Details Aren't the Devil

Cross-posted at Alien The Right's Field.

Democratic candidates offer a wealth of ideas, explained in rich detail. Republicans offer a few vague platitudes and promise to get back to us after the election.

Steve Benen says that, infuriating as it may be, the Republican approach may be savvier:

I’m not sure Republicans are wrong about this. When a GOP candidates says, “Vote for me — and I’ll work out the details later,” I’d love for there to be consequences. There never are. In 2000, Bush’s vague and ambiguous tax plan didn’t make any sense. Al Gore tried to make it a campaign issue, but the media ignored it and voters didn’t care. In 2004, Bush said more than once that he could privatize Social Security without raising taxes, raising the deficit, cutting benefits, or raising the retirement age. How did he propose to pull that off? He didn’t — he just mentioned ideas and goals without any details. There were no political consequences.

In fact, American voters don’t seem to care all that much about the details in advance. A candidate talks about what he or she finds important, and how he or she would approach the issue if elected. Voters either agree or disagree. If a candidate were to make some kind of outlandish campaign promise — free ice cream for everyone, every day, for four years — there would probably be a higher expectation to explain how that might work, but a more general policy prescription needs a lot fewer support materials.

One of the neat tricks Republicans managed to pull off during much of the past decade or two was to earn a reputation as both the party of principles and the party of ideas. Logically, those two things may be connected, but as Benen's analysis suggests, in a practical sense it can be difficult to wear both hats at the same time. When you spend a lot of time on wonky policy details, it can be hard to express basic foundational principles in a clear way. At the same time, when all you talk about are principles, your rhetoric can be so divorced from reality that it becomes meaningless.

This is just an impression, but I think that Republicans, having achieved a reasonable sense of balance between principles and ideas for quite some time, are tilting over into meaningless abstractness at this point. Much of this has to do with the exhaustion of the Goldwater conservative movement, which seems finally to have reached its Waterloo in the era of Bush the Lesser. Movement conservative ideas simply came to their logical and practical limits -- if the ideas worked, Bush would have implemented them successfully. They didn't and he couldn't, and all the rest of what conservatives say about it is just excuse-making. Does anybody really think there's a future in social security privatization or "health savings accounts"? Honestly?

Bush knew that conservatives couldn't simply slash away the social insurance state, but the price of a politically-feasible transition was too much for the right's ideology to bear -- as the Part D debacle proved. And that was just a preview of the costs that would be associated with any privatization of social security. There just isn't any way to remake America along Goldwater-conservative ideological lines. You can't go back again. There are new, young conservatives out there with some interesting (if embryonic) ideas of their own, but they aren't influential enough yet to have much impact on the presidential race, so what we're left with is a field of candidates repeating the rhetoric of conservative years past, even as that rhetoric has lost its relevance to the details of governance.

Republicans are usually the party that attracts those who crave transcendence and the appeal of pure ideology. Democrats are usually the party of pragmatism, ideological muddle, and practical government. There's nothing wrong with that basic dichotomy. A party gains an advantage when it is able to reach beyond its basic mode and do a little bit of what its opponent can do -- a strong GOP has at least some good, wonky ideas, and a strong Democratic party has at least some ability to appeal to the voters' civic-spiritual side.

My point is that Benen may be right, but he's thinking of a Republican party that was able to achieve that balance more effectively. Even just in the past couple of years it has lost the balance. Both its domestic agenda and its foreign-policy credibility have come undone. I'd like Democrats to talk about principles more, but let's let them be the party of details, too. In the end, details do matter.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:35 AM 233 comments

  GOP Frontrunners Snubbing Minorities Again

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

MyDD's Melissa Ryan wrote about this yesterday: Giuliani, Romney, and McCain have all turned down invitations to participate in Tavis Smiley's All American Presidential Forum on September 27. She cites Jack and Jill Politics:

Tavis did a 'Shout out' to his fellow Black Republicans, asking them why they were so silent on this matter. They keep on yapping that the GOP is a valid alternative for Black America, yet, when a nationally televised forum is put together so that GOP Candidates can present what they believe are GOP answers to concerns of the Black community, three of their Major Candidates don't even bother to respect Black Americans with their presence.

Melissa adds:

I don't know about you but I'm begining to get the impression that much of the Republican field just doesn't care for debates and forums. If it's not a choreographed staging of tightly scripted interactions with supporters enthusiastically waving campaign paraphernalia they're just not interested.

I agree, and it certainly has something to do with why the GOP candidates have been so leery of the YouTube debate. But the snub to nonwhite voters is worthy of notice over and above any general reluctance to debate. As president, George W. Bush has done little but damage to minority interests. But as a politician, he has been unusually keen -- for a Republican -- to win minority support (no, it doesn't add up, but that's par for his incompetent course). Right from the 2000 campaign, Bush and his advisors have made it a point to reach out symbolically to African-American and Hispanic voters (who can forget the demographics onstage during the RNC in Philly?), while his surrogates in the conservative movement work to convince their compatriots of the importance of gaining votes among those constituencies. Such efforts were not fueled by the Bushies' personal hunger to improve race relations, but by cold hard electoral math.

