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MEMO TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: How to Win On Foreign Policy in 2012

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

Obama as Commander in Chief

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MEMO TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: How to Win On Foreign Policy in 2012

To: President Barack Obama
From: Jim Arkedis, Director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s National Security Project
RE: How to Win on Foreign Policy in 2012

Mr. President:

I hope and trust that you had better things to do than watch the GOP’s last two debates on foreign policy. I took care of that for you, and reread the transcripts just because I am a masochist.

It’s clear the Republican field is offering nothing new on foreign policy this election cycle, and that creates a real political opening. This memo serves as a guideline for how you can use the issue to your advantage on the campaign trail in 2012. In a nutshell, the public must see you as a stronger leader: Your numbers are hurting there right now, and you should trumpet your national security record to help them rebound. The trick is that if voters view you as a strong leader generally speaking, it will create a spill-over effect, bolstering their confidence in your leadership on domestic issues (read: the economy).

No matter who ends up as the Republican nominee for president, they’re not going to beat you on foreign policy substance. Most of the GOP candidates offer vague criticism that you’ve handled Iran badly, but can do no better than propose “crippling sanctions” as a solution, which are somehow better than the comprehensive ones you’ve enacted.

On areas where they actually differ with you, there still isn’t that much daylight: Michelle Bachmann tried to ding you for sending thirty, rather than forty, thousand troops to Afghanistan, and Rick Perry thinks that any withdrawal timeline from that country is a bad idea (even though Mitt Romney, in the second debate, basically agrees with your timeline for withdrawal). But you know that those are hardly winning arguments with the American public, 53 percent of whom would prefer to wash our collective hands of the whole mess. The GOP field (minus perennial laggard Rick Santorum) might get closer to broad (but confused) public sentiment to slash foreign aid, but on policy alone, this is probably their only opportunity to score political points.

The main conservative line of attack is stale, but potentially effective: They’re going to out-muscle you. I was absolutely shocked that no one critiqued you on “leading from behind” in the debate, but that phrase is sure to appear–on repeat–in ads before next November. But heck, you’ve even got Jon Huntsman — the guy you appointed to be our emissary to China — saying you “can’t lead”! It could erode the public’s confidence in your leadership abilities.

For now, the GOP seemed mostly content to insinuate this alleged weakness: Mitt Romney claimed that your re-election guarantees Iran will get a nuclear bomb; both he and Newt refuse to negotiate with terrorists (you do, in case you weren’t sure); and Herman Cain doesn’t think waterboarding is torture, which is why he’d use it. Most bizarre was Bachmann’s assertion in the first debate that America has lost the War On Terrorism under your watch. I wonder how Usama Bin Laden feels about that.

You’re no slouch when it comes to politicking, and you know that this election will be won and lost on each candidate’s ability to make a case for economic growth. It’s understandable that you might want to minimize foreign policy on the stump this year.

That’s a mistake, because your ability to make an economic case should be buoyed by your solid record on foreign and security policy. This might not be intuitive, so hear me out:

You killed Bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders, helped oust Mohamar Qaddafi, have ended the Iraq war, and protected the country from a massive domestic attack. Voters have noticed: a November Gallup poll has your general foreign policy approval rating up five percent over disapproval, an astounding 63 percent support you on terrorism, and the numbers are good on handling Iraq and even Afghanistan.

More importantly, if you sell your foreign policy achievements in the right way, it will paint you as a strong leader. That’s critical: Americans want their president to project an image of strength, and you’re hurting there right now. Between May (when Usama Bin Laden was killed) and August, the percentage of Americans who viewed you as a strong leader slipped from 55 to 44 percent. Here’s the kicker: If you’re seen as a credible, effective Commander-in-Chief, voters are more likely to believe that your leadership can pull them out of the economic slump.

I realize that you’re not the type of guy who wants to pound the podium and out-flex your opponent. That’s okay. However, you still have to keep in mind that foreign policy is an emotional issue for voters, and that you have to connect with their gut subconscious before you can lead them elsewhere. Below, I offer four ways you can use foreign policy to increase your leadership credentials in 2012.

1. Explain your vision and your values. Having a good track record isn’t worth a damn if you don’t connect with voters. They’ve got to feel you on these issues. Even assuming the GOP nominee is the shape-shifting Mitt Romney, he’ll sell a consistent, militaristic vision of American exceptionalism that might resonate with America’s gut.

Don’t cede that ground, just tell your own version. You might not make a major foreign policy campaign address, but your stump speech absolutely must include your vision of America’s leading place in the world in the 21st century. It doesn’t have to be “rah-rah”. It does have to be convey some emotion using two frames: “strong and smart.”

Explain that you know that the threats facing America have changed since the end of the Cold War, and we must rise to meet the challenge. That requires strong American leadership, complemented by strong alliances and backed the world’s strongest military.

But it also requires a laser-focus on the long term: American strength in the 21st century means being smart, too. Safety at home is enhanced by spreading American values abroad, and that requires more robust diplomacy to expand economic and political opportunity for all. That’s a great way to connect on the economy, too: Economic strength is what drives American power, and that means we need to out-innovate, out-produce, and out-think our challenges.

2. Tell a us a story (often). Specifically, tell us the story of how you decided to send SEAL Team Six to kill Bin Laden. Voters remember stories, not policies. So give them the best you got, because it will reinforce your image as a substantive Commander-in-Chief. You could recount the version you gave CBS’ 60 Minutes in May. It doesn’t have to be overly dramatic: just calmly recount the facts and remember that details are good. The story sells itself, and shows America that you made a bold, gutsy, strong decision. Most importantly, the country, not your administration, was successful.

