Almost slapped myself this morning for an over-long schadenfreude wallow about the wingnut stooges being popped for what appears to be a botched attempt to bug Senator Mary Landrieu’s office. They looked so deliciously stupid standing there in front of the TV cameras, smart asses hoisted by their own petards.
Darksyde reports at Daily Kos that O’Keefe was invited to keynote a fund-raiser for the Salt Lake City GOP on Feb 4, but now GOP Chairman Thomas Wright has told the Salt Lake Tribune: “We’ll be announcing a new speaker shortly.” Even better 31 Republican congressmen had signed on to a resolution honoring O’Keefe for his pimp portrayal in his scam to embarrass ACORN.
As you might expect, Talking Points Memo has the most thorough coverage of the scandal, and if there is more substantial GOP involvement in the bugging attempt, Marshall and company will surely root it out. The shadowy wingnut front groups involvement is being nicely untangled by TPM as you read. I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked that Beck, Hannity and O’Reilly, who lavished praise on O’Keefe’s ACORN theatrics, aren’t giving much play to his bust.
Hey, could this be a wingnut plot to deflect coverage from the President’s speech tonight? Nahhh. Nobody could fake that level of incompetence.

It’s a big ritual in politics for everyone with access to a camera, microphone or keyboard to “advise” the president on what he should say in each State of the Union address, and then more or less grade him the next day on how well he took said advice.
Since I doubt he’s actually surfing the web looking for speech ideas at this point, I won’t give him advice, but it is worth noting that he’s once again in a spot when a Great Speech would do him a world of good. At TNR, Jonathan Cohn suggests this is Obama’s biggest oratorical challenge since the famous “race speech” of 2008, when his candidacy for president looked to be seriously endangered by the appearance of toxic video snippets from sermons by his long-time pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Cohn goes on to outline the president’s unhappy situation:

Obama has to deal with impulses that are clearly at odds with one another–like the fact that the voters want more jobs but oppose deficit spending, which just happens to be the most effective way of reducing unemployment. When it comes to talking about the political process, Obama must somehow address the public’s frustration with gridlock and yearning for bipartisan outreach, even though Republican obstructionism has rendered Obama’s efforts at bipartisanship futile.

More immediately, the president has to deal with the likely reaction to whatever he says from conservatives who smell blood and think they have him, at long last, on the ropes, and progressives who are already bristling at his gestures on budget deficits, and/or angry at what they consider his lack of leadership, past and potentially present, on health reform.
Most observers are looking for signs of whether Obama will give short shrift to issues like health reform and climate change, and instead fully “pivot” to an economic message, populist, deficit-hawky, or some of both. Another possibility is that he will make a supreme and long-overdue effort to explain why, in fact, health reform and action on climate change, along with the bank regulations Republicans are sure to oppose, are critical to economic recovery. Maybe he’s already “lost” the public on that proposition, but there’s certainly no venue like the SOTU to make big and relatively complex arguments with a guarantee that he will be watched by many millions.
Cohn points out that in the “race” speech Obama confounded expectations by lifting the discussion from Wright’s comments to a general review of the complexities of racial discord in America. Taking a “higher path” and changing the terms of debate, if he can do that, would represent a significant presidential accomplishment tonight.
The one absolutely essential thing he must do, however much he continues to invite the violently oppositional GOP to cooperate with him, is to make it clear that conservatives do not now represent the “change” Americans voted for in 2008. Even if you think their resistance to Obama’s agenda is righteous, the prescriptions that pass for policy “alternatives” in GOP-land these days tend to fall into two baskets: the unserious and the ludicrous, with very few of them actually having the potential to be popular. You need not tie the GOP to George W. Bush to expose that fact: his Republican successors are rapidly making Bush look like a paragon of reasonableness.
It should be clear by now that an ideal SOTU would not only show some resolution and clarity in the administration’s course of action–along with some measured humility–thus reversing the current semi-panic in Democratic ranks, but would also begin to set the stage for the November elections by reminding Americans that they actually can’t magically wish away the country’s problems, and must instead choose between distinct alternatives. The more he casts light on those alternatives–not looking to the past to “blame Bush,” but to the future where real decisions must be made on a host of big challenges–the better his presidency, however halting its steps and difficult its path, will look. Since a clear majority of Americans still seem to admire this calm and intelligent man, they will give him their careful attention tonight, and perhaps he will again move them.