But so far in this 2008 cycle the GOP has presented nonwhite voters not with a friendly face, but with a series of cold shoulders. While it's clear to anyone who keeps up with intra-conservative debate that any candidate hoping to win the nomination will have to distance himself from a good number of Bush's perceived sins against the right -- not least of them his embrace of so-called "big-government conservatism" -- it's remarkable to think that the effort to expand the GOP beyond its white Christian base may be considered one of those sins. Perhaps it's because, in the end, the administration's effort failed. But that doesn't change the math. Bush tried and failed. The current Republican contenders aren't even going to try.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:45 AM 2 comments

  Republican Decline, Part XXVII

It isn't just wishful thinking, it's real data showing the decline of the Republican party. Today's Wall Street Journal has the latest, reporting on a study by prominent Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio:

For Republicans hoping the 2008 campaign will bring a fresh start after the troubled tenure of President Bush, there are sobering signs: Evidence indicates that the party's problems with the American electorate are much bigger than the president and won't go away when he leaves office.

Recent voter surveys, including private polling done by a leading Republican strategist, suggest a broader erosion of Republicans' appeal. In particular, three groups crucial to Mr. Bush's goal of a "permanent Republican majority" are drifting away: younger voters, Hispanics and independents.

The reasons include the Iraq war, conservatives' emphasis on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion and stem-cell research, and a party-led backlash against illegal immigrants that has left many Hispanic and Asian-American citizens feeling unwelcome. The upshot is that Republicans face structural problems that stem from generational, demographic and societal changes and aren't easily overcome without changing fundamental party positions.

Fabrizio found -- consistent with his findings in a comprehensive study of Republicans earlier this year (discussed here) -- that the GOP is growing both older and more conservative. This isn't surprising, given that the present Republican party coalition is dominated by a sharply ideological conservative movement whose ideas and leadership have their origins in the Goldwater era.

The Bush administration's efforts to overcome these structural problems seem to have failed in multiple ways. Their initial efforts to overcome the party's image for fiscal meanness and to broaden the GOP beyond its white base -- thus "compassionate conservatism" and the constant references to "the Hispanic vote" and "the black vote" -- have been undermined by backlashes from fiscal conservatives (who moan endlessly about "big government conservatism") and race-baiting strategists from the party's own Congressional wing. And the idea that they could rally around social security privatization seems both cynical and naive -- an attempt to exploit the anxiety of younger Americans while ignoring the fact that young voters are more supportive of activist government than are their elders. And, of course, nothing they could do would be enough to overcome the damage caused by their disastrous medacity and incompetence in Iraq.

All of this is why the pressure is on the current crop of Republican candidates to come up with the ideas to revitalize the Republican party, perhaps by redefining conservatism for a new era. We've seen that some candidates, on a symbolic level at least, seem to represent the efforts of those feeling their way toward new models. But we've seen very little in the way of actual, working ideas.

Part of the problem is that Republicans remain captive to the conservative machine, and that machine is deeply invested in the delusion that its own preoccupations represent majoritarian sentiment. They don't. Republicans are beginning to understand how disadvantaged they are electorally, but they don't see how marginalized they are ideologically. Until they do -- and as Peter Beinart has suggested, maybe it'll take the efforts of a Republican Leadership Council -- they won't find themselves on the road to recovery. Like weak parties at any point in American history, the best they'll be able to hope for is to steal occasional victories with glamorous candidates. But that won't do anything to reverse the rot within.

Labels: conservatives, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:24 PM 6 comments

  Right Back Atcha

The National Review's editors argue that Republicans should stop complaining about the Democrats' "do-nothing Congress":

Democrats have already responded to the charge by saying that they would have passed a lot of bills if not for Republican obstruction. The solution, they will say, is for voters to remove enough Republican senators that no more filibusters will be possible, and to take the veto out of Republican hands. This advice will fall on receptive ears.

Instead, our editor friends say, Congressional Republicans should try a bit of ju-jistu:

Republicans should shift their focus from the Democratic pass/fail record to the underlying reason for it. Democratic bills are failing because they are too far left to win strong bipartisan support. This Congress has tried to raise taxes, to force taxpayers to finance the killing of human embryos, to micromanage the war, and to move toward nationalized health care. It is a Congress that wants to do much too much: in short, a liberal Congress. Maybe that’s what Republicans should call it.

The problem for conservatives is that all of these Democratic positions (no matter how the right caricatures them) are majoritarian ones. The reason the bills aren't getting bipartisan support is because the Republicans aren't a majoritarian party; they're increasingly a fringe party.

It's nice to have the courage of your convictions, but there's a fine line between courage and self-destructiveness.

Labels: Congress, National review, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:01 PM 0 comments

  A Telling Silence

On the second anniverary of the New Orleans levee failure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, d-day offers an instructive comparison between the two American political parties. While each of the frontrunning Democratic candidates for president has a comprehensive plan for reconstruction, the Republican candidates have, er... not so much:

Rudy Giuliani: Three-line press release, no specifics.
Mitt Romney: Nothing on the front page.
Fred Thompson: Nothing on the front page.
John McCain: Three-paragraph press release, no specifics.
Mike Huckabee: Nothing on the front page, at the top of the site is a news flash that "Gov. Mike Huckabee to Participate in the New Hampshire Republican Presidential Debate on September 5, 2007."
Sam Brownback: Nothing on the front page.

Katrina was a natural disaster. The catastrophe in New Orleans, though, was a disaster of conservative government. The fact that conservatives continue to have nothing to say about it suggests that they remain as great a danger to public health and well-being as ever.

Labels: d-day, Katrina, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:36 AM 2 comments

  Kids All Right; Republicans, Not So Much

This is bad, bad news for the GOP:

A Democracy Corps poll from the Washington firm of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner suggests voters ages 18 to 29 have undergone a striking political evolution in recent years.

Young Americans have become so profoundly alienated from Republican ideals on issues including the war in Iraq, global warming, same-sex marriage and illegal immigration that their defections suggest a political setback that could haunt Republicans "for many generations to come," the poll said.

