Florida Gov. Charlie Crist’s decision to take his high approval ratings and moderate image into the contest to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Mel Martinez has been greeted with excitement and relief by Beltway Republicans, who feel they now have one less vulnerable seat to worry about next year (though Crist’s conservative primary opponent, former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio, is resisting this pro-Crist tide).
But totally aside from Crist’s irritating habit of defying conservative talking points now and then (most notably in supporting President Obama’s economic stimulus package), his decision could prove to be a headache for Florida Republicans, threatening the grip on the Governor’s Office that they have held since 1998.
Don’t take our word for it; take conservative activist Patrick Ruffini’s:

[W]ith Crist out of state politics, it’s open season on the Florida Governor’s mansion. And holding on there is far from a sure thing, with old warhorse Bill McCullom the likely GOP nominee going up against much buzzed about Dem CFO Alex Sink.
We might say that the Governorship of Florida is not Washington’s problem — except this is the same sort of short-term DC-centered thinking that gives us establishment favorites inimical to the grassroots. The GOP’s revival will not come from Washington or from the Senate. It will come from the states. From an overarching party balance sheet perspective, we need to evaluate the potential loss of the Florida statehouse before stating whether Crist’s move is a good thing.

Ruffini could have added that a Democratic victory in the governor’s race could break GOP control of the decennial redistricting process. Florida was thoroughly gerrymandered on partisan lines during the last redistricting cycle, and a more evenhanded map could produce siginificant Democratic gains in both the U.S. House and in the state legislature, for years to come.

Here we go again with the neo-McCarthyist S-word name-calling. As Ed notes below, Roger Simon reports at Politico that the RNC will pass a resolution rebranding Democrats as the “Democrat Socialist Party” in “an extraordinary special session” next week. Simon keeps his source anonymous, so it’s hard to say whether the resolution is really a done deal. RNC Chair Michael Steele opposes the idea, as Simon reports:

Steele wrote a memo last month opposing the resolution. Steele said that while he believes Democrats “are indeed marching America toward European-style socialism,” he also said in a (rare) flash of insight that officially referring to them as the Democrat Socialist Party “will accomplish little than to give the media and our opponents the opportunity to mischaracterize Republicans.”

Well, he’s right that the resolution will invite ridicule, but not only from left Dems, but solution-oriented centrists of all stripes, perhaps even in the GOP. It will be correctly seen by thoughtful voters as another childish ploy to deflect attention from the lack of ideas circulating among what’s left of the Republican cognoscenti. Parroting ad hominem atttacks ad nauseum tends to make obvious failed arguments more than anything else. I won’t be surprised if a great many of the voters they are targeting will yawn or scoff at the name-calling.
This twisted tactic worked to some extent back in the day when the GOP was able to peddle their hackneyed propaganda about the evils of government spending/high taxes as America’s Big Problem. Back then it was all about “Liberal”-bashing (and still is with Ann Coulter and other snarling Republican pundits). But that was before the colossal failures of W’s administration. And who knows, it might work again down the road, if economic trends cooperate. For now, however, the American people clearly support Obama’s economic initiatives in healthy majorities (see yesterday’s staff post on Teixeira’s “Public Opinion Snapshot”).
It appears that the GOP lost most of it’s brain power when Francis Fukuyama bailed and William Buckley and Jack Kemp died. Newt sees himself as one of their last ‘big idea’ guys, but he is sounding more than a little stale these days. I guess it’s all part of the dumbing down process inside their incredible shrinking tent.
In that regard, Judge Richard Posner, who has been called “the most cited legal scholar of all time,” has an interesting post, “Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?,” at The Becker-Posner Blog, with this delicious graph, flagged by Nate Silver:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

Sounds about right. Still the Republicans behind this lame idea hope that linking the word ‘Socialist’ with every mention of the term ‘Democrat’ in the GOP echo chamber will somehow turn the tide of public opinion in their favor. A recent Rasmussen poll of LV’s, conducted April 23-24, however, suggests that the term may have lost some of its power to offend Americans, as only 53 percent of respondents in the poll now believe “capitalism is better than socialism.”
In any event, it is highly unlikely that a warped form of 21st century McCarthyism will produce the desired result of winning hearts and minds in any significant numbers—– and there are good reasons to believe it may backfire.