3. Use military veterans as surrogates: Your campaign should have the most robust veterans surrogate network in the history of American politics. In an age when Congressional approval languishes in the single digits (and yours are in the 40s), guess who the public believes? The military. A September 2011 poll reinforces a standing trend: 92 percent of Americans are confident in the military and hence, its veterans.

Remember the Swiftboat Veterans who sunk John Kerry’s campaign? They tipped the balance because they were credible messengers. This year, you’ve got to get out ahead of the game. A few days ago, I received a campaign-sponsored email from Rob Diamond, who runs “Veterans and Military Families for Obama” (full disclosure: Rob is a friend). You need to give him every resource he asks for because he needs to pack cable news, campaign rallies, and small-town newspapers in military-heavy swing-states like Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado with veterans supporting you as the Commander-in-Chief they were proud to serve.

4. Attack Republicans as reckless. You have to make the public’s decision on national security a binary choice. If you’re to be a strong leader and a tough, competent Commander-in-Chief, you need to define (presumptively) Mitt Romney is reckless and out-of-touch. A poll from back in 2008 found this to be an effective attack against Republicans on foreign policy, and I sense that it would continue to work in 2012.

Why? Well, Romney’s rhetoric isn’t that different from George W. Bush’s. In an October speech at the Citadel, Romney promised to reverse proposed defense cuts, resurrect the neocon missile-defense shield, and build six more navy ships per year, even though America’s wars are coming to a close and the country faces a massive debt issue. Does that sound smart, efficient and strong in the 21st century, or does it echo the reckless George Bush, a playground bully who fights but doesn’t think and remains stuck in the Cold War?

Mr. President, it’s going to be a tough election. But used correctly, you can turn a solid record on matters of foreign policy and national security into a real asset this year, and just maybe tip the balance in a few key states. And how’s this for a bonus? The GOP isn’t expecting that you’d dare try.

If you’ve read this far, you might follow me on Twitter @JimArkedis

Photo credit here.

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Wingnut Watch: The Rise of Fearless Republicans

Wednesday, September 14th, 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

President ObamaThere are still some observers in Washington who believe congressional Republicans will be forced by President Obama’s jobs speech and proposal to cooperate with Democrats on some sort of emergency economic legislation. But that’s not the perception, and certainly is not the inclination, of the citizens of Wingnut World, who greeted the president’s speech with a combo platter of ideological hostility and mocking indifference.

Almost universally, conservative opinion-leaders insist on calling the proposal a “stimulus” rather than a “jobs” bill. Given their equally universal claim that the 2009 economic stimulus legislation did not create any real jobs (viz. Rick Perry’s claim during the Florida candidates’ debate), this indicates its dead-on-arrival nature among conservative leaders and probably the House. Once the White House made it clear it proposed to “pay” for the jobs proposal with measures that include a limitation on itemized tax deductions by high earners, conservative condemnation solidified even more.

The bigger picture, of course, is that conservatives have long settled on a message and policy agenda that insists nothing other than business tax cuts, federal spending cuts, and aggressive deregulation can possibly be considered as helpful to the current and future U.S. economy. Public investments? That’s just a code word for more spending or worse yet, pork. Temporary relief for the unemployed or the under-employed? That’s just more stimulus, reflecting the failed ideas of John Maynard Keynes. During the long GOP presidential debate on September 12, no concept beyond disabling government was mentioned by any of the candidates with respect to reviving the economy.

But aside from hostility to the specifics of Obama’s proposal, another note is steadily creeping into conservative messaging on the economic and other debates in Washington: contempt for the president’s political influence. Here’s National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson on the jobs proposal:

In truth, Obama is out of arrows. His quiver is bare, because he came into office as a rhetorical president without much experience or any ideas other than growing even bigger a tired big government. And now the public realizes that both the speeches and the big spending do not work. The result is that we collectively know what the president cannot any longer say — and it proves far greater than what he can say. He is well past the point of Jerry Ford’s WIN buttons or Jimmy Carter’s fist-pounding malaise speech.

This sense that Republicans have nothing to fear any longer from Obama (in the same piece quoted above, Hanson compared Obama today to George W. Bush towards the end of his second term) is increasingly pervasive, and will almost certainly be intensified by hype over the Republican victory in the special election to fill Anthony Wiener’s House seat in New York. If New York Jews are abandoning Obama, many conservatives are undoubtedly saying to themselves, how can he possibly win in 2012?

If, as has been convincingly argued, Obama’s jobs speech represented a definitive effort to force Republicans into a choice between cooperation and a damaging display of indifference to the country’s economic suffering, conservatives show every indication that they will happily risk the latter. This in turn could have an effect on the tone of the GOP presidential contest, where a very confident party with fewer fears about electability could indulge itself in a base-pleasing competition tilting very far right.

The CNN-Tea Party Express debate in Florida certainly showed signs of that dynamic. A lot of headlines about this and the previous candidates’ debate focused on criticisms of Rick Perry’s harsh rhetoric on Social Security, suggesting that there was in fact a limit to how far right the primary electorate would choose to let a potential nominee go. But the fact that uber-conservative Michele Bachmann has joyfully joined in the bashing of Perry for disrespecting the very existence of Social Security shows that this may be less a matter of sensitivity to mainstream public opinion and more a matter of recognizing the strong popularity of federal retirement programs among conservative base voters—who are on average relatively old. Meanwhile, Perry’s right flank was meaningfully exposed during the debate in exchanges on immigration and his aborted effort to inoculate Texas schoolgirls against the HPV virus. He’s in some danger of looking like he feels more compassion towards illegal aliens and sexually active teenagers than towards the conservative seniors who belief they have earned every nickel of their Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The skirmishing between Perry and other candidates in the debate may have helped obscure the virtual unanimity of the candidates in support of policy positions that would have been considered wingnutty as recently as the last presidential cycle. (The shouts from the audience of “Yes!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked if a hypothetical person with no health insurance who is suffering from a fatal disease should be allowed to die was representative of the gulf between the conservative GOP base and the rest of the country). One interesting exception was foreign policy, where first Jon Huntsman and then Rick Perry called for an end to the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan without explicit contradiction from other candidates. It will be interesting to see if Perry’s rivals, especially Mitt Romney, choose to go after Perry from the right on this subject in a direct appeal to what used to be called one leg in the three-legged- stool of American conservatism: “national security conservatives.”