As a follow-up to J.P. Green’s post this morning suggesting that the DSCC is trying to split the right from the far right, it’s kind of important to understand that the far right is really feeling its oats these days, particularly in the Tea Party Movement.
But anyone trying to understand the Tea Party phenomenon is constantly injured not to stereotype its participants politically or ideologically. It’s a grassroots movement, we are told, so no one in particular speaks for them. They hate both parties equally, it is said, so you can’t confuse them with conservative Republicans. There are former Obama voters in their ranks, we are told breathlessly.
Well, okay, after reading a long, impressionistic, nonjudgmental “life among the tea party activists” piece in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath, I won’t assume the author (after all, he’s writing for The New Yorker, at the very center of Wall Street/Liberal Enemy Camp, for God’s sake) gets the views of tea party activists accurately or fairly depicted. But it’s pretty clear that there are an awful lot of these folks who can only be described as harboring views considered, until just last year, about 90 degrees to the right of the right wing of the Republican Party. They are independent of the Republican Party only to the extent that they won’t support it fully until it moves further to the right another 90 degrees (which seems to be happening at a brisk pace).
Sure, there are probably all sorts of people in the mix, but here’s my question for them: please read the following passage from McGrath’s piece and tell me how much of this scenario sounds plausible to you:

An online video game, designed recently by libertarians in Brooklyn, called “2011: Obama’s Coup Fails” imagines a scenario in which the Democrats lose seventeen of nineteen seats in the Senate and a hundred and seventy-eight in the House during the midterm elections, prompting the President to dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

If you find yourself nodding your head at much of this stuff, then you are indeed living in a different conceptual world than I am, and I’m afraid I’ll have to stereotype you as a dangerous wingnut. Maybe a nice, patriotic, well-meaning wingnut, but a wingnut nonetheless.

Fox News, of all places, has an interesting web post, “Senate Dems Unfurl New Electoral Strategy: Divide and Conquer GOP,” reporting on a new memo from The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. According to the unsigned Fox post, the memo urges Democratic campaign managers to “define their Republican opponents early and to highlight the differences between moderate voters and tea party-style conservatives.” The Fox post quotes from the memo:

Given the pressure Republican candidates feel from the extreme right in their party, there is a critical — yet time-sensitive — opportunity for Democratic candidates,” the DSCC wrote in the memo, which was obtained by FoxNews.com. “We have a finite window when Republican candidates will feel susceptible to the extremists in their party. Given the urgent nature of this dynamic, we suggest an aggressive effort to get your opponents on the record

The DSCC memo rolls out some provocative questions for Democratic candidates to ask their Republican opponents, including:

Do you believe that Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen? Do you think the 10th Amendment bars Congress from issuing regulations like minimum health care coverage standards? Do you think programs like Social Security and Medicare represent socialism and should never have been created in the first place? Do you think President Obama is a socialist? Do you think America should return to a gold standard?

Not sure the gold standard question will resonate all that much with swing voters, but forcing opponents to answer the other questions should help flush out the inner tea-bagger in GOP candidates, or even better, amplify divisions between Republican candidates in primaries and encourage flip-flops.
According to Fox, The GOP responded to the DSCC Memo with their own advisory to Republican Senate candidates, including a series of ‘have you stopped beating your wife’ type questions for their Democratic opponents:

Would you support a second so-called ‘stimulus’ bill, even though the first failed to create much-needed jobs? Or do you believe the unspent money should be returned to the taxpayers? Are you willing to hold open discussions to reach an agreement on bipartisan health care reform, or will you continue to support backroom deals — such as the Cornhusker Kickback — in order to ram an unpopular and costly government-run health care bill through Congress?
Do you support increasing the nation’s debt limit by yet another $2 trillion? Do you agree with the Obama administration that terrorists should be afforded the same rights as American citizens, tried in American courtrooms, and ultimately held on American soil?

