In a finding that will probably raise more questions about the pollster than about the poll-ees, Rasmussen has a new survey out that shows Ron Paul in a statistical dead heat with Barack Obama for the presidency in 2012, trailing him by one spare point (41/42).
The poll is of 1,000 “likely voters” (presumably likely 2010 voters), which really makes you wonder about Rasmussen’s famously narrow “likely voter” screen. And it shows Paul tying the president even though he has relatively weak support among self-identified Republicans; the eccentric opponent of foreign wars and the Federal Reserve System trounces Obama among “unaffiliated” voters 47/28.
I doubt too many observers will take this poll seriously, though it will be manna from heaven not only for the zealous foot soldiers of the Ron Paul Revolution, but for those who think (including, some might say, Scott Rasmussen) that right-wing libertarian “populism” is the wave of the future.
But the poll did produce one hilarious write-up, at USAToday. After reporting the numbers, the author (with a nod to the high-riding Senate campaign of Ron’s son Rand) says:

This raises the obvious question: will the Pauls be the next political dynasty, like the Kennedys and Bushes?

Now that’s what I call getting way ahead of the curve!

In a staff post the other day, we noted that one big reason Republicans are willing to put up with the scandals and incompetence characterizing Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the RNC is simply that new campaign finance rules have already undermined the party’s once-central role in funding campaigns.
At The American Prospect, Mark Schmitt has some useful if somewhat disturbing observations about the independent, corporate-funded committees that will dominate post-Citizens United Republican campaign financing.
Schmitt is one campaign finance expert who doesn’t think Citizens United has changed the source and direction of political money all that much. But it will affect control of political money, and strengthen an already powerful trend towards pirate independent operations that function on the margins of the political system:

Unlike parties and candidates, independent committees don’t have to worry about their long-term reputations. They are essentially unaccountable. The Republican Party plans to be around for decades into the future. It has to worry about its long-term reputation. But independent committees can be use-once-and-burn vehicles. There’s a reason we haven’t heard recently from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the independent committee formed to take down John Kerry in 2004 — like a basketball player sent in to commit six fouls, such operations have one purpose only and can disappear when they are finished.
Finally, independent committees are likely to play a more polarizing role. While parties can choose an early strategy of mobilizing the ideological base, by Election Day, they have to build majorities that include swing voters and independents. The incentives for independent committees are different — by mobilizing the ideological base, they generate not just votes but more and more donors. Their clout, unlike the party’s, derives only from money.

Republicans these days certainly don’t need any additional incentives to run negative campaigns or to elevate considerations of ideology over those of practical governing. But that’s what Citizens United may have wrought.
In the meantime, the RNC will trudge along, and the reduced actual clout of its chairman will not immediately translate into less media attention, particularly if he continues to serve up a rich diet of personal gaffes and institutional funny business. It would be nice, though, if media observers began to get a better focus on the people who are actually raising and spending the money that drives Republican campaigns. They’re the ones flying the jolly roger and proudly flouting every convention.

Democratic state senator Ted Deutch on Tuesday won the first U.S. House race since the enactment of the Democratic HCR bill, beating a Republican candidate who tried to exploit backlash against the act in FL-19. Deutch bested Republican Ed Lynch, by a margin of 62-35 percent of the vote.
Republicans quickly point out that FL-19 is a heavily Democratic district. Dems enjoy a 2-1 edge in voter registration, and the district voted nearly 2-1 for Obama in 2008. Still, Republicans were hoping for an upset to add to Brown’s win of Ted Kennedy’s senate seat in MA. Lynch wrongly perceived that massive opposition of the district’s seniors (About 40 percent of district voters) to the health care bill would help him upset front-runner Deutch. it didn’t happen.
As Congressman-elect Deutch said,

We’ve heard for months that tonight … is a referendum on health care, it’s a referendum on the (President Barack Obama) administration, it’s a referendum on what direction this country is going…’Let me tell you something, what we learned today is that in Broward County and Palm Beach County, Florida, the Democratic Party is alive and well.