The startling collapse of GOP support among young voters is reflected in the poll's findings that show two-thirds of young voters surveyed believe Democrats do a better job than Republicans of representing their views - even on issues Republicans once owned, such as terrorism and taxes.

(h/t: Donklephant)

Note which Republicans duck the trend. One is Rudy Giuliani -- but his own efforts to identify with the hard right on war and terror issues will cost him the youth vote as the campaign gains more attention.

The other:

[Arnold] Schwarzenegger, by supporting issues "once owned by the Democrats," such as the environment and education, has lured many young voters to support him and "closely identify themselves as Schwarzenegger Republicans," Mendelsohn said.

I've said it before, I'll say it again: in Sacramento, the Republicans have a model for how to resuscitate their party in blue/purple states and on a national level. But Schwarzenegger's politics are precisely the kind that conservative activists have spent 40 years trying to purge from the GOP.

Labels: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:39 AM 0 comments

  Fred Barnes's Road to Oblivion

(Photo by Ahubu)

"Follow me, comerades!"

Fred Barnes maps out the route to recovery for Republicans. A word of advice: next time you're lost, don't call Fred for directions.

First we get the counterfactual approach. I've seen this before, and it never fails to amuse me -- here is a party that has, for the past few years, insisted that reality itself would bend to their will. Now they're putting stock in the hope that reality will stop being so pesky:

What if military success by Gen. David Petraeus, the American commander, is matched by a political breakthrough engineered by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki? Or matched by the acceleration of political reconciliation at the provincial rather than the national level in Iraq? Either scenario is possible....

Nothing would boost Republicans more than visible progress in Iraq, yet other conceivable events would help. Mr. Bush can't erase the memory of his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina. But if another disaster occurred and the president responded effectively, that would counteract the memory of his Katrina performance.

So would a serious confrontation with Congress over spending, assuming Mr. Bush and Republicans win public approval as thoughtful budget cutters. And so, too, would the absence of an economic downturn as the president prepares to leave office enhance the reputation of Republicans for pursuing sensible economic policies. In short, a positive turn of events, while unpredictable, is the best hope of the GOP.

Wishful thinking on the war and the economy is one thing. And the budget battle may be a distinct possibility. But is Barnes actually rooting for another major natural disaster? Imagine the crucifixion scene if a Democrat talked this way.

At any rate, we also have the "big dumb idea" approach:

As Karl Rove has noted, Republicans need a big idea. The best available is the one Mr. Bush abandoned: ownership. Allowing private investment of payroll taxes for Social Security would only be a start. An Ownership Society would allow individual Americans, rather than government, to control how and where their health care, public education, 401(k) and IRA funds are spent.

My Republican friends, please listen to Fred Barnes. Run on Social Security privatization and the "ownership society." I hear the Whigs are looking for company in the dustbin of history.

Labels: Fred Barnes, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:19 AM 1 comments

  GOP vs. Health Care for Kids

As often happens when a government does something particularly loathesome, the Bush administration waited until Friday evening, in the middle of a congressional recess, to announce its drastic new restrictions on SCHIP:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families....

In interviews, they said the changes were intended to return the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.

“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

The new policy, coming as Bush promises to veto any bill expanding SCHIP, makes it nearly impossible for states to to cover children in families whose income is over 200% of the poverty level. Keep in mind that the poverty level for a family of four is an absurdly low $20,650. Trying to feed four kids on an income of $41,300? Good luck with the health insurance -- you're on you're own. The Bush administration is trying to prevent states from offering health care to kids whose families need the help. Dennis Smith, Bush's director of the Center for Medicaid and State Operations, said that the point of the new rules was to prevent states from "sustituting for private coverage." This is purely ideologically driven -- we're talking about denying kids health care for the sheer bloody-minded sake of satisfying the conservative think tanks. It's arrogant, cruel -- and perfectly in line with the opinions of every single Republican candidate for president.

As Paul Waldman has pointed out, the only GOP candidate to support expanding SCHIP was Tommy Thompson, now out of the race. Rudy Giuliani said it would make kids "wards of the state." Duncan Hunter called it -- what else -- "socialized medicine." As Waldman points out, the Republicans' real problem with SCHIP is that it is a widely popular government program that works well. They hate it because they are ideologically against the notion of government-supported health care. They want to take health coverage away from kids because they hate anything that shows that government can work, when it's not in the hands of incompetent Republicans.

They hate SCHIP because it shows America just how wrong and heartless the conservatives really are.


UPDATE: Gene Sperling (h/t DemFromCT) systematically dismantles the Bush administration's stated reasons for opposing the SCHIP expansion, and sums up:

Before, "compassionate conservatism" may have seemed like a political bumper sticker. Now it seems like the punch line of a sad joke, at the expense of millions of impoverished children.

Labels: health care, Republicans, SCHIP

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:09 AM 0 comments

  Fall of a "Genius"

So Karl Rove is resigning. Words I'd been wanting to type for some time now (though not as much as I've wanted to type, say, "Rove Frogmarched to Federal Prison; Norquist Eaten By Howler Monkeys," but it's an imperfect world, so hey). Why he's leaving isn't so clear -- though Marcy Wheeler has some theories. I can't speculate as to whether he might be in any legal jeopardy, but when Wheeler suggests that "Republicans think he's a loser," she's at least partly right. That may not, in itself, be why Rove is leaving, but it's certainly hard to imagine that many in the GOP will be shedding tears to see him go (I'll look at conservative responses to the move a little later).

