Posts Tagged ‘ CPAC ’

Wingnut Watch: Texan troubles in the Sunshine State

Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

In February, the “invisible primary” for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was kicked off in Washington by the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. On Friday, a second CPAC event will be held in Orlando in deliberate proximity to tomorrow’s Fox/Google candidates’ debate and Saturday’s Florida GOP presidential straw poll (CPAC will not feature its own straw poll). As in Washington in February, the event will revolve around a cattle call of speeches by presidential candidates and conservative celebrities. The smell of red meat will hang heavy in the air, and speakers can and will be expected to forswear all ideological heresy and smite both Democrat Socialists and RINOs.

But it’s instructive to note how the presidential contest has changed in those seven months between CPAC-DC and CPAC-FL. In February, the intrepid conservative-watcher Dave Weigel of Slate ranked in order of general impressiveness the CPAC appearances of no less than twelve candidates, quasi-candidates, and possible candidates: (1) Ron Paul (who won, for the second straight year, the annual straw poll); (2) Gary Johnson; (3) Mitch Daniels; (4) Haley Barbour; (5) John Bolton; (6) Donald Trump; (7) Mitt Romney; (8) Newt Gingrich; (9) Herman Cain; (10) Tim Pawlenty; (11) Rick Santorum; (12) John Thune. You will note that five of these worthies wound up never running president. A sixth, T-Paw, has dropped out. A seventh, Gingrich, is no longer being taken seriously as a candidate, while an eighth (Cain) and ninth (Santorum) are barely clinging to relevance, and a tenth (Johnson) can’t get an invitation to a debate. Meanwhile, Weigel did not even mention Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, both of whom actually did speak at CPAC, or Jon Huntsman, who at this point was still Barack Obama’s ambassador to China. Interesting, eh?

With four or five months (depending on decisions pending in the states on the date of the starting gun in Iowa) still to go before actual voters begin to participate in the nomination process, how much more is likely to change? A lot could depend on what happens in Florida late this week, particularly to insta-front-runner Rick Perry.

The Texan’s somewhat shaky performance in the CNN-Tea Party Express debate on September 12 (also in Florida) may embolden his rivals to go after him again tomorrow night in Orlando. His areas of vulnerability could again include immigration policy (Cuban-Americans–the Hispanic voting group most active in Florida Republican politics–are not terribly sympathetic to undocumented workers from Mexico). It’s unlikely Michele Bachmann will again bring up Perry’s unsuccessful efforts to immunize Texas schoolgirls against the HPV virus, since her handling of the issue backfired on her in the intervening days. But if she wants to pursue the “crony capitalism” rap on Perry in a way that undermines his Tea Party support, there’s rich ground available in his futile and unpopular campaign to build a giant system of privately operated toll roads—the Trans-Texas Corridor—that might have enriched some of Perry’s friends and supporters at the expense of local landowners, and that reminded some hard-core conservatives of shadowy rumors about a “NAFTA Superhighway” designed to encourage illegal immigration and threaten U.S. sovereignty. The whole issue looks tailor-made for Bachmann.

Perry’s apparently dovish feelings about overseas troop deployments could be another target, given the very hawkish tendencies of Florida Republicans (and especially Cuban-Americans, who went heavily for John McCain, then campaigning mainly on the Iraq “surge,” in the 2008 Republican primary).

But without question, Romney, Bachmann, and perhaps others will keep up the pressure on Perry about Social Security in a state where about one-third of Republican primary participants are over the age of 65. The most recent polling in Florida, by Insider Advantage, showed Romney with a healthy lead over Perry among likely primary voters 65 and older, despite Perry’s overall nine-point lead. Since Social Security is also central to Team Romney’s “electability” argument against Perry, alarming Florida seniors generally about the Texan’s expressed disdain for the New Deal program as an unconstitutional “failure” will be a priority. Republicans have reason to be anxious about the Sunshine State: the last Republican to win the White House without winning Florida was Calvin Coolidge in 1924.

