Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has done a very irresponsible thing that nonetheless offers Democrats a classic “teachable moment” about the true fidelity of Republicans to fiscal discipline. Shelby put a hold on all presidential appointments (70 are pending at present ) until he gets his way on a couple of big projects–one involving a Shelby appropriations “earmark”–benefiting Alabama.
Some may recall that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Republicans talked as though earmarks were the primary cause of the federal government’s budget problems. And here’s one of their own gumming up the entire executive branch over one of them, while also trying to control the exact language of a federal contract on another project to steer money to his own state.
Shelby’s action could also help draw attention to the disgraceful pattern of Republican obstruction of presidential appointments, which has left dozens of federal agencies without key personnel.
“Holds” by senators are an atavistic tradition in the first place. Democrats should not let Shelby get away with the unprecedented step of a “blanket” hold, in order to shake down the administration for earmarked money, even as his party demagogues endlessly about runaway spending. Congressional Republicans should finally begin to pay a political price for their hypocrisy and cynicism on fiscal issues.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein provides a clear explanation of what a senatorial “hold” involves, and also explains why Shelby’s gambit should backfire, comparing it to Ben Nelson’s infamous health care “deal”:

The reason holds work is that they’re small enough, and rare enough, that they never rise to the level of something the majority can’t live with. Shelby, in putting a hold on all pending nominations, just made holds very big indeed. And he did it for the most pathetic and parochial of reasons: pork for his state. If the Democrats have any sense at all, Shelby’s hold is about to become as famous as Nelson’s deal.

It’s never a good sign when a news report on your freshly-annointed statewide candidate appears on a network “true crime” site. Nor is it helpful when the report contains the words “criminal charges,” “pawnbroker,” “domestic battery,” “knife,” “prostitute,” and “massage parlor.”:
But that’s the reality facing Illinois Democrats today–a day that was supposed to feature a concession by Dan Hynes that he had narrowly lost the gubernatorial nomination to Pat Quinn, followed no doubt by unity gestures.
Instead, the big political news (broken by the Chicago Tribune) is that Scott Lee Cohen, a previously obscure Chicago pawnbroker who won the nomination for Lieutenant Governor over a scattered field in a low-turnout primary this week (after running millions of dollars in ads touting his support for Job Fairs), got arrested in 2005 for allegedly attacking his girl friend with a knife. The charges were dropped when the alleged victim failed to show up in court, but that hardly matters politically. Cohen admits they had a drunken fight (though without knifeplay), and while he protests he didn’t know the girl friend had earlier been arrested for prostitution in connection with her work at a massage parlor (he said he thought she was a “massage therapist”), the whole thing is obviously maximum tabloid-and-talk-show bait of the worst sort.
The sad thing is that the job Cohen’s running for is largely ceremonial, and few people care who occupies it so long as the governor is hale and hearty. But even though candidates for governor and lieutenant governor run independently in the primary, the nominees form a joint ticket (i.e., if you vote for Pat Quinn, you automatically vote for Cohen as well).
Politically aware people over a certain age were immediately reminded of the disaster that struck Illinois Democrats back in 1986, when low-turnout primaries for Lt. Governor and Secretary of State were won by Lyndon Larouche disciples. Gubernatorial nominee Adlai Stevenson III, who started the year as the favorite to win the office, spent much of his campaign trying to disassociate himself from his deranged ticket-mates, and what should have been a great Democratic year turned out very poorly.
Word on the street is that Gov. Pat Quinn is moving immediately to organize Democratic elected officials to pressure Cohen into dropping out of the campaign. If he succeeds quickly, he should convince all Illinois Democrats that he has the chops to manage the publicity surrounding the upcoming trial of his predecessor, Rod Blagojevich, and get through a tough political year.

