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.

For Dems seeking an alternative to the pervasive doom-and gloom mid-term speculation, John Harwood takes an even-handed look iat the upcomming election in his Sunday New York Times edition of ‘The Caucus.’ First Harwood feeds the ‘Dems are doomed’ meme, noting,

As if Republicans did not have enough cause for optimism this year, the pollster Neil Newhouse offers this lesson from history: Since John F. Kennedy occupied the White House, presidents with approval ratings below 50 percent have seen their parties lose an average of 41 House seats in midterm elections.
This year, a gain that large would return the House to Republican control. President Obama’s most recent Gallup Poll rating: 45 percent.

Harwood goes on to add that none of the previous nine Presidents experienced an increase in their approval ratings between January and October in their first midterm election years. But Bush II actually broke the first mid-term jinx in 2002, helped by the World Trade Center bombings, which elevated ‘national security’ to the leading priority of swing voters.
What I like about Harwood’s article is that he gives a fair hearing to the view that, while history is important for predicting political outcomes, it isn’t everything. Harwood cites a litany of busted political rules, including the political realignment of the South, the presidency is for whites only and the Republican “lock” on California. Harwood quotes Alan Abramowitz, who has contributed to TDS, to good effect: “As soon as a political scientist comes up with a sweeping generality about American politics, it will immediately be falsified.” Political rules were made to be broken, and 2010 should be no exception.
Indeed, President Obama’s improbable rise from an obscure state senator/law professor to the most powerful elective office on earth in less than five years ought to give political prognosticators pause in uttering cocksure predictions about electoral outcomes. Perhaps more to the point, Obama’s rise to power was based on a very creative and well-executed outside-the-box strategy, as much as his personal gifts.
This view won’t change the betting on the GOP at Intrade or Vegas, but it does allow a little room for a more encouraging outcome than is currently being parroted by pundits. Further, as Harwood notes,

Though the unemployment rate remains stuck around 10 percent, the economy in March enjoyed its strongest job growth in three years. The stock market has been booming. Democratic candidates hope that continued good news between now and November will begin alleviating the sour mood of voters.
…Ray C. Fair, an economist at Yale and a student of the relationship between economic conditions and political outcomes, argued that history shows voters take account of third-quarter performance, too. His model of 2010 economic performance projects that Democrats will draw 51.63 percent of the two-party vote for the House…That translates to roughly 224 seats — enough for Democrats to retain control of the House.

So the Republicans ought to hold the high-fives for a while, particularly if the economy takes a better-than-expected uptick between now and November.

The Republican right has a deeply disturbing covert extremist agenda for the Supreme Court – end the separation of church and state, undermine the legality of Social Security and Medicare and give individuals the right to ignore any laws they choose.
Does this sound like a wildly hysterical exaggeration?
It certainly does. But unfortunately, it also happens to be true.
The unavoidable fact is that major elements of the Republican coalition – the elements most likely to become deeply engaged in the battle over the next supreme court nominee like the Christian Right, the Tea Party Movement, and the radical Federalist Society legal wing of the Right—do indeed harbor profoundly extreme views on the Constitution. In fact, since Obama’s election these views have veered even more sharply toward extremism.

• Since the 1990’s, the Christian Right has sought to replace the traditional American separation of church and state with the notion that the U.S. was actually created as a “Christian Nation” in which Christianity was intended to receive favored treatment by government policy. The most startling recent expression of this view was last month’s decision by the Texas School Board to remove Thomas Jefferson – the symbol of America’s tradition of religious freedom and tolerance – from the states’ history curriculum
• The opponents of Health Care Reform in the Tea Party Movement and among Republicans around the country have advanced the argument that Congress does not have the constitutional authority to enact health reform legislation and are now filing lawsuits based on this view. The basis for such suits – typically a denial of the power of Congress to legislate economic matters under the Commerce and Spending Clauses of the U.S. Constitution–is automatically and unavoidably a collateral attack on the constitutionality of a vast array of past legislation, including most New Deal/Great Society programs such as Social Security and Medicare.
• The Republican revolt against any cooperation with Democratic legislation and initiatives has carried an extraordinary number of conservatives into a general attitude of defiance towards the rule of law itself and flirtation with constitutional doctrines of state nullification and succession. These doctrines were developed as arguments for state sovereignty by the Confederacy in the civil war era and as 1950’s and 1960’s era segregationist strategies to thwart desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.

Taken together, these three ideas actually amount to a covert three-pronged agenda to radically transform the American constitution:

1. To redefine America as a Christian Nation and treat Christianity as a state-favored religion
2. To create a legal doctrine that could justify the voiding of all social programs enacted since 1933.
3. To establish the right of individuals or states to ignore and disobey any laws that they happen to interpret as impinging on their freedom or natural rights.

Democrats can – and must — respond firmly and categorically to this extremist philosophy. They must respond by saying that the Democratic Party proudly upholds the traditional American view of the constitution – the view of the founding fathers of this country – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams.

