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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: 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: The GOP’s ‘Movement Conservative’ Conquest Achieved

Thursday, August 18th, 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 was a pretty good week for hard-core conservative ideologues in terms of their domination of the Republican Party. In the Fox News/Washington Examiner presidential candidates’ debate on Thursday night, every single would-be president on the stage—even Jon Huntsman—rejected a hypothetical deficit reduction deal involving a 10-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax increases. At the same event, an extended exchange in which Tim Pawlenty went after Michele Bachmann for being a windy bomb-thrower who had never actually been able to accomplish anything in public life went pretty well for the windy bomb-thrower. Meanwhile, the discussion of cultural issues featured differences of opinion that ranged from hard-core opposition to same-sex marriage (with the exception of the pariah Huntsman) and abortion to hard-core opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

At the Iowa GOP Straw Poll on Saturday, over half the votes were cast for two candidates generally considered to be minor fringe characters in the House Republican Caucus until quite recently, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul.  Tim Pawlenty, who began his national political career calling for a Republican Party that would be amenable to the views and practical needs of Sam’s Club shoppers, ended his audition for Electable Conservative Alternative to Mitt Romney with an ignominious third-place finish. Given his world-class organization in Iowa, T-Paw’s poor showing in this test of organizing strength indicated his failure to make the sale to serious conservatives, and he dropped out of the race the very next morning. Other than Bachmann and Paul, the candidate with the most to boast about on Saturday was Rick Santorum, who managed to get past Herman Cain to finish fourth and keep alive a campaign focused almost entirely on representing the most extreme right-wing cultural views (Santorum’s big moment in the Thursday debate was probably his passionate defense of a ban on abortions where the woman in question had been raped).

Bachmann’s narrow win over Paul in the Straw Poll was significant in Wingnut World for three reasons. First, it confirmed Paul’s continued marginalization in the GOP because of his highly unorthodox views on foreign policy and defense (in the debate, Paul spent an extraordinary amount of time defending Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, and went all Chomsky in attacking the CIA’s meddling in Iran in the 1950s, not a major concern of conservative Republicans then or now). Second, it lifted Bachmann into the top tier of candidates moving towards the actual delegate-selection contests next year.  And third, it confirmed the relevance of wingnut-friendly Iowa in the nominating process; a Paul win would have called that relevance into question.

Meanwhile, down in South Carolina, the long-awaited announcement of Rick Perry’s presidential candidacy further tilted the field to the right. His speech, delivered at the annual gathering of devotees of the fervent take-no-prisoners conservative website RedState.com, was a masterpiece of the rawest ideological red meat. Perhaps the most significant moment was when Perry slipped into a tirade about high taxes a nasty comment about the injustice of low-to-moderate-income Americans owing no federal income taxes while “we” are expected to pay more. The desire to raise taxes on the poor is one of the more ironic preoccupations of Tea Party activists, reflecting the reverse class warfare sentiments made so plain in the foundational “rant” by Rick Santelli that launched their movement back in 2009.

Bachmann and Perry, both major figures in the iconography of both the Tea Party Movement and the Christian Right, now represent two-thirds of the viable Republican presidential field for 2012.   Realization of that fact has some of the more Establishment-minded Republicans a bit panicked. The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat looked at the field on Sunday and didn’t like what he saw:

No one doubts Romney’s intelligence or competence, but he has managed to run for president for almost five years without taking a single courageous or even remotely interesting position. The thinking person’s case for Romney, murmured by many of his backers, amounts to this: Vote for Mitt, you know he doesn’t believe a word he says.

But his phoniness would remain a weakness even if he won the presidency. He’s a born compromiser pretending to be a hard-liner, and the hard-liners know it—which means he would enter the Oval Office with conservative knives already sharpened and ready for his back.

Rick Perry has many of the qualities that Romney seems to lack: backbone, core convictions, a killer instinct and a primal understanding of the right-wing electorate. He also has the better story….

What Perry doesn’t have, though, is the kind of moderate facade that Americans look for in their presidents. He’s the conservative id made flesh, with none of the postpartisan/uniter-not-a-divider spirit that successful national politicians usually cultivate.