Not to pile on with the bad news, but Robert Parry has a must-read bummer at Alternet, “The Right-Wing Media Machine Has Arrived on the Internet.” The title will come as no surprise to political internet junkies, who have noticed over the last year or so a distinct increase in conservative and wingnut web pages that don’t look quite so cheesy as before.
This doesn’t mean that the right has websites as widely-read as HuffPo or Daily Kos. They don’t. And there is still a noticable gap in writing quality favoring the left, at least among the middle-brow political websites. But amplifying Jerry Markon’s WaPo post on the topic, Parry does a good job of explaining why the pro-Republican right’s superior message discipline is providing the GOP blogosphere with a growing edge:

…The Right’s Web attacks on Democrats, progressives and mainstream journalists had much greater resonance because those hostile stories got picked up and amplified by the Right’s talk-radio programs, by Fox News and by print outlets, such as Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times…the Right is now fully “wired” to disseminate a potent political message via the Internet, as demonstrated by the Tea Party assaults on President Barack Obama in his first year and by the Internet-savvy upset win by Republican Scott Brown in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Worse, conservatives have not been shy in tapping corporate resources to nurture and support their blogosphere, in painful contrast to the woefully underfunded left, in which most bloggers work other jobs to support their postings. Parry adds,

Some right-wing bloggers have found their endeavors richly rewarded as right-wing institutes create “fellowships” for bloggers; other bloggers have become influential TV personalities, the likes of Michelle Malkin; and still others, like RedState’s Erick Erickson, wield outsized political influence because their commentaries resonate through the Right’s echo chamber.

It was a hollow conceit to assume that the progressive blogosphere would have a perpetual edge over the right. It was always a question of ‘when,’ not ‘if’ coporate resources would empower the right to level the field. But as the integration of streaming internet audio-visual content with television, telephones and even radio in cars becomes more seamless, perhaps there will be a more permanent democratization of media access. It won’t happen automatically, and it will certainly require an energetic effort from progressives to put in place. The alternative would be even more disturbing than Parry’s post.

In any highly fluid political situation, you will always find some observers determined to argue that it’s not fluid at all–that underneath the surface, the status quo prevails, and anyone thinking otherwise is naive or poorly informed.
Tuesday night, you just knew that Mark Kirk’s U.S. Senate primary victory in Illinois would be interpreted in some circles as proving that the much-discussed rightward trend in the Republican Party, sped along by pressure from the Tea Party Movement, was actually a mirage. And sure enough, Politico‘s Jonathan Martin published an article today entitled: “Tea Leaves: the Republican Establishment Still Rules.”
Aside from Kirk’s win (more about that in a moment), Martin’s main bits of evidence for his hypothesis are that the Republican National Committee recently rejected an effort to impose an ideological “purity test” on candidates seeking party financial support, and that recent GOP winners like Scott Brown and Bob McDonnell didn’t campaign on divisive cultural issues.
The “purity test” argument would be more compelling if not for the fact that many hard-core conservatives opposed it as insufficiently rigid, ham-handed, or unnecessary. Nobody, but nobody, in the conservative movement is more preoccupied with driving RINOs and “squishes” out of the Republican Party like whipped curs than Red State proprietor Erick Erickson. Yet he opposed the “purity test” as offering ideological heretics a phony seal of approval:

Rome long ago stopped selling indulgences, but conservatives keep right on selling them. Look, for example, at NY-23. The moment Dede Scozzafava signed ATR’s [Americans for Tax Reform] no new tax pledge, she was absolved of all her sins, including voting for 198 tax increases in the New York legislature.
Therein lies the inherent problem with candidates signing off on well meaning pablum — there are no teeth and the party will not serve as its own enforcer.
While I applaud the desire of conservative RNC members to try to put the train back on the tracks, I am afraid this will do what the ATR pledge did in Scozzafava’s case — give a lot of candidates cover to pretend to be conservative.

