Yesterday J.P. Green and I both wrote about the uncertain progressive response to events in Egypt. But it’s worth noting that conservatives are struggling with the issue even more.
Politico reports today that congressional Republicans are keeping quiet and generally being supportive of the administration’s line on Egypt. Let’s give them some credit and assume this is in part attributable to the impulse to support the president in a foreign policy crisis. But it’s also pretty clear conservatives have no defined point of view for this sort of situation, and that they are torn between the democracy-promotion fad of the Bush administration and more durable fears of democracy becoming the gateway to jihadi domination of the Middle East.
In the conservative commentariat and blogsphere, however, negative views of what’s happening in Egypt are a lot more common. Fox News coverage has dwelled on possible “radical Islamic” motives behind the Egyptian demonstrations. A Media Matters report suggests that conservative gabbers are itching to blame Obama for fears raised by the Egyptian uprising, but can’t agree whether Obama is to be attacked for abandoning Mubarak or failing to abandon him.
Some conservatives seem to be looking to Israel for clues on how to react. Mike Huckabee, who happens to be on a trip to Israel at the moment, issued a statement referring to the Egyptian protests as “destabilization,” and is almost certainly channeling Israeli appreciation of Mubarak’s longstanding support for Egypt’s treaty with Israel.
My very favorite right-wing reaction, though, is from a pseudonymous front-page blogger at the influential Red State site who is blaming all the upheaveals of the Middle East on a conspiracy of unions, new media companies, and the socialists of the Obama administration. Gaze in awe:

Given the State Department’s involvement with a group committed to using the internet for “social change,” which calls into question both the President’s as well as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call to restore the internet, it appears the world may be witnessing the first internet-led attempts at “regime change,” orchestrated by President Obama and his allies on the Left.

It’s interesting to see what conservatives come up with to say in a situation where there’s no talking points to follow.

It’s been my theory for a while that the evergreen Republican buzz over potential dark horse 2012 presidential candidates reflects a sort of quiet desperation about the field the GOP is actually likely to choose from: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingich, Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, maybe Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann. None of these folk are competing very well in general election trial heats against Barack Obama, and all of them have notable weaknesses that would afflict them in either primary or November competition.
So we are hearing a lot about John Thune and Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels and Chris Christie (and until we took himself definitively out of the running last week, Mike Pence). They, too, have their own problems, beginning with the fact that none of them have strong national name identification, all of them have time-consuming day jobs, and the time for fantasizing about a 2012 race has just about run out.
The latest White Knight to excite the GOP chattering classes is none other than the Obama administration’s ambassador to China, former Utah governor Jon Hunstsman, who is said to be on the brink of resigning his job and mulling a candidacy for president in cahoots with 2008 nominee John McCain.
As some of you may recall, there was an equally strong presidential buzz about Huntsman back in 2009 when he surprised a lot of observers by accepting the Beijing gig. A common conclusion then was that Huntsman had decided to skip 2012 because his party was in the throes of a right-wing bender, and might only come around to his way of thinking after a well-earned second trouncing by Obama.
Since Huntsman can’t exactly say he’s been spending the last twenty months reading Hayek and Strauss and getting in touch with his inner Ronald Reagan, you have to wonder why he thinks he’s a better fit for the GOP presidential race now than he did in 2009. While he was away, his party got significantly more conservative, and has now taken the 2010 midterm elections results (which he can’t take any credit for) as a mandate for even more ideological intolerance. In Huntsman’s own home state of Utah, most obviously, Sen Bob Bennett was unceremoniously dumped by a state GOP convention, an institution that Huntsman argued should be abandoned because it was dominated by “activists.”
As Dave Weigel noted, there’s just no obvious rationale for a Huntsman candidacy right now:

History isn’t the best guide to whether someone can or can’t win, but serving in the administration you want to displace is a unique problem. The questions emerge: Did you oppose the president on Unpopular Issue X? What about on Y? If these questions are successfully dodged, why were you appointed in the first place? Huntsman has a problem less severe than Mitt Romney’s, but damaging nonetheless — he signed up with the Western Regional Climate Action Initiative in 2007. Regional cap-and-trade systems are anathema to conservatives; that decision by Huntsman opens up a discussion about the other things he’s stiffed them on. If Mitch Daniels is in trouble merely because he’s talked about a “social truce,” how far can a candidate get if he’s talked down conservative dogma and acted on it?