And Douthat didn’t even address Bachmann’s even more strident stance. He concluded his column with that most thread-bare of Republicans cries for help: a plea to Chris Christie to repudiate months of disavowals of candidacy by jumping into the race. Other elite malcontents are promoting a candidacy by the very epitome of conservative fiscal orthodoxy, Paul Ryan, a more reliable figure than Romney who is also more seemly than Perry.

Aside from these desperate measures to add to the field the big debate in the chattering classes right now about the Republican nominating contest is whether it’s effectively a Romney-Perry contest or if Bachmann can remain viable by winning Iowa. Either way, the pressure will remain on Romney to perpetually prove his conservative bona fides, and the most GOP “moderates” can hope for, as Douthat observes, is that he’s lying through his teeth.

Any doubt that the “movement conservative” conquest of the GOP has now been consummated should pretty much be consigned to the trash bin. The main question now is whether conservatives prefer their presidential candidate to be cool and shifty, or raw and shrill.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

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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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No Bargain for America

Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

When you compromise between a good plan and a bad plan, you get a less good plan. So what happens when you compromise between two bad plans? We’re about to find out, as Congress this week tries to reconcile deficit reduction blueprints drawn up by House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

That we are now reduced to fallback House and Senate plans reflects the failure of the nation’s political leadership to rise to the occasion and forge a common approach to solving the debt crisis. The road not taken was the “grand bargain” every serious budget analyst knows is substantively and politically the only way to control the debt: trade more tax revenues for cuts in the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending.

While it’s easy to assume a posture of Olympian detachment and blame both sides for this failure of nerve, it’s wrong. The grand bargain died because House Republicans killed it. As President Obama said last night, it was scuttled by the “ideological rigidity” of Tea Party extremists who are trying to dictate national fiscal policy from the House.

Recall that once it was clear that he couldn’t get a “clean” bill raising the debt limit, President Obama decided to go big. That is, he pushed for a big debt reduction package of about $4 trillion, which would stabilize and eventually shrink the debt. That idea appealed to Boehner – at first. But when House GOP freshmen made it clear they would not vote to raise revenues, insisting that our massive deficits be closed through spending cuts alone, Boehner walked away from talks with the President. Not once, but twice.

As liberals ruefully noted, the House GOP’s zero-concessions approach contrasted sharply with Obama’s pliability. First he agreed to trillions of dollars of domestic spending cuts. Then he offered to put entitlements on the table, causing conniptions among the “progressives” who oppose long-overdue reforms in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. The president endorsed a package that was 3-1 spending cuts over tax revenues. Rather than accept it and declare victory, conservatives demanded unconditional surrender.

So now the spotlight shifts to the Boehner and Reid plans. Both fall well short of what the country needs.  Boehner calls for a two-step process: First, Congress would cap discretionary spending and raise the debt ceiling by $1 trillion. Then a bicameral joint committee would be charged with finding another $1.8 trillion in savings. If Congress approves the second tranche, it would lift the debt ceiling by the same amount.

The Reid bill also would cut discretionary spending by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade, and leave revenues untouched. But as critics have rightly pointed out, that includes savings from military spending as the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down that have been accounted for already. Nonetheless, Obama last night endorsed Reid’s approach, which has the virtue of extending the debt ceiling until after the next presidential election.

Neither bill, of course, offers a permanent solution to the debt crisis. It’s not even clear that each could pass its respective House of Congress. It’s not hard to imagine Tea Party types balking because the bill doesn’t cut deeply enough, or because they’d rather force the country into default as a way of defunding federal programs. Some Senate liberals are chafing over Reid’s approach, which does not ask the rich to pay higher taxes or even close tax loopholes, thereby putting the entire burden of debt reduction on domestic spending.

In the end, as everyone expects, some kind of package will be cobbled together to avoid a prolonged default. But that means the whole sorry spectacle, replete with dogmatic posturing and politically evasive behavior will drag on into next year.