Maybe it’s just my partisan tilt, but the Democratic questions are less predicated on dubious assumptions, and have more potential for eliciting answers that inflict serious damage.
The Fox post goes on to cite a Rasmussen survey indicating voters are more likely to support tea party candidates than Republicans. The ‘divide and conquer’ strategy outlined in the DSCC memo, in the wake of Scott Brown’s MA upset win, appears sound and promising — provided Democratic candidates get on it early and work it hard.

By now you’ve probably heard of the bizarre comments by South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer–a candidate for the governorship later this year–over the weekend, wherein he compared people receiving food stamps or free school lunches to “stray animals” who think of little other than “breeding.” Bauer has expressed “regret” about the “stray animals” passage because stupid people took it as an “analogy, not a metaphor,” but has defended the underlying sentiments, and even attacked those who criticized his remarks for “cynicism.”
Bauer’s remarks weren’t in an off-the-record private conversation (like Harry Reid’s “light skin” comment about Barack Obama), and he didn’t commit a small, one-sentence gaffe that was taken out of context. No, Bauer was speaking in a “town hall” meeting with state legislators present, and the “stray animals” remarks was part of a fairly long, coherent (if evil) rant about the “culture of dependency,” the refusal of public assistance recipients to “give back” to the community, and the growing tendency of people to “vote for a living rather than work for a living.” He didn’t take any of that back in any way, shape or form.
And by and large his fellow South Carolina Republicans, many of whom really, really don’t like him, have gone to his defense, or at most suggested he made a “poor choice of words.” Nothing wrong, it appears, with suggesting that an actual majority of the population of his own state are folks who are ripping off taxpayers instead of working, and are “voting for a living” by supporting socialists like Barack Obama, so long as we all understand that comparing them to fast-breeding animals is a “metaphor, not an analogy.”
What this really represents is the growing radicalism of the Republican Party. It’s clearly advanced in South Carolina, where Bauer’s remarks are little more than a lurid version of the views of U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, who has suggested that the “culture of dependency” that Bauer talked about extends not only to people receiving food stamps, but those benefitting from Social Security and Medicare, and not only to parents whose kids eat subsidized school lunches, but parents who rely on “government schools” (better known as “public schools”) to begin with.
And beyond South Carolina, Bauer is also reflecting the narrative, beloved of the Tea Party movement and embraced in part by John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2008, that “looters” and “freeloaders” abetted by “radical” groups like ACORN blew up the economy by obtaining home mortgages they couldn’t afford, then demanded “bailouts” and elected their guy Obama president to introduce socialism.
How big a change is that in the views of Republicans? Lest we forget, the food stamp program, long beloved of Republican Members of Congress from farm states (most notably 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole), was designed to ensure that poor families could eat and didn’t get use up disposable income on more trivial expenditures. The school lunch program, which has never been controversial up until now, was based on the rather common-sense observation that hungry kids don’t learn very well, significantly reducing the likelihood that they would become productive members of society who could raise their own kids to be the same.
Moreover, listening to conservatives today rant about the “welfare entitlement” and those who refuse to “contribute to society,” you’d never know that Republicans just over a decade ago were boasting endlessly about a federal welfare reform initiative that eliminated any unconditional entitlement to public assistance and introduced work requirements and time limits. It didn’t go away in the years since 1997.
Unfortunately, Andre Bauer reflects some pretty scary trends within the Republican Party. And those Republicans who don’t want to be understood as favoring a dehumanization of poor people and minorities and conspiracy theories about welfare looters “voting for a living,” have a responsibility to denounce utterances like Bauer’s as something a bit more serious than a “poor choice of words.” How about a poor choice of morals, and a poor grasp of their own country?

