If it’s Tuesday, there must be another primary election, and today’s is in Oklahoma, where both parties are holding gubernatorial primaries, and there are a couple of congressional contests of interest.
I’ve got a preview up at FiveThirtyEight for those who want a serious run-down. The bottom line is that Attorney General Drew Edmondson is favored to defeat Lt. Gov. Jari Askins for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, in what’s been a very civil contest; while Rep. Mary Fallin is almost certain to defeat Tea Party advocate Randy Brogdon for the GOP nod. Meanwhile, Blue Dog Dan Boren will turn back an underfunded progressive primary challenge, and Republicans will go to runoffs in his district and in Fallin’s.
Oklahoma’s one of those states with a pretty hardy Democratic tradition (registered Dems still outnumber registered Republicans) that’s been trending Red for some time. Hanging onto the governor’s office and a congressional seat, particularly in this kind of year, would be quite an accomplishment. Today’s primary will help determine whether that happens.
Colorado is without question a key target for the GOP this year. It’s a traditionally “purple” state where Democrats captured the governorship and legislature in 2006, and then carried the state for Barack Obama in 2008. With incumbent Gov. Bill Ritter stepping down voluntarily, and with a competitive Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate between appointed Sen. Michael Bennet and former House speaker Andrew Romanoff, GOPers have definitely been seeing an opening. Polls have been showing close general election races for both the governorship and the Senate.
But somebody up there must not like Colorado Republicans, because they are in the midst of a plague-of-frogs series of misfortunes. As I noted here recently, the campaign of the front-running GOP gubernatorial candidate, Scott McInnis, imploded upon allegations that he plagiarized big chunks of a report he supposedly wrote to justify a very lucrative think-tank contract just a few years back.
As Colorado GOPers tried to figure out what to do, the wingiest nut of them all, former Rep. Tom Tancredo (last seen calling for the President’s impeachment on grounds that he is a “dedicated Marxist”) publicly demanded that the two Republicans officially in the race advance to drop out after the August 10 primary (enabling the party to name someone else), or he’d run for governor himself on the Constitution Party ticket. Presumably the answer didn’t come fast enough, and Tancredo duly announced his third-party candidacy, following that up with a public shouting match with the state Republican chairman.
But the weirdness has not been confined to the gubernatorial race. In the Senate primary, district attorney Ken Buck, a big Tea Party favorite who’s recently moved ahead of “establishment” candidate Jane Norton in the polls, got caught saying this into a live microphone:
[W]ill you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera?
Boy, what a quandry for Buck: he now has to eat a big plate of crow to avoid offending his own base, but in doing so he will appear intimidated by a Birther contingent that he obviously considers stupid. And he’s already in some hot water for earlier blurting out that he was a better candidate than Norton because “I don’t wear high heels.”
All in all, it would have been a good week for Colorado Republican officials–and their various candidates–to have taken a vacation.
Democrats like to think of themselves as champions of economic fairness for working families. But for decades now, working class voters – especially white ones – haven’t been feeling the love. Even as their economic condition has deteriorated, they persist in voting against their “class interest” by voting Republican.
Few U.S. political leaders have studied this phenomenon more intently than Virginia Senator James Webb. In a thought-provoking Wall Street Journal article last week, Webb took aim at government policies intended to promote “diversity,” which he says have marginalized many white workers.
Webb acknowledged Washington’s responsibility to redress the wrongs endured by black Americans. But he maintained that affirmative action policies have been expanded to include many people, including recent immigrants, who cannot by any stretch of the imagination claim to be victims of discrimination. Such policies give a leg up to minorities in competition for government jobs and contracts, broadcast licenses, college admissions and even private sector hiring.
“Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years,” Webb wrote.
Excepting programs intended to benefit black Americans, “government-directed diversity programs should end,” he added.
Webb’s criticism of group preferences is reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” approach to reforming affirmative action. Perhaps because of their own humble origins, both men feel viscerally that policies that treat all whites as privileged, regardless of wide variations in their socio-economic background and circumstances, make a mockery of the liberal ideal of equal justice.
That glaring contradiction at the heart of contemporary liberalism offers a more-than-plausible explanation for why non-college white voters spurn Democrats. Liberals generally have preferred other explanations: endemic racism, or the supposed power of cultural issues to trump economic ones. Webb is challenging Democrats to come to grips with the obvious: white working class voters have good reasons for believing the party doesn’t stand for economic fairness for them.
All this is highly relevant to Democrats’ electoral prospects, in the midterm election and beyond. In last year’s big elections in New York, Virginia and even solidly Democratic Massachusetts, only a third of working class whites picked the Democratic candidate. According to a recent Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll, a mere 34 percent of non-college white men and 37 percent of non-college women approve of the job President Obama is doing.