Photo Credit: Robert Reed Daly

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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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Wingnut Watch: The Tea Party Celebrates Tax Day

Monday, April 18th, 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 Tax Day (or more accurately, Tax Weekend) observances of the Tea Party movement weren’t as large or well-publicized as in the past, but they did reflect the hardening consensus of conservative activists against both the appropriations deal just agreed to by congressional Republicans, and the coming legislation increasing the public debt limit. This consensus is being reinforced by potential presidential candidates and other opinion leaders who are encouraging the perception that the Beltway GOP is once again “selling out” the conservative movement and its latest Tea Party incarnation.

This snapshot of the mood at New Hampshire Tea Party events by Michael Crowley is illustrative:

The overall picture is one of a restless Republican base that sees defeating Obama as a matter of national survival. Angry conservatives believe Washington is spending the country into oblivion, and that lazy freeloaders are leeching federal money at the expense of ever more squeezed middle-class taxpayers. They also feel that the Washington game is rigged against them: “We’re constantly being lied to,” fumed Dan Dwyer of Nashua at a local GOP confab on Thursday night, still angry that Republicans had “caved” in their budget negotiations with Democrats earlier this month.

At a Wisconsin Tea Party rally, anger at congressional Republicans was fed by none other than Sarah Palin, who “unleashed a withering critique of congressional Republicans Saturday, lambasting them for not cutting spending deeper and faster, and saying the party needs to ‘fight like a girl.’”  Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, who spoke at a number of Tea Party events, has been urging Republicans to oppose a debt limit increase on the questionable grounds that arrangements could be made to avoid a federal credit default until the autumn.

The superficially confusing aspect of this rhetoric is that the conservatives who are being most vocal about the dire nature of the deficit-and-debt emergency are precisely the same people who are fearful that congressional Republicans might cut some long-term budget deal with Senate Democrats and the administration that leaves increased taxes on the wealthy on the table.  That’s why they are linking any approval of a debt limit increase not just to some deficit agreement, but to acceptance of the kind of deep spending cuts and “entitlement reforms” laid out in Paul Ryan’s budget proposal.

Accordingly, we will soon see Tea Party fire concentrate on those Senate Republicans said to be negotiating a deal that would include some tax increases.  The Republican point man in the so-called “Gang of Six” of bipartisan senators engaged in these negotiations, Saxby Chambliss of GA, is already drawing unfriendly home-state fire from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who had this to say today:

Senate Republicans are going to support raising the debt ceiling and raising taxes all while refusing to demand passage of a Balanced Budget Amendment. House Republican Leaders will no doubt decide that . . . well . . . Republicans only control one house of one branch of government so . . . .

Bend over America.

This conflict will soon make it more obvious than ever that most conservative activists, including those identified with the Tea Party Movement, are less concerned with deficit reduction than with permanently shrinking the size and reach of the federal government and pushing both radical spending cuts and continued tax cuts.

On another front, there are growing signs that Republican elites have decided to give Donald Trump the same dismissive treatment that was said to have led to Sarah Palin’s steady decline in credibility as a potential presidential candidate.  Over the weekend, Karl Rove called Trump a “joke candidate.” Playing his snooty Tory role, George Will called The Donald a “blatherskite,” and warned he could seriously screw up Republican presidential candidate debates.  Slate’s Dave Weigel went to the trouble of reading Trump’s 2000 proto-campaign book, and noticed that Trump expressed a fondness for the Canadian single-payer health care system.  Surfing off that disclosure, the Club for Growth put out a release calling Trump a “liberal.”

It’s almost certain that this offensive was stimulated by the Public Policy Polling survey of Republicans that was released on Friday showing Trump jumping out into a sizable national lead over the rest of the potential presidential field.  Trump’s 26 percent is higher than any proto-candidate has registered in early national polls.  And the internals, showing 23 percent of Republicans saying that could not vote for a candidate who believes Barack Obama was born in the United States (and another 39 percent saying they weren’t sure if they could or not), were probably terrifying to beltway GOPers.

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The American Electorate and the Budget Battle

Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

As the budget negotiations grind to a halt, it’s helpful to keep in mind two important characteristics of the American electorate.

