This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
There are so many unknowns to bedevil any poor pundit trying to call the 2012 Republican nomination. For starters, we still don’t know for sure who’s going to run. We also don’t know how the candidates will respond to the pressures of a campaign cycle dominated by new campaign-finance standards and loaded with countless opportunities for gaffes. And here’s another crucial variable that rarely gets mentioned, which could actually be fundamental in determining whether the race becomes a drawn-out slugfest between Mitt Romney and an anti-Romney, or something resembling John Kerry’s quick 2004 victory over Howard Dean, or a savage coup for someone like Michele Bachmann: We don’t yet know when, and in what states, the primary contest will be decided.
Political junkies sometimes act as though the primary and caucus calendar came down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets. We are deeply accustomed to the rituals of Iowa and New Hampshire, where candidates hug babies in the cold hoping to make a good first impression and eager young activists pile into tour buses, having long prepared for “the presidential.” Yet those states are only the beginning, and the calendar is in fact a complex, ever-shifting amalgam in the hands of largely uncoordinated state legislators and local party officials. Every election cycle, the sequence and timing–and thus the opportunities and pitfalls for different candidates–has changed.
This election, the schedule is completely in flux. At the beginning of both the 2008 and 2012 cycles, the national parties actually made a serious effort to impose some order on the nominating calendar, in no small part to limit the phenomenon of “frontloading,” whereby every state has an incentive to schedule its vote earlier in order to gain more clout. In response to complaints (particularly among Democrats) that the old Iowa-New Hampshire duopoly wasn’t a representative sample, two other states, Nevada and South Carolina, were let under the velvet rope to hold officially sanctioned early contests. But the limited ability of national parties to control the states was evidenced by the Florida and Michigan fiascos of 2008, in which defiant interlopers very nearly succeeded in pushing the first event in Iowa back into 2007, and posed an uncomfortable challenge to national leaders reluctant to punish them with a loss of delegates.
Now, both parties have worked together on a coordinated calendar that tries to confirm the Iowa/New Hampshire/Nevada/South Carolina events as privileged; pushes them forward into February; and banishes the other states beyond a March 1 barrier. When these rules were adopted, they required 35 states, which were crowding into February if not January, to move their primary or caucus dates forward. And, notably, the Republicans added an additional inducement to later nominating events by limiting winner-take-all delegate awards, which enhance a state’s clout, to primaries or caucuses held after April 1.
But even as most states worked dutifully to comply with the new rules, bad-boy Florida acted out again, with Republican legislators threatening to leave the primary date at January 31–the day before the Iowa caucus–a maneuver sure to blow up the entire carefully arranged schedule, driving the “privileged four” early states to push their contests even further forward and expose themselves, along with Florida, to sanctions for defying the ordained calendar. Renewed pressures for “frontloading” could also tempt other states to sneak forward into forbidden territory. In saber-rattling typical of the jockeying for calendar position, the chairmen of the Iowa and South Carolina Republican Party have called on the RNC to move the 2012 National Convention from Tampa to some more law-abiding site.
Yet, adding to the confusion, there is another dynamic pushing in the exact opposite direction. Even as some states keep the frontloading pressure up, others are trying to schedule their contests very late, often because constrained budgets make it inadvisable to maintain separate presidential and state-local primaries. Texas is looking at a consolidated primary in late March or early April, and California may move all the way to June (where it was for many years). The unchallenged expert on all these complex dynamics, Davidson College’s Josh Putnam, explains at his amazingly focused site, Frontloading HQ:

If Texas were to move back [to late March or April] and California to June, it would fundamentally reshape the delegate calculus in the Republican nomination race. The point at which one candidate could surpass the 50% plus one delegate level would shift back significantly as a result and potentially shift back the point at which the nomination is settled in the process. It would also make Florida a much more attractive early calendar prize. As an aside, if the Texas primary is moved back to April the Republican Party in the state to keep the winner-take-all elements they have maintained in terms of delegate allocation in the post-reform era.

So how will these two cross-pressures ultimately sort out the field, and which candidates stand to benefit or lose under different likely scenarios? For one thing, the start-date in Iowa is more than a bit important to candidates in a field that has already been slow to emerge. You don’t want to be caught putting together your caucus organization in the autumn of 2011 if the big event itself is immediately after the holidays, as it was in 2008. That’s particularly true if you are, say, Haley Barbour or Mitch Daniels, competing with candidates who already started lining up highly motivated religious conservatives for the caucus back in March.
More generally, it’s thought that a heavily frontloaded calendar makes a relatively quick knockout victory–like those of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 and Democrat John Kerry in 2004–more likely, while an extended calendar favors candidates with the money and hard-core support to survive early losses and win by attrition, particularly if the early winners cannot mathematically win a majority of delegates until late March or April. The 2008 Democratic contest, which featured not one but two equally matched candidates with that kind of money and support, is unlikely to be replicated any time soon, and it’s worth noting that Obama might have wrapped up the nomination very early if he had won just a few thousand more votes in New Hampshire.