Michael Tomasky has a good piece at the Guardian, arguing that Rove's twin legacies are "incompetence and duplicity." With regard to the former, Tomasky points out that, for all the "genius" talk, Rove's actual electoral record is pretty shabby. He lost in 2000 and 2006, and 2004 is not exactly the stuff of legend:

So Rove engineered only one successful presidential election. By a bare 3 million votes (or just 70,000 votes in Ohio, if you care to count it that way). Against a mediocre candidate who ran another bad campaign. For an incumbent president during wartime. Not really a feat for the ages, but okay, a win is a win.

Matt Yglesias, drawing off a new Atlantic article by Josh Green, suggests that "Rove's talk of masterminding an electoral realignment wasn't just bluster, but played an actual causal role in his thinking about the administration's political and policy choices." I think this has been pretty clear from the beginning, in fact. Generally speaking, as much as we (righfully) demonize Rove as the catalyst of so much of the Bush administration's mendacity and cynicism, it's important to keep a clear analytical picture of the role he played within the GOP coalition. He was the strategist who aimed to create a lasting Republican majority with a combination of "big-government conservatism" and a broadened appeal to minority voters.

And that combination, I think, has a lot to do with why Rove is marginalized these days. Big-government conservatism has become the bete noir of the establishment right, while the minority-outreach strategy -- never really much more than a fantasy given the political realities of our era -- foundered on the twin shoals of Katrina and anti-Latino nativism. Wheeler notes the irony of this last point:

I said there was one exception to the rule that Rove simply "creates his own reality" and makes policy promises without delivering on those promises. The exception was supposed to be Latino voters. That is, Rove really did want to court the Latino vote, rather than just claiming Republicans had Latino support. The reason is obvious: if Republicans don't get Latino voters, they're sunk.

Of course, this conflicts (and has, in noticeable ways) with the nativist instincts of the base of the Republican party. About the only thing, at this point, that could mobilize the Republican base (and save some Congressional seats, if not the White House) is to give in to these nativist instincts, and start attacking brown people with gusto. But I doubt Rove would stick around for that--he knows the numbers too well. So it's possible that Rove is out so the Republicans can turn into the full-fledged racist party they've always been.

But then, that's the broader historical irony surrounding Karl Rove's turn at the wheels of power. He failed because he was a bit stupid, and because he was so dishonest, and because he was so easy to dislike. But mainly he failed because he was simply unable to overcome the challenges he correctly identified as needing to be overcome. There's a very good case to be made that Rove's basic strategic instincts were correct. The Republican party can't remain the party of white Christians and survive. And it must come to terms with the fact that the majority of Americans do expect the government to provide effective services and to act on behalf of the common good.

Rove was no humanitarian; he was a hack who happened to notice the major structural problems facing the Republican coalition. Thanks in large part to the incompetence of his boss and the stubbornness of his party, those problems loom at least as large today as they did in 1999. Karl Rove, it seems, simply wasn't possessed of the genius to find the answers.

Labels: conservatives, Karl Rove, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 9:43 AM 0 comments

  So What's Happening Here?

What does it mean that Barack Obama is currently the third choice of Iowa Republican voters in the general election -- after Romney and Giuliani but before Thompson and McCain? What does it mean that, as the campaign goes on, abortion apostate Rudy Giuliani is losing strength not among conservative voters, but among Republican-leading independents?

Of course it's far too little data to draw any real conclusions. But for the sake of positing a theory, let's go back to the Fabrizio poll we discussed about a month ago. As you may recall, the poll described, among other things, the emergence of two very interesting constituencies within the GOP coalition: "Heartland Republicans" and "Government Knows Best Republicans." My capsule description:

The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

So here you have a good 21% of 2000 Republican voters with distinctly moderate -- we might even say progressive -- politics. And who, in the current crop of GOP presidential candidates, represents them? McCain has glued himself to Bush on the war. And Giuliani's standing with R-leaning independents has sunk precisely during the time in which he has run away from his previous reputation as a moderate and made a name for himself as one of the most belligerent, partisan candidates in the race.

There's at least a fifth of the Republican party up for grabs if the GOP's own candidates continue to amp up the partisanship and crowd each other on the right side of the spectrum. One data point -- that Iowa poll -- suggests that Barack Obama, with his "post-partisan" rhetoric, might be the Democrat best positioned to peel their support away from the GOP. But all the Democratic candidates might be well advised to take note of them. I'm not saying they should flee the Democratic base -- far from it. Rather the point is that candidates should be confident that in making the case for progressive values, they're actually taking the fight to the Republicans.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:25 PM 1 comments

  Sometimes Politics Is What You Need to Play

K-Lo and her Senate "friends" are shocked at Harry Reid's statement that the Minnesota bridge collapse should be a "wake-up call" as to the need to reinvest in our crumbling infrastructure -- investment the anti-government Republicans have manifestly, and now disastrously, failed to accomplish.

Underinvestment -- a consequence, in part, of conservative government -- is a serious problem and will lead to more, similar disasters if not corrected. The political crisis contributes to the disaster. So why is it not appropriate to use the spotlight on that disaster in an attempt to solve the political crisis?

It's entirely appropriate, of course -- but it's politically inconvenient for Republicans.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat suggests that Republican candidates like Romney and Rudy can issue their own calls for infrastructure investment. Given the two candidates' eagerness to sell themselves to the anti-government ideologues of the right, though, the message might come out sounding a little ironic.

Labels: infrastructure, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:23 PM 0 comments

  The Path to a Brokered Convention?