Regardless of exactly how he does in the debate, or in his CPAC-FL speech, Perry has long planned to cap the week with a smashing victory in the Saturday state party straw poll (which goes by the rather self-important name of “P5” to indicate that it is the fifth such event in Florida). But Romney and Bachmann have undermined the significance of the event by declining to appear in the pre-straw-poll cattle call, or actively compete in the straw poll. The pre-ordained nature of the Perry victory, and thus its relative lack of newsworthiness, is reinforced by this straw poll’s unusual nature: voting participants were selected months ago by county GOP organizations. So Ron Paul won’t be able to win this one by any last-minute packing of the room with his youthful supporters.

P5 might, on the other hand, draw attention to Perry’s support among Florida GOP power-brokers, including several key legislative leaders, and reportedly (though he remain officially neutral), the controversial right-wing Gov. Rick Scott. But the even bigger dogs in Florida Republican politics are another matter. Sen. Marco Rubio, who is the presumptive favorite for the second spot on the ticket no matter who wins the first spot, has little reason to endorse anybody. And his political patron, former Gov. Jeb Bush, is assumed to share his clan’s general antipathy towards Perry. If Romney can build doubts about Perry’s electability and specifically his appeal to seniors, and also secure open or covert backing from Jeb Bush, this difficult week in Florida could be just the beginning of the front-running Texan’s troubles in the Sunshine State.

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Wingnut Watch: Re-capping the CPAC Fireworks

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

The 2011 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington over the weekend provided, as always, a sort of dysfunctional family picnic for the self-conscious Right, and an opportunity for a large cast of would-be 2012 presidential candidates to tug the forelock to The Movement and beat up on the godless socialist foe.

Aficionados of conservative ideological infighting had a lot of entertainment at this year’s CPAC. There was, as reported in last week’s Wingnut Watch, lots of maneuvering over participation in the conference, with the conservative gay organization GOProud and the conservative Muslim group Muslims for America serving as the big flashpoints.

While most CPAC attendees (and some not attending, such as Sarah Palin) more or less defended inclusion of GOProud, its leader, Chris Barron, did himself no favors by calling critics “bigots.” There are reports the group won’t be invited back next year. Similarly, Muslims for America’s patron, anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, made few friends by calling critics of CPAC’s agenda “losers,” and promptly earned an anathema from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who called on conservatives to come up with a better venue for coordination than Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings.

The most visible sign of ideological problems at CPAC involved, predictably, the Ron Paul brand of libertarians, who noisily heckled the presentation of a “Defender of the Constitution” award by Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld. (Paulites might justly claim this was too much provocation for any libertarian to resist, and CPAC organizers really screwed up by scheduling the award just after a speech by Rand Paul.)

But the social conservative complaint that fiscal hawks, libertarians, and/or political pragmatists were trying to subordinate their agenda probably exposed a more serious problem for the Right, and also a source of considerable confusion about the much-envied role of the Tea Party Movement. Certainly those, most conspicuously Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who have argued for a temporary suspension of any talk about cultural issues, are being touted by many observers as representing the Tea Partiers’ alleged single-minded focus on deficits, debts, and limited government.

But no less prominent a figure as Rush Limbaugh has sought to identify the Tea Party Movement with social conservatives and indeed with anyone wanting an ideologically exclusive Republican Party:

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, himself considered a conservative icon, blasted this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference for drowning out tea partiers and those concerned with social issues, lamenting, “That’s not the CPAC that I’ve always thought of or known.”

Saying he was concerned that “I might just drum myself out of a movement,” Limbaugh blamed the “ruling class” at CPAC for missing the message of the 2010 election, namely that there is “an unmistakable conservative ascendancy happening in this country,” evidenced most prominently in the tea-party movement….

Instead, Limbaugh said, CPAC seemed smitten with the idea of dumping traditionally conservative values in order to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.

“So you had a weird list of priorities and focus. I mean we had it all,” Limbaugh said. “We had GOProud, the gay conservatives. We had demands to legalize drugs, marijuana at CPAC. Most conservatives strongly oppose gay marriage and legalized pot.”

He continued, “The position of some people who spoke at CPAC: ‘Look, if you’re worried about immigration, stop it. We don’t want to be seen as racist. Stop talking about abortion, stop talking about the social issues, stop talking about all this. That’s only gonna hurt; we don’t need to deal with that in our party.’ This is what the ruling class guys were saying at CPAC.”

A conservative movement that can’t decide whether Mitch Daniels is the leader of the Tea Party Movement, or its deadliest “ruling class” enemy, has got some issues to sort out.