The first is that voters tend to like compromise. In poll after poll, solid majorities of voters say they prefer leaders who compromise over those who stick to their guns. The latest Pew poll is typical: by 55 percent to 36 percent, voters say it is important to compromise on the budget as opposed to standing by principles, even if it means a government shutdown.

The poll is also typical in finding that Democrats are significantly more likely to favor compromise (69 percent do) than Republicans (only 43 percent do). And Tea Partiers, not surprisingly are the most intransigent (only 26 percent favor compromise).

Of course, the same poll found that voters would blame the two sides about equally, with Democrats blaming Republicans and Republicans blaming Obama, with independents split, presumably also along partisan-leaning lines (since most independents are closet partisans). So neither side has a clear advantage right now. Opinion seems to be pretty much solidified along partisan lines.

While it’s not clear Democrats have an advantage on being the party of compromise right now, presumably that will change if a government shutdown does occur and Tea Partiers celebrate and proclaim that their principled stand forced this. This will, of course, help the Democrats.

The second characteristic is that Americans tend to be symbolic conservatives, but operational liberals. What this means in practice is that when government is discussed in the abstract (like, say, in a number) people want less of it. But when it’s discussed in the specific (like, say, any actual program) people like it.

Consider the polling: When asked, 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about. But a recent Pew poll found not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). Cuts to these two line items get you nowhere near $61 billion.

Presumably, Democrats should by now have found a sympathetic, sensible program that Republicans wanted to cut, and let that program stand in for Republicans heartlessness. But I don’t know: Maybe they don’t see that much worth aggressively and publicly defending in the $28 billion that separates them and the Republicans. And in an argument about how much to cut Government (in the abstract), the public is probably going to come down on the side of MORE.

Of course, the larger problem here is that we’re still talking about small potatoes. The federal budget is $3.5 trillion. That means we’re talking here about cutting it by either one or two percent here. That’s because this debate is all about non-military discretionary spending, which is only 13 percent of the overall budget. It remains frustrating to see this lack of context in the way the budget showdown keeps getting reported.

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Why Obama Shouldn’t Play it Safe in 2012

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

So, surprise, surprise, Barack Obama is officially running for re-election in 2012. As someone who knocked on doors in 2008, I watched the official 2012 announcement video with some eagerness, hoping to be inspired anew. Perhaps he would say something akin to his 2007 speech in Springfield, which launched his then long shot campaign with stirring calls to purpose.

“I want to win that next battle – for justice and opportunity,” he said in 2007. “ I want to win that next battle – for better schools, and better jobs, and health care for all. I want us to take up the unfinished business of perfecting our union, and building a better America.”

But Obama doesn’t even appear in the 2012 video, a two-minute montage of five “volunteers” talking in the most remarkably content-free generalities: “There’s too much that is fundamentally important” says a white man from North Carolina, who later admits, “I don’t agree with Obama on everything” (though he does trust and respect him).

“There are many things on the table that need to be addressed,” says a Latino mom, who wants the best for her children, and for Obama to be the person who addresses, you know, things. An African-American woman reminds us that the President has a job to do, so we’ll have to get inspired ourselves. Fade to blue: “It begins with us,” reads the text.

Yes, I understand what Obama is doing. He’s trying to re-capture what made the 2008 campaign work, which was a propulsive sense of “we” – volunteers caught up in the story of Obama and all he could do. And he could get away with the vagueness of “Hope” and “Change” because all he needed to be then was the anti-Bush. And so I hoped: Here was a real intellectual who will not only take the challenges of governing seriously, but who could also stirringly articulate a national vision of coming together to solve hard problems.

Now, as the 2012 campaign season kicks off, Obama is clearly playing it safe. The fundamentals are on his side. The Republican field is weak; the economy is moving back in the right direction; his poll numbers are decent; demographic shifts are expanding his base of supporters. And Obama’s not one to veer from the cautious path. Especially not at this early stage.