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Wingnut Watch: Jim DeMint’s Filibuster, T-Paw and Bachmann’s Catfight.

Wednesday, July 27th, 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

Like most politically active Americans, the residents of Wingnut World are heavily focused on the debt limit negotiations.  Unlike many politically active Americans, hard-core conservatives by and large are just fine with a failure to reach any agreement.  In some cases, it’s because they don’t buy the idea that failure to raise the debt limit will cause a default on federal government obligations.  The “Full Faith and Credit Act”, introduced some time back by Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Club for Growth) and backed by most Tea Party groups, is designed to bolster that case by directing the Treasury to pay creditors, the armed services, and Social Security recipients first if the debt limit is reached (this approach, of dubious legality, would virtually guarantee a major shutdown of unprotected federal programs).

Then there are those conservatives who don’t necessarily dispute that a debt limit increase is necessary to avoid a default, or that a default would produce economic havoc, but nonetheless argue that cutting federal spending, taxes and debt is more important (economically and morally) in the long run. Thus, they are adamantly opposed to any deal that doesn’t meet the politically impossible “Cut, Cap and Balance” template.  This is the official position of the 183 conservative organizations, including those that have signed onto the “Cut, Cap and Balance” Pledge, along with nine presidential candidates (ten if you count likely candidate Rick Perry), 12 senators and 39 House Members.  There is no deal anywhere in the works that these folks can support without subjecting themselves to charges of hypocrisy and betrayal.  And the senators among them—including wingnut Big Dog Jim DeMint—have regularly threatened a filibuster against any deal they don’t like, which would produce highly dangerous delays even if it is not backed by sufficient votes to thwart the majority.

Outside this circle of solemn oaths to wreck the national economy if it’s necessary to pursue their ideological agenda, conservatives vary in what they might consider acceptable, with some focused on the precise extent of the concessions that might be wrung from the administration and congressional Democrats, and some standing with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in making political point-scoring against the administration the top priority. Virtually no conservatives have conceded the possibility of a deal including revenue measures that aren’t pared with tax rate cuts. And on top of everything else, profound institutional rivalries between House and Senate Republicans that have already become a problem in coordinating GOP strategy will make expeditious final action difficult. It’s going to be a very long week.

Meanwhile, on the presidential campaign trail, the rivalry between those Minnesota twins, Michele Bachmann and Tim Pawlenty, has been heating up. T-Paw has recently taken several shots at Bachmann’s record in Congress—and lack of executive experience—along with making what looked to be a thinly veiled reference to her medical condition as a possible problem (he later flatly stated he had never seen Bachmann suffer from any incapacity in fulfilling her duties). Bachmann fired back harshly with a denunciation of Pawlenty’s earlier positions on health reform, climate change, and TARP, suggesting he had a lot in common with Barack Obama.

The knife-fight reflects the fact that Pawlenty is fighting for his political life in Iowa, and can ill afford to lose badly to Bachmann at the August 13 Iowa GOP Straw Poll. But both Minnesotans are increasingly laboring under the tall shadow of Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is reportedly 99% sure to announce a candidacy next month. Already in the double-digits in national and some state polls (a statute that poor T-Paw has yet to reach after months of campaigning), Perry probably benefitted from the decision of the Iowa GOP to keep him off the Straw Poll ballot, which means he doesn’t have to rush his announcement and won’t suffer from a poor showing in Ames.  But Perry also courted controversy on the Right the other day by expressing indifference to New York’s recent legalization of same-sex marriage on states’ rights grounds:

“Our friends in New York six weeks ago passed a statute that said marriage can be between two people of the same sex. And you know what? That’s New York, and that’s their business, and that’s fine with me,” he said to applause from several hundred GOP donors in Aspen, Colo. “That is their call. If you believe in the 10th Amendment, stay out of their business.”

This comment immediately attracted criticism from Christian Right leaders, including Gary Bauer and Iowa kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, who don’t think their “marriage is between a man and a woman” stance is a matter of state preference any more than individual preference. Perry’s stance, and the casual attitude he conveyed in talking about it, could give Bachmann fresh traction in her struggle to compete with the Texan for Christian Right support.

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Balanced Budget Amendment: A Gimmicky Disaster-in-Waiting.

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

By refusing to budge on tax revenues, House Republicans have blown a rare chance to get Democrats to swallow trillions of dollars in federal budget cuts. As New York Times columnist David Brooks notes in a shrewd piece today, cuts of such magnitude would have provoked a rancorous split between President Obama and liberals.

Instead, Republicans have opted for ideological purity, including today’s purely symbolic vote on a balanced budget amendment that isn’t going anywhere.

The Balanced Budget Amendment (BBA) is an almost perfect embodiment of the contemporary GOP’s gimmicky approach to governing. It’s an uncomplicated way to convey toughness, and it allows conservatives to drape themselves in the mantle of fiscal responsibility without taking the heat for cutting specific programs. And like many of the faux solutions to which Republicans seem fatally attracted, it would damage our economy.