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Those who are wondering about the effects of the latest wave of Republican union-busting on union voters should read Alan I. Abramowitz’s column at Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Abramowitz, a member of the TDS Advisory Board and author of “The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization and American Democracy,” provides an informative analysis of union members’ recent voting patterns and party i.d. data.
Acknowledging that unions are influential because of the money and turnout manpower they provide for Democrats, Abramowitz then presents data demonstrating that union influence as a voting block is small and declining: “In 1952, 28% of voters were members of union households; in 2008, only 13% of voters were members of union households.” In terms of party identification, he explains:

…Attachment to the Democratic Party among voters in union households peaked in the 1960s. At that time, 69% of union voters identified with the Democratic Party compared with 51% of non-union voters. By the first decade of the 21st century, however, Democratic identification among union voters had fallen to 58%compared with 48% among non-union voters. While union voters remained considerably more attached to the Democratic Party than non-union voters, the gap between the two groups had shrunk considerably due mainly to declining Democratic identification among union voters.

Breaking it down by race, church attendance and marital status, Abramowitz presents data in charts and tables and adds,

The decline in Democratic identification since the 1960s has been much greater among some types of union voters than among others, however. Among African-Americans, who have gone from 10% of union voters in the 1960s to 13% today, there has been no decline in Democratic identification. Between 89% and 93% of African-American union voters identified with the Democratic Party throughout this time period. Among white union voters, however, Democratic identification fell from 66% in the ’60s to 51% in the 2000s. Moreover, the decline in Democratic identification among white union voters has been greatest among socially conservative groups such as regular churchgoers and married men. Among regular churchgoers, Democratic identification fell from 67% in the ’60s to 40% in the 2000s and, among married men, Democratic identification fell from 68% in the ’60s to 44% in the 2000s.
…Evidence from the 2008 National Exit Poll indicates that even in an election in which the economy was the dominant issue, both church attendance and gun ownership exerted a substantially stronger influence than union membership on candidate preference among white voters. It remains to be seen whether an increase in the salience of issues affecting unions such as the collective bargaining rights of public employees will alter this pattern in 2012.

Abramowitz’s findings may be discouraging to Democrats, but he leaves open the possibility that the attacks on collective bargaining rights could sway union voters to support Dems in greater numbers. In addition, unions may be poised for a new era of growth, if only because we may be approaching the point at which millions of workers begin to realize that unions provide the best hope for job security, decent wages and benefits.

As we are all debating the significance of Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, the heretical Republican David Frum offers a very interesting perspective:

If the plan is not a real-world budget proposal, not an electioneering document, not a negotiating position — then what is it?
Answer: The Ryan plan is a Republican “memo to me” — an attempt by a party emerging from a troubled history to answer the question, “Who are we?” The answer is not aimed at the general public, but at Republicans themselves.
It goes like this: “Perhaps we used to be the people who introduced Medicare Part D. No longer. We have rediscovered our identity as the people who shrink government, not the people who expand it. Here is the proof.”
This “speaking to ourselves” mission explains many things about the plan that are otherwise puzzling.
■Why are there no revenue enhancements of any kind — not even fees or excise taxes that have no negative impact on incentives or savings?
■Why is Medicare protected in its existing form for a decade while the changes to Medicaid go into effect immediately?
■Why is Social Security exempted entirely?
■Why is agriculture treated so lightly — $30 billion in savings over 10 years, all of them (interestingly) to be decided by the Agriculture Committee, a unique concession by a Budget Committee otherwise determined to centralize decision-making?
Pose these questions and the answers become obvious:
These days, Americans over 55 vote heavily Republican. Under-55s lean Democratic, under-30s overwhelmingly so. (That’s the reverse, by the way, of the situation that prevailed as recently as the 1980s). Farmers vote Republican. Medicaid recipients do not. The deficit grows because the deficit reduction plan includes a big additional tax cut to upper-income taxpayers. And so on.