Gary Andres explains how it isn't just Democrats who are looking at a real possibility of winding up in a brokered convention next year. Republicans may find that none of their candidates will be able to take a majority of delegates into St. Paul, though for different reasons.

The wild cards in the GOP process are the "winner take all" primaries, used by Republicans in 20 states. Andres observes that Giuliani is well positioned to work around poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire by winning key early WTA states like Florida, California, New York, and New Jersey. Still, other frontrunners may be able to counter:

But Fred Thompson and Mr. Romney may also do well in other early WTA states like South Carolina, (47 delegates), Georgia (72 delegates), Missouri (52 delegates) and Tennessee (55 delegates), which all take place on or before February 5. And Mr. Romney's current lead in New Hampshire and Iowa could bode well for generating momentum going into the WTA primaries. This all has the makings of a topsy-turvy end-game.

A brokered GOP convention would be a fascinating exercise in testing the relative strengths of different parts of the conservative coalition. Is it likely? Maybe not. But it's perhaps a stronger possibility this cycle than it has been in quite a while.

Labels: 2008, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:15 AM 3 comments

  "Lower-Middle Reformism" and the Battle for the Midwest

Frank Luntz, self-exiled in LA, pops up to tell Republicans that they should run in 2008 as the party of optimism and reform. Take a moment to stop laughing, and then read on, because there's a worthwhile nugget of discussable material in his piece (plus it'll make you feel good). Note these points:

A GOP victory is not absolutely out of the question, of course, but getting there would take a forward-looking agenda, unparalleled message discipline, a strict focus on the millions of independent voters, an innovative candidate and campaign and a lot of luck....

To be perfectly blunt, no Republican can win the White House without winning Ohio. Although readers of this column would no doubt like to see and hear the presidential nominees up close, the reality is that California, at least when it comes to elections, is as blue as the Pacific. A successful Republican candidate in Ohio will have learned how to articulate a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland. Without the support of the anxious working class, Ohio will also turn deep blue. And so will the United States.

Daniel Larison and Ross Douthat are quick to jump on this, because they've spent a good deal of time arguing precisely this sort of thing (despite Jonah Goldberg's painfully embarassing attempt to condescend to a group of writers who are 1) smarter and 2) no younger than he). As Larison once put the basic argument:

[S]mall-government conservatism doesn’t sell and “strong government” conservatism does... I don’t like it, but it is true. Ceteris paribus, a GOP that does not attempt to co-opt or develop its own answer for ”lower-middle reformism” or populism is a GOP that is much more likely to lose in a nationwide contest with a party that has started turning to precisely that kind of politics. It will in all likelihood lose the presidential race if it does not address this weakness and instead continues to trot out the old “tax cuts and deregulation” mantra.

Larison now points out that the Republican candidates best positioned to carry a "lower-middle reformist" message ("Huckabee, The Other Thompson, Hunter") are stuck in the second tier of presidential contenders, while the frontrunners seem unable to learn the lesson of how to talk about economics. If Luntz is right, then the Republicans are getting the geography all wrong:

Giuliani and McCain poll better in named match-ups with Democratic contenders than the other two “leading” candidates, but on trade and economic policy they have nothing to offer Ohio, Pennsylvania and other Midwestern states. Leave aside their foreign policy craziness for a moment, and remember (if you somehow had forgotten) that these two are the strongest pro-immigration advocates in the field. That will not, already does not, play well with Republican voters, and it likely will not play very well with the electorate in Ohio, either. Needless to say, the state that went for Bush in ‘04 at least partly thanks to the gay “marriage” ban referendum is not going to be a good fit for Giuliani.

The Republicans need to be able to compete in Ohio and Midwestern states like Ohio, and they appear to be gearing up to nominate a candidate that will make them relatively more competitive in either the South (Fred), California (McCain), the Northeast (Giuliani) or nowhere in particular (Romney). They have apparently learned nothing from the close call in 2004 and the repudiation of 2006.

A very important point here is the different direction the parties are heading in when it comes to economic rhetoric. It's not just the candidates, it's the entire conservative message apparatus, which seems determined to ignore what Larison calls the difference between "economic indicators" and "political reality," as witnessed by Bill Kristol's latest Kudlow-esque "everything is fine, stop whining about he economy" piece in the Weekly Standard. Democrats, meanwhile, are finally taking just the opposite tack, noting that while the numbers may look good, the lived experience of the American economy these days is one of insecurity and doubt. Pundits will surely warn the Democrats away from their new populism, but Democrats are starting to understand the economy as Americans do, not as Beltway economists do, and that's going to give them a huge advantage next fall.

Labels: 2008, Daniel Larison, economy, Frank Luntz, Republicans, Ross Douthat

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:38 AM 4 comments

  STILL Not Gonna Happen

Given all the recent noise about defections in the GOP Senate caucus over Iraq, I'd like to call attention to this post by Jonathan Singer, which takes a little bit more of a critical look at what the cash value of these developments might be. Says Singer:

Neither in the [Washington Post] article nor in other reporting has there been much of an indication that Senators like George Voinovich -- or John Warner or Pete Domenici or Susan Collins or Richard Lugar or almost any of them on the Republican side of the aisle -- have a willingness to do what it takes to bring forward an end to the Iraq War. Sure, they'd be willing to support the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group -- recommendations that might have made a difference had they been implemented last year when they were released but today would do little to either improve the situation on the ground in Iraq or help move us closer to an end to the war -- but they remain unwilling to support legislation that would actually mandate the draw down of forces from Iraq with the goal of ending U.S. military involvement any time before the end of the Bush presidency.

