Kentucky voters seeking a better understanding of the roots of the political, social and economic beliefs of GOP senate nominee Rand Paul should have a gander at some of the more revealing, but largely overlooked articles about his father’s views.
For openers, sample “Who Wrote Ron Paul’s Newsletters?” by Julian Sanchez and David Weigel, posted at Reason.com, the website of libertarian Reason Magazine. The article is mostly an expose of the influence of two libertarian activist-‘intellectuals,’ Llewellyn Rockwell and Murray Rothbard, on Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul. The authors, who apparently identify with the anti-racist wing of the Libertarian movement, give no quarter to Paul’s mentors:

Ron Paul doesn’t seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has “no idea” who might have written inflammatory comments such as “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”–statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists–including some still close to Paul–all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.
Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul’s congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared–roughly 1989 to 1994–Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist “paleoconservatives,” producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul–accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman’s recent writings and audio recordings.

The authors go on to cite several credible sources affirming the close ties between Rockwell, Rothbard and Ron Paul, and note other issues of the newsletters that printed vicious slurs against Martin Luther King, Jr.They say Paul once claimed that his most lucrative source of donations was the mailing list for “The Spotlight,” a virulent anti-Semitic tabloid run by Holocaust denier Willis Carto. Elsewhere Rockwell has railed against “state-enforced integration,” and the authors say:

…Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”…Anyone with doubts about the composition of the “parasitic Underclass” could look to the regular “PC Watch” feature of the Report, in which Rockwell compiled tale after tale of thuggish black men terrifying petite white and Asian women.

Perhaps there is a distinction to be made between the racial views of Ron Paul and his mentors on the one hand, and Rand Paul’s views on the other. But, as Joe Conason notes in his Salon.com post, “The roots of Rand Paul’s civil rights resentment”:

To understand Rand Paul’s agonized contortions over America’s civil rights consensus, let’s review the tainted pedigree of the movement that reared him. Specifically, both the Kentucky Republican Senate nominee and his father, Ron Paul, have been closely associated over the past two decades with a faction that described itself as “paleolibertarian,” led by former Ron Paul aide Lew Rockwell and the late writer Murray Rothbard. They eagerly forged an alliance with the “paleoconservatives” behind Patrick Buchanan, the columnist and former presidential candidate whose trademarks are nativism, racism and anti-Semitism.

In his article in The New Republic, “Angry White Man:The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul,” James Kirchick sheds light on a sort of split in the Libertarian movement, which puts Paul and his followers and mentors in the ‘paleo-libertarian’ camp:

The people surrounding the von Mises Institute–including Paul–may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American history–the moment when a tyrannical federal government established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent Washington libertarian told me, “There are too many libertarians in this country … who, because they are attracted to the great books of Mises, … find their way to the Mises Institute and then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of libertarian thought.”

Kirchick’s article goes on to cite even more repulsive examples of racial slurs and bigotry towards other groups in Ron Paul’s newsletters. Of course the elder Paul has done as much as he can to distance himself from the views he was so proudly associated with a decade ago. Rand Paul stretches even further to disavow such overtly racist views, but seems unable to completely let go of the racial attitudes he was raised around, and so he stumbles around the Civil Rights Act.
History provides numerous examples of political leaders who were more progressive than their parents, and Rand Paul has been given that opportunity. Regrettably, there are also plenty of politicians, like W and Rand Paul, who make sympathetic noises about change and equal opportunity, but when it comes to policy, can’t quite make the break.
Rand Paul has been muzzled by his GOP handlers, as far as “Meet the Press’ and other in-depth interview programs are concerned. They hope to deprogram some of his paleo-libertarianism, steer him toward the center, or at least the neo-con right and block one of the Democrats’ best pick-up opportunities. There won’t be any free rides, however, from his Democratic opponent, Kentucky Attorney-General Jack Conway, who is equally-determined to hold Paul accountable for his noxious views on race and economic privilege.