This last comment is probably an allusion to Huntsman’s famous decision to defy Utah Republicans in early 2009 by coming out for same-sex civil unions, a stand that is not likely to endear him to the activists who will dominate the Iowa Caucuses in 2011, obsessed as they are with overturning their state’s legalization of gay marriage. More generally, the last thing the 2012 field needs is another rich flip-flopping Mormon trying to occupy the moderate lane against a passle of hard-right candidates. If he were to run, Huntsman would indeed complicate Mitt Romney’s life immeasurably. But take a look a the long, admiring profile of Huntsman that Zvika Krieger wrote for The New Republic in 2009, and tell me if he sounds like a guy in tune with the current GOP zeitgeist. I don’t think so.
But Huntsman will get his buzz, at least in Washington, as both Republican insiders and the news media cast about for someone to write about other than the usual suspects of the 2012 field.

Neither political party has much to gain by engaging in “Who lost Egypt?” finger-pointing, since both parties have demonstrated a high tolerance for Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship for 27 years. Such are the realpolitik considerations of mideast diplomacy.
Of course that didn’t stop Max Boot from waxing nostalgic in Commentary about Ronald Reagan’s supposed confronting Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Boot’s less than subtle suggestion that the GOP has a superior record in confronting abusive regimes and would somehow be doing better than President Obama in addressing the events in Egypt falls flat. Smart Republicans don’t want to subject their human rights policy toward South Africa, China, Nicaragua and a dozen other abusive dictatorships to comparative scrutiny. Not that Dems have all that much to brag about, other than Democratic congressional leadership’s passage of some significant human rights measures like anti-apartheid legislation.
What Dems should rethink is the nature of our means of confronting abusive regimes. Clearly, we can no longer afford open-ended, large-scale military occupation of nations, nor multi-billion dollar budgets to subsidize repressive governments. We should more assertively question the value of subsidizing abusive regimes just because they serve our geopolitical interests, while abusing the human rights of their citizens. It’s always been wrong; Now it’s a bad investment as well.
President Obama gave a great speech in Cairo in 2009, challenging Arab nations to embrace Democracy, and offering them hope and opportunity in return. Democrats should now rally around his vision with a new focus on our policy towards Arab nations. What we can escalate instead is our efforts to educate “at-risk” populations about the benefits of tolerance, secular government, free speech and democracy. Let a stronger engagement in the effort to win hearts and minds replace military force. That’s the kind of nation-building that merits our sustained support, and it’s a lot more cost-effective in the long run than squandering billions every week on military operations that win temporary victories at best.
It’s highly unlikely that the uprising in Egypt will do much to directly influence voters in the U.S. to support one party or the other. But the protests in Egypt do provide a timely reminder that the days when subsidizing repressive dictatorships were a sound investment are coming to a close. We need a new grand strategy to win respect, instead of fear, in the strife-torn nations of the middle east, and Democrats should lead the way.