But here’s the thing. In 2008, conservatism was discredited. Heck, even McCain wanted to be the candidate of change. In 2011, conservatism is flourishing again, reinvigorated by the Tea Party. And conservatives are telling a compelling about the American spirit, and the way in which it can be regenerated if only we can get rid of that awful greedy leech responsible for everything that’s gone wrong for the last however many years: Big Government. Moreover, the coalition that Obama put together in 2008 looks decidedly weaker now.

Presidential campaigns can be defining moments. There is no other opportunity for a political figure to speak so often and so loudly to the American people about what we stand for as a nation, to define the moment and define the basis for leadership in it. And yet, most incumbent presidents waste this moment, because they just want to play it safe. They figure, I’ll get re-elected, and then, then I’ll finally be free to offer a true vision, to lead this time for real without actually having to worry about re-election.

Except, second terms rarely offer the opportunity for that defining moment. And they especially don’t offer that opportunity if the campaign hasn’t paved the ground for it, hasn’t prepared the public and made the case. As Irving Kristol once put it: “What rules the world is ideas, because ideas define the way reality is perceived.”

I’m sure the Obama campaign people will come up with some wonderful poll-tested cognitive scientist-approved campaign slogan for 2012 and then repeat it ad infinitum. But in doing so, here’s what I ask: please, please don’t squander this opportunity. Please come up with a message and a story that makes an affirmative case for lasting progressive values of pragmatic experimentation and solving hard problems through collective means. Challenge the Tea Party memes. Reclaim history, reclaim the Founders, reclaim the meaning of American Exceptionalism.  These are more than just things on the table. They are the way we understand and make sense of present day events.

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One Cheer For the Ryan Plan

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

As progressives pounce on Rep. Paul Ryan’s new budget proposal, they should also give the man a little credit. The plan he unveiled today is a daring attempt to define an actual conservative governing philosophy. That’s a big improvement on the reactionary and crotchety anti-government platitudes served up by the Tea Party.

And while progressives will rightly reject Ryan’s overall plan as draconian and unfair, they ought to keep an open mind about some of its most audacious elements, especially his ideas for controlling public health care spending.

For better or worse, the House Budget Committee Chairman has produced a coherent vision for limited government. It would sharply cut domestic spending, returning it to 2008 levels, reduce federal deficits by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, and hold federal spending below 20 percent of gross domestic product. It would further roll back the state and buttress “individual responsibility” by repealing Obamacare.

Ryan embraces President Obama’s Fiscal Commission proposal to cut tax expenditures and use the proceeds to bring the top individual and corporate income tax rate down to 25 percent. But unlike the commission’s approach, which commits a chunk of the savings to deficit reduction, Ryan makes his revenue neutral in obeisance to the Prime Ideological Imperative of today’s GOP: taxes must never, on any account, be raised.

Ryan’s most controversial proposals are also his most intriguing. In what he describes as a continuation of the bipartisan welfare reforms of the 1990s, he would convert Medicaid, which provides health insurance to poor families, into a block grant. Currently its costs are shared by the federal and state governments. As critics like Ezra Klein point out, a block grant is a device to limit federal health spending, shifting costs to states and individuals. It’s true that a block grant alone doesn’t constitute “reform” of Medicaid. But in tandem with reforms in health care delivery, especially efforts to move from fee-for-service to capitated “accountable care organizations,” a block grant could dampen inflationary pressures and protect taxpayers against the automatic and unsustainable growth of public health care spending.

Similarly, Ryan proposes to control Medicare costs by replacing open-ended subsidies with a “premium support” model. Under this approach – essentially a voucher, despite Ryan’s denials – Washington would give Medicare recipients a set amount (varying according to income and health status) they could use to buy insurance from competing private plans. Although Republicans wrongly assume that competition alone will drive down health costs – again, changing incentives to focus medical spending on the value rather than the volume of care is the key — premium support at least puts a governor on the engine of mandatory public health care spending, the main driver of America’s debt crisis.

