[W]hile I’m generally reluctant to be one who says that the internet changes everything, I do think this is at least plausibly a case where it matters. For one thing, in the old days — say, before the debut of the Hotline in the 1988 cycle — it was still possible for a local story to sit out there for a long time without anyone knowing it. No way could that happen now.

I’d agree, with the crucial qualification that in the past a “local story” about a presidential candidate did not have to be completely unknown nationally to be functionally invisible or at least unimportant. A great example was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter’s fairly elaborate and not-too-distant history of flirtation with segregationists was hardly a secret, but never became a factor during the Democratic primaries or the general election. Indeed, one aspect of that history, his vote for arch-segregationist Lester Maddox when the Georgia legislature was forced to elect a governor of Georgia in 1966, went almost entirely unnoticed.
Now it’s true that the staunch support of Andrew Young and the King family helped inoculate Carter from charges of past racism in 1976, along with Carter’s own decent civil rights record once he actually became governor in 1971. Indeed, Carter was very popular among African-American primary voters around the country (just like Bill Clinton years later, even though Clinton, like Carter, was perceived as less than ideally progressive, albeit never vulnerable to accusations of racism). But you have to wonder if Carter could have survived the kind of early exposure of and daily questioning about his past positioning on civil rights if he had been subjected to today’s levels of scrutiny and discussion.
My point is that modern media have not only made it harder to hide damaging information about politicians, but have made it harder to hide such information in plain sight, passed over as irrelevant or unimportant. To cite a seminal example, Trent Lott’s 2002 remarks expressing regret that Strom Thurmond hadn’t been elected president back in 1948 were widely reported, but it took relentless discussion of them by blogger Josh Marshall and others to make it something other than a “local story” of brief interest to Beltway insiders and Mississippians.
While it’s still possible for candidates and political parties–supported by friendly media–to “control the narrative” in a way that shoves negative information under the rug, it’s simply not as easy as it used to be. And that could very well be a factor in the decisions of potential 2012 presidential candidates to take a pass.