A political commentariat that’s finally getting nervous about the slow-to-develop 2012 presidential field has been operating on the assumption that the real show begins on February 6, 2012, the current date for the Iowa Caucuses. That’s where the two parties’ calendars, which only allow four states to hold nominating events prior to March, have placed the starting gun.
But states have to take action to implement the party schedules, and at present, the big fly in the ointment is once again Florida, which under state law is scheduled to hold its primary on January 29, 2012. Unfortunately for those who want an orderly process, Florida legislative leaders, and now superstar U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, are opposing a change in the date.
Much of the talk about Florida’s primary date revolves around the question of whether the national GOP will penalize the state by denying it delegates if it breaks the calendar rules (this was the dilemma that faced Democrats in 2008). But just as important is the almost certain triggering of action by Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina to guarantee their primacy by moving up their own contests into January, as happened four years ago.
Josh Putnam, an expert on this whole topic, is currently projecting that Iowa will hold its caucuses either on January 16 or January 9, with New Hampshire’s primary occurring on January 17 or 24, and Nevada and South Carolina holding their events on January 28. That could all obviously change, but any Republican wanting to run for president would be smart to assume their campaign needs to be in very high gear by Thanksgiving Day of this year.

Whatever the relative degree of success or failure conservatives have had in convincing Americans that deep spending cuts are necessary to reduce debts and deficit at the federal level, I don’t think there’s much doubt they’ve done pretty well in blaming public employee benefits and pensions for budget problems at the state level. But it’s important to understand that what Gov. Scott Walker is trying to do in Wisconsin right now goes a lot further than any effort to trim benefits and pensions. Here’s Slate‘s Dave Weigel, who is not unsympathetic to conservative spending reduction efforts:

This goes much, much further than reckoning with the size of public employee pensions. This is clearly designed, as Taft-Hartley was clearly designed, to make it impossible for labor to retain its strength. And this is happening in most states now; the table’s set for cuts to public sector union benefits, so it’s not altogether difficult for Republicans to go a little further, while they have the chance. (It’s tough to imagine Wisconsin retaining its lopsided GOP majorities after 2012.) The difference between what states can get away with now and what the Democrats could get away with in 2009-2010 — when they were always a few votes short of passing [card] check — is dramatic, but it’s not new.

It’s also pretty clear that pols like Scott Walker (and Christ Christie, and Rick Scott, and others) see themselves as enjoying the same political benefits from busting public employee unions as Calvin Coolidge, the obscure Massachusetts governor who broke a police strike and was quickly elevated to the vice presidency and then the presidency. As in so many areas of public policy and politics, today’s conservatives are taking us down a long memory lane deep into the last century and beyond.

Do you think Democrats are divided over the necessity or advisability of thinking about “entitlement reform?” Maybe, but that’s in part because Democrats have somewhat different ideas about how to maintain a robust and progressive social safety net.
Among Republicans, there’s little or no substantive disagreement about the desire to transform Social Security and Medicare into something radically different. But when it comes to politics–well, just check out two prominent GOP voices on this subject that were raised this very day.
Today New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie came to Washington and made a well-received speech at the American Enterprise Institute thundering against the cowards in Congress and demanding an immediate Republican assault on Social Security and Medicare as a simple measurement of “spine.” There’s no speech text available just yet, but believe me, Christie sounds a lot like Howard Dean circa late 2003 challenging the guts of his party colleagues on Iraq.
And yet here is Rich Lowry of National Review, by any conventional measure a much more conservative figure than Christie, making a very different calculation:

The public opposes cuts in Social Security and Medicare, and most Republicans did nothing to signal on the campaign trail that they’d do anything to touch them — in fact, most of them ran against Obama’s Medicare cuts. Changing popular programs without an explicit mandate to do so is a perilous business. It may be that the public is in a Chris Christie “give it to us straight” mood, and House Republican work on the entitlement front will dovetail with the bipartisan effort developing in the Senate, forcing President Obama to make good on his oft-expressed interest in reform and making real progress possible. It also may be that the House Republicans will repeat the experience of their forebears in 1995-96, who didn’t run on Medicare cuts, made them a centerpiece of their budget-balancing anyway, and got killed, setting back the limited-government cause for more than a decade.

As Jonathan Chait notes, Lowry goes on to endorse an assault on Medicaid–not a program of enormous interest to the old-white-folk base of the GOP, except for those who can’t afford nursing home care–and perhaps some cautious probing on Medicare. But in a context where pols like Christie (and others) are loudly trying to shame Republicans into expressing the courage of their actual convictions on Social Security and Medicare, such tactics may ring hollow both within and beyond the conservative movement.