Ideological conflict aside, the role of CPAC as the first serious event in the Invisible Primary leading to the Republican presidential nomination was on full display this weekend, but produced no game-changing results.

The presidential straw poll held on the final day of the conference was easily won, for the second year in a row, by Ron Paul (whose collegiate admirers were out in force), an outcome that instantly devalued it as a indicator of future developments in the nominating process. Mitt Romney, whose PAC probably devoted more resources to the conference than anyone else’s, finished second, while every other name wound up in the low-to-mid single digits.

As for speechifying, there were some putative presidents who did better than others (though experts differed on “winners and losers”), but no real knockout punches or disasters. None of the longest shots (e.g., Herman Cain, John Bolton, Rick Santorum) did anything to vault themselves into serious contention.

Most candidates modestly met their most immediate needs. Tim Pawlenty showed he could give a fiery red-meat speech. Haley Barbour touted a right-wing record as governor of Mississippi (boasting of both Medicaid cuts and harassment of abortion providers), reminding listeners he’s a serious reactionary, not just a fundraiser. Mitt Romney stuck to tried-and-true conservative themes and showed once again he’s as smooth as Obama as a speaker. Mitch Daniels dealt with his “cultural issues truce” problem, and interestingly enough, did so by doubling down on his argument that fiscal issues, the “red menace” of our time, have to come first. Newt Gingrich showed he can still wow a live audience with his wonkery and one-liners.

It’s not really clear, however, that the no-shows (most notably Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee) lost anything by spending their weekend elsewhere.

We’ll soon see if the ideological fissures exposed by CPAC continue to widen or instead subside; the internal fights of the congressional GOP over legislative and budget priorities show all’s not well on that front.

Meanwhile, it’s finally fish-or-cut-bait time for GOP presidential candidates, or those who don’t already have near-universal name ID and some sort of history with Iowans. Newt Gingrich has said he’ll make up his mind whether to run by the end of February; John Thune seems to be on the same timetable. Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels, both sitting governors, will wait until their current legislative sessions end in April. At present, you’d have to guess Gingrich and Barbour are in, while Thune and Daniels are out, though nobody knows for sure. And it’s anybody’s guess what Palin and Huckabee will do; the shape of the field will remain amorphous until those two figure out how they will spend their time in 2012.

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Wingnut Watch: What to Look For at the CPAC Meeting

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Tomorrow every wingnut’s attention will be on Washington, where the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) begins its annual meeting and vetting session for Republican presidential candidates. The three-day affair will end with a straw poll of attendees that becomes, for better or worse, a data point in the nominating process (last year’s straw poll was sort of ruined, according to most accounts, when Ron Paul’s college-aged supporters packed the room and won it for him). The significance of the event has probably been increased by the late-developing presidential field; this really does represent, as Michael Shear of the New York Times put it yesterday, the “starter’s pistol” for the 2012 cycle.

There’s always some maneuvering about who shows up and doesn’t show up, and who’s behind the scenes manipulating things, at CPAC meetings. But this year is kind of special in that there has been a sustained and ostensibly ideological effort to boycott the event from the right. It’s been organized by social conservatives who are unhappy that a gay conservative group—known as GOProud, which is distinct from the better-known Log Cabin Republicans in that it is more explicitly conservative on issues other than GLBT rights—has been allowed to become one of the meeting’s many sponsors.

More generally, elements of the Christian Right may be using this brouhaha to send a message that they will not accept subordination to those in the conservative movement who demand an exclusive focus on fiscal issues. Indeed, in addition to the GOProud’s inclusion, one of the grievances against CPAC among social conservatives is the very fact that Mitch Daniels has been given a featured speaking slot, presumably as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels has enraged the Cultural Right by calling for a “truce” in the culture wars, which from their point of view means a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding refusal to go beyond lip service on issues like abortion, gay rights and church-state separation.

There’s a secondary behind-the-scenes issue with CPAC that’s drawn less attention outside the fever swamps of right-wing internecine warfare: anger among Islamophobes at the inclusion of a group called Muslims for America, which noted neoconservative agitator Frank Gaffney has attacked as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brouhaha in turn reflects long-standing hostility among some conservatives to the efforts of anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, long a fixture at CPAC meetings, to legitimize Muslim-American organizations and convince Republicans to pursue Muslim voters.