A balanced budget amendment would handcuff the federal government in times of emergency. Backers say the rule could be waived during recessions, but it’s never clear until after when recessions begin and end. Since most of the states have balanced budget mandates, only Washington can spend at the right time and on a scale sufficient to exert counter-cyclical pressure during downturns. The federal government’s superior resources and borrowing capacity make it in effect the nation’s fiscal reserve.

Republicans almost rammed through a BBA in 1997. In the years that followed, the Clinton administration produced balanced budgets the old-fashioned way, by cutting actual programs and making trade-offs among competing public priorities.

Nonetheless, House Republicans once again claim that only a Constitutional amendment can force Congress to do its fiscal duty. Their “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan not only would bar budget deficits, but would also limit federal spending to 18% of economic output, two points below the average of the past several decades.

In other words, it would force massively disruptive cuts in all federal spending, from Medicare and Social Security to the Pentagon and domestic programs. Not even Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, the GOP’s uber fiscal hawk, goes this far.

At the same time, the proposed amendment would make it well-nigh impossible to raise taxes, which would require a two-thirds vote in the House and the Senate. It’s a formula for rigidity at best and fiscal paralysis at worst. It would invite judicial interference in a power the Constitution unambiguously delegates to Congress – the power of the purse – and narrow the scope of democratic decision-making.

So why are House Republicans pushing it now? Because they know that, in the end, at least some House Republicans will have to vote to raise the debt limit to avert an economic calamity. They want the political cover of having voted for a “permanent” solution to the debt crisis – the BBA – to shield them from the Tea Party’s wrath.

Senate Democrats of course aren’t about to let Republicans write their economic ideology into the nation’s fundamental law, and President Obama has threatened a veto. Still, it’d be a relief if Republicans could find ways to score political points with their base that don’t injure our economy — either by plunging the nation into default, or enshrining archaic notions of a feeble national government in the U.S. Constitution.

Photo Credit: Common Pixels

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WingNut Watch: Social Issues Very Much In-Play For GOP Field.

Tuesday, June 7th, 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

Last week’s less-than-positive jobs report revived ever-hopeful mainstream media talk that economic issues would decisively trump cultural or constitutional issues in the Republican Party’s councils. And indeed, some reporters saw this long-awaited sign even in the entrails of the Christian Right: the annual Washington get-together of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which attracted most of the GOP presidential field. Here’s how Reuters described the confab, under the title, “Social issues fade as Republicans court conservatives”:

Christian conservatives looking to put a Republican in the White House heard a lot about the economy on Friday in a sign that their social issues may take a back seat in 2012…. In contrast to some previous presidential campaigns, social issues like gay marriage and abortion have not been prominent topics for Republicans hopefuls seeking to replace President Barack Obama in next year’s election.

That’s a Beltway wish-fulfillment view of the FFC event, and of contemporary Republican politics generally.

But it’s also not exactly right: There was lots of talk about those supposedly forgotten “social issues” at Ralph’s soiree. The proto-candidate for president who defines the left wing of the GOP these days, Jon Huntsman, did not consign these issues to the “back seat.” Here’s what he had to say:

“As governor of Utah I supported and signed every pro-life bill that came to my desk,” Huntsman said, rattling off legislation that made second trimester abortions illegal, a bill that he said allowed “women to know about the pain that abortion causes an unborn child,” a bill “requiring parental permission for an abortion,” and another piece of legislation “that would trigger a ban on abortions in Utah if Roe vs. Wade were overturned.”

“You see,” Huntsman explained, “I do not believe the Republican Party should focus only on our economic life to the neglect of our human life.”

Turning the “social issues don’t matter” meme on its head, another supposedly non-social-conservative candidate, Mitt Romney, argued that economic and fiscal problems represented a “moral crisis.”

Most MSM treatment of the FFC event missed the rather central point that Ralph Reed’s organization is not a full-on Christian Right group purely devoted to social issues, but instead a “teavangelical” effort explicitly designed to merge the religious and limited-government impulses of the GOP.  There is already a massive overlap of affiliation with Tea Party and Christian Right identities.  And there’s a more important if less understood overlap in the Tea Party and Christian Right theories of what’s gone wrong with America: an emphasis on alleged judicial usurpations of state and private-sector powers going back to the New Deal, and a hostility to supposed cultural elites who favor both secularization of American society and maintenance of the progressive legacy of New Deal/Great Society programs.

There’s really not that much tension between the economic and social wings of today’s conservative movement.  And both appear to converge in an aggressive foreign policy, focused especially on the Middle East. FFC Speaker Rep. Michele Bachmann ended her remarks with a prayer that concluded:

Our nation hangs precariously in the balance financially, morally and also in our relationship with the rest of the world — with our position toward Israel.

Another already-announced presidential candidate, who reportedly received the most impressive response, Herman Cain, told FFC attendee:

“The Cain doctrine would be real simple when it comes to Israel: You mess with Israel, you mess with the United States of America,” he said to a long standing ovation.

In general, bad economic indicators don’t seem to be tilting the conservative movement or the Republican Party in any sort of economics-only direction.  Indeed, to the extent that Republican economic policy now focuses on short-term federal spending cuts and long-term elimination of New Deal/Great Society entitlements, it converges with non-economic policies aimed at a cultural counter-revolution remaking America according to mid-twentieth-century values and opportunities.  The very people who want to criminalize abortions and restore “traditional marriages,” also want to get rid of unions and collective efforts to make health care or pensions universally available.