It’s not clear just yet that “electibility” is going to be an overriding factor in the Republican 2012 presidential nominating contest, partly because so many Republicans are convinced that electibility and ideological coherence are the same thing, and partly because they think the election will be a referendum on a “failed” Obama administration. But it’s always useful to keep an eye on head-to-head trial polls pitting the president against this or that would-be successor, and PPP has a new batch out that are quite interesting.
Against the five best known GOP probables, Obama leads Huckabee by three points, Romney by five, Gingrich and Ron Paul by nine, and Palin by twelve. But in terms of positive support for the five GOPers, there’s surprisingly little variation: just five points between Paul’s 39% and Huck’s 44%. Meanwhile, a “generic” Republican candidate would get 47%, tying Obama (and a generic “moderate” Republican, not that there’s any such thing these days, would receive 46%, actually leading Obama by two points).
The other interesting finding involves someone rarely tested in polls, but who is the object of intense longing and speculation among many conservatives (most notably the folks at National Review, who devoted much of a recent issue to an effort to get him to consider running): Jeb Bush. In a trial heat with Obama, Jebbie lost by the exact same fourteen-point margin as a rather less than serious possible candidate, Donald Trump. He also did a lot more poorly than his older brother (in a hypothetical in which W. was allowed to run for a third term), who ran within four points of Obama. Meanwhile, 44% of respondents (including half of independents) said they wouldn’t vote for another member of the Bush family at all, a good measurement of hard-core dynastic fatigue.
These polls obviously don’t mean that much this early in the 2012 cycle, but they do suggest two things: nobody in the current presidential field is lighting up supporters, and while Jeb Bush might solve a lot of the GOP’s internal problems, his famous name remains more poison than magic.

One of the great mysteries of the Egyptian crisis was the ability of the Mubarak government to disrupt internet services, in a vain effort to disrupt protests. James Glanz and John Markoff have written a fascinating account in the New York Times about that phenomenon, and exactly how and why it occurred:

The strength of the Internet is that it has no single point of failure, in contrast to more centralized networks like the traditional telephone network. The routing of each data packet is handled by a web of computers known as routers, so that in principle each packet might take a different route. The complete message or document is then reassembled at the receiving end.
Yet despite this decentralized design, the reality is that most traffic passes through vast centralized exchanges — potential choke points that allow many nations to monitor, filter or in dire cases completely stop the flow of Internet data.
China, for example, has built an elaborate national filtering system known as the Golden Shield Project, and in 2009 it shut down cellphone and Internet service amid unrest in the Muslim region of Xinjiang. Nepal’s government briefly disconnected from the Internet in the face of civil unrest in 2005, and so did Myanmar’s government in 2007.
But until Jan. 28 in Egypt, no country had revealed that control of those choke points could allow the government to shut down the Internet almost entirely.

In the end, finding the “off switch” for the internet hardly saved the Mubarak government, but other authoritarian regimes were probably watching and taking notes.

The Republican assault on the budget is starting to lose the country — just as they unveil the scale of their cuts and the specific targets. And this survey conducted by Democracy Corps shows how Democrats and progressives can best frame their budget message, link it to the economy, and put the Republicans on the defensive.
The Republicans do not go into this battle protected by any honeymoon with voters. In our congressional ballot, Democrats have closed the margin to within 2-points — a 6-point gain since November; Republican incumbents already trail in the seats won by Obama. Just 40 percent of presidential voters approve of the new Republicans in Congress, which drops to just over a third among independents. On that critical battleground, the Republicans are losing the intensity war, with strong disapproval outpacing strong approval by two-to-one.
Still, Democrats are struggling on the economy, jobs and spending. Voters trust the Republicans more on handling the economy and jobs and employment (by 5 points) and on making the right choices on deciding how to reduce the federal budget deficit (by 15 points). Democrats have a lot of work to do to get this debate right.
But the more Americans hear about Republican plans, the less they like them. In our first survey in 2011 just one month ago, a full 60 percent of respondents supported the plan to cut $100 billion from the budget, but that support has dropped to just 50 percent with a supposedly less austere $32-billion plan. (The poll was conducted before the Republicans doubled the cuts.)
And the more the issue is debated, the more voters pull back from the Republicans’ budget plan. Respondents heard Republican arguments on the compelling need to cut spending that kills jobs, but as respondents heard more about the actual cuts, the Democratic arguments, and reassurances on spending, almost a quarter pulled back from the budget plan. Voters are paying a lot of attention to how these cuts impact them and the country.
This debate produces important potential shifts among swing voters — independents, non-college whites, seniors and suburban voters. We also saw dramatic shifts among the new Democratic base of unmarried women and younger voters. These are people who will be hit hardest by these cuts, which will erode support for families and communities, which will have to pick up the burden by spending out of pocket or losing the programs they rely on most.
The key is not just opposition to budget cuts, but credibility building on spending, making an economic argument and identifying the cuts that are most problematic.
The full memo, graphs, and frequency questionnaire can be found at Democracy Corps.