The 19th district has a Cook Partisan Voting Index score of D +15. interestingly, the District has only 6.1 percent African American residents, with 12.7 Hispanics. It appears that Democrat Deutch did very well with white seniors, who some pundits see as a big problem for Dems in November. Deutch will finish the remaining eight months of his predecessor’s (who resigned) term, then will run again in November for a full term.

In this week’s ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has some bad news for JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who has been whining about the Obama administration’s proposal to help prevent future financial crises by strengthening regulation of the financial sector. As Teixeira explains:

The public by an overwhelming 77-15 margin said in an early March ABC poll that banks have not yet done enough to make amends for their role in the financial crisis. The same poll asked the public whether banks and other financial institutions owe it to the country to help Americans struggling with the economy. Once again, an overwhelming majority (69-26) said it is banks’ responsibility to help out.

Clearly, stronger financial sector regulation is a great issue for the Administration, and one which could give Dems another important legislative victory, while making dissenting Republicans look like apologists for the worst practices of the banking/financial industry.

It’s long been apparent that immigration is an issue that is the political equivalent of unstable nitroglycerine: complex and dangerous. It arguably splits both major parties, although national Democratic politicians generally favor “comprehensive immigration reform” (basically a “path to citizenship” for undocumented workers who meet certain conditions and legalize themselves, along with various degrees of restriction on future immigration flows), and with George W. Bush gone, most Republicans oppose it.
It is of most passionate concern, for obvious reasons, to Latino voters, and also to many grass-roots conservatives for which widespread immigration from Mexico into new areas of the country has become a great symbol of an unwelcome change in the nation’s complexion. But the fact remains that perceived hostility to immigrants has become a major stumbling block for Republican recruitment of otherwise-conservative Latino voters, which explains (along with business support for relatively free immigration) the otherwise odd phenomenon that it was a Republican administration that last pursued comprehensive immigration reform. (Some may remember, in fact, that immigration reform was and remains a big part of Karl Rove’s strategy for insuring a long-range Republican majority).
I’m not sure how many progressives understand that immigration policy is a significant part of the narrative of “betrayal” that conservatives have written about the Bush administration–right up there with Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, and big budget deficits. And implicitly, at least, when Republicans talk about “returning the GOP to its conservative principles,” many would make repudiation of any interest in comprehensive immigration reform–or as they typically call it, “amnesty for Illegals”–part of the litmus test.
This is one issue of many where professional Republican pols are almost certainly happy that Barack Obama is in office right now–they don’t have to take a definitive position on immigration policy unless the president first pulls the trigger by moving a proposal in Congress, and it’s unlikely he will until other priorities are met.
But at some point, and particularly if Republicans win control of the House in November, and inherit the dubious prize of partial responsibility for governance, they will come under intense pressure to turn the page decisively on the Bush-Rove embrace of comprehensive immigration reform. And no matter what Obama does, immigration will definitely be an issue in the 2012 Republican presidential competition.
So it’s of more than passing interest to note that the pressure on Republicans to take a national position on this issue has been significantly increased by the rise of the Tea Party Movement.
At 538.com today, Tom Schaller writes up a new study of tea partiers and racial-ethnic attitude in seven key states from the University of Washington’s Christopher Parker. While the whole thing is of considerable interest, I can’t tease much of immediate political signficance from the fragmentary findings that Parker has initially released, beyond the unsurprising news that Tea Partiers have general views on race, ethnicity, and GLBT rights that you’d expect from a very conservative portion of the electorate.
But one finding really does just jump off the page: Among the 22% of white voters who say they “strongly support” the Tea Party Movement in the seven states involved in the study, nearly half (45% to be exact) favor the very radical proposition that “all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. should be deported immediately.” That’s interesting not only because it shows how strong anti-immigrant sentiment is in the Tea Party “base,” but because it embraces a very specific and proactive postion that goes far beyond resistance to comprehensive immigration reform or “amnesty.” The finding is all the more remarkable because it comes from a survey on “racial attitudes;” I don’t know what sorts of controls Parker deployed, but polls that dwell on such issues often elicit less-than-honest answers from respondents who naturally don’t want to sound intolerant.
So if and when push comes to shove for the GOP on immigration, the shove from the Tea Partiers could be especially strong. And that won’t make Republican elites happy: they understand that however bright things look for the GOP this November (in a midterm contest that almost always produces an older-and-whiter-than-average electorate), their party’s base of support is in elements of the population that are steadily losing demographic ground. Beginning in 2012, that will become an enduring and ever-worsening problem for the GOP, and a position on immigration guaranteed to repel Latinos would be a very heavy millstone, just as Karl Rove concluded when he pushed W. to embrace comprehensive immigration reform.
The issue is already becoming a factor in the 2010 cycle. This is most obvious in Arizona, where J.D. Hayworth’s Tea-Party-oriented challenge to John McCain is in part payback for McCain’s longstanding support for comprehensive immigration reform. But it could matter elsewhere as well. You’d think that Cuban-American Senate candidate Marco Rubio would be in a good position to do very well among Florida Latinos. But actually, his potential achilles heel in a likely general election matchup with Democrat Kendrick Meek (who as it happens is an African-American with his own close ties to South Florida’s Cuban-American community) is a weak standing among Latinos, particulary the non-Cuban Latino community in Central Florida, attributable in no small part to his vocal opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. Indeed, even if he defeats Meek, if Rubio gets waxed among Florida Latinos, Republicans will have an especially graphic illustration of the continuing political peril of opposing legalization of undocumented workers, even when advanced by a Latino politician.
The real acid test for Republicans on immigration could come in California, the state where in 1994 GOP governor Pete Wilson fatally alienated Latino voters from his party for years to come by championing a cutoff of public benefits for undocumented workers (a far less draconian proposal than immediate deportation, it should be noted). Underdog conservative gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner has made his campaign all about reviving Wilson’s proposal. If Republican front-runner Meg Whitman can crush Poizner without any accomodation of his views on immigration, it could help her overcome a problem with Latino voters that emanates not only from Democrat Jerry Brown’s longstanding ties to the Latino community, but from the fact that her campaign chairman is none other than Pete Wilson.
In any event, whether it’s now or later, in 2010 or in 2012 and beyond: the Republican Party is going to have to deal with the political consequences of its base’s hostility to Latino immigration, and to growing demands for steps ranging from benefit cutoffs to deportation of undocumented workers. With the Tea Partiers exemplifying instensely-held grass-roots conservative demands for a more aggressively anti-immigration posture, even as he political costs of obeying these demands continues to rise, Republicans will be juggling explosives on this issue for the foreseeable future.