Like a lot of non-Rush-Limbaugh listeners, when I first heard that a large faction of Republican National Committee members was pushing for a formal resolution calling on GOPers to start referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party,” I thought it was a puerile joke that the adults in the Republican Party would quash.
Apparently not. According to sources speaking to Politico‘s Roger Simon, the Republican National Committee will approve the resolution at a special meeting of the RNC called for that very purpose.
Here’s how the sponsor of the resolution, Jeff Kent from Washington State, explained its rationale a few weeks ago:

There is nothing more important for our party than bringing the truth to bear on the Democrats’ march to socialism. Just like Ronald Reagan identifying the U.S.S.R. as the evil empire was the beginning of the end to Soviet domination, we believe the American people will reject socialism when they hear the truth about how the Democrats are bankrupting our country and destroying our freedom and liberties.

I don’t know what’s more offensive: the idea of identifying the Democratic Party, which the American people elected to run Congress and the executive branch just six months ago, with the Soviet Union, or the idea that Ronald Reagan brought about the collapse of the Soviet bloc through a magic spell. All in all, the highly adolescent nature of Kent’s thinking is illustrated not only by this comic-book historical revisionism, but by his insistence on retaining in his version of the “Evil Empire” the little-boy-taunt of dropping the last syllable from the adjective “Democratic.”
The St. Paul of the “Democrat Socialist” rebranding, Indiana RNC member James Bopp, Jr., sent an encyclical around further explaining its purpose. Here’s a pertinent passage:

The threat to our country from the Obama administration cannot be underestimated. They are proceeding pell mell to nationalize major industries, to exponentially increase the size, power and intrusiveness of the federal government, to undermine free enterprise and free markets, to raise taxes to a confiscatory level, to strap future generations with enormous unsustainable debt, to debase our currency, to destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death, and to weaken our national defense and retreat from the war on terror. Unless stopped, we will not recognize our country in a few short years.

Yeah, I think the 60-plus-percent of Americans who approve of the job President Obama is doing are pretty happy with the plan to “destroy traditional values and embrace a culture of death.” Or perhaps they don’t understand that returning the top marginal tax rate to where it was ten years ago, and at a far lower level than in those fine days when Ronald Reagan abolished the Soviet Union, represents “confiscatory” taxes. Who knows, maybe they even think that we don’t need to deploy barbaric torture methods to fight terrorists.
It’s easy to mock this stuff, but it’s actually pretty significant: we are not talking about some radio blowhard or self-promoting Fox “personality” in this case, but the Republican National Committee. If, as Simon predicts, it approves this resolution, Republicans who like to think of themselves as serious people need to feel some real shame. Comparing the Democratic Party to the leadership of a totalitarian society, and treating it as an enemy of the country, isn’t just ridiculous: it’s an incitement to crazy people to act crazy or worse.

In a brief but fascinating column for The American Prospect yesterday, Mark Schmitt meditates on the relationship between reliance on ideology, and reliance on “experts,” in resolving public policy challenges. As he notes, Barack Obama has often been credited with, or blamed for, a “pragmatic” attitude about public policy that is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy; and it’s worth remembering that JFK’s technocratic approach to many issues led pretty quickly to a backlash from the ideological left and right.
As Schmitt also notes, the perils of rejecting expertise as illusory or as inherently harboring ideological biases has been amply illustrated by the era of conservative ascendancy:

We are still recovering from eight years of an administration governed by contempt for experts and facts, in which every problem could be solved with a political solution.
George W. Bush left us with a staggering set of questions for which political answers are elusive at best. Like Kennedy at Yale, Barack Obama has had to make the case that many long-held political truths, such as that the deficit shouldn’t get too high and that government shouldn’t intervene in the private sector, are actually ideological myths. In his March 24 press conference, he reiterated that his mission is not ideological but is marked by “knotty problems” such as how to “improve liquidity in the financial markets, create jobs, get businesses to reopen, keep America safe.” Despite the fact that he is building what may turn out to be the most progressive presidency since Lyndon Johnson, Obama eschews ideology not just for tactical reasons but because it provides little guidance on bank bailouts, reviving the auto industry, dealing with international currency account imbalances, or shifting the whole economy to a lower level of consumption.