A New Republic piece by Alexander Hart that tries to draw attention not only to the fiscal crisis in the states, but to the human and economic consequences of massive state spending cutbacks, almost feels quaint. Yes, everything he says is correct; it really is dumb to tolerate big state employee layoffs and public benefit cuts in the midst of an economy struggling to recover. But the GOP takeover of the House makes any relief package for state and local governments a complete non-starter.
Sure, Republicans are willing to “help” the states by eliminating Medicaid coverage mandates and thus encouraging states to dump millions of poor and elderly recipients from the rolls. Beyond that, any relief, however humane or sensible, would be denounced as a “bailout” or another “failed stimulus package.” So it ain’t happening.
Indeed, the hot conservative idea for the states at the moment is the suggestion, made most visibly by Newt Gingrich and Grover Norqust, that they be allowed to declare bankruptcy. And Gingrich has made it abundantly clear what his motives are in pushing for this extraordinary measure:

I … hope the House Republicans are going to move a bill in the first month or so of their tenure to create a venue for state bankruptcy, so that states like California and New York and Illinois that think they’re going to come to Washington for money can be told, you know, you need to sit down with all your government employee unions and look at their health plans and their pension plans and, frankly, if they don’t want to change, our recommendation is you go into bankruptcy court and let the bankruptcy judge change it, and I would make the federal bankruptcy law prohibit tax increases as part of the solution, so no bankruptcy judge could impose a tax increase on the people of the states.

So two of the major tribunes of the alleged party of fiscal probity are encouraging states to default on their obligations in order to screw over public employee unions and cut current retirement and health benefits.
This won’t actually happen, if only because Newt and Grover’s Wall Street buddies aren’t about to get in line to recoup their own state debt holdings. But it’s an interesting reflection on the true conservative commitment to federalism that prominent leaders would even discuss this idea, even as they frown on middle-class consumer debtors and reject any genuine relief for the states.

The release of the president’s FY 2012 budget and the beginning of a protracted budget battle distracted a lot of attention from the denoument of the CPAC conference, which concluded on Saturday. Suffice it to say that if CPAC was indeed the “starter’s gun” for the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest, it was something of a false start, since it changed little or nothing.
First of all, the “barometer” value of the presidential straw poll held at CPAC was spoiled, for the second year in a row, by a heavy turnout from Ron Paul’s collegiate cadres, who would have won the poll for him even if he had spent his time at the podium hustling gold coins. You could try to make a case that this or that candidate’s single-digit finish in the straw poll was more significant than another’s, but any survey won by Ron Paul is suspect as a measurement of conservative grassroots support.
Second of all, none of the would-be presidents at CPAC bombed and none broke away from the pack. You can read lots of assessments of the speeches (I’d recommend those by Politico‘s Alexander Burns and Slate‘s Dave Weigel). But even the consensus “top speaker,” Mitch Daniels, probably didn’t do much to sway social conservatives with his double-down justification for elevating fiscal issues above all other concerns. (If you believe that legalized abortion is a second Holocaust, then you aren’t going to be convinced to stop focusing on that even if you agree with Daniels that public debt is “the new Red Menace.”) Yes, Tim Pawlenty showed some fire, but didn’t quite get audience members beating on each other with big sticks. And yes, by touting his record as governor Haley Barbour finally gave conservatives a reason to like him other than his prodigious fund-raising ability, but it won’t be easy over time to convince actual voters that Mississippi is some sort of model for the rest of America.
At the same time, extreme dark horses like Herman Cain and Rick Santorum and John Bolton didn’t do anything to create some credibility-earning buzz or get big donors reaching for their checkbooks. It’s hard to conclude that Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee lost much of anything by skipping the whole show.
It’s clear attendees had a good, rousing time (pure entertainment offerings like Donald Trump helped), but fissures in the conservative movement were not healed and may have grown deeper. Libertarian/neocon tensions were definitely heightened by the disruption of a Cheney/Rumsfeld lovefest by Paulites. The furor over gay conservative group GOProud’s inclusion at the event–puncuated by the denunciation of “bigots” by GOProud leader Chris Barron–appears to have led to a ban on the group for next year’s conference. And Islamophobic attacks on Grover Norquist for defending Muslims for America participation at CPAC took on a whole new dimension after the conference when RedState proprietor Erick Erickson called on conservatives to find a new DC gathering point and abandon Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings.
So at a conference where genuine diversity of opinion was limited, and pretty much everyone joined in trashing Barack Obama as a socialist and a terrorist-loving wimp, the big concern remained rooting out heresy rather than helping Republicans settle on a presidential nominee. No wonder conservatives continue to idolize Ronald Reagan. They could use a little more leadership right now.