Even among college white men, Obama’s approval stands at 42 percent, and 50 percent for women. In fact, the sharp drop in Obama’s public esteem Gallup seems to be largely due to the defection of white voters, and women in particular, since nearly two-thirds of minority voters approve of his performance.
Obama and the Democrats don’t need to win a majority of white voters, but they can’t afford to lose them by enormous margins, either. To close the gap, progressives must do a better job of addressing the real economic interests of white working class, which after all are not much different than those of working class blacks, Latinos or Asians.
What’s needed is a new agenda for modernizing public infrastructure, expanding access to education and retooling the American economy to win in global competition. The details of that agenda are a subject for another day. But Sen. Webb is right: Progressives should start by tailoring affirmative action policies narrowly to those they were originally intended to help, and let everyone else compete for economic opportunities without government’s thumb on the scales.
As you may have noticed, the latest right-wing “scandal” (at least for those who are not mesmerized by the “exposure” of liberal opinion in the leaked archives of the JournoList) is the planned construction of a mosque and Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero in New York. This is essentially a local land use issue of the sort that New York authorities deal with every day, but the “threat” of this mosque has already become a cause celebre around the country, particularly with the Tea Party folk.
But the most radical reaction so far has been not from any Tea Party spokesman or talk radio jock, but from the former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a putative presidential candidate in 2012, Newt Gingrich. Check this statement out:
There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.
Yes, Gingrich is arguing that religious liberty for Muslims in the United States should be made contingent on religious liberty for non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Anything less is a “double standard.”
I suppose this sounds reasonable to people who think all or most Muslims are “Islamists,” or buy Newt’s dubious assertion that the name of the proposed facility, Cordoba House, is a deliberate Islamist provocation aimed at heralding some future armed conquest of the United States. But put aside the particulars here and think about the idea that a unilateral commitment to religious liberty by the United States represents a “double standard” inviting our destruction.
This isn’t a particularly new idea. For a very long time some American Protestants resisted full civil rights for Catholics on grounds that Catholic countries did not extend similar rights to Protestants. You’d think Newt Gingrich, as a very avid recent convert to Catholicism, would be aware of that history and its relevance to his “double standard” argument.
Newt’s line, of course, is an analog to the argument beloved of some conservatives that in the civilizational struggle with Islamism, American principles of decency–say, a reluctance to torture prisoners–are just signs of contemptible weakness that make our enemies laugh at us. It’s richly ironic that the kind of people who deeply believe in “American exceptionalism”–the notion that much of what is good on this planet would disappear if America began to resemble countries like Canada or England or France–are sometimes among the first to argue that America should abandon its distinctive beliefs whenever it is convenient. But Gingrich carries the freedom-is-weakness argument to a brand new extreme. Wonder how his fans would react if he suggested that the right to bear arms should be suspended for the duration of the War On Terror to keep guns out of the hands of Islamists? The mind reels.
I’ve found this year’s primaries in my home state of Georgia to be very interesting. Clearly, Georgians do not agree. Despite a host of competitive contests in both parties, total turnout in yesterday’s primaries was about 22 percent, which is pretty pathetic.
In any event, the consequences wrought by those few voters were pretty interesting. On the Democratic side, former governor Roy Barnes took the next step in his attempted redemption from a huge stumble in 2002, when his grossly overconfident re-election campaign was upset by a party-switching good ol’ boy named Sonny Perdue. This time around Barnes impressively defeated an African-American statewide elected official by a three-to-one margin, doing especially well in heavily African-American urban areas. Two Democratic congressmen, Hank Johnson and John Barrow, survived primary challenges.
Republicans set themselves up for some potentially wild-and-crazy runoffs. Sarah Palin’s candidate, Karen Handel, will face Newt Gingrich’s candidate, Nathan Deal, on August 10. All kinds of nastiness between these two candidate broke out late in the primary contest; Handel has basically called Deal a crook and Deal has basically called Handel a godless liberal. It’s not likely to get more civil in the runoff.
The Republican congressional primaries produced some odd results, too. You have to have some sympathy for 9th district congressman Tom Graves. He won his gig after a special election in May and then a runoff in June, all because Nathan Deal resigned the seat to (take your pick) devote more time to his gubernatorial campaign or short-circuit an ethics investigation. Then he had to run for a full term in yesterday’s primary, and once again, he’s in a runoff against the same candidate, Lee Hawkins. So Graves and Hawkins will be facing each other for the fourth time in three months.
Then you’ve got state Rep. Clay Cox (R-GA), who was endorsed by a who’s-who of Georgia Republican politics in his bid to succeed the venerable right-winger John Linder in a safe GOP district. Cox dutifully endorsed Linder’s hobby-horse, the “Fair Tax” proposal, and did everything else expected of him. But he finished a poor third, losing not only to Linder’s former chief of staff, Rob Woodall, but also to talk radio host Jody Hice.