But at the same time, the financial meltdown didn’t particularly inspire confidence in “the experts” on a host of economic policy issues, and some of the same “experts” are helping guide policy under Obama. And thus, a conservative “populist” assault on Obama policies in areas like health care or climate change, where a little expertise is long overdue, has been joined by many voices from the left when it comes to financial policies, where perhaps we’ve had too much input from “experts.”
Here are the “two lessons” Schmitt ” derives from the Kennedy experience:

One is that the experts had better get it right. There is a huge political price to be paid for getting these technical questions wrong. The second is that, complicated as these questions are, “trust us” isn’t a good enough answer. The Obama administration must find a way to bring the public in, to let it feel a sense of participation and ownership. Ideology, in a measured dosage, can help people understand where we’re headed and why.

I’d add a third lesson implicit in the first: “expertise” is not just a matter of credentialing or prestige or peer approval; it’s ultimately established and then verified by correspondence to objective reality. When “experts” get something big wrong, it’s not time to abandon the whole idea of “expertise” or technical competence; it’s time either to get a new batch of “experts,” or to ensure that those who got things wrong understand their mistakes and adjust their views accordingly. Much of the intra-progressive debate about Obama’s economic policy team really revolves around the extent to which you believe some of its key members got very big things wrong, and/or have since adjusted their views.
As for ideology, I’m with Jonathan Chait: progressives do typically distinguish themselves from conservatives by being a “reality-based community” that can adapt its ideological predispositions to empirical results. And that’s true not just of economic or environmental or health care policy, but of politics itself–which is, after all, one of the founding principles of The Democratic Strategist.

In his latest “Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages, Ruy Teixeira has good news for President Obama and his agenda:

There’s no doubt about it: President Barack Obama is quite popular with the American public. As a recent report from Gallup notes: “Nearly all major demographic categories of Americans are pleased with his job performance.” As just one example of this broad support, Obama receives 76 percent approval among those in households with less than $24,000 in income, 62 percent approval in households from $24,000 to $59,999, 57 percent approval in households from $60,000 to $89,999 and 61 percent approval in household with over $90,000 in income.

Teixeira goes on to note that a new NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll finds high approval ratings for a range of the President’s policies addressing education, diplomacy, health insurance and energy.

Back when the economic stimulus bill was being debated, and reshaped, in the U.S. Senate, a few of us drew attention to the fairly radical cutbacks in “flexible” state money being demanded by the Nelson-Collins group that held the fate of the legislation in their hands. The idea for the flexible funds was to keep states from undercutting the national stimulus effort by cutting back services and laying off employees.
In the end, the overall “state fiscal stabilization fund” in the stimulus legislation was cut from the $79 billion (over two years) in the House bill to $53 billion; but the truly flexible portion of the fund that could be used by states for non-education as well as education purposes dropped from $25 billion to $8 billion. (If you want to understand the complicated math and confusing terminology of these developments, check out my posts here and here.)
So: now the other shoe is dropping, and as a report in the Washington Post today shows, states are indeed cutting back services and employees, in some cases drastically.
When asked if “centrist” senators regretted the cutbacks in flexible state money, a spokesman for Ben Nelson told the Post:
“This is a stimulus bill, not a state bailout bill,” he said. “While the economic recovery bill will undoubtedly help states with their budgets and employment, the primary intent was to stimulate the economy.”
You’d think that Nelson, a former governor, would understand how state cutbacks and layoffs would negatively effect efforts to “stimulate the economy,” but I guess not.
Perhaps the best defense that can be made of the flexible funding cutbacks is that some states are not exactly showing very good judgment in using what little money they got outside Medicaid. In Missouri, Republican legislators are trying to use a big chunk of stimulus money for a highly regressive tax cut. One of these solons told the Associated Press: “This is real stimulus. This is what will make our country turn around — give the dollars back to the taxpayers, give the power to the people.” Since the latest tax shenanigans in Missouri are part of a broader GOP effort there to repeal the income tax and impose higher sales taxes, it’s pretty clear which “people” they want to empower.