Frum’s characterization of the Ryan proposal as a reassurance of the GOP’s right-wing base is persuasive, but does leave a fairly obvious question: why do Republicans consider it necessary to share this “memo to me” with the rest of the country? You get the sense that hard-core conservatives will only trust the Republican Party if it makes its covenant marriage with the Right a matter of public record. But that public record won’t fare well when compared with the later argument that Republicans are mild-mannered folk who just want to rein in the excesses of the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

In my last post I speculated that all the publicity surrounding Paul Ryan’s budget proposal was going to heavily influence public perceptions of responsibility for the technically unrelated but thematically indistinguishable battle over current-year appropriations that seems headed towards a government shutdown. Basically, conservatives haven’t been able to curb their enthusiasm for Ryan’s radical proposal, so they are inadvertently helping Democrats (who frankly could use the help) in making the “shutdown” argument revolve around something tangible and scary: Ryan’s assault on Medicare and Medicaid.
There’s a straw in the wind in Washington today that shows how Republicans may be losing control of the spin over the appropriations battle. At a Tea Party rally aimed at keeping up the pressure for deeper spending cuts, this interchange transpired, as reported by TPM’s Ryan J. Reilly:

Minutes after the crowd that was assembled at an Americans for Prosperity-backed Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill on Wednesday broke out into chants of “shut it down,” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the Tea Party doesn’t want the government to shut down and that Democrats would unfairly blame the movement if it did.
“They want to blame it on you,” Bachmann said. But there was a large part of the crowd willing to step up and take the blame.

So TV viewers tonight are going to see Republicans ecstatic about Ryan’s radical budget and Tea Partiers–despite the tips-from-the-coach offered by Bachmann–chanting for a government shutdown. Sure, most rank-and-file Republicans will see nothing wrong with this scenario, but elsewhere, the public is likely to deduce that the “savings” congressional GOPers are demanding are about something more fundamental than subsidies for Big Bird or the exact level of cuts.

There’s no actual connection between the release of a draft budget resolution by Rep. Paul Ryan yesterday, and what appears to be a stalemate in negotiations over a short-term appropriations measure, that could trigger a partial shutdown of the federal government.
But you have to wonder, given all the talk from Republicans about Ryan’s incredible boldness and courage, and from Democrats about the dire consequences of what he is proposing, if the public is going to make a connection on its own. As Mark Blumenthal explains at Pollster today, polls show a very volatile situation in terms of the “blame” assigned if the government shuts down. Self-identified Democrats are much more supportive of a compromise by their side than are Republicans. But the perception that Republicans have introduced a new, radical note in the “budget” negotiations (which is how most media have described the appropriations battle) could influence the reactions of both self-identified Democrats and independents in the direction of anger towards the GOP for upsetting a delicate situation.
We’ll soon see how it plays out, but it is worth remembering that most folks make little or no distinction between short-term and long-term budget fights, and have every reason to figure that Paul Ryan is leading Republicans into a confrontation with Democrats over his aspirations to end Medicare and Medicaid as we’ve know them.

As my and other progressive reactions to the Ryan budget proposal have tried to make clear, the document is a true landmark in the consolidation of movement-conservative control over the Republican Party. Not since Barry Goldwater opposed the original Great Society legislation has such an effort been made to roll it all back.
But there are reminders today that even this degree of rightward movement by the GOP is not enough for more than a few conservatives. There’s this interesting tidbit in the Washington Post‘s account of congressional GOP reaction to Ryan’s budget:

Some Republicans have already dismissed the Ryan plan as too timid, saying they can’t go back to constituents without a balanced budget.

Similarly, a leading Tea Party blogger warns conservatives not to get too excited about Ryan himself:

Many conservatives desperate for the second coming of Reagan and Jesus have poured out their hopes, dreams, and ambitions into Paul Ryan as if he is some sort of empty vessel to be filled with the desires of conservatives.
Paul Ryan is a very decent guy, but he is just a man. He supported No Child Left Behind, the medicare prescription drug benefit, TARP, the auto bailout, the arguably unconstitutional AIG bonus tax, and capping CEO pay among other things. He is not infallible. Please, conservatives, try not to sound too enraptured.

Meanwhile, rank-and-file conservative radicalism was on display in a startling new PPP poll from New Hampshire, which showed Donald Trump jumping into a competitive second-place position just below Mitt Romney in a trial primary heat:

If Trump actually runs 21% of New Hampshire GOP voters say they’d vote for him, compared to 27% for Romney. The key to Trump’s relatively strong showing? He does well with birthers and Tea Partiers, two groups he has seemed to actively court with his public comments of late. 42% of primary voters firmly say they do not believe Barack Obama was born in the United States to 35% who believe that he was and 23% who aren’t sure. Trump leads Romney 22-21 with the birther crowd, but Romney holds the overall lead because he’s up by a much wider margin with the folks who dismiss the birther theory.
Trump also leads Romney 23-21 with the Republican primary voters who consider themselves to be Tea Party members but that’s only 30% of the electorate and Romney’s up by a good margin with the folks who don’t identify with that movement.