…

On the presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney formally declared his candidacy, but on the same day, in Boston, Sarah Palin spoke out against the Massachusetts health reform plan.  Palin’s impossible-to-divine ambitions received vast attention. … Michele Bachmann has reportedly recruited Ed Rollins, Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, to her cause.  … Newt Gingrich followed up his disastrous campaign launch by suddenly announcing a two-week vacation to the Greek Islands, subsequently losing his Iowa political director. … Jon Huntsman became the first candidate to officially announce he was skipping Iowa.  And polls consistently show Mitt Romney narrowly leading a field of candidates who will soon be attacking him on many grounds, most notably RomneyCare.  While Romney appears to think his economic message and resume will make him ultimately irresistible to both primary and general election voters, it’s unclear he can overcome hostility to his health care record among the former, and coolness towards his Wall Street Republican orientation among the latter.  We’ll soon know if what Romney has to do to get the Republican presidential nomination will prove to be too much for him, or too much for the November 2012 electorate.

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Wingnut Watch: Cain Raised as Mitt Romney, Frontrunner, Foiled By Microwave Popcorn

Wednesday, June 1st, 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

If Newt Gingrich’s self-destructive criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals pushed Republicans more firmly into Ryan’s corner (e.g., Tim Pawlenty’s forced statement that he would sign a bill implementing Ryan’s budget as president, even though he intends to present his own “ideas”), you might think the results of last Tuesday’s special congressional election in New York would then exert counter-pressure against Ryan’s plan.  After all, it’s pretty clear that Republican candidate Jane Corwin’s support for Ryan’s budget was the central issue in the campaign, and contributed to her loss in a strong GOP district.  But for the most part, conservative opinion-leaders are resisting the pressure, either rationalizing Corwin’s loss as attributable to other factors (mainly through an unconvincing claim she would have won without the presence of self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate Jack Davis splitting the GOP vote), or simply arguing that Republicans need to do a better job of explaining Ryan’s proposal.

In any event, last week’s results guarantee that Democrats will keep relentlessly tarring the entire GOP with the unpopularity of Ryan’s specific take on Medicare.  Whatever individual Republicans actually think, they probably calculate they’d rather take their chances on a general election loss over Medicare than invite a primary challenge by dissing Ryan.  Many also undoubtedly hope the president will eventually give them “cover” by supporting a budget deal including enough changes to Medicare and Medicaid that makes it describable, accurately or not, as Ryan Lite.

Elsewhere, it’s been another wild week on the Republican presidential campaign trail, particularly on the Wingnut Right.  Three national polls of Republicans have shown Georgia-based radio talk host Herman Cain leaping past more highly-regarded competitors to a high-single or low-double digit position of support, despite low name ID and meager (up until now) media coverage.  The Hermanator (as he likes to call himself) has already been regularly winning straw polls after candidate speaking engagements, and is at this point the unquestioned favorite of Tea Party activists around the country.  He’s been wowing audiences in Iowa in particular, and a Public Policy Institute poll of likely Caucus-goers in the Hawkeye state to be released later today will reportedly show him running second.

The media attention Cain has now earned will be a mixed blessing, making him more of a national conservative celebrity, but also inviting the kind of negative scrutiny he has avoided as a fringe candidate.  It could well produce both effects, as illustrated by the mockery he’s already getting for conflating the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution in his announcement speech.  In Wingnut World, it’s gospel that the latter document incorporates the former, which is how both Christian Right and Tea Party folk import God, natural law, and an implicit right of resistance against Big Government into the Constitution.  Odds are Cain wasn’t being ignorant, but was simply blowing a dog whistle to conservative activists.  His insouciance about foreign affairs could be a bigger problem, as could publicity about his past support for TARP and his service on the Federal Reserve Board back in the 1990s.  Above all, Cain’s new prominence will bring race back into the national political discussion with a vengeance, even though many of his supporters seem to feel he represents  sort of definitive rebuttal against charges that anti-Obama sentiments reflect racial undertones.

Even as polls have been raising Cain, however, an even bigger phenomenon could be unfolding as Sarah Palin—assumed to have been driven away from a 2012 run by poor poll numbers, savage Republican Elite criticism, and her highly remunerative day jobs—is suddenly behaving very much like a proto-candidate.  First up, it came out that she had commissioned a full-length feature film centering on her persecution by the forces of Establishment Evil, to be released next month in Iowa, followed by other early primary states.  Then she sprang into action by becoming the chief Celebrity Guest at the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, and is on the verge of launching a bus tour that will eventually make its way to Iowa.  By all accounts, she’s viewing this re-emergence on the national scene as a test of whether she could launch a viable candidacy while pursuing an “unconventional campaign” that apparently would involve low-substance “patriotic” appearances with her large and famous family in tow.

The impact of all this turbulence on the rest of the field is an interesting sub-plot.  As someone whose candidacy would be mortally endangered by a Christian Right/Tea Party coalescence around Cain, or a campaign by her doppelganger Palin, Michele Bachmann had quite the nerve-wracking week, including a damaging and clumsily handled no-show at an important Iowa Republican fundraiser she was supposed to headline.  Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, considered the likely beneficiary of any surge of support for a presumably unelectable right-wing candidate like Cain or Palin, made his first appearance in Iowa in many months.  As he sought to maintain a delicate balance between dissing Iowa and committing to the kind of full-tilt campaign in the state that undid him in 2008, Romney delivered a shirt-sleeve speech to an audience at a state facility in Des Moines.  But before he could get into his altar call, fire alarms went off and Romney had to cut short his remarks and urge the crowd to calmly head to the exits.  Ever snake-bit in Iowa, the Mittster was foiled on this occasion by someone overcooking a bag of microwave popcorn.

Picture Credit: DonkeyHotey

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Will Marshall in Politico on the Gang of Six

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
The Progressive Policy Institute




by The Progressive Policy Institute

Head on over to Politico’s site today to see Will Marshall’s take on the implosion of the Gang of Six, a group of Senators trying to forge a bipartisan compromise on the budget. Here’s an excerpt, but click here to read the whole piece:

Sen. Tom Coburn’s defection from the Gang of Six obviously sets back prospects for restoring fiscal sanity in Washington. Nonetheless, the now diminished Gang remains the only plausible vehicle for advancing the political breakthrough achieved by the president’s Fiscal Commission.