Finally, some conservatives have always had issues with CPAC due to concerns over the alleged financial irregularities of David Keene, long-time head of the American Conservative Union, the primary sponsor of the event. It’s often hard to untangle the personal from the ideological in these disputes, but they both definitely exist.

In any event, eight significant conservative organizations have joined the boycott of this year’s CPAC conference, the most prominent being the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. But the boycott hasn’t had much of an effect on the would-be presidents invited to speak. According to Slate’s Dave Weigel, no-shows by Sen. Jim DeMint and House Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan may be partially attributable to sympathy for the boycott, and/or for the complaints of social conservatives that their agenda is being deep-sixed.

It’s also possible that the most notable no-shows, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, are being influenced by it; it’s hard to say, though in an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody, Palin seemed to be saying in her elliptical manner that she had no problem with GOProud’s inclusion in the conference. Palin has now found reason to skip four CPACs in a row, and some of her detractors say she simply does not want to speak without a hefty fee and an unchallenged spotlight.

Others have interpreted Huckabee’s and Palin’s decision to take a pass as indicating they really aren’t running for president in 2012. Influential Iowa Republican activist Craig Robinson took this tack in ranking the presidential candidates’ potential appeal in his state’s pivotal caucuses, refusing to list Huckabee and Palin as members of the potential field.

So background noise aside, what should astute observers look for at CPAC, particularly in the cattle-call series of “featured speeches” that begin with Michele Bachmann tomorrow and conclude with fiery Tea Party congressman Alan West of Florida on Saturday? Obviously the straw poll results—and the frantic efforts of the winner and the losers to spin them—will be of interest. The speeches may get tedious to non-conservatives; this is not a venue for truth-telling challenges to conservative shibboleths, and the smell of red meat will be overpowering. You can count on metronomic shout-outs to the power and the glory of the Tea Party Movement, and vast quantities of Obama-bashing.

Since no one can rival Michele Bachmann in appealing to the conservative id, I’d keep an eye on her speech, particularly since she’s playing with the idea of running for president (probably if Palin does not run), and could be formidable in Iowa. Similarly, a much longer long-shot for the presidency, John Bolton, could use his Saturday address to play off the news from Egypt and challenge both the administration and his fellow-conservatives to treat the disturbances in the Middle East as an Islamist threat to U.S. security.

But the most interesting speeches may be from presidential wannabes not known for their ability to get conservative crowds growling and roaring. Tim Pawlenty, for example, is putting together a credible Iowa campaign and seems to be every Republican’s second choice, but desperately needs to show he can fire up the troops. Mitt Romney (who won the CPAC straw poll at this point in the 2008 cycle) needs to recapture the mojo that made him the “true conservative” candidate four years ago, particularly now that he’s being generally depicted as representing what’s left of the moderate tradition in the GOP. Rick Santorum is a good bet to bring the grievances of the Christian Right into the open. Haley Barbour could really use a speech branding himself as something other than a former tobacco lobbyist who can raise large stacks of cash when he isn’t displaying an unfortunate nostalgia for the Old South.

It should be a good show, and an illustration of the hard-core Right’s emergence from the sidelines of Republican politics into the very center of power and attention.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

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The Party of “Hell No” Parties in New Orleans

Monday, April 12th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

This marks the first of a series of semi-weekly columns (on Mondays and Fridays, whenever possible) I’ll be doing for ProgressiveFix summarizing and digesting political news from around the country as we head towards the November midterm elections and inch inexorably towards the 2012 presidential cycle.

I will periodically do reports on the various regions, and will also regularly give readers the gist (without a lot of charts, graphs or wonkery) of current polling that is of interest (those interested in charts, graphs or wonkery should visit pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com). I will also make every effort to lift horse-race analysis from isolated snippets on specific campaigns into a general sense of political trends, and give a taste of the strategic debates that are going on in both major parties.

This weekend’s major political event was the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) in New Orleans, which rivals February’s CPAC conference in Washington as an unofficial “kickoff” event for the 2012 presidential nomination contest. Naturally, SRLC featured a lot of speakers who are on the 2012 “mentioned” list, along with a couple of underlying stress points.