Republican elected officials are under a lot of pressure to say and do things they’d never have considered saying and doing–in public, at least–until things started getting weird for them in 2008.

The wave of conservative hype greeting the release of Rep. Paul Ryan’s draft budget resolution is a pretty clear indication the Republican Party is about to take a deep breath and go over the brink into a direct assault on the programs and commitments that gave the United States a small replica of the modern welfare state common in the rest of the developed world. So excited are they that the New York Times‘ David Brooks, who normally likes to position himself as an eagle soaring above the grubby machinations of both political parties, just can’t contain himself:

Over the past few weeks, a number of groups, including the ex-chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers and 64 prominent budget experts, have issued letters arguing that the debt situation is so dire that doing nothing is not a survivable option. What they lacked was courageous political leadership — a powerful elected official willing to issue a proposal, willing to take a stand, willing to face the political perils.
The country lacked that leadership until today. Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes. Ryan is expected to leap into the vacuum left by the president’s passivity. The Ryan budget will not be enacted this year, but it will immediately reframe the domestic policy debate….
The Ryan budget will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.

Wow, you can almost hear the soaring music of a Tim Pawlenty ad when you read that passage! As Brooks would have it, Ryan’s assault on “the welfare state” isn’t really debatable; it’s based on Revealed Truth that all honorable people will accept and only scoundrels will deny. Anyone second-guessing this leader who has exposed Barack Obama’s cowardice must come with his or her own six-trillion dollar package of cuts for benefits affecting those people whose aspirations to luxury items like health insurance are now “unsustainable.”
But while Brooks and others praising Ryan’s budget are laughable in lauding the “courage” of a safe-seat congressman throwing red meat to his party’s base while taking on the poor and disabled and delighting private health insurers and anyone paying corporate taxes–they are right about Ryan’s audacity.
The simple way to put it is that Ryan’s budget steers clear of taking on the signature New Deal social program, Social Security, but takes dead aim on the Great Society’s accomplishment of a partial set of guarantees for access to health care.
By any meaningful measurement, Ryan’s proposal would kill Medicare by privatizing it and capping its costs, and kill Medicaid by making it simply a soon-to-be-phased-down grant to states with no obligation to provide a set of minimum benefits for the poor and disabled.
On the first point, Josh Marshall nicely explains why privatizing Medicare destroys its very rationale:

We all know about pre-existing conditions. You’re a cancer survivor so no insurer will cover you. Or you have one of the myriad possible conditions that make you a bad risk. And no insurer wants to issue a policy for someone who odds say is likely to cost a lot of money. Well, guess what, people over 65 all have a preexisting condition: they’re old!
Now, not that people aren’t living longer and longer lives. And plenty of folks in their late 60s are in better health than folks 10 or 20 years younger. But by and large, we all know how this life thing works. When you hit your mid-60s or so, things start breaking down. And eventually, you die. That’s a bald way to put it. But we all understand that this is true. The simple truth is that for all the problems with private health insurance for the young and working age populations, it just doesn’t work for seniors.
We tried it. That’s why we ended up creating Medicare.

We created Medicaid (originally a Republican alternative to universal health coverage) to ensure that people with insufficient funds to purchase health services or insurance or whose health costs outstripped their ability to pay would not, to put it pretty bluntly, get even sicker and/or die. Ryan’s “block grant” proposal would end any personal claim on health services for any American, and would simply subsidize state health care programs for the indigent and the disabled (a subsidy guaranteed to be a fat target in futue federal deficit reduction efforts once the “problem” is thought of as a state responsibility). Here’s a mild estimate of what that would involve from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities:

States would most likely use their additional flexibility to cap Medicaid enrollment and put people on waiting lists once the cap was reached (which they cannot do today), significantly scale back eligibility for millions of low-income children, parents, pregnant women, people with disabilities and seniors — driving many of them into the ranks of the uninsured — or cut services substantially, with the result that many of the nation’s poorest and most vulnerable people could become underinsured.