I stand by my previous assertion that virtually all the expressions of Congressional Republican "dissent" on Iraq, no matter how breathlessly reported, are meaningless -- full of sound and simulated fury, signifying nothing.

Labels: Iraq, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:11 AM 0 comments

  Republicans Abandoned by the Mainstream

Conservative blogger Soren Dayton uses a poll about the Libby commutation to note a trend that should disturb Republicans. Comparing ideological self-identification ("conservative"-"moderate"-"liberal") to party ID, he notes:

• The GOP and conservatives are, basically, the same with Republicans being 30% and conservatives are 29%


• Liberals are, however, only half the self-identifying Democrats with self-IDing Dems being 40%, while liberals only 19%


• In other words, 50% or so of self-identified moderates feel comfortable identifying as Democrats.


• In other words, almost no moderates are identifying as Republicans.

The GOP is not appealing to moderates at this moment while half of self-identified Democrats are moderates. That should scare us.

As Dayton notes, caveats apply. Bush hasn't helped the right's numbers, and it's plausible that they could recover after he's gone -- though given the GOP's current commitment to a war-and-terror strategy, they might not. At any rate, this is not a good sign for Republicans.

Labels: polls, Republicans, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:15 PM 2 comments

  This Time I Really Mean It

At Conservative Battleline, Craig Shirley says it's time for conservatives to consider declaring their independence from the GOP -- emulating the actions of the "Manhattan Twelve," who, in 1971, confronted Richard Nixon over his deviations from conservative orthodoxy:

True conservatives are now faced with this choice once again. In order to save their ideology, should the conservative movement declare it’s independence from the Bush Administration and the GOP? The arguments for doing so are compelling.

The immigration bill, most conservatives believe, is a sellout of everything they hold dear – the rule of law, justice, freedom and sovereignty. But rather than listen to the grassroots American people, the GOP elites are listening intently instead to their master’s voice, corporate America....

The war has held together the unhappy shotgun marriage of the elitist GOP and the populist conservatives, but the D-word (“divorce”) is now on the lips of many in the movement.

The arguments for at least a trial separation are legion; from steel tariffs to federal mandates to the states educational systems, to the biggest entitlement since the Great Society to the corruption of Republican “lawmakers” and Enron and the GOP K Street walkers, whose main job is to convince GOP lawmakers into doing un-Republican things. Arrogance, ignorance, the unseemly pursuit of power over principles and betrayal of conservatism are the hallmarks of the current GOP.

Shirley doesn't really identify who the "GOP elites" are -- the Bush administration, one supposes, but who specifically, and why should we believe that they will continue to be the party's "elites" in 2009? And would conservatives have as much leverage with a self-absorbed lame-duck as they did with Nixon, who after all was about to seek re-election? What about the candidates for 2008? And what does a "divorce" from a major party mean? A third party?

In fact Shirley is simply calling for the conservative movement to lead the party, as it did in the 1970s. Unfortunately for Shirley, the movement is a lot less coherent now than it was in the days of the "Manhattan Twelve."

At any rate, Shirley and his compatriots got their way on the immigration bill. Articles like this one might serve as reminder not to mistake conservative sound and fury for any actual plan to break with the GOP.

Labels: Conservative Battleline, conservatives, Craig Shirley, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:15 AM 1 comments

  Libby and the Right

I won't pretend to do a comprehensive post on this, but we can sample some of the conservative reaction.

The National Review's editors are basically satisfied:

We wish the president had chosen a pardon. But as it is, he has removed the most onerous burden facing Libby as a result of this strange and maddening case, and for that we applaud him.

Byron York compares the decision to Bush the First's pardon of convicted Iran-Contra criminals, thus providing further historical evidence for the notion that conservatives expect a different sort of justice than the rest of us, since their crimes are committed for totally good reasons.

The Wall Street Journal is outraged -- that Bush didn't issue a full pardon. In the Journal's telling, Libby was merely trying to defend the administration's Iraq policies against mean old Joe Wilson, and when mean old Patrick Fitzgerald and mean old Judge Walton ganged up on the poor guy, Bush abandoned him. The commutation is par for this unfortunate course:

Mr. Bush's commutation statement yesterday is another profile in non-courage. He describes the case for and against the Libby sentence with an antiseptic neutrality that would lead one to conclude that somehow the whole event was merely the result of Mr. Libby gone bad as a solo operator....

Mr. Libby deserved better from the President whose policies he tried to defend when others were running for cover. The consequences for the reputation of his Administration will also be long-lasting.

Daniel Larison, on the other hand, thinks the WSJ editors are out of their damn minds:

It could have been written before the fact, but regardless of this it is a rich artifact of Bush-era propaganda. Mr. Bush is “evading responsibility” by failing to pardon Libby, when his act of commutation before Libby’s appeal was heard was something that he definitely did not have to do. He is “evading responsibility,” even though the WSJ position on this entire matter is one, long evasion of responsibility, moral, political and legal. These people are simply amazing. The commutation is a “dark moment” in the history of the administration–and not because it is giving cover to a convicted perjuror! It is a “dark moment” because the President did not misuse his pardon power to completely exonerate a felon. That is what these people mean. The WSJ said that Libby deserved better. Actually, he deserved to go to jail. He should be glad that the President was willing to do this much for him. So should his moronic defenders.

Andrew Sullivan jeers as "the aristocracy rejoices":

The wealthy, connected, powerful coterie around Scooter Libby are reveling in their power to subvert the decision of a petty bunch of know-nothing jurors in favor of their best friend.