The stress points were (1) the widespread unhappiness with unhelpful news from Michael Steele’s Republican National Committee, which no one in New Orleans explicitly mentioned, but which was clearly a subtext (Steele’s own speech quickly emptied the room), and (2) the debate on whether Republicans should or should not be satisfied to be thought of as “the party of no,” more interested in obstructing Barack Obama’s agenda than in offering their own.

My take is that you can forget what the various SRLC speakers explicitly said on the “party of no” meme; they generally, for what it’s worth, spoke out of both sides of their mouths, first denying a hardcore negative message and then endorsing it in every rhetorical and policy specific. Newt Gingrich, for example, emphatically said the GOP had to become “the party of yes,” but then called for an appropriations-driven government shutdown to force major concessions from the president if Republicans win control of Congress this November — which is pretty amazing considering how well that strategy worked for Speaker Gingrich back in 1995 (if you are really young or new to politics, take my word for it: it bombed disastrously).

But the real rhetorical champion (and crowd favorite) of the conference was Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose speech called for a war not just on Democrats (or “liberals” and “socialists,” as he preferred to call them) but on government itself:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says Republican congressional candidates must say “no” — no to President Barack Obama, and no to anything that makes Washington relevant to the American people….

He said GOP candidates should tell voters, “Elect me and I’m going to Washington, D.C, and will try to make it as inconsequential on your life as I can make it.”

Now that should give GOPers a good positive agenda!

Meanwhile, Perry’s only real rival as crowd favorite, Sarah Palin, said Republicans should be the party of “hell no” when it came to health reform, and reprised her usual approach of personally baiting the president, particularly on energy and nuclear policy.

GOP: Smaller Tent Needed

The other big repetitive theme at the conference was what might be called a rather unnecessary demand that the GOP rebrand itself as relentlessly conservative. Probable 2012 candidate Rick Santorum, who’s been under attack during recent Iowa appearances for having endorsed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey in 2004, tried to argue that his step was aimed at ensuring pro-life Supreme Court justices, not at accepting any “big-tent” thinking on issues like abortion:

You questioned my judgment, and you have every right to do so. But please don’t question my intention to do what’s right for those little babies.

There was, of course, a 2012 presidential straw poll in New Orleans, and it was a bit of a surprise that Mitt Romney’s vote-buying exercise beat Ron Paul’s, by exactly one vote. Paul, as you might recall, won the February CPAC straw poll by packing the seats with young, readily mobilized supporters. Romney (who, unlike Paul, didn’t show up in New Orleans) utilized a group called Evangelicals for Romney that bought up a bunch of tickets and offered them for free to all comers, and then pre-spun the media by predicting defeat to Paul’s hordes.

Palin edged Gingrich among the presumably non-stuffed boxes (though Palin’s PAC did offer caribou-on-a-stick to attendees), and everyone else trailed badly (notably, Rick Perry took himself off the ballot). As Tom Schaller noted, however, Romney and Paul had limited “second-choice” support (as the straw poll allowed attendees to indicate), so effectively it was a four-way wash. Invisible Primary monitors Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin of Politico adjudged the straw poll as pretty much a nothing-burger.

Poll Watch

A new poll from Dem-leaning Kos/R2K has Democrat Roy Barnes narrowly leading the three most prominent Republican candidates for governor of Georgia; Republican-leaning Rasmussen has all three major Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire leading Democrat Paul Hodes.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs on Mondays and Fridays.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout/

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A Pretty Wild Mainstream

Monday, March 1st, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

I don’t quite know exactly where this is coming from, but there’s clearly a media effort underway to show that the conservative movement and the Republican Party are reining in “the extremists” in their ranks, presumably in order to look all ready to govern.

Today’s Politico features a long piece by Kenneth Vogel detailing claims by various conservative and Tea Party spokesmen that the influence of “the fringe” has been grossly exaggerated by “the Left,” and that in fact unruly elements are being ignored or excluded by the Right’s grownups.

“Birthers,” Birchers and militia types, we are told, are being shown the door, and haven’t been that important to begin with, except in the propaganda of the Left.