This item is by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a member of the TDS advisory board.
As Ed Kilgore recently discussed at FiveThirtyEight.com, it has become almost an article of faith in Republican circles that the best way for the GOP to regain the ground it has lost in the last two elections is to nominate candidates who take consistently conservative positions on the issues facing the country. According to the “move right and win” theory, by standing forthrightly for traditional family values, smaller government, and less regulation of business, Republican candidates can energize their party’s base and win back conservative voters who became disillusioned with the free-spending ways of the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans.
But while the move right and win theory is extremely popular among Republican activists, it directly challenges the widely accepted view of American voting behavior among election scholars. According to the median voter theory first proposed by Anthony Downs in his seminal work, An Economic Theory of Democracy, general election candidates in the U.S. who take strongly conservative or strongly liberal positions tend to alienate moderate voters and therefore perform more poorly at the polls than candidates who hew more closely to the center of the ideological spectrum.
Fortunately, there is some readily available evidence that allows us to test these two competing theories. We can compare the performance of moderate and conservative Republican incumbents in recent U.S. Senate elections. If the move right and win theory is correct, we should find that conservative incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while moderate incumbents did worse than expected; if the median voter theory is correct, however, we should find that moderate incumbents did better than expected based on the normal vote for their party while conservative incumbents did worse than expected.
In order to determine whether Republican incumbents did better or worse than expected based on the normal vote for their party, I measured their vote share compared with that of the current or most recent Republican presidential candidate in their state. I measured the conservatism of Republican senators based on their voting records in previous two years using a modified version of the familiar DW-NOMINATE scale with a range from 0 (moderate) to 8 (very conservative).
Figure 1 displays the relationship between the conservatism of Republican senators and their electoral performance. A positive electoral performance score means that a senator ran ahead of the Republican presidential candidate while a negative score means that a senator ran behind the Republican presidential candidate.

The results in Figure 1 show that there was a fairly strong negative relationship between conservatism and electoral performance. The more conservative the voting record, the worse the performance of the incumbent. Republican senators with moderate voting records like Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, and John Chafee generally ran well ahead of the Republican presidential candidate in their state while those with very conservative voting records like John Ashcroft, James Inhofe and Jim Bunning frequently ran behind the Republican presidential candidate.
The results in Figure 1 would appear to support the median voter theory and undermine the move right and win theory. Before reaching this conclusion, however, we need to control for a variety of other factors that influence the outcomes of Senate elections involving incumbents such as the strength of the challenger, the national political climate, and the presence of any major scandals or controversies involving the incumbent. Therefore Table 1 presents the results of a multiple regression analysis of Senate election outcomes including all of these predictors along with the conservatism of the incumbent’s voting record. Challenger strength is measured by the natural logarithm of challenger spending in thousands of collars, the national political climate is measured by dummy variables for each election year, and scandals or major controversies are measured by a dummy variable. Once again, the dependent variable is the performance of the incumbent compared with the Republican presidential candidate.


The results in Table 1 provide additional support for the median voter theory. After controlling for challenger strength, the presence of major scandals or controversies, and the national political climate, the conservatism of the incumbent’s voting record continues to have a strong negative influence on incumbent electoral performance. For every additional one point increase in conservatism, Republican incumbents lost an additional three percentage points in support relative to their party’s presidential candidate.
Conclusions:
Evidence from U.S. Senate elections since 2000 provides strong support for the median voter theory of U.S. elections. This evidence shows that conservatism had a significant negative effect on the electoral performance of Republican incumbents. Based on these results, efforts by the Tea Party movement and other conservative activist to purge moderate incumbents and pressure Republican candidates into taking more consistently conservative positions are likely to have a detrimental impact on the GOP’s performance in future elections.

It’s been quite an election cycle so far for the South Carolina Republican Party.
First you had the Mark Sanford psycodrama, resulting in a failed impeachment effort and lots of material for late-night comics and Democrats.
Then there was the speech by Lt. Gov. (and gubernatorial candidate) Andre Bauer comparing beneficiaries of the school lunch program to “stray animals.”
And throughout it all, you had Sen. Jim DeMint ranging around the country intervening in Republican primaries to promote a rightward lurch in the GOP, while his Senate colleague, Lindsay Graham, appears to have been intimidated into curtailing cooperation with Democrats on climate change and immigration legislation.
And now with the gubernatorial primary just two weeks away, the front-runner, arch-conservative state Rep. Nikki Haley, has been hit with allegations of an illicit affair by a former Sanford (and Haley) staffer who is now a self-styled “bad boy” political blogger.
The blogger in question, Will Folks, has a rather sketchy reputation, in part because he left the governor’s staff in 2005 after being convicted of domestic violence. Haley, who is married (as she was at the time of the alleged “inappropriate physical relationship”) is angrily denying the whole thing, while her friend Sarah Palin has joined other supporters in attacking the allegations as a dirty trick engineered by her political enemies.
Now the web site that published Folks’ statement on the affair is rather broadly hinting that it has years of emails and text messages between the two that it will make available if Haley has the guts to sue for libel.
All this is occurring just as a new PPP poll (conducted before this story broke) shows Haley opening up a big lead over the GOP gubernatorial field, though likely heading for a runoff.
Haley had started the race at the back of the pack, with the unwelcome reputation as Mark Sanford’s protege. But early backing from out-of-state conservatives (e.g., Erick Erickson of RedState) and then endorsements from Jenny Sanford and Palin had helped earn her the prized Most Conservative mantle in the race.
And now all this.
There’s no telling how the latest Palmetto State saga will turn out, but it could be good news for one of the two Democrats (Vincent Sheehan and Jim Rex) in the gubernatorial race. I mean, really, how much craziness from one political party in one state can voters accept?