In general, the August 10 runoffs will be mostly a Republican affair, and in that rarefied company, we can expect a lot of more-conservative-than-thou one-upsmanship. Looking forward to the general election, Democrats are in reasonably good shape to do relatively well in this red state, in this bad year.
It’s been obvious for quite some time–dating back at least to the fall of 2008–that the Republican Party is undergoing an ideological transformation that really is historically unusual. Normally political parties that go through two consecutive really bad electoral cycles downplay ideology and conspicuously seek “the center.” Not today’s GOP, in which there are virtually no self-identified “moderates,” and all the internal pressure on politicians — and all is no exaggeration — is from the right.
But as Jonathan Chait notes today, there are two distinct phenomena pulling the GOP to the right this year: there’s ideological radicalism, to be sure, but also what he calls “tactical radicalism:”
Obviously the conservative movement is intoxicated with hubris right now. Part of this hubris is their belief that the American people are truly and deeply on their side and that the last two elections were either a fluke or the product of a GOP that was too centrist. It’s a tactical radicalism, a belief that ideological purity carries no electoral cost whatsoever.
This is what I’ve called the “move right and win” hypothesis, and it’s generally based on some “hidden majority” theory whereby every defeat is the product of a discouraged conservative base or some anti-conservative conspiracy (e.g., the bizarre “ACORN stole the election” interpretation of 2008). As Chait observes, there is a counterpart hypothesis on the left, but is vastly less influential, and anyone watching internal party politics these days will note the vast difference in tone between Democratic primaries where moderation is a virtue and Republican primaries where it’s a vice.
While many Democrats (including Chait in the piece I’ve linked to) are interested in the short-term implications of tactical radicalism, such as the possibility that GOP candidates like Sharron Angle or Rand Paul could lose races that should be Republican cakewalks, there’s a long-term factor as well that no one should forget about for a moment. If, as is almost universally expected, Republicans have a very good midterm election year after a highly-self-conscious lurch to the right, will there be any force on earth limiting the tactical radicalism of conservatives going forward? I mean, really, there’s been almost no empirical evidence supporting the “move right and win” hypothesis up until now, and we see how fiercely it’s embraced by Republicans. Will 2010 serve as the eternal validator of the belief that America is not just a “center-right country” but a country prepared to repudiate every progressive development of the last century or so?
That could well be the conviction some conservatives carry away from this election cycle, and if so, what would normally pass for the political “center” will be wide open for Democrats to occupy for the foreseeable future.
It didn’t get the kind of national attention that Sarah Palin’s endorsement of Karen Handel received, but it could matter down the road: Newt Gingrich has endorsed his former House colleague Nathan Deal for governor of Georgia, just a week before the July 20 primary. Moreover, Gingrich offered his imprimatur in Georgia, not on a Facebook site (Palin’s only venue for Handel so far), and has cut an ad for the North Georgia party-switcher.
I’d say this is a pretty risky gambit for Newt, taking on Palin in his own home state, all the more because this is an extremely unstable race. Five different polling outfits have released surveys of this contest since July 1, and the results are all over the place. Two polls, from Survey USA and Mason-Dixon, have shown longtime frontrunner John Oxendine maintaining his lead with over 30 percent of the vote, and Karen Handel moving up into second place at 23 percent. Two other polls, from Insider Advantage and Magellan, have Oxendine’s support collapsing down into the teens; IA had him tied with Handel, and Magellan had Handel surging into the lead. All four polls had Nathan Deal bumping along in the teens as well, and not showing much momentum.
Now Rasmussen‘s weighed in with a poll showing Handel and Deal tied for the lead at 25 percent, with Oxendine semi-collapsing back to 20 percent.
If Rasmussen’s right, and Handel and Deal wind up in a runoff, the Newt-Versus-Sarah story-line will get a lot more play, and pressure on Palin to personally campaign for her latest Mama Grizzly will grow intense.
All this activity is preliminary, of course, to the general election, and the latest poll to test various Republicans against likely Democratic nominee Roy Barnes, the Mason-Dixon survey, shows the former governor tied with Oxendine, up eleven points over Handel, and up eighteen points over Deal.
Going into yesterday’s Alabama runoffs, the Republican gubernatorial contest revolved around rumors of a big, teacher-union-generated Democratic crossover vote in favor of Dr. Robert Bentley, along with speculation that his opponent, Bradley Byrne, might have gained crucial momentum by accusing Bentley of being a Democratic or union stooge.