The substance of what’s happening in a turbulent Egypt right now is beyond the scope of this site. But the anxiety and ambivalence over U.S. policy that many progressives are feeling right now is of interest, and may only get more intense during this week’s potentially historic develpments.
The Obama administration is currently in the slow process of liquidating a policy of accomodation of a non-democratic Egypt that has existed for more than thirty years, through three Democratic and three Republican administrations. For progressives who strongly sympathize with the Egyptian protestors, and have embraced their now-realizable goal of the destruction of the repressive Mubarak regime, the tentativeness of the Obama administration’s reaction has been embarassing at best. For us oldsters, it does indeed feel an awful lot like the day-late-dollar-short reaction of the Carter administration to the Iranian revolution of 1979, though there’s been nothing like that administration’s steady embrace of the dictator up to and beyond the moment of his demise.
But it should be obvious that we have little idea of the Obama administration’s activities behind the scenes, and can’t really judge the wisdom or folly of its course of action until Egypt’s own course is determined. We can fully grasp, however, the potentially enormous stakes for the United States in what happens next, which, ironically, underlines the strategic position that has made it easy for Mubarak to shake down America for support and subsidies for so long.
To put it simply, a “bad” outcome in Egypt–whether it’s Mubarak surviving by savage repression, a civil war, or some sort of inherently unviable Kerensky-like successor government likely to give way to something worse–would blow up the Middle East in unpredictable ways, and could well plunge much of the entire planet into a second phase of global recession. The impact on oil prices alone of extended instability in the country that controls the Suez Canal could bring back to Americans a relic of the 1970s that has been all but forgotten: “stagflation,” the maddening, policy-paralyzing coexistence of powerful price inflation and high unemployment. So in a very real sense, Egypt could make pretty much irrelevant many of the domestic policy arguments Americans were having before the first demonstration in Cairo.
It’s tempting to turn on the tube and simply cheer for the unquestioned good guys in the Egyptian drama, the pro-democracy forces, and shake our heads in dismay at the apparent defensiveness and sometimes even cluelessness of administration officials. If Egypt transitions more or less seamlessly into a peaceful, secular multi-party democracy then it may well be time for some serious progressive soul-searching about our past complicity in the previous regime’s outrages. But this is not a television show, and the consequences of a false step by the Obama administration for regional peace and domestic prosperity–not to mention the democratic aspirations of the people of Egypt and the Middle East–are a lot more important than current ratings of its behavior in front of the cameras.

By July 16th of last year, Fox News had run 95 different reports about the “intimidation” of voters by the New Black Panther Party, all of them featuring videotape of two individuals in front of a polling station. The intense coverage of the event not only convinced literally millions of Fox viewers that this was just the “tip of the iceberg” of a pattern of widespread voter intimidation but also provided “proof” that the Obama Justice Department had ignored a “slam-dunk case” of voter intimidation.
Despite an intense search, however, investigators could not find any voters at the precinct to assert that they had actually been intimidated. On April 23, Civil Rights Commissioner Arlen Melendez stated “no citizen has even alleged that he or she was intimidated from voting at the Fairmount Avenue Polling Station in 2008.”
In today’s Washington Post Plum Line Adam Serwer describes what happened next:

“Having been unable to find any actual voters who were intimidated, [Commissioner] Adams and his colleagues settle on the witness accounts of Republican poll watchers.
The J memo (or justification memo) arguing that the case should be brought forward states that two Republican poll watchers, Larry and Angela Counts, were so intimidated by the two New Black Panther Party individuals that they were afraid to go outside, that they had their lunch brought to them as a result, and that Angela Counts had expressed the fear that someone might “bomb” the polling place.”

You can read the official transcript of what the two poll watchers testified to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission here and here.
The following are the key passages from Larry Counts testimony:
——————————-
Q. So did you actually ever see the Black Panthers?
A. No I never seen them…
—————————-
Q. Did you ever become aware – and I know I asked you this but let me run through it – did you become aware that members of the New Black Panther Party were outside?
A. No….
—————————–
Q. did anybody from the Republican Party come in and speak to you during election day?
A. No.
Q. Let me be specific. There is a tall gentleman who was wearing a white shirt and blue jeans. His name is Chris Hill. Did he come in and speak to you?
A. Not that I recall, no.
Q. I’ll be explicit. If Mr. Hill is on videotape saying that he spoke to you and you indicated that you were afraid, you don’t recall any statement like that to Mr. Hill.
A. No. I had no reason to be afraid.
————————————
Q. And you never heard anybody inside the election room say that there are two members of the Black Panther Party outside?
A. No. Nobody was, you know. Communicating or talking about no Black Panthers on the inside.
——————————-
Q. Mr. Counts I only want you to refer to the photo at the bottom of the scene.
A. I ain’t never seen those two guys.
Q. OK just to be explicit so it’s in our written record, there appear to be two members of the – – I won’t even say that they are members of the New Black Panther Party — but the two gentlemen there in dark black uniforms and one of them has a nightstick. You don’t recall seeing either one of those gentlemen on election day. Is that right?
A. No…
—————–
Q. did you see any voters turned away at the polling site?
A. No.
Q. Did anybody who came in to vote indicate that they were concerned or worried about their safety?
A. No.
————————-
The account given by Angela Counts is largely similar in its lack of any testimony about “intimidation”.
The supposed “intimidation” of the Counts was a central part of the “Justification Memo” that has subsequently been used to convince vast numbers of Americans to distrust the American political system and believe in a conspiracy within the Justice Department to allow the intimidation of white voters to occur unmolested. Yet the actual testimony directly contradicts what the memo asserts.
In one important respect, however, it must be admitted that the promulgators of the “intimidation” story are entirely correct.
The actions of some people within the Justice Department are indeed appalling and terrifying.