After reading a dozen or so bios of potential nominees to replace Justice Stevens, I’m much impressed by the talent pool of prospective justices said to be under consideration by President Obama. I know the available internet bios probably leave out more than they include, but they do provide a sense of what these individuals are about.
There are no names on the ‘short lists” I’ve read that I would oppose, unlike the Bush appointees, all of whom should have been Borked, IMHO. Glen Greenwald and others have made a case for concern about putative front-runner Elena Kagan. On the one hand, Kagan reportedly did an outstanding job of representing the Obama Administration in the Citizens United v. FEC case, even though the high court’s reactionary majority ruled the wrong way. That’s important in a nation where corporate power is not only unchecked, but growing.
Greenwald argues, however, that it’s very hard to figure out what Kagan stands for, other than mastery of the law. There is no question that she has a brilliant legal mind, and her academic credentials, like all of the short-listers are very impressive. But published evidence in her bios of the “empathy” President Obama has said is an important quality to look for in judicial nominees is a little thin. No doubt, she has more empathy than she has shown thus far, since she clerked with Justice Marshall and the President knows her character.
Most of my progressive friends, especially the lawyers, are hoping that Judge Diane Wood will get the nod instead of Kagan. More than Kagan, Wood has a record that indicates her beliefs in the context of the law. Like several other judges on the short list, Wood’s record indicates fairly strong empathy for the disadvantaged, if not a great passion for the underdog. The same can be said for other judges said to be under consideration. True, neither Justice Douglas or Brennan displayed all that much empathy before their years of service on the high court, but they nonetheless set the progressive standard I would like to see more of among the Supremes.
Other names of the growing list of possible Obama appointees include: Rueben Castillo; Merrick B. Garland; Pamela Karlan; Harold Koh; Martha Minnow; Janet Napolitano; Deval Patrick; Leah Ward Sears; Cass Sunstein; Sidney Thomas; and Elizabeth Warren.
I have confidence that whoever the President nominates will have impeccable legal credentials and solid progressive values. In terms of measuring up to a high “empathy standard,” however, one name on the short list stands out, after reading the bios: Governor Jennifer Granholm of Michigan.
After considering the impressive but very dry legal achievements chronicled in the bios of the others, Granholm’s bio provides a strong impression of a public servant who cares deeply about working people and their struggles for a decent life, and that this concern would be at the center of her decision-making. As Michigan Governor, for example, Granholm not only signed into law, but also proposed the “No Worker Left Behind” act which provides two years of free training/community college for unemployed and displaced workers, which has benefited more than 100 thousands in her state. She fought tenaciously against budget cuts for homeless shelters and mental health agencies, challenging her foes to not turn their backs on ‘the least of these.”
While her legal gravitas and experience may not match the lofty achievements of Kagan, Wood or some of the others, Granholm has some impressive legal creds of her own, including a Harvard J.D., an appeals court clerkship and four years as Michigan A.G. In addition, she has lead an energetic, well-rounded life, with varied working experience. Of course it’s much easier to convey such an impression, when your operative base is a political career, instead of a purely legal one, as is the case for all of the sitting justices. But it would be good to have at least one Supreme Court Justice who has been actively engaged in creating changes to improve the lives of people. Any of the Obama short-listers would merit support from progressives. But this is one I would cheer.