Bentley beat Byrne 56-44, and a cursory look at the returns shows no evidence of any massive Democratic crossover vote. In fact, turnout was down 6 percent from the primary, with no apparent relationship between Republican turnout numbers and those counties with or without significant Democratic contests to keep Democrats on their side of the line. Moreover, Byrne did quite well in most of the counties with a big Democratic constituency. There was some anecdotal buzz yesterday about Democratic crossover in isolated locations (e.g., Madison County, where Republican turnout actually dropped 17 percent), but most election officials said it didn’t seem to be happening.
The much more likely explanation is that Bentley got the bulk of voters who cast ballots for Tim James and Roy Moore in the primary, hardly a stretch since both their campaign managers endorsed Bentley. James voters in particular probably discounted Byrne’s attacks on Bentley as no more credible than Byrne’s earlier attacks on their candidate.
In any event, future Republican candidates who think demonizing teachers unions is a failsafe strategy should take a close look at Alabama.
In the two congressional runoffs, nothing that unusual happened, either. In the 2nd district Republican contest, “establishment” candidate Martha Roby easily dispatched Tea Party activist Rick Barber 60-40, beating him nearly three-to-one in their common home county, Montgomery, where the fiery pool hall owner did not gather his armies effectively. Roby will now face Democratic incumbent Bobby Bright in what is expected to be a close race in November.
And in the 7th district Democratic contest, where the Democratic nomination really is tantamount to election, Terri Sewell, who had superior financial resources and significant national support, defeated Shelia Smoot 55-45, with the key being Sewell’s 54-46 margin in Jefferson County, where local races boosted turnout.
Seyward Darby has an amusing piece at the New Republic‘s site with some of the loonier provisions found in state Republican Party platform documents.
It’s all good clean fun, but does this craziness matter? No, suggests the CW; party platform committees these days, at any level, are a sandbox dominated by ideological activists, producing turgid documents that candidates feel free to ignore.
Fair enough, I guess, but what about those states where ideological activists have an unusually important role? How about, say, Iowa, whose caucuses often all but dictate one or the other party’s nominating process?
I strongly suggest a reading of the Iowa Republican Party Platform by anyone who accuses “liberals” or “the media” of exaggerating the extremism of today’s conservatives.
This 367-plank, 12,000-word document, adopted just last month at the Iowa State Republican Convention, is relentlessly kooky. Right up top, before the “statement of principles,” the platform features a long, ominous quote from Cicero about “traitors.” It’s not made clear whether said traitors are Democrats, RINOs, or Muslims, but treason sure seems to be a major preoccupation for Iowa Republicans.
Once you get to the “statement of principles,” it’s hard to miss principle number seven, which would have satisfied Ayn Rand even on one of her crankier days:
The individual works hard for what is his/hers. Therefore, the individual will determine with whom he/she will share it, not the government. No more legal plunder. Legal plunder is defined as using the law to take from one person what belongs to them, and giving it to others to whom it does not belong. It is plunder if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what that citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Given that principle, it’s not surprising that elsewhere the platform flatly calls for the abolition of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (along with minimum wage laws), and of the federal departments of Agriculture (!), Education and Energy. It also appears to oppose any anti-discrimination laws of any sort.
Beyond such basics, the Iowa GOP Platform is essentially a compilation of every right-wing consipracy theory-based preoccupation known to man. In a nod to Glenn Beck, the statement of principles mentions “Progressivism” along with “Collectivism, Socialism, Fascism, [and] Communism” as ideologies incompatible with the Founding Fathers’ design. There’s a birther plank. There’s a plank about the “NAFTA Superhighway.” There’s a plank about ACORN. There’s a plank about the “fairness doctrine.” There’s plank after plank after plank opposing the nefarious activities of the United Nations. There’s a plank calling for abolition of the Federal Reserve System. Needless to say, there are many, many planks spelling out total opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage in excrutiating detail, and attacking any limitation on campaign activities or use of tax dollars by religious organizations.
The very end of the platform holds that Republican candidates should be denied party funds if they don’t agree with at least 80% of the platform, as determined by questionnaires asking about every single crazy plank. This is something we should all be able to get behind; I’d love to see not only Iowa Republican gubernatorial candidate Terry Branstad, a notorious fence-straddler on many issues, but the entire 2012 GOP presidential field, have to check boxes next to solemn items like:
We oppose any effort to implement Islamic Shariah law in this country.
If all this madness is really out of the mainstream of Republican thinking, then perhaps the adults of the GOP should expend the minimum effort necessary to say so very explicitly.
It’s puzzling that President Obama keeps returning to the combustible subject of immigration. You’d think that, with big financial reform and energy/climate bills hanging fire, he’d have his hands full. And with unemployment stuck at nearly 10 percent, it’s not exactly a propitious time for a national debate over legalizing millions of immigrants who are living and working illegally in this country.