If you are interested in a deeper interpretation of what’s been happening in and to the Obama administration–deeper, that is, than conservative allegations of “radicalism” and “socialism” and progressive complaints about “spinelessness” or “corporate influence”–then I highly recommend a colloquoy on The American Prospect site between TAP’s Mark Schmitt and historian Rick Perlstein. It’s in essence a lookback at the simmering debate among progressive observers that ran all through the 2008 election cycle about Barack Obama’s “theory of change,” and especially the tension between his progressive goals and his rhetoric of bipartisanship.
As it happens, Schmitt (along with Michael Tomasky and yours truly) was highly identified with the argument that Obama’s “theory of change” was aimed at offering the political opposition a choice between cooperation on progressive policy initiatives or self-isolation through obstruction and extremism. In other words, in a country unhappy with partisan gridlock, Republicans would either go along with key elements of a progressive agenda, or shrink themselves into an ever-more-extreme ideological rump that was irrelevant to the direction of the country.
Rick Perlstein was more of an Obama-skeptic, but he, too, began to feel that Obama might be luring Republicans into a big trap. As he recalls now, during the stretch drive in 2008:

Conservatives eagerly played to type — GOP congressional leaders called in Joe the Plumber for strategy sessions, and Newsmax.com started advertising a 2009 “Hot Sarah Calendar.” On my blog I labeled what Republicans had been reduced to as “Palinporn”: “material to help lonely conservatives retreat within their own cocoon of fantasy rather than participate in the actual conversations taking place to govern the country.” It was a very “Obama theory of change” insight: Obama could simply get on with governing. Republicans would conversely build ever more elaborate halls of mirrors that made it increasingly impossible for them to speak to America. In fact, around that time, I was exhilarated by the thought of Rush Limbaugh’s ratings exploding through the roof, from 20 million to 30 million listeners — 30 million Americans able only to speak to each other, sounding to the rest of the country like practitioners of esoteric Masonic rites.

Today, of course, Republicans haven’t gotten any less extreme–au contraire in fact–but their political prospects, for 2010 at least, look pretty good. What went wrong? Was Obama’s “theory of change” fundamentally flawed, making him look weak and unprincipled when talking about “bipartisanship?” Would Democrats have done better under the leadership of someone whose theory of change was based on “fighting” or constituency-tending?
You can read the whole piece, but both Schmitt and Perlstein agree that Obama underestimated the ability of Republicans to achieve almost total solidarity against the new administration, and overestimated his own ability to maintain the strong and excited coalition he put together in 2008, given the excrutiatingly difficult circumstances he face upon taking office. Moreover, they agree that going forward, Obama must find ways to “draw lines” with the Republican opposition without trying to abandon his natural style and tone. To put it another way, they suggest that Obama’s “theory of change” required, in practice, a more aggressive approach than trap-setting and jiu-jitsu. The strategy isn’t just falling into place naturally.
What I would add to their analysis is that this “line-drawing” should focus more on the present and future than the past. Yes, George W. Bush is responsible for a lot of the country’s current problems and even many of the policies that Obama was more or less forced to continue. Yes, Obama inherited two wars, vast long-term budget deficits, and an economic nightmare, and he should remind people of that now and then. But inevitably, fairly or not, with every day that passes more Americans will hold the current administration responsible for current conditions in the country. Moreover, what the “blame Bush” narrative misses is that Republicans have in no small part insulated themselves from responsibility for his record by moving harshly to the Right, implicitly criticizing Bush for not being a “true conservative,” and in particular, attacking the steps he took to head off a global economic collapse, which are deeply unpopular. And focusing on Bush distracts attention from the extremism, craziness and emptiness (depending on the issue) or the post-Bush Republican Party, which ought to be the source of comparison for voters this year and in 2012. Without an aggressive, presidentially-led effort to expose that extremism, you can’t really expect political independents to look past the mainstream media’s inveterate tendency to assume the political “center” is half-way between wherever the two parties happen to be at any moment, and to blame both parties equally for the climate of “partisanship” (or maybe blame Obama even more, since he was supposed to be “post-partisan”).
Presenting a choice not just to Republicans, but to voters, of two distinct courses in American politics and policy is the best chance the president and the Democratic Party has of negotiating the current climate, re-energizing the 2012 coalition, and eventually, getting a clear mandate for progressive governance that will include public support for overcoming Republican obstruction, especially in the Senate.
Obama’s “theory of change” hasn’t been refuted, just immensely complicated, and there’s no compelling evidence that a different strategy of dealing with a public wanting conflicting things, an opposition party that’s gone nihilistic, and the built-in obstructions to change in our system, would have worked better. But at some point, the theory has to be adjusted to current realities and past mistakes, and get visible results. Otherwise, the spectacle of the post-partisan president getting attacked for “socialism” while trimming his own policy sails and begging the opposition for cooperation really will look just feckless.