As the administration’s Nuclear Security Summit takes place in Washington this week, CNN has a new look at public opinion on a variety of issues related to nuclear weapons policy. And it’s safe to say that there is strong public support for what the President’s is proposing, if not always for the utopian-sounding goals he has articulated.
The latter problem is not new. In a May 2009 Democracy Corps survey that found remarkably strong support for Obama’s foreign policy and national security leadership–strong enough, in fact, to all but erase the traditional “national security gap” between Democrats and Republicans–Obama’s stated goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons got a decidedly lukewarm reaction, with 60% of Americans agreeing that “eliminating all nuclear weapons in the world is not realistic or good for America’s security.”
The DCorps question on this subject combined skepticism about a nuclear-weapons-free world with opposition to the idea on national security grounds. But CNN separates the two issues, and while respondents split right down the middle (with significant differences based on age, as over-50s who remember the Cold War tend to be negative) on the desirability of eliminating nuclear weapons, the percentage thinking this can actually happen has dropped from one-third in 1988 to one-fourth today.
But the big difference between May 2009 and today in terms of nuclear weapons policy is that the President is now taking concrete steps to address the “loose nukes” issue, to build-down nuclear weapons in conjunction with Russia, and to strengthen the international non-proliferation regime (in conjunction with efforts to isolate Iran’s defense of its nuclear program). And CNN finds strong support for Obama in every tangible area, even if his long-range goals still produce skepticism.
Most importantly, 70% of Americans–including 68% of independents and even 49% of Republicans–think the Senate should ratify the START Treaty with Russia, despite the predictable charges of “weakness” towards Obama that have been emanating from many conservative circles since the treaty was signed. With a two-thirds Senate vote being required for ratification of the treaty, that’s probably just enough public support to keep Republican defense hard-liners (and/or obdurate Obama-haters) from launching a big Senate fight.
Moreover, by giving high-profile attention to the “loose nukes” issue, Obama is tapping a deep well of public anxiety about the possibility of nuclear terrorism. By a 7 to 1 margin, respondents to the CNN poll said “preventing terrorists from getting nuclear weapons” should be a high priority than “reducing nuclear weapons controlled by unfriendly countries.” One of the great ironies of the Bush years was that his administration constantly promoted fears about nuclear terrorism while making nuclear security a very low priority, even in bilateral relations with Russia. Dick Cheney in particular treated truculent and unilateral behavior towards potential adversaries as the sole means of preventing nuclear terrorism. By unpacking nuclear security from other issues and making it a focus of bilateral and multilateral initiatives, Obama is linking diplomacy with a national security concern that Americans care about passionately.
Public support for the president’s nuclear weapons policies will get its strongest test beginning next month with the beginning of a scheduled review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. As Steven Clemons notes in an excellent overview of Obama’s “nuclear wizardry” at Politico today, that’s where the rubber will need to start meeting the road in terms of the administration’s efforts to round up the world community for an effective united front towards Iran’s nuclear program. But it’s clear the president’s nuclear initiatives are off to a very good start despite generic conservative carping.