So what gives? Maybe it’s simply that Obama is the son of an immigrant father. Republicans, of course, have a more cynical explanation. They say Obama is throwing a bone to Latino advocacy groups disappointed by his failure to redeem a campaign pledge to move comprehensive immigration reform. Facing a very difficult midterm election, Democrats can’t afford to give Latino voters reasons to stay home.
After the Justice Department sued Arizona this week over a controversial immigration law, the Wall Street Journal accused Obama of being “more focused on branding the GOP anti-immigrant than he is on signing a reform bill.”
It’s true that immigration has opened up a fault line between Republican restrictionists and moderates like former President Bush, who won a substantial chunk of the Latino vote in 2000 and 2004. But give Obama some credit: He’s consistently ignored advice from Washington wise men to postpone politically risky undertakings – like health care and the climate bill – until the economy turns up again. His determination to take on the nation’s biggest problems, rather than “kick the can down the road,” is admirable, if impolitic.
But while Obama may be ready to lead, it’s not clear the public is ready to follow. A new Gallup poll finds Americans closely divided on immigration reform. By a 50-45 margin, they favor halting the flow of illegal immigrants over “developing a plan to deal with immigrants now in the U.S. illegally.” The survey also found that immigration is far from uppermost in voters’ list of concerns.
In a major speech on immigration last week at American University, Obama once again showed a fine instinct for the middle ground. He chided restrictionists who imagine that all 11 million illegal immigrants can simply be rounded up and sent home. But he also criticized immigrant advocates who call for a blanket amnesty for all people here illegally. “It would suggest to those thinking about coming here illegally that there will be no repercussions for such a decision. And this could lead to a surge in more illegal immigration. And it would also ignore the millions of people around the world who are waiting in line to come here legally,” Obama said. And he added: “Ultimately, our nation, like all nations, has the right and obligation to control its borders and set laws for residency and citizenship. And no matter how decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these laws should be held accountable.”
That kind of moral clarity has been missing from liberal discourse on immigration, and it gives Obama a chance to be heard by Americans worried that the flow of undocumented immigrants across our southern border have eroded U.S. sovereignty and made a mockery of our laws. Once that has been stipulated, it’s easier to engage people in rational discussion about a compassionate way to deal with the millions of illegal immigrants working in our communities.
So far, so good. But Obama’s speech contained two large blind spots. One has to do with developing our capacity to enforce immigration laws in the workplace. After all, what attracts undocumented immigrants is the opportunity to work in the U.S. Until we have reliable systems for establishing the identity and legal status of workers, it will be difficult to hold employers accountable for hiring those who came here illegally.
Second, and even more important, the president seemed oblivious to the fundamental mismatch between U.S. immigration laws and our economy. America needs to import more skilled labor to plug gaps for scientists, engineers and technicians throughout our high-tech, high-wage economy. Our immigration system, however, gives priority not to skills, but to family unification.
Rather than simply urge Congress to take up comprehensive immigration reform where it left off back in 2006, the administration needs to think more creatively about modernizing immigration policy, and aligning it more closely with the requirements of U.S. economic innovation and competitiveness. I’ve offered some ideas along these lines, but more fundamental change is needed.
President Obama’s instincts on immigration are sound, but he needs to bring our policies and laws up-to-date in addition to finding a fair and compassionate way of dealing with people who came here illegally to find a better life.
When a presidential hopeful like Mitt Romney signs a Washington Postop-ed attacking the president for an arms agreement with Russia, there’s a tendency among Democrats to shrug and ignore it. Mitt, we all understand, is a former governor with no foreign policy experience who needs to burnish his credentials in this area, even if it’s only by bloviating. And Mitt, we know, is vulnerable on his right flank, partially because the GOP has decisively moved in a more conservative direction since Romney posed as the “true conservative” candidate in 2008, and partially because his sponsorship of a Massachusetts health reform initiative that’s hard to distinguish from the hated ObamaCare is going to be a constant problem for him in 2012.
So you read Mitt’s op-ed and maybe laugh at the extraordinary retro feeling of it all — you know, all the Cold War hostility to the godless Russkies — and note the many right-wing boxes he checked off, from the ancient conservative pet rock of missile defense, to the ill-repressed desire for war with North Korea and Iran, to the ritual denunciations of Obama for his alleged fecklessness in negotiating with bad people. But initially, few if any Democrats had anything to say about it.
That certainly changed Wednesday, when Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) took to the same WaPo pages to pen a devastating riposte to Romney for getting, well, just about all the facts wrong. After tearing Romney apart on missile defense, on MIRVs, on what the treaty would and wouldn’t let the Russians do, and on the bipartisan support for what Obama’s done, Kerry concluded with this well-placed jab:
I have nothing against Massachusetts politicians running for president. But the world’s most important elected office carries responsibilities, including the duty to check your facts even if you’re in a footrace to the right against Sarah Palin. More than that, you need to understand that when it comes to nuclear danger, the nation’s security is more important than scoring cheap political points.