Even as Republicans fulminate about the president’s alleged lack of focus on the country’s fiscal condition (not, to be sure, its economic condition, which has largely dropped off the GOP’s radar screen), the pent-up social policy demands of the party’s dominant conservative wing can no longer be repressed. A major case in point is the drive to further restrict government funding for abortions, a matter than most of us thought had been resolved in the right-to-life movement’s favor a long time ago. But no, the Hyde Amendment’s not enough, explains Mother Jones‘ Nick Baumann:

Rape is only really rape if it involves force. So says the new House Republican majority as it now moves to change abortion law.
For years, federal laws restricting the use of government funds to pay for abortions have included exemptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. (Another exemption covers pregnancies that could endanger the life of the woman.) But the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act,” a bill with 173 mostly Republican co-sponsors that House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has dubbed a top priority in the new Congress, contains a provision that would rewrite the rules to limit drastically the definition of rape and incest in these cases.
With this legislation, which was introduced last week by Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Republicans propose that the rape exemption be limited to “forcible rape.” This would rule out federal assistance for abortions in many rape cases, including instances of statutory rape, many of which are non-forcible. For example: If a 13-year-old girl is impregnated by a 24-year-old adult, she would no longer qualify to have Medicaid pay for an abortion.

You may recall that during the debate over health reform last year, Republicans tried to make a case that “ObamaCare” would somehow increase government coverage of abortion services, even as Democrats again and again made concessions to restrict that possibility. It’s increasingly obvious, though, that it’s not the statuo quo on abortion that conservatives are defending; instead they are pursuing a long-delayed opportunity to unsettle old compromises now that the midterm elections of 2010 have given them a supposed mandate:

There used to be a quasi-truce between the pro- and anti-choice forces on the issue of federal funding for abortion. Since 1976, federal law has prohibited the use of taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest, and when the pregnancy endangers the life of the woman. But since last year, the anti-abortion side has become far more aggressive in challenging this compromise. They have been pushing to outlaw tax deductions for insurance plans that cover abortion, even if the abortion coverage is never used. The Smith bill represents a frontal attack on these long-standing exceptions.

The Senate won’t let this happen, but it’s a good example of an area where claims of Democratic “extremism” are a thin veil for conservative efforts to turn the clock way back.

It’s unlikely that anyone at 1600 PA Ave. will lose much sleep about the left critique of Obama’s SOTU speech, and the white house is understandably euphoric about glowing reviews of the President’s state of the union address. In a CNN/Opinion Research survey, 84 percent of those who watched the speech liked Obama’s address; and 52 percent responded “very positively.” A CBS News/Knowlege Networks poll indicated 91 percent favored the president’s proposals.
But progressive critics nonetheless made some good points that merit consideration, mostly having to do with what was not said.
The Nation’s contributing editor Robert Scheer offered the left’s most acerbic review, saying,

I had expected Barack Obama to be his eloquent self, appealing to our better nature, but instead he was mealy-mouthed in avoiding the tough choices that a leader should delineate in a time of trouble….The speech was a distraction from what seriously ails us: an unabated mortgage crisis, stubbornly high unemployment and a debt that spiraled out of control while the government wasted trillions making the bankers whole. Instead, the president conveyed the insular optimism of his fat-cat associates…

American Prospect editor-at-large and WaPo columnist Harold Meyerson raised an omission I wondered about:

If we’re going to rewrite our corporate tax code, why don’t we rewrite it to reward those companies that employ workers at good jobs here at home?…Why can’t our tax laws discriminate between those companies that both develop and manufacture their products here and those that go abroad for cheaper labor?…We can at least use tariffs and taxes to reward those corporations that invest at home and penalize those that disinvest in this nation’s future. …That carrot and stick is what’s missing from the president’s commendable-as-far-as-they-go proposals.