With respect to Medicaid, the downward spiral of eligibility and benefits contemplated by Ryan’s proposal would occur after the immediate disqualification of an estimated 15 million Americans who would obtain Medicaid coverage under the provisions of last year’s health reform legislation, which Ryan would repeal. That’s quite a giant leap backward for anyone supporting the basic idea of universal health coverage.
Against the background of a budget that will apparently leave defense spending pretty much as it is, while applying any savings from closing tax loopholes to the lowering of top and corporate rates, Ryan’s Medicare/Medicaid proposals are astoundingly unbalanced. For all the talk about his “courage,” it’s also noteworthy that Ryan insulates today’s seniors (who happen to be more heavily Republican in their voting preferences than at any time in recent memory) from any changes in Medicare, while targeting a Medicaid-eligible population with few GOP voters.
To conservative ideologues who think America went fatally wrong in the Great Society years–except, of course, for the establishment of a National Security State supporting a vast array of overseas military commitments that helped our allies afford their own welfare states–Ryan’s budget makes perfect sense. In taking on Ryan, it’s imperative that Democrats begin by making it clear exactly what is at stake.

There’s been a fair amount of commentary, some snarky, some genuinely sad, about the contrast between the atmosphere surrounding Barack Obama’s low-key re-election campaign announcement today and the exciting, historic launch of his 2008 campaign.
It is true that lack of enthusiasm for the administration among progressives could be a problem for Obama ’12, though the virulent radicalism and ill will of the contemporary GOP will help reduce that gap significantly. And it remains to be seen if the Obama political brain trust is going to be able to replicate much of the grassroots orientation–in organization and in fund-raising–of the original model.
But let’s remember that presidential re-election campaigns by their very nature are almost invariably a more sober proposition than those of challengers. Presidents seeking another term want to convey the sense that they are working hard, under enormous pressure, on the problems facing the country, and are elevated by their office to a level of discourse not typical of mere politicians. There’s a reason a number of presidents have chosen to wage “Rose Garden Campaigns” that eschew much of the hullabaloo of traditional canvasses. And obviously incumbent chief executives have no need to raise their name IDs or introduce Americans to their personal and ideological traits.
A time will come when the Obama campaign strikes a more urgent tone, and ’08 Obama voters will definitely be reminded that they aren’t going to get what they bargained for back then by switching horses and parties in 2012. Songs will be sung and celebrity endorsers will be back. But nobody should expect much in the way of excitement from Team Obama any time soon.

It’s become pretty common-place to note that most of the crew looking to run for president as Republicans in 2010 are trying mighty hard to leave no space to their right. By and large, they are churning out red meat to “the base” on every subject that comes up.
The exception, interestingly enough, may be immigration, where the pols haven’t quite kept up with activist demands. The firebrands at NumbersUSA have published a “report card” for proto-candidates on the issues they care about, from opposing “amnesty” to ending “birthright citizenship.” They are not happy with most of the candidates, less because of the positions they’ve taken than because of the controversies they’ve dodged (particularly on ending birthright citizenship and lowering rates of legal as well as illegal immigration).
Chris Christie is given a nice even “F”; Haley Barbour, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich all earn “D-minus” grades; Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee come in at “D.” Then comes Ron Paul at “C-minus.” At the top of the list are Tim Pawlenty at “C-plus” and Michele Bachmann at “B-minus.” Both the Minnesotans have come out for eliminating birthright citizenship.
Barack Obama, of course, is given an “F-Minus,” a hitherto unknown point of depth in the grading scale.
Perhaps falling levels of immigration and competing problems are creating fears among anti-immigrant zealots that their cause, given such a big lift last year by the viral spread of state laws resembling Arizona’s, is on the wane. Or maybe they just want to get the candidates’ attention and get their fair share of pandering. But it’s become a truly crazy conservative world in which even Michele Bachmann can’t win a higher grade than “B-minus” on an issue measuring ideological orthodoxy.

Today is the 43rd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther KIng, Jr., who was murdered while supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN in 1968. Dr. King, a strong supporter of the American trade union movement, said “The Labor Movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress.” Today, American labor will honor Dr. King with more than 1000 events in the ‘We Are One’ campaign, coast to coast. From the AFL-CIO Now blog:
You can keep up with all of the We Are One events on April 4 by checking out a live Web stream, Twitter feed and photo slide show of ongoing events at the AFL-CIO site….
If you are out at a rally or event, share what’s going on through Twitter using the #April4 hashtag. And if you’re on Twitter and attending a rally, please send twitpics using the #April4 hashtag and we will add them to the slideshow at www.aflcio.org.
On April 4 and in the days before and after, working people are joining students, religious leaders, elected officials and community activists across the country in more than 1,000 We Are One actions to show solidarity with workers under attack and to honor the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assassinated that day in 1968. He was in Memphis April 4 helping sanitation workers fight for the same workers’ rights now under attack in Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and elsewhere.
Click here to find an event near you…Click here for ideas you can use to stage your own event, here for resources and here to add an event to our We Are One calendar