Why are Republicans willing to accept Michael Steele’s many missteps as National Chairman of their party? Well, part of the story is that they aren’t real eager to confirm their image as the party of Angry Old White People by dumping an African-American chairman who’s willing to toe their increasingly reactionary line, but there’s more to it than that. As John Heilemann explains for New York magazine, the specific role of the two parties is already being narrowed rapidly by the new campaign finance rules:

In the wake of McCain-Feingold and more recently the landmark Citizens United Supreme Court decision on campaign spending, both national parties were already in the process of seeing their roles weakened dramatically and taken over by private interests. That trend is secular and has nothing to do with Steele. But his gaffes, mismanagement, and all-purpose absurdity may very well exacerbate the trend within the GOP—in the process presenting a short-term opportunity for Democrats to do better in 2010 than the political class expects.

To make a long story short, Citizens United is rapidly shifting many partisan functions to private groups. But RNC incompetence is giving the DNC a bigger-than-expected advantage in the functions that are left:

[Republican meta-operative Ben] Ginsberg points to three distinct areas where Steele and his people appear to be in danger of falling short: developing a ground game (“they’ve cut the budget like maniacs”); pumping money into the congressional campaign committees to put more seats in play (“instead, we’re going to wind up leaving more than we need to on the table”); and the crucial work on this year’s post-Census redistricting (“the Democrats are in a really good place, and the RNC is letting everyone down—they’re nowhere”).

Tim Kaine’s not getting much attention during the endless saga of Steele’s mistakes. But that’s fine with Democrats. the DNC doesn’t pretend to be the big dog in Democratic finance, strategy or message, and it’s playing its critical support role competently, and compared to the opposition, well enough to win.