As it turns out, Kerry was nicer to Romney than was foreign policy wonk Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate:
In 35 years of following debates over nuclear arms control, I have never seen anything quite as shabby, misleading and–let’s not mince words–thoroughly ignorant as Mitt Romney’s attack on the New START treaty in the July 6 Washington Post.
Whether or not Romney’s efforts to display conservative ferocity on foreign policy work with the GOP base, he could pay a price down the road in terms of the impact on people who aren’t hard-core conservative ideologues. Talking to progressives, you generally get the sense that while they would fight Mitt Romney like sin itself if he’s the 2012 GOP presidential nominee, they basically think the man’s sane and relatively competent, and wouldn’t threaten the foundations of the Republic like some possibilities they could name. But a few more rabid op-eds on world affairs like Romney’s latest effort will definitely undermine any latent tolerance for Romney in center-left precincts, and will also provide some target practice in case the endlessly flip-flopping former governor’s act gets him to a general election.
As regular readers might recall, back in May I did an analysis which predicted that the furor over immigration policy touched off in Arizona would have its greatest political impact not in the southwest or west coast, but in the Deep South, where a combination of new and highly visible Hispanic populations, low Hispanic voting levels, and red-hot Republican primaries would likely bring the issue to the forefront.
Nothing that’s happened since then has made me change my mind about that, though southern Republican unanimity on backing the Arizona law and replicating it everywhere has reduced the salience of immigration as a differentiator in some GOP primaries, most notably in South Carolina (where in any event the Nikki Haley saga eclipsed everything else).
But in Georgia, whose primary is on July 20, immigration is indeed a big issue in the gubernatorial contest, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway:
For the next 13 days, all stops are off when it comes to debating the issue of illegal immigration.
The Obama administration’s court challenge to the Arizona law that gives its peace officers the authority to stop and impound undocumented residents is already serving as a stick to a wasp nest in Georgia’s race for governor.
Former congressman Nathan Deal’s first TV ad of the primary season on Wednesday focused on illegal immigration and a promise that Georgia would soon have an Arizona-style law.
On the answering machines of tens of thousands of GOP voters, former secretary of state Karen Handel left a message of endorsement from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer. Expect to see Brewer at Handel’s side before the July 20 vote.
The climate doesn’t brook dissent. Democrats have been uniformly silent on the Arizona issue.
As it happens, Deal and Handel are battling for a runoff spot. Handel and long-time Republican front-runner John Oxendine are also proposing radical changes in the state tax code, abolishing income taxes entirely, but so far that momentous issue is not getting the kind of attention generated by the action of another state on immigration three time zones away.
One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and — in some cases — charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.
We’re seeing this phenomenon re-emerge with the implementation of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative, a competition to reward states for educational innovations including higher academic standards, more openness to public school choice, and stronger performance indicators for teachers. Unsurprisingly, many on the left dislike charter schools, pay-for-performance, and “teaching to the test.” Many of the right are hostile to the very idea of federal involvement in education, and particularly to national standards of any sort; others are lukewarm to charter schools because they are public, and instead favor private-school vouchers and/or oppose “government schools” altogether.
Liberal hostility to Race to the Top was reflected in this recent effort by House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey to shift emergency funds out of Race to the Top and into teacher layoff prevention. More broadly, there’s notable tension between teachers unions (particularly the NEA) and the administration on education policy.
One of the most interesting examples of conservative infighting on education policy is in Georgia, where lame duck Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue has made his state’s RTT application the centerpiece of his administration’s education program, and also a major part of its strategy to balance the state budget. But when Republican State School Superintendent Kathy Cox abruptly resigned to take a Washington think tank post, after the filing deadline for the post, the GOP was left with two candidates who opposed RTT because they oppose federal involvement in education altogether. So Perdue is backing an independent bid for the post by the career educator he appointed to replace Cox, which has made conservatives quite unhappy.
This is one major policy area where the differences within and between the two major parties are playing out at every level of government. It could be a very rocky ride just ahead for anyone longing for consistency in how our public schools are run.
It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal asked 109 Republican “insiders” to rank possible nominees in terms of likelihood, Daniels finished fifth, tied with Sarah Palin and well ahead of Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee. And at the same time, 111 Democratic “insiders” ranked Daniels fourth when asked about the most formidable prospective GOP candidate. And that was all before a slow but steady drumbeat of interest in the Hoosier, culminating in one of those long, hagiographical magazine profiles that often serve as the informal launching pad of presidential runs, this one by Andrew Ferguson for The Weekly Standard.