The news that the president is going to propose a three-year “freeze” on appropriations for non-defense discretionary programs (with veterans and homeland security programs exempted) is creating a lot of consternation among progressives today.
But folded into this consternation is a significant amount of confusion. The term “budget freeze,” long the default-drive Republican fiscal austerity “idea,” usually connotes an across-the-board flatlining of spending in non-exempt accounts, a total commitment to the budgetary status quo that neatly allows its proponents to avoid separating sheep from goats and offending any constituency for any particular program. If that’s what Obama was proposing, it would indeed be inconsistent with any new jobs initiative, or indeed, with key elements of the “middle-class relief” agenda the administration just announced. But that’s not what he is proposing; it is instead really an overall spending “cap” under which specific programs could be increased or decreased, presumably depdending on their usefullness in creating jobs or other worthy social goods. It’s an approach that Bill Clinton, back in 1992, called “cut and invest.”
Since it’s Congress, not the administration, that will actually make appropriations decisions, and since Members of Congress and the committees they chair which often serve as the most powerful constituencies for programs with little real justification, it can definitely be argued that any real “freeze” would look more like the across-the-board variety (indeed, that’s what happened to Clinton’s “cut and invest” budget when Congress got its hands on it in 1993). Alternatively, it can be argued that the whole thing is mainly rhetorical, given public concerns about government spending.
But in conjunction with the president’s push for a bipartisan “deficit commission” that would be emppwered to make recommendations on long-term budget savings that would be submitted to Congress for an up-or-down vote, the “freeze” proposal, whatever it actually means, will definitely upset progressives fearing that Obama is “going Hoover” in economic policy. And make no mistake, there’s one objection to the “freeze” idea that’s not based on confusion: if you really do believe that the federal government needs to be running larger short-term deficits in order to provide Keynsian stiimulus to consumer demand, then any domestic spending limits, however selective in application, will strike you as a very bad approach.

One of the strangest media narratives in American politics today is the idea that the Tea Party Movement represents some sort of disenfranchised “center” that wants the two major parties to play nice and work together on compromise policies to address the country’s problems. Maybe that’s true of some grassroots Tea Party participants, but it’s simply not true of its activist leadership.
If you want fresh evidence of how silly this narrative has become, check out Dave Weigel’s report in the Washington Independent of a meeting at FreedomWorks involving a variety of Tea Party leaders, aimed at drafting a new “Contract with America”-type document for this fall’s elections.
You should read the whole thing, particularly if you are under the illusion that the Tea Party Movement is easily distinguishable from the right wing of the Republican Party. But here’s the most important passage about the discussion:

When all of this was boiled down, the activists came up with three goals. The first: “No tax & spend incumbent goes unchallenged.” The second: “Take over the Republican Party,” which meant scouting out “strategic opportunities to put fiscal conservatives in the House and Senate.” The third: “Fiscal conservatives will take back the House and Senate”….
The less popular items were ones that smacked of federal government intervention in the economy. The group voted down a tight term limits rule, a “Committee on Constitutional Authority” that would rule on whether bills passed muster, and waivers from the EPA “in order to allow states flexibility in establishing environmental priorities.” That prompted activists to argue that they should simply support abolishing the EPA. After no one supported a “corporate welfare commission” to scour wasteful spending, Pennsylvania activist John Stahl suggested that the movement campaign against corporate welfare altogether. And Stahl worried that the Contract was missing a major action item.
“There are assaults underway by the Obama administration, and others, on our Constitutional right to vote,” said Stahl. He rattled off examples — the motor voter law, giving the vote to “anybody who’s on the dole,” amnesty to undocumented immigrants — and argued that it needed to become an issue or there would be “a lot of disappointed people out there.”

Now “abolishing the EPA” is not exactly one of those consensus, bipartisan ideas that gridlock in Washington is holding back from immediate implementation. “Abolishing corporate welfare” altogether sounds nice, but if serious, that means eliminating any tax incentives for socially desirable business behavior, which Democrats have long embraced as a fiscally responsible alternative to direct government spending, and which most Republicans have avidly defended as a form of “tax cuts” that can never be rescinded.
And while rolling back voting rights for poor people, “people on the dole,” or legal immigrants has long been a rhetorical staple for the hard-right faction of the GOP, it’s not “centrist” in any conceivable way.
Some will object that no particular group speaks for the Tea Party Movement, and that’s true, but the more activists sit around with conservative Republicans planning a “takeover of the Republican Party” and promoting radical policy positions aimed at eliminating government initiatives that go back to the New Deal, the more it becomes apparent that genuinely “centrist” Tea Party fans are getting used for a very different agenda. That’s worth understanding, particularly since the “takeover” of the Republican Party under discussion all across the Movement looks like an effort to push on an open door.