Plenty of other conservatives opposed the “purity test” on grounds that “grassroots Republicans” were best equipped to police candidates. Some interpreted such rhetoric as indicating a big-tent willingness to tolerate regionally important ideological variations. But as the recent DK/R2K survey of self-identified Republicans illustrated, “regional differences” in the GOP are pretty much a relic of the past in a monolithically conservative party. And nowadays the “grassroots” means conservative activists, who are indeed avid to conduct ideological purification rituals. If there is a significant body of “grassroots activists” fighting to protect the interests of Republican “moderates,” it’s an awfully quiet group.
In general, the “purity test” furor reminds me of a quip I heard during the Jim Crow era about the relative weakness of the John Birch Society in the South: “Nobody sees the point in joining an organization standing for things everybody already agrees with.”
The argument that the success of hyper-opportunist Scott Brown and stealth theocrat Bob McDonnell “proves” the ideologues don’t have much real power in the GOP strikes me as almost self-refuting. Sure, Brown had a “moderate” reputation in the MA legislature, but that’s not why he became the maximum hero of the Tea Party Movement, whose themes he adopted wholesale. By contrast, McDonnell didn’t need to reassure social conservatives of his bona fides by campaigning on “their” issues; he had proven himself to be “one of them” for many years.
As for Mark Kirk, it’s true that conservative activists don’t like him, and there’s even a chance his Senate campaign will be immensely complicated by a Tea Party inspired third-party effort. But it’s also true he spent much of the primary campaign tacking steadily to the right, flip-flopping on the Gitmo detainee issue, and more dramatically, promising to vote in the Senate against the climate change legislation he voted for in the House. He’s hardly a good example of the weakness of conservatives in the GOP nationally.
More generally, it’s increasingly obvious that what passes for a “Republican Establishment” these days is focused heavily on surrendering to the most immediate ideological impulses of Tea Party and conservative movement activists (who are in fact the very same people in many places) and then coopting them for the 2010 and 2012 campaign cycles. In attempting a takeover of the GOP, the hard right is in many respects pushing on an open door. The RNC chairman, supposedly a “moderate” of sorts, never misses an opportunity to identify himself with the Tea Party Movement. Sarah Palin, who was the party’s vice presidential candidate in 2008, has called for a merger of the Movement and the GOP. Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has argued that they have already more or less merged.
In his piece Martin suggests that the longstanding Republican pedigree of Florida Tea Party hero Marco Rubio somehow proves the “establishment” is still in charge. I’d say it shows that “establishment” is in the process of rapidly surrendering to the “conservative coup” that Martin scoffs at. Charlie Crist, whom Rubio seems certain to trounce in a Republican Senate primary later this year, was without question a major “GOP establishment” figure just months ago, and Rubio was considered a nuisance candidate. Now he’s the living symbol of a “purity test” being applied to Republicans by the “grassroots” to dramatic effect.
Yes, many Tea Party activists continue to shake their fists at the “Republican establishment,” just like unambiguously Republican conservative activists have done for many decades, dating back to the Willkie Convention of 1940. But with some exceptions, they are choosing to operate politically almost exclusively through the GOP, to the “establishment’s” delight.
The emerging reality is that the Tea Party activists are the shock troops in the final conquest of the Republican Party by the most hard-core elements of the conservative movement. It’s apparent not just in Republican primaries, but in the remarkable ability of Republican politicians to repudiate as “socialism” many policy positions their party first developed and quite recently embraced (Mark Kirk’s support for cap-and-trade would have been considered relatively uncontroversial just a few years ago). You can certainly root around and find a few exceptions to this trend, but they are few and far between. And the implicit assumption of Martin’s piece–that the “adults” of the Republican “establishment” will once again tame the wild ideological beasts of their party–is actually dangerous.

Gallup put out an analysis of daily tracking data this week that was designed to establish that Asian-Americans are the most liberal U.S. ethnic group. But as Matt Yglesias immediately noted, what the analysis really does is to call into question the entire “liberal-moderate-conservative” self-identification spectrum in public opinion research.
Gallup’s numbers for African-Americans show this rather emphatically: 24% call themselves liberals, 42% call themselves moderates, and 29% call themselves conservatives. By this measurement, African-Americans are a “center-right” bloc of voters. Yet the same survey notes that African-Americans self-identify as Democrats (or as Democratic “leaners”) by a margin of 83% to 8%. And despite many years of conservative hopes and dreams for a rightward trend among African-Americans, they consistently represent the most solidly “liberal” category of voters by any measurement other than ideological self-identification.
In other words, as many of us have been saying for years, the L-M-C typology for ideological self-identification is deeply flawed and of limited utility. Yet an astonishing edifice of “analysis,” commentary, and political rhetoric has been built on this shaky foundation, most recently the claim that Barack Obama is defying a “center-right nation” by trying to implement his campaign platform. It’s time to retire it or replace it.

Those who are interested in, and/or alarmed by, the Tea Party phenomenon often struggle to understand the welter of groups and individuals who seem to be influencing this movement. This has been particularly true during the controversy over the National Tea Party Convention that’s getting underway today in Nashville, which has been characterized by lots of insults thrown back and forth and by shifting alliances of various organizations. Who are all these guys?
Fortunately, TNR’s Lydia DePillis has put together a handy-dandy guide of key dates, individuals and organizations in the Tea Party Movement. Aside from improving your knowledge-base, her guide also implicitly shows the close and intimate links between the movement and all sorts of previously-disreputable right wing organizations.