You can see the logic behind the Daniels-for-president enthusiasm. Virtually unknown among voters outside Indiana, Daniels has none of the baggage accompanying retreads like Gingrich, Huckabee and Mitt Romney, or even fellow-insider-favorite Haley Barbour, much less the lightning-rod Palin. He’s a state official who has never had to cast a controversial vote in Congress, but also has DC street cred from his work in the Reagan White House and his stint as George W. Bush’s first OMB director (where he exited before the inevitable gusher of red ink really exploded). He’s very popular in a state carried by Barack Obama in 2008, and his state’s positive fiscal record stands out sharply against a national landscape of state fiscal disaster. Moreover, as Ferguson’s profile illustrates, Daniels has a moderately quirky but folksy personality that seems a lot more appealing than those of other, dark horses like Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota or John Thune of South Dakota.
Given the newly rediscovered monomania for deficit hawkery among Republicans, buttressed by Tea Party demands for smaller government now, Daniels looks like someone who can credibly wear a green eyeshade at a time when that’s the sexiest look around.
But in the self-same Ferguson profile that exemplified the emergence of Daniels ’12 buzz, the putative candidate himself (who has mastered a stance of disinterested availability for a White House run) tossed a little hand grenade into his own camp:
And then, he says, the next president, whoever he is, “would have to call a truce on the so-called social issues. We’re going to just have to agree to get along for a little while,” until the economic issues are resolved.
Predictably, Mike Huckabee pounced on the “truce” idea (or gaffe, or whatever it was):
“Apparently, a 2012 Republican presidential prospect in an interview with a reporter has made the suggestion that the next president should call for a ‘truce’ on social issues like abortion and traditional marriage to focus on fiscal problems,” Huckabee said. “In other words, stop fighting to end abortion and don’t make protecting traditional marriage a priority.”
“For those of us who have labored long and hard in the fight to educate the Democrats, voters, the media and even some Republicans on the importance of strong families, traditional marriage and life to our society, this is absolutely heartbreaking. And that one of our Republican ‘leaders’ would suggest this truce, even more so,” said Huckabee, a social conservative who is weighing another presidential run.
Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins chipped in with his own more harshly worded condemnation of Daniels for talk of a culture-war truce:
We cannot “save the republic,” in Gov. Daniels’ words, by killing the next generation. Regardless of what the Establishment believes, fiscal and social conservatism have never been mutually exclusive. Without life, there is no pursuit of happiness. Thank goodness the Founding Fathers were not timid in their leadership; they understood that “truce” was nothing more than surrender.
Other, more sympathetic social conservatives, like National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru, wondered if Daniels had simply misspoken or overstated his focus on fiscal issues, but also warned him not to get carried away with fiscal-first rhetoric:
A lot of people will cheer [Daniels’] statement: Truces are usually popular, and most people see the economic issues as more important than the social ones at this moment. But I’m not sure how a truce would work. If Justice Kennedy retired on President Daniels’s watch, for example, he would have to pick someone as a replacement. End of truce.
I also can’t help but think of Phil Gramm’s presidential campaign in 1996. Like Daniels, Gramm was an enthusiastic budget-cutter. Concern about big government was running strong in the years just prior to that election. Gramm had a solid social-conservative record, but consciously chose not to campaign on it; he famously flew out to Colorado Springs to tell James Dobson, “I’m not a preacher.” That approach helped to doom Gramm’s campaign.
Finally, the Washington Post’s resident religious conservative Mike Gerson gave Daniels a chance to backtrack, and the Hoosier allowed as how cultural issues with a fiscal dimension, like the Mexico City rules (and presumably abortion funding generally), would not fall under any “truce.”
Crisis averted? Perhaps; certainly many Republicans will be privately counseling Daniels not to make the same mistake twice, and he’d be smart to take advantage of the Kagan confirmation issue by blowing the dog whistle of determination to appoint “strict constructionist” judges. Meanwhile, he’ll get some credit from the shrinking band of social moderates in the GOP, not to mention libertarians, along with secular MSM types whose skepticism of the Tea Party movement has always been tempered by their obvious relief at the sight of conservatives thumping not Bibles but the Constitution.
But it’s worth noting that Huckabee’s not the only 2012 possibility who is taking a different tack than Daniels on the culture wars. And indeed, the other candidate with a bullet next to his name of late, and in public polls rather than insider buzz (viz. a recent PPP survey of Texas Republicans, which placed him at the top of the 2012 list with or without home-state Gov. Rick Perry), is none other than Newt Gingrich, who seems determined to escalate the culture wars into a full-scale Clash of Civilizations.