I’m with Steve Benen on this one: after listening to Republicans say all weekend that the president needs to surrender on health care reform and start embracing their policy ideas, maybe it’s time to draw a lot more public attention to all that fine GOP thinking on the subject.
So where to begin? I guess that would be with the “plan” that drew 176 Republicans votes in the House in a test vote in November of last year, the so-called “Boehner plan.” Dissed by an official Congressional Budget Office analysis that suggested it would cover almost none of the uninsured, while controlling costs far less effectively than the House Democratic proposal, this plan followed the usual conservative template of focusing on tort “reform,” “interstate markets” for private heath insurance (e.g., elimination of state regulations), elimination of the entire employer-based system, and a two-pronged strategy of subsidizing high-deductible individual health plans for healthy people, and state-run risk pools for sick people. It was, as Matt Yglesias put it, an “un-insurance” plan that would take health policy, in some respects, back to the 1950s.
Another example of Republican “thinking” on health care policy is the idea of “voucherizing” Medicare, which was the central health policy element of the official House GOP “alternative budget” offered last April by Rep. Paul Ryan of WI. While “Medicare voucher” proposals vary, they all at the very least aim at transforming Medicare into a system of federal subsidies for purchasing private health insurance, while capping expenditures regardless of the impact on benefits. To put it simply, seniors would march through the streets with torches to protest any such plan if it were taken seriously.
And then there’s the most fully developed Republican health care plan, the one developed and implemented by the front-runner for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, and recently promoted by the party’s maximum “new star”: the Massachusetts health reform plan. How about allowing a vote on that in Congress? Oh, yeah, sorry, that’s pretty much the plan already passed by the U.S. Senate without a single Republican vote! It’s socialist!
Suffice it to say that while Democrats have been materially hurt by endless scrutiny and confusion about the substance of their ideas on health care, Republicans have massively benefitted from a total lack of accountability for their own ideas. Best I can tell, Republicans would probably be politically destroyed if people truly paid attention to GOP health proposals. So Democrats should find ways to help their GOP colleagues publicize their ideas.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Most of the analysis of the impact of Scott Brown’s upset victory in Massachusetts has naturally revolved around the Democratic Party. Having lost the “Kennedy seat,” in the bluest of blue states, with health care reform legislation (and the ability to overcome Republican filibusters on other legislation) in extreme peril, and already facing a very difficult midterm election environment, what can the Donkey Party and its leaders do to mitigate the damage? Will they pull together or scatter to the four winds? Will vulnerable House members retire, making a Republican takeover in November that much more likely? And is the president in a political freefall that could make him effectively a lame duck between now and the end of 2011, and a sitting duck in his re-election year?
These are all reasonable questions, but it’s also worth asking whether Republicans may be in danger of over-interpreting the Brown win, and refusing to deal with some of their own political problems.
Few vulnerable Democrats this November will run anything like the kind of clumsy and somnolent campaign conducted by Martha Coakley. Few Republican challengers will have the luxury enjoyed by Scott Brown to pose as all things to all people: a “liberal Republican” to some, a nonpartisan to others, and a tea party zealot to the rest. No other venue will give Republicans the opportunity to attack national health care reform by way of defending identical reforms at the state level. And few states will provide GOP candidates with a fat-and-happy state Democratic establishment used to winning with little or no effort (indeed, some states, such as Georgia and South Carolina, have a fat-and-happy Republican establishment with a growing record of corruption and toxic infighting). More fundamentally, the idea that a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts means the nation is turning “red” makes no more sense that asserting Nebraska or Alaska turned “blue” when they elected Democratic senators in actual general elections without the skewed turnout patterns exhibited in the Bay State’s special election.
But what makes the new over-confidence so dangerous for the GOP goes beyond the enduring facts that the Republican “brand” remains damaged and that congressional Republicans are distrusted by the public even more than congressional Democrats. The rise in the party’s short-term fortunes has occurred even as it has negotiated a rare, post-defeat race-to-the-Right. This trend has been punctuated by scorched-earth tactics in Congress and a virtual witch-hunt for moderate “RINOs” to vilify and defeat in primaries. At some point, and perhaps soon, the “new” Republican Party will have to define itself as something other than a pure opposition party.
This is true in health care policy, where for all the demagogic GOP rhetoric about defending Medicare from Democratic “cuts,” the default conservative policy impulses vary between “you’re-on-your own” encouragement of individual responsibility for health care costs, to such potential political disasters as voucherizing (or in effect, capping and privatizing) Medicare, and eliminating state regulation of private health insurers. But it’s even truer in economic policy, where the rightward trend in the GOP may have enabled conservative pols to attack corporate subsidies and “bailouts,” but also pushes them to oppose any sort of regulation of the financial system. If, as is already happening, the Obama administration and congressional Democrats begin to push for new regulations in the run-up to November, Republicans may have to fatally re-identify themselves with Wall Street at the worst possible time. Jonathan Chait’s profile on the economic thinking of Republican megastar Marco Rubio of Florida suggests some of the juicy attack lines Democrats could soon enjoy.
There’s also the whole question of turnout in November. What’s been fueling Democratic pessimism about the 2010 elections all along has been the understanding that older white voters—one of Obama’s weakest demographic groups in 2008—usually turn out at relatively high levels in midterm elections, while younger voters—and sometimes minority voters—usually don’t. There’s nothing quite like an Armageddon-like national political atmosphere, with Republican extremism fully on display, to boost overall turnout.
Looking beyond 2010, Republicans have a real problem with their putative presidential field for 2012. It’s easy to say that new “stars” will emerge this November, but it’s extremely unlikely any of them—or for that matter, the flavor-of-the-month, Scott Brown—would be in a position to run for president so soon. That leaves the GOP with some slim pickins: Mitt Romney, whose identification with health reform in Massachusetts is a potentially disqualifying problem; Mike Huckabee, whom economic conservatives and most conservative talk-show-hosts hate; the less-than-scintillating Tim Pawlenty, who is deeply vulnerable to an early knockout blow in his next-door-state of Iowa; and of course, Sarah Palin.
While Democrats have some very big problems, it’s no time for irrational exuberance among Republicans. They’ve got problems, too, and at the moment, appear far less willing to deal with them.