The door-keepers in Vogel’s account, however, are not a group that would normally strike you as moderately-tempered unless the bar for political sanity is set very low. One is none other than Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation, who told Vogel that activists needed “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.” That’s interesting, since Phillips’ recent National Tea Party Convention featured a race-baiting keynote address by Tom Tancredo, another speech by “birther” advocate Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, and a breakout panel headed by Christian Right extremist Roy Moore. Another is dirty-trickster and ACORN conspiracy theorist Andrew Breitbart, who is credited with disrepecting Farah at Phillips’ event. Still another is Erick Erickson of RedState, that ferocious advocate of strife against “squishes” and moderates of every variety.

If these folk want to keep “the Left” from talking about crazy people on the Right, they might want to make their policing a bit more rigorous than the occasional tip from the coach to stay on the political sidelines. “The Left” did not invent the cosponsorship of the recent Conservative Political Action Conference by the John Birch Society and the militia-friendly Oathkeepers. But more to the point, it’s a disturbing sign in intself that people like Phillips, Breitbart and Erickson are being treated as some sort of “mainstream,” where it’s perfectly normal to call President Obama a socialist, treat Democrats as presumptive traitors, and advocate an array of radical economic and social policies. All the “self-policing of the Right” narrative really shows is how far and fast conservatives have recently moved to what used to be thought of as “the fringe.” It’s cold comfort to learn there is ample frontier territory on the Right that’s well beyond that.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/heroiclife/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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A Push Into the Abyss

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

Glenn Beck”s weird tutorial that ended this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference seems to have been a big hit among attendees. Yes, it’s a bit ironic that he expressed views highly similar to those of Ron Paul, whose student-driven victory in the CPAC straw poll was heavily panned and booed by the “regular” conservatives at the conference. Yes, some may have been put off by his constant use of Alcoholics Anonymous metaphors (people who need any form of government assistance are apparently just like alcoholics who haven’t “hit bottom” yet). But there really didn’t seem to be much dissent in this crowd with the idea that “progressivism” dating all the way back to Wilson and TR has been demonic, or that Republicans have to repudiate all forms of activist government if they want to get back on the paths of righteousness.

I was particularly struck by John Fund’s analysis of Beck’s appearance for the Wall Street Journal, which treated it as a constructive warning to Republicans against the temptations of governing.

It’s true that people like Beck and Paul, and most obviously the Tea Party Movement, are encouraging Republican politicians to take an ever-more-rigid position against government spending which, in combination with perpetual demands for both fiscal discipline and major new tax cuts, suggest a level of government retrenchment far beyond anything Americans have experienced since Hoover. But it’s surprising how few observers on the Right seem to be aware of the exceptionally perilous political direction of such talk.

Chris Bowers recently offered a useful summary of recent polling on specific cuts in government spending. And the bottom line is that Americans really, really don’t want them except in small categories like NASA and non-defense foreign assistance. And this is why symbolic anti-spending measures like never-to-be-enacted constitutional balanced budget amendments (Tim Pawlenty’s favorite panacea) and various “freezes” have always been so popular among GOP politicians. It’s probably poetic justice for conservatives that decades of anti-government demagoguery have convinced so many people that it would be easy to slash spending by attacking “waste” or “bureaucrats” or “welfare” or “foreign aid,” but the reality is that any serious attack on federal spending will have to include major cuts in defense; very popular domestic entitlement programs; or very popular domestic discretionary programs like public education and law enforcement.

So all the white-hot rhetoric about spending you hear from GOPers these days carries some pretty interesting implications, particularly for the bulk of Republicans who also favor a big escalation of the Afghanistan War (and perhaps a new war with Iran), and who have no prescriptions for economic growth other than still more tax cuts. I’m sure that Beck and Paul would have no problem calling for the abolition of Medicare and Social Security as they exist today, but are GOP politicians ready to follow? I don’t think so. And this is the real reason they struggle to articulate a governing agenda for 2010 and beyond.

Maybe John Fund thinks it’s good for Republicans to regularly get a kick in the pants from right-wing figures whose own views, if put to a vote, wouldn’t get support from more than a quarter of the electorate. But it looks to me more like a push into a political abyss. Maybe they can get away with fierce-but-vague rhetoric and opposition to Democratic initiatives for a while, but ultimately they will have to come right out and admit that the fiscal arithmetic of their own “thinking” would lead to a federal government more like that of the Coolidge administration (Beck’s favorite) than that of the Reagan administration. If they do, it won’t be Beck or Paul who has to pay the political price.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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