The former House Speaker raised some eyebrows in May when his new, just-in-time-for-the-campaign book, To Save America, came out, with the unsubtle subtitle of: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Most of the negative commentary involved his comparison of the Obama administration to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and even on that assertion, he’s only partially backtracked, according to a Fox News report:
Gingrich said that he stands by his argument that the “secular-socialist machine” represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, not in the sense of the immorality of those deadly regimes, but as a “threat to our way of life.”
In the book itself, Gingrich calls this “threat” an “existential threat,” a term most often heard in connection with Israeli fears of a genocidal nuclear attack by Iran. And he is very clear that he’s not just fretting over debt or deficit forecasts, but instead is fighting an anti-religious threat to the essence of American culture:
[E]ven more disturbing than the threats from foreign terrorists is a second threat that is right here at home. It is an ideology so fundamentally at odds with historic American values that it threatens to undo the cultural ethics that have made our country great. I call it “secular-socialism.”
The Left has thoroughly infiltrated nearly every cultural commanding height of our civilization.
Not much of a hint of any “truce” in that kind of talk, is there?
So which of these two conservative Republicans best has his finger on the conservative Republican zeitgeist, the green-eyeshaded Daniels or the crusading Gingrich? Will there be peace with the socialist infidels until the books are balanced, or total war until the secularist roots of the socialist “machine” are destroyed once and for all?
It’s probably worth remembering where both of these men–and particularly the nationally-obscure Daniels–would have to begin any path to the White House: in Iowa.
This is not only a caucus states where social conservatives have always had a disproportionate influence (viz. Huckabee’s astonishing 2008 victory over Mitt Romney, who outspent him a gazillion-to-one). It’s also a place where conservative activists are more than a little obsessed with the goal of overturning the State Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex marriage, a process that cannot, due to the vagaries of Iowa constitutional law, culminate before 2014.
Here’s guessing that a awful lot of Iowa Republican Caucus-goers won’t be ready to smoke any peace-pipes with their secular-socialist–and in their eyes, “sodomite”–enemies real soon, and that Daniels will have a tough sell convincing them otherwise.
In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican U.S. senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.
In a long and interesting profile of Sen. Lindsey Graham that appeared in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, it was vouchsafed that the senior senator had described the Tea Party Movement as a marginal, passing fad that “will die out.”
Asked about this comment on Fox News yesterday, the junior senator from South Carolina, Jim DeMint, who has been intervening in state after state to support Tea Party-approved candidates against alleged RINOs, had this to say:
“Lindsey’s a great friend, but he’s wrong on this.”
“The tea party is just the tip of the iceberg of an American awakening of people that want to take back their government,” said DeMint, a vocal leader of the tea party movement. “Americans are going to show in November that they aren’t going anywhere.”
Insofar as DeMint appears to think the Tea Party Movement is coextensive with “Americans,” it might be inferred that doesn’t think his “great friend” Lindsey Graham is actually an American, much less right on this subject.
As for Graham’s intentions, the Times profile can be read in two very different ways. Perhaps he’s already decided to pack it in when his current term ends, and thus doesn’t care what he says. On the other hand, given his obvious pride in mastery of public opinion polls, perhaps he thinks he can flip-flop just enough to stay ahead of the conservative mobs back home who are itching for his destruction, and get re-elected anyway. He’s certainly off to a good start with his abandonment of bipartisan negotiations on several key topics, but he might be advised to be a little more circumspect about the political calculations that guide his conduct.
If it’s Tuesday, there must be another primary election, and today’s is in Oklahoma, where both parties are holding gubernatorial primaries, and there are a couple of congressional contests of interest.
I’ve found this year’s primaries in my home state of Georgia to be very interesting. Clearly, Georgians do not agree. Despite a host of competitive contests in both parties, total turnout in yesterday’s primaries was about 22 percent, which is pretty pathetic.
It’s been obvious for quite some time–dating back at least to the fall of 2008–that the Republican Party is undergoing an ideological transformation that really is historically unusual. Normally political parties that go through two consecutive really bad electoral cycles downplay ideology and conspicuously seek “the center.” Not today’s GOP, in which there are virtually no self-identified “moderates,” and all the internal pressure on politicians — and all is no exaggeration — is from the right.
It didn’t get the kind of national attention that 
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One of the great and ironic constants in this age of partisan and ideological polarization has been a tacit left-right alliance hostile to federal education initiatives promoting test-enforced national standards and — in some cases — charter public schools. In fact, one of the more reliable ways to get applause at both liberal and conservative grass-roots gatherings around the country for years now has been to call for the repeal of No Child Left Behind, that unlikely product of cooperation between Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush.
It’s no big secret that one of the rising smart-money favorites for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination is Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Matter of fact, back in January, when National Journal 
In case you missed it, there was an indirect exchange between the senior and junior Republican U.S. senators from South Carolina that raises a few questions.