1. That the constitution guarantees religious freedom and tolerance for all Americans of every faith and creed.
2. That the constitution guarantees the right of the freely elected representatives of the people in a democracy to pass laws for the common good. The people have the right to elect new representatives who promise to repeal laws with which they disagree, but not to simply ignore and violate laws of which they do not happen to approve
3. That the constitution protects individual liberty but is not a prescription for anarchy. It provides equal rights for all under a system of laws, but does not provide veto rights for anyone who happens to disagree with a particular law.

The battle between these two views is not a battle from which Democrats should shy away. Most Americans aren’t likely to react well to the spectacle of conservatives demanding a virtual revolution against a popularly elected government, threatening to undermine the legal foundation of the social safety net many Americans depend on for their well-being and seeking to overturn constitutional doctrines that have been in place for many decades and even since the foundation of the Republic.
Republican strategists will desperately try to frame this debate as an argument between the “founding fathers” on the one hand and the “crazy liberal democrats” on the other. They will attempt to blur the distinction between the two fundamentally different visions of America embodied in the two interpretations of the constitution above.
Democrats should not let them get away with this deception. A substantial part of the Republican base deeply and sincerely believes in the three-pronged extremist agenda described above and will consider any attempt by the Republican leadership to shy away from those views as a betrayal tantamount to treason. If Democrats firmly and consistently demand that Republican leaders honestly say where they stand on these issues, the Republican coalition will become deeply fractured.
So if conservatives want to make a battle over Barack Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee, let them bring it on.

• Let them bring it on with all the rhetoric Tea Party folk and other radicalized conservatives have been using about Obama’s “socialism” and the Nazi-like tyranny of universal health coverage.
• Let them bring it on with all the segregation-era legal strategies of succession and nullification.
• Let them bring it on with arguments that programs like social security and medicare are illegal and unconstitutional
• Let them bring it on with all the attempts to write Thomas Jefferson and the separation of church and state out of American history.

The truth is that Democrats don’t want an ugly ideological battle over the next Supreme Court nominee. They would much rather focus on important economic issues like financial reform.
But if the Republicans insist on a fight, let’s stand ready to give them a battle they’ll wish they never started.

So it’s official: Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is retiring, effective at the end of the current Court term, which means a new Justice needs to be confirmed before the October term convenes.
As I noted when Stevens’ retirement became likely, there are two ways Democrats can react to this news.
We can go through the certain Court fight ahead in a half-hearted and distracted way, hoping to get back to “real” issues like financial reform. Or we can take advantage of the opportunity a Court fight presents to expose the extraordinary radicalism of the contemporary conservative movement and its captives in the GOP, best illustrated by its views on the Constitution.
An aggressive and proactive strategy for this fight is in my opinion the right way to go; it will help raise the stakes for the midterm elections for lukewarm Democratic voters, while also casting the choice in November as one between two futures rather than a referendum on a very unpopular status quo in Washington.
So let’s get the game on!

There’s an interesting feature article by Michael Calderone up at Politico today about the gradual revolution in political journalism going on at some of the mainsteam media’s major institutions. Its point of departure is the success enjoyed by my friend Ezra Klein at the Washington Post:

When Washingtonian magazine recently profiled The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, the story contained a tidbit that ricocheted around the Post newsroom: Klein has his own assistant.
An assistant? For that new guy with the blog?
Turns out to be true. Nothing more vividly highlights the changing times at legacy news organizations — or the bilious feelings those times have caused among the assistant-less masses in the depleted ranks of traditional reporters — than the instant status achieved by a newcomer like Klein.
Hired last year at age 24 from The American Prospect, the liberal monthy, Klein was given a prized platform — the invitation to hold forth with commentary and analysis about domestic policy — that not long ago would have gone only to someone with years of experience and achievement.
Klein is hardly alone. Reflecting a mix of desperation and determination to reinvent themselves for a new media era, legacy publications are recruiting and lavishly rewarding a new breed of journalists. They offer an edgy style and expertise in a particular field, but have never spent a day covering cops or courts or county boards — traditionally the rungs of the ladder all reporters had to climb.