Alas, Larison and Sullivan are not typical of conservatives in their reactions. As Todd Beeton reports at MyDD, the GOP presidential candidates, as well as 2/3 of their conservative base, fall somewhere on the spectrum between "it was a good decision" and "it should have been a full pardon." That puts them at odds with 60% of the American public, who believe that Bush should have respected the judge's decision. As Todd notes:

Once again, pandering to their base will marginalize them with the electorate at large and serves as further evidence of just how far outside the mainstream the Republican Party has become.

To drive the point home, the Carpetbagger Report has some questions we might ask the GOP candidates over the next few months:

* Will you, as president, routinely overturn criminal sentences for unrepentant convicted felons before they serve time behind bars?

* If obstruction of justice and perjury are not serious crimes deserving of serious punishment, what other felonies are you inclined to disregard?

* Will your White House out covert CIA agents in a time of war, too?

* If there are two systems of justice — one for politically-connected Republicans, and one for everyone else — how will you decide who makes the cut?

* Why is privilege more important than justice?

Labels: conservatives, Republicans, Scooter Libby

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:02 AM 0 comments

  GOP Candidates Snub Hispanic Forum

While the seven Democratic candidates for president made appearances at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference on Saturday, the Republican contenders suffered from a mysterious case of scheduling conflictitis: of all the GOP candidates, only Duncan Hunter managed to make it to Orlando for the event. It was left to Florida Senator and RNC Chair Mel Martinez to make the excuses:

"When you're running a campaign, it is difficult to be everywhere you want to be," he said. He called it "wrong and unacceptable to draw from that the conclusion that the Republican presidential candidates don't care about the Hispanic vote or Latinos in this country. … As this campaign unfolds, I think that will become completely clear."

Asked about the harsh opposition to the immigration bill by several of the GOP candidates, including Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Thompson, he said, "This is a very politically toxic issue, and those that are running for office sometimes run away from tough problems."

While the Republican candidates were running away from a conversation with Hispanic leaders, the Democrats had plenty of time to comment on the nastiness fueling GOP rhetoric on immigration. Barack Obama mentioned the "ugly overtone" to the immigration debate, while Joe Biden suggested that it has become "has become a race to the bottom - who can be the most anti-Hispanic."

According to reports, there was plenty of "buzz" at the conference about the remarks by Fred Thompson seemingly comparing Cuban immigrants to terrorists. Hillary Clinton said the comments "appalled" her, adding: "Apparently he doesn't have a lot of experience in Florida or anywhere else, and doesn't know a lot of Cuban-Americans."

Thompson's comments will be particularly unhelpful to Republicans at a time when Democrats are seeking to expand their Hispanic support, even in Florida, where Cuban exiles have provided a stronghold for the GOP:

In Florida, Republican-leaning, anti-Castro Cubans have long dominated Hispanic politics, and most big-name Hispanic politicians are Republican. But Democrats see hope in the growing proportion of non-Cubans and in the generational erosion of Republican dominance among Cuban immigrants.

While Republicans are "conceding the Latino vote in Florida to Democrats," the Democratic candidates are "fully recognizing the importance of the Latino community in Florida and nationally," trumpeted a state Democratic Party press release about the candidates' forums at the conference.

The no-show on Saturday may only hasten the GOP's demographic doom. They fed the fires of the immigration debate and now they're being held hostage to the rages of their own shrinking base, watching as Democrats move in on the voters they have abandoned.

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Labels: 2008, Hispanics, Presidential election, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:58 AM 95 comments

  Novak: GOP Depressed

Novakula reports on the mood in the Republican Senate caucus following the failure of the immigration bill. Republicans who stuck with the administration and voted for the bills are furious with majority leader Mitch McConnell, who abandoned them during the fight. And they are exhausted and demoralized, especially after the harrowing experience of reaping what their party sowed over immigration:

It is difficult to exaggerate the pessimism about the immediate political future voiced by Republicans in Congress when not on the record. With an unpopular president waging an unpopular war, they foresee electoral catastrophe in 2008, with Democratic gains in both the House and Senate and Hillary Clinton in the White House. That's the atmosphere in which these lachrymose lawmakers have for several months faced an increasingly hysterical onslaught from constituents demanding the death of the "amnesty" for immigrants they heard vilified on talk radio...

"This isn't a day to celebrate," McConnell said in his postmortem. Indeed, Republicans drove another nail in George W. Bush's political coffin and undermined hopes for winning the growing, and winnable, Hispanic vote. Contending that the time "wasn't now" for immigration, McConnell added: "It wasn't the people's will. And they were heard." He was blaming Republican failure on his fellow citizens, which seldom works in politics.

Now, don't let schadenfreude get the best of you: politics has a way of turning the depressed into the triumphant suprisingly quickly. But for the purposes of brightening a Monday morning (er...afternoon), you're allowed to feel a little bit of pleasure in the Republicans' pain.

Labels: Republicans, Robert Novak, U.S. Senate

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:47 AM 0 comments

  Targeting the GOP Coalition

There are a number of things worth discussing with regard to the Fabrizio poll of Republicans. One thing I haven't seen widely mentioned is that the poll was underwritten by a number of groups dedicated to moving the GOP toward the center on social issues: the Republican Leadership Council (which "supports fiscally conservative, socially inclusive Republican candidates"), Republican Main Street Partnership, Republican Majority for Choice, and the Log Cabin Republicans -- all of whom must be pleased with the survey's finding that Republican voters are much more socially moderate than the conventional wisdom would suggest.