In this week’s ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira affirms that, despite all of the controversy over Arizona’s new law empowering police to harass suspected immigrants, the American public continues to support comprehensive immigration reform. As Teixeira explains:

In a recent AP-Gfk poll…the public was asked whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that the Obama administration had not yet passed a comprehensive immigration bill. A plurality of 48 percent pronounced this a bad thing, while just 9 percent thought it a good thing (41 percent thought it was neither).

And not only does the public want action; They want fairness for illegal immigrants:

The public particularly wants to see a path to citizenship made available. Fifty-nine percent in the same poll favored “providing a legal way for illegal immigrants already in the United States to become U.S. citizens” compared to 39 percent who were opposed.

Despite the Arizona distraction, explains Teixeira, the public wants policy-makers to address immigration reform in a constructive way — as ” the real solution to the immigration problem. The public still wants the country to move in this direction and policymakers should, too.”

At a time when it seems most elections have been “nationalized,” it’s worth noting that local factors can have a major impact on individual contests. That’s being demonstrated by an incident in the red-hot competitive Alabama gubernatorial race.
Tim James, a Republican candidate closely associated with the Christian Right, has been struggling to get into a runoff position against “establishment” candidate Bradley Byrne. James recently got a boost from an infamous Fred Davis’ “viral” ad that fed the post-Arizona immigration frenzy among Republicans by attacking Alabama’s system of allowing driver’s tests in languages other than English. A new R2K/DKos poll of Alabama shows James moving up and challenging “Ten Commandments Judge” Roy Moore for a runoff spot.
But now James is dealing with a problem that is distinctive to Alabama: reports that he’s said he’d fire or cut the salary of Nick Saban, the coach of the reigning National Championship Alabama Crimson Tide football team. The rumor is apparently based on a remark–which might well have been a joke–the candidate made to a University of Alabama student newspaper. But its power is evidenced by the James’ campaign’s official denials, and the prominence the “issue” has acheived in the primary that will be held on June 1. It has added salience because James’ candidacy owes a lot to the legacy of his father, former Gov. Fob James, who was a star football player at Auburn (the school Tim James also attended).
A Georgia-based college football blogger hilariously referred to this “issue” as “the third rail of Alabama politics.” But in a close primary contest in a state where college football is a quasi-religious phenomenon, that may not be much of an exaggeration.