Michael Steele’s chairmanship of the Republican National Committee continues to lurch from disaster to disaster. Even though he’s scaled back his media appearances, the ones he’s making aren’t helping matters. Late last week, he was on Bill Bennett’s radio show, and offered the following thoughts when asked by a caller if Mitt Romney had been denied the 2008 GOP presidential nomination by “liberals” and “the media” who were pulling wires for John McCain:

“Remember, it was the base that rejected Mitt because of his switch on pro-life, from pro-choice to pro-life,” Steele told the caller. “It was the base that rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism. It was the base that rejected Mitt because they thought he was back and forth and waffling on those very economic issues you’re talking about.”
“So, I mean, I hear what you’re saying, but before we even got to a primary vote, the base had made very clear they had issues with Mitt because if they didn’t, he would have defeated John McCain in those primaries in which he lost,” Steele concluded.

As Michelle Cottle of TNR’s The Plank observed today:

[B]y trying to make a simple, completely accurate observation about last year’s presidential primary, he managed simultaneously to pick a fight with Mitt Romney and tar the party’s base as a bunch of anti-Mormon bigots.
When oh when will someone put this man out of his misery?

Yep, Steele’s comments were something of a two-cushion scratch shot. But the maddening thing for Republicans is that they can’t dump him as chairman without courting the impression that they are bigots or small-tent types themselves. The chairman-in-waiting, South Carolina’s Katon Dawson (he of the recent memebership in a segregated country club) wouldn’t help much. One conservative blogger has suggested a very different name for
Steele’s replacement: a guy named Norm Coleman. If that idea has legs, it’s no wonder that Steele said “No, hell no!” to the suggestion that Coleman give up his guerilla legal challenge to his retirement from the U.S. Senate.

Evidence continues to mount that the American public is becoming more tolerant of same-sex marriage and immigration — two of the hot button ‘cultural’ issues the Republicans hoped to exploit in upcoming elections. As Ruy Teixeira reports in a recent edition of his “Public Opinion Snapshot” at the Center for American Progress web pages,

…Consider these data on gay marriage—perhaps the most contentious of all cultural issues—from the most recent Washington Post/ABC News poll. In that poll for the first time a plurality of Americans (49-46) endorsed the idea that it should be legal for gay and lesbian couples to get married. And support for legalizing gay marriage was even higher among 18- to 29-year-olds (66 percent). This suggests that we will see even stronger public support for gay marriage as more members of the rising Millennial generation enter adulthood in years to come.

And,

…In the same poll, 61 percent supported a program to allow illegal immigrants now living in the United States to live here legally if they pay a fine and meet other requirements, compared to 35 percent who opposed such a program. That’s up from a narrow 49-46 split in favor back in December of 2007. And, as with gay marriage, support for immigration reform is even stronger among young Americans at 73 percent.

Absent the myriad distractions presented by cultural classhes of earlier years, Teixeira notes, the GOP will be forced to persuade voters that their policies “actually work and will solve people’s problems….Given that they have little to offer except retreads from the disastrous Bush administration, it could be a tough sell.”