Open Left’s Mike Lux had a mostly favorable review of SOTU, calling it “a solid, steady performance,” but with some pointed concerns:

…There also were some anti-progressive, irritating moments, too: screwing consumers on medical malpractice, screwing government workers with a wage freeze, screwing us all with the five-year freeze on domestic discretionary spending (which is actually at least a 7 percent cut if you factor inflation in).

Yesterday the Washington Post weighed in with an editorial taking the President to task for not even mentioning gun control, despite having the family of Christina Taylor Green, the nine-year old girl murdered in Tucson sitting with the first lady:

The lack of urgency is appalling. How many more tragedies must occur before the president is moved to act? How many more stricken families will be forced to sit through Washington dog-and-pony shows while those with the power to stem the violence do nothing?

To be fair, some leading progressives had a more positive reaction, including New Republic senior editor John B. Judis, who called the 2011 SOTU Obama’s “best speech as president.” And MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who echoed some of Ed Kilgore’s take, credited the President with “wrenching the center back from the right” and “stopping the country’s rightward drift.”
It may be that President Obama does intend to address all or some of the aforementioned progressive concerns with reform proposals. It’s not always good strategy to state absolutely everything you want or plan to do in one SOTU speech. I just hope he does plan to push forward a saner firearms policy and some of the carrots and sticks to keep jobs in the U.S. Meyerson noted.
Few would doubt, however, that the schitzy conservative response to the President’s address — Ryan’s uninspiring, visionless view of the possibilities ahead and Bachman’s weird, blundering screed — was a mess. Compared to that, at least, progressive and moderate Dems should have no trouble agreeing that President Obama won the day.

So all the pleading from national conservatives didn’t matter: Rep. Mike Pence announced today that he would not run for president in 2012. He is now universally expected to run for governor of Indiana, where he will begin as a strong favorite against a so-far-invisible field.
In terms of the presidential field, it’s now denied the one plausible candidate who could have met a strict limus test of right-wing orthodoxy, since Pence voted against No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, TARP, and the recent tax cut deal.
More to the point, his decision should speed up the game of musical chairs over who will try to occupy the True Conservative position in the nominating process. John (Empty Suit) Thune and Haley (Boss Hawg) Barbour probably don’t qualify, so look for signals from Huckabee, Palin, and Bachmann. It’s very unlikely that the Right will allow Newt Gingrich or Tim Pawlenty to become their champion by default.

One of the most predictable amusements of this new Congress is to watch the fiery, nothing’s-off-the-table budget hawks of the Republican Party begin to make exceptions for defense spending, even, in fact, opposing cuts already being advocated by the Pentagon.
Elisabeth Bumiller and Thom Shanker of the New York Times have a rundown on efforts by more senior GOP solons to “educate” Tea Party freshmen about the importance of defense spending to the country and to their own districts. That’s because so few said a word on the subject during the recent campaign:

The discordant Republican voices on military spending have bred confusion on Capitol Hill, among military contractors and within the military itself, where no one is exactly sure what the members backed by the Tea Party will do. It also shows why taking on the military budget will be so hard, even though a widening deficit has led the president and the leaders of both parties to say this time they are serious.
Most Tea Party candidates spoke little about national security and the military in fall political campaigns focused on cutting spending over all.