Some liberals undoubtedly will see it as a plot to destroy Medicare. But recall that a bipartisan Medicare reform commission President Bill Clinton created in 1998 came close to embracing premium support. It’s also been endorsed by leading Democrats, including former CBO chief Alice Rivlin, and is part of the Rivlin-Domenici deficit reduction plan. In fact, as part of a more comprehensive strategy to contain health care costs, a Medicaid block grant and premium support for Medicare could serve a progressive purpose, by preventing rapid entitlement spending growth from squeezing vital public investments in children and families, scientific research, infrastructure and a clean environment.

On Social Security, Rep. Ryan disappointingly punts, proving no bolder than the White House. And as certified fiscal hawk David Walker points out, the Ryan plan does not include substantial savings in defense spending, and raises not a penny in new revenues to help the nation whittle down its enormous debts.

In other words, it’s an unbalanced plan, morally and politically, that gives the Pentagon and the wealthy a pass, and concentrates the pain of deficit reduction on middle and low-income families. The Fiscal Commission’s approach, broadly endorsed by 32 Republican and 32 Democrats Senators – if not yet by Obama himself – is infinitely preferable as a starting point for a serious debate.

Nonetheless, the Ryan plan puts conservatives’ ideological cards on the table and helps clarify the trade offs that must be made to strike a bipartisan deal. And it contains some ideas for ensuring that public budgets aren’t swamped by runaway health costs – ideas that progressives ought not to reject out of hand.

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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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Is the Tea Party Finally Boiling Over?

Thursday, March 31st, 2011
Lee Drutman


Lee Drutman is a senior fellow and the managing editor for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Lee Drutman

Maybe the Tea Party is finally starting to boil over, after all. According to CNN’s latest polling, 47 percent of the public now views the Tea Party unfavorably, a new high (up four points from December, and up 21 points from January 2010). By contrast only 32 percent now view the movement favorably, down five percent from December. Tea Party favorability had actually been pretty stable for the last year in the high 30s, so the recent downslide is significant.

Meanwhile, in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner appears increasingly willing to leave Tea Party demands for $100-billion-in-cuts-or-bust behind, and instead gamble that he can find enough moderate Democrats to support a shutdown-averting deal.

Tea Partiers are descending on the Capitol today to hold a “continuing revolution rally” to demand no surrender on the budget. Tea Party nation founder Judson Phillips wrote in an email to supporters that: “Boehner must go. The Tea Party must unite and make sure Boehner is replaced in the next election. Boehner is living proof of something I have said for a long time. It is not enough that we vote out bad leaders, we must replace them with good leaders.”

I hope Boehner’s stand will be a decisive moment: a solid break that begins the marginalization of the Tea Party as too-crazy-to-govern.

Presumably, Boehner the strategist understands a few things that the Tea Partiers do not.

First: that, if there is a government shutdown, Republicans are much more likely to get blamed, and nobody really wants a government shutdown.

Second: Many voters are symbolic conservatives in that they like to say they are for things like small government and fiscal discipline. But when it comes to specific government programs, well, they like those. As a recent Pew poll reminds us, there is not a single budgetary area in which a majority of voters would favor a decrease, and only two federal programs in which more respondents favored a decrease in spending than an increase: Global poverty assistance (45 percent for a decrease, 21 percent for an increase) and unemployment assistance (28 percent for a decrease, 27 percent for an increase). The only other program that at least 30 percent of voters support decreasing is military defense. (I’m still mystified with how this squares with the fact that 64 percent of Americans think “federal spending and the budget deficit” is a problem that they worry “a great deal” about, but that’s a rant for another time)

If Boehner can make a break with the Tea Party, it will presumably drive the Tea Party into over-boil (I envision more Boehner-must-go memes). And that’s good.

The more visibly extremist the Tea Party gets, the high the level of disapproval (I hope!). But even better, if they’ve declared war on Republican leadership, it means that Republican leadership now has a vested interest in casting them as unhelpful extremists. And this is the key.

So could this be the moment for some GOP leaders to re-discover a bit of courage in moderation and finally offer some real thought leadership that gives ordinary Republicans an alternative to the exasperating slash-and-burn anger that has dominated the dialogue for too long? I certainly hope so.

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