Expect the debate about the importance of new media in the nonviolent revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt to continue for years, although I’m satisfied that facebook, twitter and cell phones were highly significant tactical tools in both countries.
In terms of strategy, however, give due credit to a central idea in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions — the unique power of organized nonviolence to topple entrenched totalitarian regimes. For a good read on the topic, see “A Tunisian-Egyptian Link That Shook Arab History” by New York Times reporters David D. Kirkpatrick and David E. Sanger. As part of their investigation, the authors note the influence on both uprisings of a new England scholar who has dedicated his life to the study and advocacy of nonviolence as a potent political strategy:

Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they…were especially drawn to a Serbian youth movement called Otpor, which had helped topple the dictator Slobodan Milosevic by drawing on the ideas of an American political thinker, Gene Sharp. The hallmark of Mr. Sharp’s work is well-tailored to Mr. Mubark’s Egypt: He argues that nonviolence is a singularly effective way to undermine police states that might cite violent resistance to justify repression in the name of stability.
The April 6 Youth Movement modeled its logo — a vaguely Soviet looking red and white clenched fist–after Otpor’s, and some of its members traveled to Serbia to meet with Otpor activists.
Another influence, several said, was a group of Egyptian expatriates in their 30s who set up an organization in Qatar called the Academy of Change, which promotes ideas drawn in part on Mr. Sharp’s work. One of the group’s organizers, Hisham Morsy, was arrested during the Cairo protests and remained in detention.

Sharp is the founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, an important, though underfunded organization dedicated to the study and promotion of nonviolent action. The author of ground-breaking scholarly works, including “Making Europe Unconquerable” and “Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System,” Sharp has long insisted that his key writings, available on the Einstein Institution’s web pages be translated into Arabic and numerous other languages. He is undoubtedly the foremost expert on nonviolence, in both theory and application, and has been called the “Machiavelli of nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of nonviolent warfare” — although neither designation does justice to his progressive outlook.
One shudders to consider the countless billions of dollars Sharp could have saved taxpayers, had a long line of U.S. presidents consulted with him before launching expensive nation-building schemes and other military initiatives. In a saner world, he would be a top national security advisor to the President.
Sharp isn’t the only nonviolence advocate being consulted by the young revolutionaries of Egypt. The American Islamic Congress re-published (in Arabic) and distributed in Egypt a 50-year old comic book about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. You and anyone else in the world with internet access can read the entire comic book in English, Arabic and Farsi right here.
Comforting, that along with all of the blundering disasters of U.S. foreign policy over the years, two humble but dedicated Americans could have such a constructive influence on the freedom struggles of oppressed people in the Middle East.

In a perfectly rational world, you’d think Republicans would make Latino voters a very ripe target. It’s a rapidly growing segment of the electorate in which Republicans have occasionally shown strength, and it was an especially important element of the Obama coalition in 2008.
But in a new tracking poll from Latino Decisions based on surveys of Latinos in 21 states (representing 95% of the Latino population), Obama is showing impressive strength in this community, and Republicans are making no gains at all.
The president’s job approval rating in this poll is at 70%, up from 57% in the last LD survey in September. The percentage of respondents saying they are “certain” they will vote to re-elect Obama is at a relatively soft 43%; but with “probables” and leaners, his “re-elect” number rises to 61%. Meanwhile, the total percentage of Latinos inclined to vote for a Republican candidate in 2012 is at 21%, with only 9% certain to vote that way. It’s worth noting that in most polls, a “generic” Republican presidential candidate has been doing a lot better than named candidates in trial heats against Obama. And the 61-21 margin he enjoys among Latinos in this survey compares favorably with the 67-31 margin he won in 2008 against John McCain.
With the Republican presidential nominating process more than likely pushing the candidates towards immigrant-baiting statements, and with Latinos having relatively positive attitudes towards the kind of federal health care and education policies the GOP will be going after with big clawhammers, it’s hard to see exactly how the GOP makes gains among Latinos between now and Election Day. They’d better hope their 2010 margins among white voters hold up.