To the surprise of many jaded Washington observers, the commission struck a fiscal “grand bargain” that marries tax and entitlement reform. Defying the Norquist Doctrine, Coburn and two other GOP senators agreed to close tax expenditures and use the savings not only to lower individual and corporate tax rates, but also to cut the federal deficit. This prompted a reciprocal act of political courage by several Democrats led by Sen. Dick Durbin, who embraced Social Security reforms unpopular with liberals.

Continue reading the whole piece at Politico.

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Obama Reframes the Fiscal Fight

Thursday, April 14th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Entering the lists at last, President Obama delivered a stout defense of progressive values yesterday and checked the rightward drift of the deficit debate.  For all its strengths, though, his speech also left open the question of whether he and his party are ready to grapple effectively with surging health and entitlement costs.

Obama started with a history lesson. As the Tea Party harks back to 19th century conceptions of limited government, he reminded Americans that the nation’s progress since then has been built upon a pragmatic synthesis of free enterprise and progressive governance. The extent of public activism required to create optimal conditions for shared prosperity is always a legitimate matter of debate, but the basic need for it shouldn’t be.

By insisting that deficit reduction leave room for strategic public investments in scientific research, modern infrastructure and education, Obama underscored a vital distinction that was being lost in the scramble to cut government spending: Reducing budget deficits is integral to reviving America’s economic dynamism. For most Americans, the priority is to get our economy moving again, not shrink government.

Obama also pushed back hard against Rep. Paul Ryan’s delusional budget, which asserts that the America’s path back to fiscal responsibility entails 100 percent spending cuts and 0 percent tax increases. In endorsing (finally!) his own fiscal commission’s plan, the president has set up a clear choice between the GOP’s fanatical devotion to shielding the rich from higher taxes and a bipartisan approach that exempts no one from sacrifice.

The president’s confident rejection of GOP tax dogma left House GOP Whip Eric Cantor sputtering. He was reduced to repeating the ridiculous Republican mantra that asking the wealthy to pay higher taxes is tantamount to killing America’s small businesses. Please Eric, bring it on: this is a debate progressives can win.

But Obama can’t just win debates. He needs to preside over passage of a comprehensive deficit-reduction package that, in a divided government, can only be achieved on a bipartisan basis. If he wants moderate Republicans to play on raising revenues – and a few intrepid souls like Sens. Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss have begun to do – he is going to have to convince Democrats to play on entitlement reform.

Here his speech fell short. Clearly mindful of President Clinton’s success in rallying the pubic behind his plans to protect Medicare and Medicaid during the 1995-96 budget battle, Obama categorically ruled out structural changes in how government finances those programs. That could prove to be a mistake.

It’s one thing for Democrats to reject the size of Ryan’s proposed cuts in the big public health care programs. But for both substantive and tactical reasons, they shouldn’t reject out of hand innovative devises to constrain entitlement costs.

It’s 2011, not 1996, and the baby boom retirement is underway, not over the horizon. This demographic surge, combined with health care costs that have been rising for decades faster than the economy has grown, are the real drivers of America’s debt crisis. To put a governor on the engine of federal health care spending, Ryan has proposed moving Medicare to a premium support model, and turning Medicaid into a federal block grant.

In his speech, Obama endorsed an alternative: strengthening provisions in his health reform bill to slow the unsustainable rate of health care cost growth. These provisions would encourage health providers to shift from fee-for-service to fixed fees for bundled services or capitated payments, which reward the value rather than volume of care delivered. These and other Obamacare provisions, including the independent commission set up to explore efficiencies in Medicare, are all good ideas. But even if they work, it will take a very long time for them to reach the scale necessary to break the back of medical inflation.

In the meantime, we need to protect public budgets from surging health care costs that threaten to soak up every dollar of revenue raised by 2040. If premium support and block grants are ruled out – even though some prominent liberals and Democrats have long supported one or the other — progressives need to come up with an alternative.

The political “grand bargain” Obama must strike couldn’t be clearer. It’s embedded in the fiscal commission plan: GOP support for raising revenues in return for Democratic support for constraining public health care and retirement costs. As the political action now shifts to the Senate, Obama needs to challenge his own party too.

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Going Bananas

Monday, April 4th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

It’s spring and the sap is rising in Washington – especially among Tea Party militants. They seem determined to shut down the federal government, even if it means making the United States look like a plus-size banana republic.

House Speaker John Boehner has been trying to talk sense to his vast freshman class, but they are in no mood for compromise. Although Democrats have agreed to reduce current spending by $33 billion, the GOP’s fiscal fundamentalists won’t budge from the $61 billion in cuts they have already passed on a party-line vote.

Nor will they back off from a slew of nakedly partisan policy riders calculated to be radioactive to Democrats. These poison pill measures, for example, would cut funding for Planned Parenthood, bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, and block implementation of parts of President Obama’s health care law.

The government will run out of money if no agreement is reached by midnight Friday. The prospect of government agencies shutting down and hundreds of thousands of federal workers being furloughed doesn’t faze Tea Partiers. Having drunk deep of their own strange infusions, they apparently believe the public shares their contempt for the federal government. More experienced GOP hands know better.

“Let’s all be honest, if you shut the government down, it’ll end up costing more than you save because you interrupt contracts. There are a lot of problems with the idea of shutting the government. It is not the goal. The goal is to cut spending,” Boehner warned at a news conference last week.

The economic costs of a shutdown, of course, aren’t the real issue. Behind closed doors, Boehner no doubt is reminding his caucus of the fierce public backlash against Congressional Republicans who forced two shutdowns in the mid-1990s. These battles energized Democrats and set the stage for Bill Clinton’s political resurgence and reelection in 1996.