With yesterday’s easy primary victory by Mark Kirk in IL, and with the news that former Sen. Dan Coats will leave his lobbying gig to take on Evan Bayh in IN, Republicans are now getting excited about the possibility of retaking the Senate this November.
They should probably chill a bit. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post breaks down the ten Democratic seats Republicans would have to win–without losing any of their own–to regain control of the Senate. And while anything’s possible if this turns out to be a “wave” election, running this particular table will be very difficult.
To start with the least likely Republican victories, Chris Dodd’s retirement makes Democratic attorney general Richard Blumenthal a solid front-runner in CT. Republicans must negotiate a difficult primary and then take on one of the most popular politicians in recent Nutmeg State history. Similarly, CA Republicans must get through a tough primary before taking on Sen. Barbara Boxer, one of the more popular politicians in a state that really hates its politicians (in both parties) these days.
Bayh will hardly be an easy mark The never-defeated former Boy Wonder of Hoosier politics, he’s sitting on $13 million in campaign cash, and has a history of winning big in good Republican years. Meanwhile, Coats has to deal with bad publicity over his ten years of DC lobbying work, including representation of banks and equity firms. And he’s been voting in Virginia, not Indiana, all that time.
A lot of Republicans seem to be assuming that Mark Kirk will win easily in IL. Only problem is: he’s currently trailing Democratic nominee Alexi Giannoulias in early polls, and will also have to explain some major flip-flops he executed to survive his primary.
I’m probably not the only observer in either party who remains skeptical that former Club for Growth chieftain Pat Toomey is going to win in PA against the eventual winner of the Sestak-Specter primary. Toomey is certainly the kind of guy who will make sure that intra-Democratic wounds heal quickly.
And then there are states which are absolute crapshoots at this point, such as CO, where either appointed Senator Michael Bennet or former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff will probably face former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. The same is true of an open Republican seat in MO, where Democrat Robin Carnahan has been running essentially even with Roy Blunt.
Republican open seats in NH, OH, and KY are hardly safe for the GOP, either.
All in all, it would take a odds-defying “wave” indeed to deliver the Senate to Republicans. And by the very nature of Senate races, which match high-profile politicians usually well known to voters, “waves” are less likely to control outcomes than in House races. The only real precedent for what GOPers are dreaming of came in 1980, with Republicans improbably won every single close race.
In many respects, the Senate landscape will be much improved for Republicans in 2012. But then we will be dealing with a presidential year, different (and more favorable for Democrats) turnout patterns, and the little problem that the Republican presidential field doesn’t look that exciting (with the possible exception of Sarah Palin, who’s a little too exciting).

Yesterday’s Illinois primary produced intense competition in both parties, but no huge surprises. In the gubernatorial contest, photo finishes are occurring in both parties, with incumbent Pat Quinn holding a 5,000 vote lead over Dan Hynes (Quinn has declared victory, but Hynes has not yet conceded) among Democrats, and downstate conservative state senator Bill Brady leading his colleague Kirk Dillard by less than a percentage point.
The Senate races were less dramatic. The long-time Democratic front-runner, state treasurer Alexi Giannoulias, won by a comfortable margin over David Hoffmann, and Republican Rep. Mark Kirk won with a majority over three conservative rivals. For all the hype about Kirk nationally, Giannoulias actually leads him in the polls, and Kirk could still face a right-wing third party candidate.
There was one surprise in House races: Ethan Hastert, son of former House Speaker Denny Hastert, got waxed by conservative state senator Randy Hultgren for the GOP nomination in Denny’s old district. The seat is now held by Democrat Bill Foster. In a sign of the times, the more conservative candidate also won the GOP nod for the seat being vacated by Kirk, with Bob Dold beating Beth Coulson.

Please Democrats, read and understand Ian Millhiser’s article, “How to Kill the Filibuster with Only 51 Votes” in The American Prospect. If Millhiser is right, this may be our best chance to escape the hellish predicament of not being able to enact anything, even with 59 percent support of the U.S. Senate. As Millhiser explains,

With conservatives salivating, and progressives seriously questioning whether American government is too crippled to solve major problems, it’s difficult to imagine that Democrats won’t take additional losses next November. Even if they don’t, however, a minority bent on total obstructionism now enjoys the power to veto nearly any bill or nominee. With the exception of the annual budget, literally nothing is likely to pass the Senate for the next three years.
It doesn’t have to be this way, however. A long line of Supreme Court decisions forbid former legislators from tying the hands of their successors. Thus, although current senators may choose to impose a supermajority rule on themselves, they cannot impose such a rule on a new Senate. Under the Supreme Court’s precedents, just 51 senators will have a brief opportunity to reform or eliminate the filibuster next January — but this opportunity will disappear if they do not act right away.