Before we move on from the controversy over Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s important to understand that controversy over his political philosophy is likely to persist. And ironically, that’s especially true if the accusations of active or latent racism on Paul’s part are completely unfair.
If Paul’s original observations on the Civil Rights Act were motivated by indifference to discrimination against minorities, or the conviction some conservatives share that any government action to protect minorities is itself racism, then the controversy is limited to this one topic. In that case, the damage is limited to those voters who care about civil rights, many of whom will not be voting for Rand Paul in Kentucky or Republicans anywhere else.
But if, as his defenders insist (and as the record seems to support), Paul is simply expressing the consistent view that the operations of free markets, not government, are the best guarantor of individual rights in general and the interests of the poor and minorities in particular, and that the U.S. Constitution, rightly interpreted, reflects this conviction, then other, equally controversial issues may come into play, and not just those that involve other types of discrimination.
Most immediately, it’s worth remembering that principled, non-racist opponents of civil rights laws have to accept responsibility for their tacit alliances with racists. Best I can tell, Barry Goldwater did not have a prejudiced bone in his body. But there can be zero doubt that thanks to his “principled” opposition to the Civil Rights Act, his 1964 presidential campaign was totally dominated by segregationists in five of the six states he carried in the General Election, and served as the “bridge” whereby segregationists eventually migrated from the Democratic to the Republican party. At some point, the subjective motivation of civil rights opponents, past, present or future, becomes rather irrelevant.
But more importantly, Rand Paul’s concerns with the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act suggest a radical outlook with political implications that go far beyond civil rights. After all, the provisions of the Civil Rights Act that limit the right to discriminate by private property owners depend on the same chain of “activist” Supreme Court decisions that made possible the major New Deal and Great Society initiatives, involving interpretations of the General Welfare, Commerce and Spending clauses that today’s (like yesterday’s) “constitutional conservatives” routinely deplore. Rand Paul’s campaign platform reflects the common Tea Party demand that the federal government be restricted to the specific enumerated powers spelled out in the Constitution. This constitutional fundamentalism, which appears to object to every expansion of federal power enacted since 1937, is made more explicit by Rand and Ron Paul’s friends in the Constitution Party, which forthrightly calls Social Security unconstitutional and demands that it be phased out immediately.
So: instead of challenging Rand Paul’s latest backtracking on the Civil Rights Act, or calling him racist, progressives would be better advised to corner him on his attitude towards the constitutionality of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which, like the Civil Rights Act, reflect functions of the federal government that are not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.
Add in the fact that Rand Paul has been calling for an immediate balancing of the federal budget without tax cuts, which would require some drastic action on federal spending, and it becomes plain that his honest and principled (at least up until his flip-flop on the Civil Rights Act) efforts to apply “constitutional conservative” doctrines to current affairs imply policies that when spelled out would repel many, many voters–just like Goldwater’s platform in 1964.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Conventional wisdom: it is a fickle, fickle thing. The latest example of the incredible lightness of opinion in today’s media and political climate is the reaction to the results of the race in Pennsylvania’s 12th congressional district. Politicians and pundits, right- as well as left-leaning, are taking it as evidence that Republican hopes of retaking the House this November are too optimistic. That may turn out to be the case, but PA-12 is hardly enough evidence to warrant the conclusion.
First, let’s place that district in context. Yes, it was one of Obama’s ten worst Appalachian congressional district’s during his 2008 primary contest with Hillary Clinton. But it was his best of those ten, by far, during the general election (he got 49 percent of the vote), and it was the only one of the ten that John Kerry carried in 2004. The reason: its party registration is so overwhelmingly Democratic that even when lots of conservative Democrats peel off, a majority or near-majority remains for the party’s nominee. So while the Republicans may have believed their own hype in the run-up to this week’s special election, PA-12 was always going to be tough for them.
Now let’s look at three Gallup surveys released within the past week. One notes that so far in 2010, only 23 percent of Americans have been satisfied with the way things are going–well below the 40 percent average of the past three decades, and the lowest reading recorded in a mid-term election year going back to 1982. A second survey observes that the two political parties have been at or near parity among registered voters since January in the generic congressional ballot. This is especially significant because (as the survey shows) “the structure of voting preferences seen in the first three months of the [election] year generally carried through to the end.” And parity among registered voters would be bad news for Democrats: on average, Republicans have enjoyed about a five-point turnout edge in midterm elections.
The third survey underscores this point. It highlights a 19-point gap between conservatives and liberals in their enthusiasm about voting in this year’s midterm elections. And 62 percent of those who describe themselves as “very conservative” (10 percent of registered voters) say that they are very enthusiastic, versus only 44 percent of those who term themselves “very liberal” (a scant 4 percent of registered voters).
Connect the dots and we have the portrait of an electorate that’s highly dissatisfied with the status quo and that seems poised to give more votes in the aggregate to Republican than to Democratic candidates this fall. I don’t know how many House seats that translates into, but I’d be surprised if the number didn’t start with a “3” (at least). As far as I can see, only a big change in the economy–a significant increase in the rate of GDP growth leading to a noticeable reduction in top-line unemployment numbers and a bump up in real disposable income for those who have jobs–would be enough to change the overall outlook for November.

MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer has a post up that should be of interest to the Jack Conway for Senate campaign. Singer focuses on one of Rand Paul’s more significant vulnerabilities revealed in recent interviews:

…Paul made fairly clear that he did not believe it within the bounds of Congress’s powers to address issues of private discrimination. In legal parlance, Paul does not believe that Congress’s power under Article I, section 8, clause 3 of the Constitution to “regulate Commerce… among the several States” extends to the private actions of the citizens of these states…
…The problem with this view is apparent to just about anyone who lives in a world of reality rather than ideology. It is fine enough to believe that, in theory, individuals’ contractual and property rights should not be trampled on by the state, and that, what’s more, the market will solve all problems. But the fact is the market did not solve the problem of institutional racism. It took state action, not only in directing state actors but also in directing the practices of private individuals like the ones who owned restaurants. The same can be said about the Americans with Disabilities Act, which like the Civil Rights Act restricted individual action to ensure access for those who otherwise might be denied access. The good acts of individual property owners to accommodate their workers in the ways described by Paul in his NPR interview are important — but they were not enough. Only when the state stepped in were the rights of the disabled to access restaurants and other accommodations ensured.