All this is ancient history to Tea Partiers, who believe they won a public mandate in 2010 for a drastic and immediate fiscal retrenchment. But a more dispassionate reading of the midterm results suggests that the voters’ foremost concern was the economy’s poor performance. Yes, they also want to reduce federal deficits, but timing is crucial. With unemployment falling at last, GOP demands for austerity now are likely to strike many Americans as premature. Plus, what the public wants is for their elected leaders to pull together and tackle the nation’s economic and fiscal problems, not bring government to a grinding halt.

What’s more, House Republicans are fighting on the wrong battleground, haggling over discretionary spending programs that comprise only 13 percent of the federal budget. Slowing and eventually reversing today’s rapid run-up of public debt will require a combination of tax reform and constraints on the automatic spending growth of “mandatory” programs, chiefly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will introduce tomorrow a comprehensive debt reduction package along these lines. The Ryan plan is really radical: it would voucherize Medicare and turn Medicaid into a block grant. But at least it will focus the House on the real drivers of our fiscal crisis and realistic fixes.

Meanwhile, over in the Senate, there’s been a striking, bipartisan convergence around the idea that the comprehensive blueprint developed by the President’s Fiscal Commission should be the starting point for fiscal reform. Remarkably, 64 Senators (half from each party) endorsed that approach, as has the bipartisan “Gang of Six” led by Senators Mark Warner and Saxby Chambliss.

This is the main arena for serious action to restore fiscal stability in Washington. The sooner we move beyond the distracting “squirmish’ in the House, the better.

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Wingnut Watch: Iowa’s Cattle Calls and Conferences Continue, But is it Too Much “Camp Christian”?

Wednesday, March 30th, 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

Aside from rather predictable carping about the president’s handling of the military intervention in Libya, the wingnut world has been preoccupied the last week with an anticipatory sense of betrayal on federal spending and with sorting through its 2012 presidential options.

Conservative activists continue to pant for a government shutdown over FY 2012 appropriations, and are alarmed at any and all Republican efforts to avoid a shutdown via negotiations with the White House or congressional Democrats. News that Speaker John Boehner has begun talks with “moderate Democrats” in the House as a hedge against conservative defections on a compromise plan has spurred shrieks throughout the wingnut-o-sphere.

RedState’s Erick Erickson left no cliché undeployed in announcing that the GOP leadership had “no spine” and was so “scared of its own shadow” that it would “sell its soul, betray its base, and out-negotiate itself.” Conservative activists vary somewhat in their bottom lines; some are demanding no compromise on the policy riders aimed at Planned Parenthood, EPA and NPR; some want language crippling “ObamaCare;” some just want much deeper cuts, even though Democrats seem willing to reach the targets originally announced by House Republicans. Some want a separate deal on “entitlement reform” as part of the initial discussions on a long-term budget. And some will scream about any deal blessed by the America-hating socialist in the White House.

From a tactical point of view, of course, this conservative agitation will give Republican negotiators a bit of extra leverage, so long as the rank-and-file in the House doesn’t take it too seriously and sabotage any ultimate agreement.

Even as they keep a suspicious watch on their current representatives in government, conservatives are already avidly engaged in the 2012 presidential nomination contest, particularly in Iowa, where the whole game begins. There were two major Iowa events last weekend: a home-schoolers conference addressed by Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain; and a cattle-call organized by Iowa’s own favorite wingnut, Rep. Steve King, which drew Bachmann, Cain, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, and John Bolton. At the former event Bachmann touted her own history of homeschooling her kids (before setting up a “Christian school” with her husband) while Paul proposed a large tax credit for homeschoolers. It was not lost on anyone that homeschoolers were a significant part of the coalition that won the 2008 Iowa Caucuses for Mike Huckabee.

Steve King’s event produced an array of proto-candidate speeches. Bachmann and Cain gave all-red-meat addresses split between liberal-baiting and challenges to the audience to get ready for 2012 and ultimately for leadership of the country. Bolton stuck to foreign policy in his speech, while Barbour stuck mainly to economic and fiscal policy. Gingrich gave his standard stock speech. In what is likely to become a pattern for such events, Cain and Bachmann got far and away the strongest audience response. And King’s influence was validated by the appearance of not only the presidential candidates, but of national conservative titan Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). King is widely expected to endorse Bachmann, his closest colleague in Congress, if she ultimately makes the race.

The cavalcade of culturally conservative events in First-in-the-Nation Iowa is spurring some debate, there and nationally, about the extent to which other Republican voices are being marginalized. Doug Gross, who was the Republican gubernatorial nominee in Iowa in 2006 and ran Mitt Romney’s 2008 Caucus operation, complained to The New York Times:

We look like Camp Christian out here. If Iowa becomes some extraneous right-wing outpost, you have to question whether it is going to be a good place to vet your presidential candidates.

The observation earned Gross some seriously angry responses (the Iowa Republican’s Craig Robinson referred to him as “Mr. Irrelevant”). But it did get some non-Iowa analysts looking at the numbers to see if the “Camp Christian” rep of Iowa Caucus-goers was overblown. RealClearPolitics’ Erin McPike ran some numbers:

The strength of religious conservatives in Iowa, while formidable, may be somewhat overstated.

To be specific, add Romney’s 2008 results in Iowa (about 30,000 votes, or 25.2 percent) to Arizona Sen. John McCain’s (about 15,500 votes, or 13 percent) to former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s (16,000 votes or 13.4 percent) to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s (4000 votes or 3.4 percent), and the total is about 55 percent of the votes. Texas Rep. Ron Paul garnered a tenth of the votes. Compare that to winning Mike Huckabee’s winning share of some 41,000 votes, 34.4 percent of the vote.