Millhiser goes on to give an account of two U.S. Supreme Court decisions establishing and affirming the aforementioned precedents, and adds:

Taken together, these two decisions open a narrow window every two years, when the Senate’s newly elected members take their seats. During this time, only 51 senators (or 50 senators plus the vice president) are needed to change the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold, eliminate the 30 hours of delay that the minority is allowed to demand between a successful cloture vote and a final vote on a filibustered bill, or even eliminate the filibuster entirely.

Further, Millhiser reasons,

The reason why the filibuster exists is because the rules of the Senate say that it exists. Article I of the Constitution provides that “each House may determine the rules of its proceedings,” so the Senate is allowed to create a rule requiring 60, 70, or even 100 votes before it can proceed with any business.
What the Senate is not allowed to do, however, is tell future senators what rules must apply to their proceedings. Because Reichelderfer prohibits a previous Congress from tying the hands of a future Congress, the rules governing Senate procedure in 2010 cannot bind a newly elected Senate in 2011. The old Senate rules essentially cease to exist until the new Senate ratifies them, so a determined bloc of 51 senators could eliminate the filibuster altogether by demanding a rules change at the beginning of a new session. Once the new Senate begins to operate under the old rules, however, this can function as a ratification of the old rules — essentially locking those rules in place for another two years.

Yes, the reactionary activists of the Roberts Court could conceivably screw with any such Democratic initiative, as Millhiser considers. He adds, however,

Such a turn of events, however, is exceedingly unlikely. For one thing, if the Supreme Court accepts the continuing-body theory, it would do a whole lot more than simply lock the filibuster in place. Were the mere existence of a legislator who has not stood for election since a law or rule was enacted enough to prevent newly elected lawmakers from repealing a recently enacted law, then all federal laws could be enacted with a six-year shield of invulnerability — untouchable until the last senator present when the law was enacted stands for a new election. Nothing in the Supreme Court’s precedents suggest that erecting such a shield would be acceptable, however — indeed, they say quite the opposite. As far back as the Court’s 1810 decision in Fletcher v. Peck, the justices unanimously declared that “one legislature is competent to repeal any act which a former legislature was competent to pass,” acknowledging no exception for laws enacted within the last three election cycles.
There is also a profoundly practical reason why the Court is unlikely to undo a change to the Senate rules — it lacks the authority to do so. Under a line of precedents stretching back to its landmark 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, the Court will actually refuse to hear any case involving a matter that is “textually committed to the political branches.” In other words, if the text of the Constitution itself provides that a particular question must be resolved by the Senate, the House, or the White House, the Supreme Court won’t stand in that branch’s way…The Supreme Court would be grossly overstepping its bounds to second-guess the senators.

And lest we forget, we are one justice away from restoring a modicum of sanity to the High Court. Millhiser concludes:

Now that it has enough votes to sustain a filibuster, it is exceedingly likely that a Senate minority bent on pure obstructionism will have enough votes to block virtually all of the majority’s legislative agenda. Meanwhile, health-care costs will continue to grow at three or four times the rate of wage growth. Long-term deficits will continue to threaten the future of American prosperity. Largely unregulated markets will remain a time bomb that could trigger another great recession, and catastrophic climate change will continue to threaten the very existence of many island and coastal civilizations.
Fifty-one senators will have the power to change this outlook next January — but they get exactly one chance to act.

The downside of Millhiser’s challenge is that even under the best case scenario, we are stuck with the current mess for 11 months. However, that should not deter Democratic leaders from making use of the budget reconciliation process as much as possible in the interim, when the stark alternative facing them leading up to November is campaigning with zero Democratic reforms enacted between now and then.
To do otherwise amounts to a pathetic abdication of political responsibility, recalling a skit by one of the guerilla theater groups of the sixties, in which a group of protesters occupies the Dean’s office of a large university. When ordered to leave, they get down on all fours and crawl out of the building on hands and knees, chanting “Grovel, grovel, grovel. Who are we to ask for political power?”
So the question for Democratic leaders is, “do we have the mettle to act on our mandate?” The only acceptable answer for a political party that hopes to have a future is, “Hell, yes.”