This dilemma has been brewing for quite some time. Back during the campaign, Sarah Palin took it upon herself to act as the defense industry’s main emissary to the Tea Party Movement, urging fiscal conservatives to give the Pentagon a pass:

There’s growing concern among Republicans — and especially among the pro-defense neoconservative wing of the party — that national security spending, which is under a level of scrutiny and pressure not seen since the end of the Cold War, could fall victim to the tea party’s anti-establishment, anti-spending agenda. The former Alaska governor, as the unofficial leader of the movement and its most prominent celebrity, is moving to carve out such funding from any drives to cut overall government expenditures.
“In the conservative ranks and within the party, she’s really quite a crucial piece in this puzzle,” said Tom Donnelly, a defense fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “She’s got both political and tea-party/small-government bona fides, but she also has a lot of credibility in advocating for military strength.”

More recently, would-be president John Bolton took this same no-cuts position on defense spending It will be most interesting to see what some other presidential candidates–e.g., Mitt Romney, who’s tried to pose as Mister Tough Guy on foreign and defense policy–will have to say on this rather obvious contradicton in the conservative message and agenda.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
The ideas and policy proposals in Barack Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Address were anything but fresh and original. Much of it could easily have been harvested from any number of interchangeable speeches given during the last 20 years–not just by presidents by members of Congress, governors, mayors, and CEOs–from both parties. Yet that may have been exactly the point. By staking his claim to decades of well-worn political detritus, I think Obama has set a cunning political trap for his enemies.
A crash program for economic competitiveness? We’ve heard it dozens of times, and Obama’s speech mainly substituted new global rivals for old ones. Harrumphing about how education and a skilled workforce are they key to national prosperity? Obviously an old theme. Reorganizing major federal departments was one of Jimmy Carter’s signature initiatives. Tax simplification was one of Ronald Reagan’s. Making government a lean, mean efficiency machine has been promised many times, most notably by Bill Clinton. Across-the-board spending freezes, support for small business entrepreneurs, growing green jobs, better infrastructure, boosting exports (without, presumably, those pesky imports)–we’ve heard it all. One conceit–the “Sputnik Moment”–was so old that you wonder if the president’s young speechwriters just found out about it.
And that’s the beauty of Obama’s address. He basically put together every modest, centrist, reasonable-sounding idea for public investment aimed at job creation and economic growth that anyone has ever uttered; and he did so at the exact moment that the GOP has abandoned the very concept of public investment altogether. He’s thrown into relief the fact that Republicans no longer seem interested in any government efforts to boost the economy, except where they offer an excuse to reduce the size and power of government.
Paul Ryan’s deficit-maniac response played right into Obama’s trap: Ryan barely mentioned the economy other to imply that every dollar taken away from the public sector will somehow create jobs in the private sector economy (a private sector economy wherein, as Obama cleverly noted, corporate profits are setting records). For those who buy the idea that government is the only obstacle to an economic boom, this makes sense. But for everybody else, the contrast between a Democratic president with a lot of small, familiar ideas for creating jobs and growth, and a Republican Party with just one big idea, is inescapable. It’s a vehicle for the “two alternate futures” choice which Obama will try to offer voters in 2012.
Moreover, Obama’s tone–the constant invocation of bipartisanship at a time when Republicans are certain to oppose most of what he’s called for, while going after the progressive programs and policies of the past–should sound familiar as well. It was Bill Clinton’s constant refrain, which he called “progress over partisanship,” during his second-term struggle with the Republican Congress. During that period, the Republicans being asked to transcend “partisanship” were trying to remove Clinton from office. And Clinton wasn’t really extending his hand in a gesture of cooperation with the GOP but, by creating a contrast with their ideological fury, indicating that he himself embodied the bipartisan aspirations of the American people and the best ideas of both parties. It was quite effective.
By playing this rope-a-dope, Obama has positioned himself well to push back hard against the conservative agenda. Having refused to offer Republicans the cover they crave for “entitlement reform,” while offering his own modest, reasonable-sounding deficit reduction measures, he’s forcing the GOP to either go after Social Security and Medicare on their own–which is very perilous to a party whose base has become older voters–or demand unprecedented cuts for those popular public investments that were the centerpiece of his speech. Either way, in a reversal of positions from the last two years, Obama looks like he is focused on doing practical things to boost the economy, while it’s Republicans who are talking about everything else. Boring it may have been, but as a positioning device for the next two years, Obama’s speech was a masterpiece.