Calderone goes on the examine other examples of the New Journalistic Kids on the Block, and the backlash against them among old-school reporters who view them as unprofessional interlopers who mistake bloviating for journalism.
Meanwhile, in his take on the Calderone piece, Jonathan Chait identifies the main weakness in the old-school argument: there are different skills involved in “pure reporting” and the synthesis and interpretation of facts. And that’s not changed by the journalism profession’s tradition of treating success at the former as the precondition for the opportunity to do the latter.
I vividly recall from my days in Georgia politics and government a friend who was a very good statehouse reporter. She was ultimately offered a rare spot on the editorial board of her paper, and given a weekly column. Soon afterwards she called me to complain of the difficulty of finding something to write about once a week. She hated her new gig, and it didn’t last very long.
Not long thereafter, I tried to make a lateral transfer from government and policy work, with a heavy side order of speechwriting, into a job on the editorial board of a Georgia paper. The pay was horrendous; the work-load was brutal; and although I was reasonably sure I was totally qualified, I was told I could forget about it because I didn’t have a journalism degree and hadn’t done any “pure” reporting. A reporter friend explained to me patiently that editorial jobs were the rabbit that kept underpaid reporters running around the track for decades, and that hiring someone like me would represent a disruption of the journalistic career path.
I finally “got it,” and didn’t try journalism any more. Eventually, I got a job with a Washington think tank that ultimately involved writing op-ed length institutional opinion pieces every single day for years. It dawned on me that I had become a “journalist” in all but name. But only the advent of “blogging” made it possible to perform that skill under a byline.
I know it’s fashionable in many journalistic and political circles to think of “bloggers” as ignorant bloviators who have destroyed the ancient standards of opinion journalism and driven politics into a perpetual hate-frenzy. And without a doubt, there’s a lot of crap out there for anyone to read. But as people like Klein and many others have demonstrated, there are also bloggers with much higher standards of research and fact-verification, and much more intelligent levels of reasoned discourse, than their counterparts in the MSM. And that’s why the MSM, forced increasingly to live “online,” is snapping up some of the best of them.
Sure, I have some sympathy for the ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate who are embittered by this revolution, which has been driven by the same economic realities that would be threatening their jobs even if the Internet didn’t exist. But they should have some sympathy for the many very talented policy wonks and political analysts who were shut out of their profession for the sin of wanting substantive training or practical experience in politics or government instead of J-School. I’m certainly old enough to remember the days when the very best of what would now be called “blogging” was available only through the extraordinarily narrow window of “Letters to the Editor” that almost no one read. We’re only now as a society beginning to understand that some of the best potential teachers are people who would not have for a moment considered taking many hours of Education classes in college in order to become professionally certified. The journalism profession has benefited from opening up the guild as well.

Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, has a post up at the Blog for Our Future urging progressives to raise hell about CNN’s decision to give four hours of free airtime to Pete Peterson’s “I.O.U.S.A.,” regarded by progressive economists as shameless “deficit hysteria,” according to Hickey. As Hickey explains,

Whose voices will be shut out this weekend?
The nation’s leading economists who are urging our government to use deficits today to invest in long-term prosperity – such as Paul Krugman, James Galbraith and Dean Baker.
The fiscal experts who have repeatedly said Social Security is sound and broader health care reform will protect Medicare.
All of you who voted for an active government to invest in our future.
While you are kept silent, who does CNN give the microphone to?
A multimillionaire Wall Street mogul who wants our government to slash investments while millions are losing their jobs. This guy had no problem taking tax cuts for the wealthy that caused our deficit problems – and his Wall St buddies crashed the economy.

Time is short, but Hickey is urging progressives to “demand CNN give equal time to defenders of Social Security, Medicare and public investment,” all of which will be taking a heavy pummeling in Peterson’s flick and the subsequent televised discussion about it. As Hickey says, “We already have a cable news network that does that. We don’t need another unfair, unbalanced channel.” Hickey links to a handy protest form to send to CNN courtesy of The Campaign for America’s Future.

As we inch closer to the November 2010 elections, some of the early indicia affecting turnout are showing remarkable numbers predictive of an unusually high turnout for a midterm election.
Now it should come as no great surprise that when asked by USA Today/Gallup if they are “more enthusiastic than usual” about voting in November, 69% of Republicans respond affirmatively. This comports with the general sense that Republicans are getting ready to joyfully snake dance to the polls in November to get rid of the socialist usurpers in Washington and restore the natural order of things. But as Nate Silver has pointed out, the same survey shows 57% of Democrats expressing unusual enthusiasm as well–a higher percentage than ever registered before a midterm by voters in either party, until now.
At pollster.com, turnout guru Michael McDonald of George Mason University stares at the data and suggests we could be seeing a historic turnout rates this November, since overall enthusiasm levels are about where they were two years ago. He’s pretty sure turnout will exceed that of the last midterm election, in 2006, which was considered a very good turnout year by historic standards.
Normally high overall turnout in a midterm election would be good news for Democrats, but turnout predictions based on voter enthusiasm must note the advantage GOPers have on that measurement. We’ll see if conservative excitement about November can be sustained at its current high-pitch chattering whine, and if Democrats can maintain or increase their own level of engagement.

There’s been a theory running around that Republicans, concerned about the craziness surrounding conservative reactions to health reform, would rein in the extremists and steam towards November in a state of calm and moderation.
The first shots fired from the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans don’t sound very moderate. Here’s what tonight”s speaker Newt Gingrich had to say in a press release about his speech:

“To win in 2010 and 2012, it’s not enough to say no to the radical agenda of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid,” Gingrich said in a released statement. “Tonight’s speech will explain why real leadership requires Republicans to offer a compelling vision of safety, prosperity, and freedom that stands in vivid contrast to Obama’s secular, socialist, machine now running Washington.”

Secular, socialist machine? One can only imagine the reaction if a major Democrat referred to the GOP as a “Christian Right, corporatist machine.” And it would have the added benefit of being largely true.