Daily Kos has just released a large Research 2000 poll it commissioned to test the views of just over 2000 self-identified Republicans. Here’s Markos’ analysis of the findings, and here are the crosstabs so you can slice and dice the results yourself.
Markos calls the poll’s results “startling,” but I guess that depends on your expectations. Seems to me that it confirms the strong rightward trend in the GOP that its leaders have been signaling now for the last two years. Some of this actually represents a long-term trend that ‘s been underway since the early 1960s; some of it involves the shrinkage of the Republican “base” to a seriously conservative core from the party’s identification peak around 2004; and some is attributable to a conscious or subconscious effort to absolve the party from the sins of the Bush administration by treating it as too “moderate.”
In any event, aside from a general and rigorous conservatism, the two findings that are probably most relevant to the immediate political future, and to the relationship between Republicans and independents, are the GOPers’ exceptionally hateful attitude towards Barack Obama, and their unregenerated cultural extremism. The first factor will complicate any efforts in 2010 to go after congressional Democrats as a bad influence on the well-meaning president (who remains more popular among voters outside the GOP than either party in Congress). And the second undermines the media narrative that today’s Republicans are semi-libertarians who have finally sloughed off all that crazy Christian Right stuff and are focused like a laser beam on the economy and fiscal issues.
How much do self-identified Republicans hate Barack Obama? Well, this is hardly news, but in the DK/R2K poll they favor Obama’s impeachment by a 39/32 margin (the rest are “not sure”). Only a narrow plurality (42/36) believes he was born in the United States. By a 63/21 margin, they believe he is a “socialist” (tell that to his progressive critics!). Only 24% say Obama “wants the terrorists to win,” but with 33% being “not sure” about it, only a minority (43%) seem convinced he’s not an actual traitor. Only 36% disagree with the proposition that Obama is a “racist who hates white people” (31% agree with the proposition, and the rest are not sure). And only 24% seem to be willing to concede he actually won the 2008 election (12% think “ACORN stole it,” and 55% aren’t sure either way).
On the cultural-issues front, self-identified Republicans are divided only between the very conservative and the very very conservative. The number that jumps off the page is that 31% want to outlaw contraceptives (56% are opposed). But that’s not too surprising since 34% believe “the birth control pill is abortion,” and 76% (with only 8% opposed) agree that “abortion is murder.”
But it’s the homophobia of GOPers that’s really striking, considering the steady national trend away from such a posture, particularly among younger voters. It extends beyond familiar controversial issues like gay marriage (opposed 77/7) and gays-in-the-military (opposed 55/26) to exceptionally unambiguous statements of equality like the ability of openly gay people to teach in public schools (opposed 73/8). This last finding really is amazing, since St. Ronald Reagan himself famously opposed a California ballot initiative banning gay and lesbian public school teachers, way back in 1978.
The crosstabs for the poll break down the results on regional lines, and there are some variations; most notably, southerners are marginally more conservative on most questions, and really stand out in their incredible levels of support for their own state’s secession from the United States (fully 33% favor a return to 1861, as opposed to only 10% in the northeast). But by and large, the regional splits aren’t that massive; the old idea of the GOP as a coalition of conservatives based in the south and west and moderates in the midwest and northeast is totally obsolete.
The poll finds no real front-runner for the 2012 presidential nomination. Given eight options (about the only plausible candidate not mentioned is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels), Sarah Palin tops the list at 16%, with Romney at 11%, Dick Cheney (!) at 10%, and everyone else in single digits. Fully 42% are undecided. Given the overall results of the poll, that almost certainly means the 2012 nomination process will exert a powerful pull to the right for all the candidates. I mean, really, in a scattered field, is it at all unlikely that someone will focus on that one-third of southern Republicans pining for secession and start channeling John C. Calhoun before the early South Carolina primary? Or might not a candidate seeking traction in the Iowa Caucuses, a low-turnout affair typically dominated by Right-to-Life activists, maybe call for banning those “murderous” birth control pills?
We’ll know soon enough how crazy the GOP crazy-train will get in 2012, I suppose. But it’s a lead-pipe certainty that the dominant right wing of the Republican Party won’t find any reason to moderate itself if the GOP makes serious gains in November.