Singer then suggests four very good questions for Paul, “considering his apparently limited views of Congress’s Commerce Clause powers”:

1. Do you believe the federal minimum wage is constitutional?
2. Do you believe federal overtime laws are constitutional?
3. Do you believe the federal government has the power to enact work safety laws and regulations?
4. Do you believe that federal child labor laws are constitutional?
A “no” answer to any of these questions would presumably be problematic for the Paul campaign considering folks seem to like the minimum wage, laws that stop employers from, say, making their workers use machines that cut off their hands, and laws that prohibit 7 year olds from laboring in coal mines.

So it’s not only the racial aspects of Paul’s views that are going to cause him trouble. Singer has hit on a major weakness of Paul’s knee-jerk libertarianism, the belief that the private sector has constitutional protection from damn near all regulation. The politically-alert segment of the white working class in KY would be very interested in Paul’s answers to Singer’s questions.
Jack Conway didn’t get to be Kentucky A.G. by missing opportunities like this one. This senate seat should be a Democratic pick-up.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take before the past views and associations of new Republican superstar Rand Paul all come to light, but he’s currently on track to serve as the living link between all sorts of older forms of radical conservatism and the contemporary Tea Party movement. Indeed, it appears that his Lester Maddox-ish instincts about the supremacy of private property rights could be the least of his problems. Now it transpires that just last year he was guest speaker at an event held by the Constitution Party.
Now this is hardly a surprise, since his old man has long been friends with CP founder Howard Phillips, and endorsed that party’s presidential candidate in 2008. But most people don’t know much about the CP, which combines limited-government conservatism with the peculiar doctrines of Christian Reconstructionists, for which a simpler term is Theocrats. And no, I’m not using “Theocrats” as an insult, but as a technical description of what they support.
Here, right off the Constitution Party’s web page, are the opening words of its party platform:

The Constitution Party gratefully acknowledges the blessing of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of these United States. We hereby appeal to Him for mercy, aid, comfort, guidance and the protection of His Providence as we work to restore and preserve these United States.
This great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason peoples of other faiths have been and are afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.
The goal of the Constitution Party is to restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.

What the Constitution Party means by “Constitutonal boundaries” is made clearer in the later sections of its platform, particularly this section:

Social Security is a form of individual welfare not authorized in the Constitution.
The Constitution grants no authority to the federal government to administrate a Social Security system. The Constitution Party advocates phasing out the entire Social Security program, while continuing to meet the obligations already incurred under the system.

Do you suppose Rand Paul would like to go on Rachel Maddow’s show and discuss the constitutionality of Social Security or the Dominion of Jesus Christ and His Believers over the United States? Probably not. Theocracy and abolishing Social Security don’t poll well. And maybe he doesn’t actually believe this stuff, but simply enjoys the company of extremists.
But Paul does not have some sort of inherent right to pose as a victim when he own words and his own associations come back to haunt him. And I suspect we are just at the tip of that particular iceberg.
UPDATE: Clearly, Rand Paul wants to stay in the news. He’s just been quoted defending BP from “un-American” attacks by the Obama administration.

Although they offered significant positive signs, the elections this Tuesday were not in any way a decisive victory for Democrats. What they did represent, however, was a very powerful and substantial setback for the bitter extremist campaign that was launched against the Dems more than a year ago.
Some fierce opponents of Obama and the Democrats were elected in Republican primaries on Tuesday and a group of moderate Republicans fell to challengers from the right even as progressive Dems had a good night and Dems won the single partisan election. But something deeper was also going on. Years from now these primary elections may very likely be seen as the moment when the furious advance of a bitter and determined conservative political assault reached its limit and ground to a halt. This Tuesday was the day when the arrogant claims that the vast majority of Americans were so ferociously and bitterly opposed to the Democratic agenda that they would swamp the political system with their fury were revealed to be hollow. It was the day that the social movement that Republicans had described as unstoppable found itself stopped and the citizen army that conservatives declared invincible encountered opposition that it could not overcome.
Let us be very clear. Millions of Americans sincerely believe that health care reform and the entire Obama agenda is profoundly misguided and they have every right to their view. They have a right to insist on that limits to government are more important than needed social legislation, that balancing the budget is more important than creating jobs and to vote and speak in support of their beliefs.
But what Democrats have faced for the last year has not been a normal political conflict, but rather an assault modeled on a military campaign — an attack conducted in the language and spirit of warfare. The defeat of the Health Care Reform bill was to be – in Jim DeMint’s memorable phrase – “Obama’s Waterloo.” The fierce conservative resistance to his plan would resonate with Americans like a modern-day version of the Alamo, or the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and lead to a stunning, catastrophic defeat that would not produce a renewed and sincere search for compromise but rather a body blow to the democrats that would break Obama’s spirit and doom his agenda.

Read more…