The problem with this analysis is that in 2008 Mitt Romney was running as the “true conservative” candidate (he was ultimately endorsed by Jim DeMint, Paul Weyrich, Sean Hannity, Robert Bork, and many other hard-right figures) while Fred Thompson was the candidate of both Steve King and the National Right to Life Committee. Limiting “Camp Christian” to Huckabee caucus-goers misses a big part of the picture.

In any event, 2012 proto-candidates seem to be taking seriously the state’s reputation as a stomping ground for the Christian Right specifically and “movement conservatives” generally. King’s being treated like a senior statesman rather than a much-mocked crank. Romney’s giving the state a wide berth for the time being and trying to tamp down expectations. And if Mitch “Truce” Daniels is ultimately going to run, he certainly hasn’t shown his face in Iowa. Newt Gingrich probably did a very smart thing politically by getting one of his PACs to pour money into the successful 2010 effort to recall some of the judges responsible for the Iowa Supreme Court’s 2009 decision legalizing same-sex marriage. In a Caucus environment where evangelical fervor has a lot to do with the willingness to spend hours on an icy night standing up for a candidate, investing in the foot soldiers of the Christian Right makes a lot of sense.

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Wingnut Watch: The Ideological Crusade Behind the Budget Battles

Wednesday, February 23rd, 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 Washington and around the country, conservatives are going on the anti-spending warpath, delighting the Tea Party base with tough talk and confrontational tactics.  The amazing scenes from Madison, engineered by new Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are emboldening GOPers elsewhere (notably in Ohio and Indiana) to go to the barricades in demanding pay and benefit concessions, if not actual suicide, from public employees and their unions.  And in Congress, a government shutdown is beginning to look like a virtual certainty, quite possibly accompanied by the drama of a debt limit collision.

The internal conservative debate on these subjects is being heavily dominated by those counseling “no retreat,” and laboring mightily to explain why a hard-core approach that threatens the daily functioning of government won’t turn out as it did for the short-lived Republican Revolution of the mid-1990s.

But amidst all the dramatics over spending, it’s increasingly obvious that conservatives have a lot of other fish to fry, and are using their demands for big cutbacks in public-sector spending to impose policies and priorities that have little or nothing to do with money.

This is most obvious in Wisconsin, where Walker’s demands go beyond pay and benefit concessions from public employees and aim at severely restricting collective bargaining rights.  Walker and his defenders, of course, claim that no path of budget austerity is compatible with the existence of strong public employee unions.  That’s another way of saying it’s possible to relate all sorts of ideological objectives as having an impact on spending. Interestingly, two Republican governors close to this particular fire, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and Florida’s Rick Scott (the latter state is not close geographically to Wisconsin, but is similar in the scope of its gubernatorially-induced budget crisis) have conspicuously parted ways with Walker on demanding non-financial concessions from public employee unions.

An even more obvious ideological aspect of state budget “crises” is the determination of nearly all GOP governors to cut taxes and/or create new corporate subsidies even as they claim there’s just no money for spending they don’t particularly favor in the first place.  Walker, in particular, is insisting on both tax cuts and new “economic development incentives” (e.g., public concessions for companies moving into the state) that have significantly worsened the fiscal situation.  So, too, has Florida’s Scott, who is also demanding a major new private school voucher initiative.

The overlap of ideological and fiscal priorities is even more obvious in Washington.  The FY 2011 continuing appropriations resolution passed by the House last weekend is loaded with long-time conservative hobby-horses, including an end to public broadcasting, severe cutbacks in funding for bank regulators and food inspectors, plus an unprecedented assault on federal support for family planning services, including a total ban on use of federal money by Planned Parenthood and an end to the Title X program that funds many clinics dispensing contraceptives.  Echoing the confrontations in Madison, the bill also slashed funding for the National Labor Relations Board by one-third, and 176 House Republicans voted to kill the NLRB altogether.  Meanwhile, Republicans are leaving the Pentagon budget largely alone.

Since the House CR is primarily symbolic, the real tale of the tape will be in the internal priorities Republicans set in negotiations with Senate Democrats and the White House.  But GOP leaders are under intense pressure from the large majority of its Members from the arch-conservative Republican Study Group, and from Tea Party-oriented freshmen, to use budget cuts to completely change the scope as well as the size of the federal government.

Most interestingly, there is a growing sense that House conservatives and the right-wing chattering classes are increasingly favoring a federal government shutdown (which will happen on March 4 if no agreement is reached on the CR or on a short-term stopgap, which Republicans say they will oppose unless it incorporate major spending cuts) not just as a negotiating tactic, but as an end in itself.  Highly influential anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist has been explicit about what he sees as the political advantage Republicans would derive from a shutdown: “Obama will be less popular if — in the service of overspending and wasting people’s money — he closes the government down, as opposed to now, when he’s just wasting people’s money.”

More to the point, Republican leaders would like to get rid of the RINO label as soon as possible and earn the trust of Tea Party types. It’s even possible that they are powerless to act otherwise (particularly given the example set by Walker in Wisconsin) or will be forced to engineer a shutdown in order to head off the more economically-consequential defeat of a debt limit measure.

In any event, conservatives are busy reassuring GOP pols that a shutdown won’t produce the sort of political damage the brief 1995 shutdown incurred.  They are typically blaming the 1995 setback on Newt Gingrich’s clumsiness, Bill Clinton’s diabolical political skills, the post-Oklahoma City backlash against government-hating, the malice of the pre-Fox “liberal media”—all ingredients that are missing from today’s impending confrontation.  All these psychological factors should be kept in mind in assessing what happens before, on, and after March 4.

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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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