As I am sure you have noticed, one of the big talking points of conservatives in recent months has been that the Obama administration and congressional Democrats despise democracy, because they have (sic!) used “revolutionary methods” to (sic!) “cram down” health reform against the manifest wishes of the American people, who wisely oppose socialism. Fortunately, Republicans are determined to help Americans “take back their country” in November.
But at the very same time, bless them, conservatives can’t help but express some long-held negative feelings about this small-d-democratic claptrap. One sign is their great hostility to any efforts to encourage higher levels of voting (though this is typically framed as opposition to “voter fraud,” evidence for which is completely lacking). Another is the Tea Party theory that there are absolute limits on the size and cost of government that either are or should be enshrined in the Constitution or enforced by the states, regardless of the results of national elections. And still another involves period bursts of outrage over people who don’t pay income taxes being allowed to vote.
This last meme got a boost very recently when estimates emerged that 47% of U.S. households won’t have any 2009 federal income tax liability.
“We have 50 percent of people who are getting something for nothing,” sneered Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.
Sean Hannity chipped in with alarums about the implications of “half of Americans not paying taxes.”
One conservative site took the AP story on this data and added this helpful subtitle: “Tax Day Is Just Christmas For Many.”
Another had an even more suggestive title: “Let’s Make You Spend More on Me,” along with a chart showing upward federal spending trends. This interpretation is clearly just a hop, skip and jump from the “cultural of dependency” rhetoric most famously expressed by SC Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer in his speech comparing subsidized school lunch beneficiaries with stray animals who shouldn’t be encouraged with free food. And in retrospect, Bauer showed some unorthodox brilliance in directing conservative anger about socialist “free lunch” redistribution towards kids who are literally receiving free lunches.
Now the various conservative “analysts” of the free-lunch, free-rider phenomenon rarely go to the trouble of acknowledging that most of that lucky 47% not owing federal income taxes (which represent less than half of federal revenues) pay high and very regressive federal payroll taxes, not to mention even more regressive state and local sales and property taxes. Nor do they note that most non-federal-income-tax-paying households are either retirees living on savings and retirement benefits or working poor families with kids (the beneficiaries of those child tax credits that conservatives are always promoting as “pro-family” policies). And I’ve yet to see even one concede that the 47% figure is a temporary spike attributable to the recession and to short-term tax credits that will expire with the economic stimulus program.
While the reverse-class-warfare subtext of some of the conservative angst about alleged tax-and-benefit freeloaders is pretty clear, there are those who would link it to an even more lurid, culture-war theme. Check out this remarkable weekend post from National Review’s Mark Steyn, who compared our system of “representation without taxation to”–no, I’m not making this up!–Muslim oppression of non-Muslims. Gaze in awe:

United States income tax is becoming the 21st-century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith. Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, the non-believers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity, and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.

So there you have it: socialism and Islamofascism nicely bound up in the policies of that madrasa-attending elitist, Barack Obama.
However you slice it, the conservative commitment to democracy sometimes seems limited to those “real Americans” who think right and vote right. At a minimum, progressives should not let them combine such attitudes with pious invocations of the Popular Will.

As the 2010 political cycle kicks into high gear, it’s as good a time as any to stipulate some basic, but often misunderstood, facts about U.S. House elections.
For one thing, some of the adjectives being applied to possible GOP gains in the House this November–you know, “massive,” “overwhelming” or even “big”–can be misleading, in that they imply some sort of landslide or popular uprising. It’s important to remember that the entire U.S. House faces re-election every two years. And while it’s natural to focus on the fact that Democrats “picked up” 21 seats in the very good election year of 2008 (after gaining 31 net seats in 2006), and inferring that a Republican “pick-up” of 35 or 40 seats this year would represent a “massive” swing, gains and losses are cumulative. Democrats won a 79-seat margin in 2008. A Republican pickup of 40 votes would represent a relatively even election producing a dead-even House, not a “landslide.” A true Republican “landslide” would be defined as one in which the GOP picked up something more on the order of 70-80 seats, which would probably reflect a popular vote margin of around 10%–usually the most expansive definition of an electoral “landslide.”
Secondly, in terms of early predictions of what will happen in November House elections, the numbers usually touted are “generic congressional ballot” poll results. Right now Gallup shows the congressional ballot as even-steven. But there’s a widespread assumption that the generic ballot always, always overstates Democratic performance. While there is a slight bias factor (as pointed out by Nate Silver last week), probably attributable to less “efficient” Democratic vote distribution (or, to put it another way, to pro-Republican gerrymandering in the last redistricting cycle), much of the “overestimation” of Democratic strength in past generic polls has involved early tests with no “likely voter” screen. As we get closer to Election Day, the Gallup generic ballot is usually quite accurate (as shown some years ago by TDS contributor Alan Abramowitz of Emory). So it’s not a good idea to just mentally add a few points to Gallup’s number for the GOP and assume that’s close to reality.
Mark Blumenthal has a learned column up at National Journal on the whole subject of generic ballots; give that a look if you are interested.