In the run-up to an expected confirmation fight over President Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment, Republicans are already warming up their tired old rhetoric attacking “judicial activism” as an unacceptable quality for judges. A perfect dissection of the emptiness of this term has been offered up at Politico by Keenan Kmiec, a former law clerk to Chief Justice Roberts, and thus presumably not a wild-eyed liberal:

Complaints about judicial activism have plagued Supreme Court confirmation hearings for decades. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor fielded dozens of questions on judicial activism in 1981. Justice Stephen Breyer was urged to “resist the siren calls of judicial activism” in 1994. The term appears 56 times in the record of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s confirmation hearings, and it seemed omnipresent at the Roberts and Alito hearings.
But what does “judicial activism” mean? To borrow from Justice Antonin Scalia, it often “doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t say whether you’re going to adopt the incorporation doctrine, whether you believe in substantive due process. It’s totally imprecise. It’s just nothing but fluff.”
Without context or a clear definition, a charge of judicial activism is an empty epithet, the legal equivalent of calling someone a jerk.

Kmiec goes on to look at several issues that lurk below the surface of charges of “judicial activism,” including deference to legislative decisions, respect for judicial precedent, and various approaches to the interpretation of both constitutional and statutory texts. But the fundamental issue of a putative Justice’s judicial philosophy is not often captured by talk of “activism:”

There are about as many theories of constitutional interpretation as there are judges. The current Supreme Court includes self-described “originalists,” “minimalists” and proponents of “active liberty,” to name a few….
Understanding a nominee’s judicial philosophy is hard work, but it should be the goal of the confirmation process. Amorphous charges of “judicial activism” score cheap political points, but they have no place in a serious confirmation debate. Let’s banish the term or at least use it carefully.

Sounds like a very good idea, but don’t hold your breath for Republicans to agree.
Meanwhile, MSNBC’s First Read has come up with what it calls a “working short-list” of six for Obama’s SCOTUS pick:

The co-frontrunners (in no particular order): Diane Wood of the 7th Circuit, Solicitor General Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor of the 2nd Circuit, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Merrick Garland of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

Granholm and Napolitano are a bit of a surprise for so narrow a “short-list,” but it should be noted that they both served as Attorney General of their states. Napolitano knows a little about confirmation fights, too. As Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Napolitano was an attorney representing Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas confirmation saga.

The chattering classes have been engaged over the last couple weeks in one of those debates over hypotheticals that only political junkies–and perhaps fans of “alternative history”–could care about: what would have happened in the presidential nominating process if John Edwards had gone the other way on running for president under the threat of exposure of his extramarital affair?
Unsurprisingly, Hillary Clinton’s 2008 pollster and “strategist,” Mark Penn, has looked for evidence that his candidate would have benefited from a one-on-one competition with Barack Obama, particularly in Iowa. As Mark Blumenthal has established by looking at polling data from Iowa, that’s not terribly plausible, since Obama was decisively the second-choice candidate among Iowa Edwards supporters. There was some pretty strong data early on suggesting that HRC and Edwards were both drawing from similar demographic categories–particularly older and more blue-collar voters–and Penn seems to think that the demographic-driven nature of the Obama-Clinton competition might have taken hold earlier without Edwards in the race. But it must be remembered that Obama’s difficulties in attracting “traditional” Democratic voters never really materialized in the upper midwest.
I do have to disagree for once with the excellent Mr. Blumenthal about one thing: his contention that the “least plausible” Edwards withdrawal scenario was between Iowa and New Hampshire. Makes perfect sense to me that Edwards might have gambled on keeping his secret until his very best state had voted, and then packed it once he lost, eliminating any realistic chance that he’d win the nomination. In any event, as Blumenthal shows, this scenario would have almost definitely produced an Obama win in NH, and quite possibly, an early end to the nomination contest. Would that have been good for Obama? The conventional wisdom is that an early win is always better, and for all the talk about Obama benefiting from the publicity and competition associated with the long struggle against HRC, that’s probably true. In retrospect, the largest advantage derived by Barack Obama from the nomination battle may well have been the obstinate belief of Republicans that he was very vulnerable in the general election–not to mention the really strange conviction that putting Sarah Palin on the GOP ticket would pull all those Clinton supporters across the line.