But what I want to focus on in this post is how the data indicate that progressives should not pursue an alliance with libertarians, but should instead focus on building consensus around government-backed social insurance.

Debate about the prospects for a "liberaltarian" coaltion has been bubbling for several months (see Brink Lindsey's initial essay on the subject here; see also Jonathan Chait's rebuttal). Six years of Bush administration assaults on civil liberties and pandering to the religious right have lent the idea an undeniable appeal, but the results of the Fabrizio poll suggest that Lindsey's particular version of "progressive fusionism" would lead liberals in the wrong direction, away from a genuinely strong progressive coalition.

The poll breaks GOP voters down into seven categories, the largest of which are the "moralists" -- social conservatives as we know them, heavily evangelical and defined by a "laser-like focus" on issues like abortion and homosexuality. Yet these moralists constitute only a quarter of Republican voters, and even they retain a surprising degree of flexibility -- 33% would vote for a candidate with whom they disagreed on abortion, if the candidate shared enough of their other views.

Overall, by 53-42%, Republicans believe their party "has spent too much time on moral issues...and should instead be focusing on economic issues." Judging by the poll results, there's little evidence that the views of the moralists represent a GOP consensus on social issues. By 49-42% Republicans favor allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. By 77-18% (including a large majority even of moralists), GOP voters believe it should be illegal for employers to fire workers based on sexual orientation. Only 28% believe that abortion should be illegal under all circumstances (this does not of course mean that the majority of Republicans are pro-choice, but it does mean that the issue continues to be defined by its nuances, rather than by moral absolutes).

Particularly notable is that, setting the moralists aside, the most anti-government segments of the party -- "Free Marketeers" and "Dennis Miller Republicans" -- are not appreciably more socially liberal than the other groups. Only on one question -- how much impact religion should have on public policy -- do the Free Marketeers stand out as significantly more liberal than their compatriots, and even here the other non-moralist groups are closely divided. In fact, on the abortion and sexual orientation questions, two non-moralist groups stand out as more progressive than the anti-government groups.

These two factions -- the "Heartland Republicans" and the "Government Knows Best Republicans" -- are the most intriguing, from a liberal standpoint. The former, constituting 8% of the GOP electorate, are "more pragmatic and less ideological," worried about gas prices but supportive of government action on economic issues and climate change, and somewhat Midwestern. The latter group are 13% of the party, the "strongest supporters of government intervention to solve social and environmental problems," as well as being "skeptical of the Patriot Act" and of military spending generally, heavily female, and "more likely to be found on the coasts."

These two groups look to be classic examples of voters who are "theoretically conservative and operationally liberal." By large margins, they share with their fellow partisans the broad feeling that government is too big and spends too much, taxes are too high, and the budget should be balanced. But on questions of specific priorities, their views are much different. On economic issue after economic issue they favor government intervention over the invisible hand of the market: they believe that universal health care should be a right; they prefer fully-funded Social Security to private retirement accounts; they believe the federal government should be more involved in the education system; they think the government is not doing enough to combat global warming; and they agree that "government should be there with a helping hand for those who can't make it on their own." On some of these issues, they are even joined by a third group -- the "Fortress America" isolationists.

These groups look not unlike the independent voters Democrats seek to court. And keep in mind that, again, they are pro-government, but for the most part no less socially liberal than the libertarians.

All of this comes in the context of a new divide within the GOP, over war and terror issues. Republican voters overwhelmingly believe that Iraq and the war on terror now define the Republican party, though they are less united in how they feel about that fact. Here it's instructive to return to Reihan Salam's theory about the two Republican narratives most likely to emerge:

I see two ways to do this: a moralistic domestic reformism that ties together the applied neoconservatism of welfare reform and crime-fighting, the social conservatism of moving to reduce the number of abortions (through restrictions or abortion alternatives) and income-splitting and other marriage-friendly and family-friendly measures, and a civic nationalism that emphasizes America's common culture and the central importance of assimilation and integration.

Or War on Terror nationalism, which focuses on the defeat of America's enemies to the exclusion of domestic issues.

I largely agree with Salam, which is why I think that the kind of conservatism that he and his ideological compatriots advocate represents the right's best chance to build a majority over the long term. But I think that these numbers are even more promising for Democrats, if we take advantage of them.

Liberaltarianism represents an effort to build a firewall against moralist and authoritarian conservatism. But Fabrizio's data suggests that such a firewall is unnecessary, because it already exists within the Republican coalition. And building the liberaltarian wall would mean shutting out the very constituencies we should be trying to peel off: socially moderate, operationally-pro-government Republicans and independents. In this regard liberatarianism seems like a cousin of DLC triangulationism, which was driven in part by an elitist distaste for moralists and economic populists alike, and which sought to exploit the right's divide on social issues while ignoring the possibilities of exploiting its divide on economic issues (though, in fairness, the latter divide has widened significantly since the Clinton era).

There is, I think, room to assemble a coalition around sensible, well-considered social insurance ideas. Conservative reformists like Salam are hoping to get there first, and Democrats should realize the danger in allowing them to do so. One advantage for progressives, though, is that efforts to build a "moralistic domestic reform" conservatism will be slowed both by conservative institutional resistance to anything that smacks of compassionate conservatism redux, and by the right's current pre-occupation with war and terror. At the very least we should be in a position to negotiate social insurance policy with the conservative reformers from a position of strength. We should take advantage of the space these delays offer us to get a head start on building a real progressive fusionism.

Cross-posted at MyDD.

Labels: conservatives, Fabrizio poll, polls, progressives, Reihan Salam, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:59 AM 5 comments