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

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

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

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

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

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

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

This is becoming a pretty old story (Alan Abramowitz wrote about it definitively last year, as did John Sides), but since it hasn’t much sunk in amongst mainstream media political observers, its worth repeating ad infinitum: Mark Blumenthal makes the case that most “independent” voters aren’t very independent. The general consensus is that of the 30 percent to 40 percent or so of Americans who call themselves independents, no more than 10 percent are independent voters in any meaningful sense of the term. And “pure independents” are also less likely to vote than partisans.

This is important for a whole lot of reasons. For one thing, the idea that “independents” are a third force in politics positioned in some moderate, bipartisan space equidistant from the two parties is entirely wrong. They are not a bloc of voters who think just like David Broder or David Brooks, spending their days pining for deficit reduction and “civility.”

More immediately, the high percentage of Tea Party activists who call themselves “independents” obscures the fact that most of them are in fact highly partisan Republicans who are close ideologically to the right wing of the GOP. Here’s how Blumenthal puts it:

Remember the 52 percent of Tea Party activists who [in a recent CNN poll] initially identify as independent? It turns out that virtually all of them lean Republican. According to CNN, 88 percent of the activists identify or lean Republican, 6 percent identify or lean Democratic and only 5 percent fall into the pure independent category.Remember that CNN pollster Holland reported that 87 percent of the Tea Party activists would vote Republican if there were no Tea Party-endorsed third-party candidate running? That makes perfect sense for a group that is 88 percent Republican.

Why do functionally partisan, and sometimes quite ideological, people self-identify as independents in such large numbers? Some of it is just fashion: many folk conflate “independence” with “intelligence” or “thoughtfulness.” Some of it reflects short-cuts by pollsters, who often give respondents the impression that voters who have ever split a ticket should call themselves “independents.” In the case of the Tea Party activists, there is undoubtedly some mistrust of the godless moderate “GOP establishment” and its Beltway habits–mistrust that will not, however, keep them from voting uniformly for Republican candidates in any two-party contest, and which in any event may not last long given the rightwards trajectory of the party as a whole.

In any analysis, wherever possible “independents” should be broken down into D and R leaners and “true” independents, and the vast array of “independent” ideological tendencies should be explained. Better yet, pollsters should ask follow-up questions to determine actual voting behavior and specific views rather than self-identification by partisan or ideological labels. Otherwise, we’re allowing those labels to distort reality in major ways.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

The annual Conservative Political Action Committee conclave in Washington got underway yesterday, and it’s not surprising there’s a tone of excitement bordering on triumphalism as the participants celebrate both the Democratic Party’s political troubles and the rightward lurch of the GOP. Much of the press coverage of the event will revolve around this weekend’s traditional straw poll of attendees on their preferences for the 2012 presidential nomination (which usually favor potential candidates who show up to speak at CPAC; this year it’s Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum, but not Sarah Palin or Mike Huckabee).

But underneath the surface is a complex dance between old-school conservatives who served in or lionized the Bush-Cheney administration, and a newer breed that purports to despise the Bushies as sellouts. The Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel is covering CPAC will a keen eye on that dance, dramatized by the surprise appearance of Dick Cheney and a few nostalgic references from the podium to Bush’s superiority to Obama:

Conservatives who winced at the Bush-Cheney record were out in force, but serious disagreement with the back-to-Bush conservatives was hard to find. Two years ago, Ron Paul’s presidential campaign was lacking a booth in the CPAC exhibit hall until Mitt Romney dramatically quit the presidential race and opened up space for their back-to-1776 brochures. This year, Paul’s Campaign for Liberty occupied a larger section of the exhibit hall than any group except the NRA, with reams of fliers, copies of Young American Revolution magazine (with an illustration of Paul taking the presidential oath on the cover)….

The once-extreme obsessions of Paul’s fans bled into the rest of the convention. They were present in speeches from mainstream figures like Romney, and they were present in lectures that filled large rooms to overflowing. Tom Woods, the author of “The Politically Incorrect History of the United States” and a sometime ghostwriter for Paul, spoke to a packed room on the subject of nullifying federal laws.

In most respects, it’s probably safe to say that the oldsters have quickly moved towards the Ron Paul revolutionaries and some of the hard-core Christian Right cultural warriors, not to mention the Tea Party Movement which features elements of both. After all, the one thing that most unites all of them, other than hatred of Obama, is retroactive opposition to TARP and the other “bailout” policies initiated by Bush (with Bush’s Medicare Rx drug entitlement ranking a close second). Cheney complicates the picture, since his ferocious national security and civil liberties stances remain very popular with many of the conservatives who now denounce Bush administration domestic policies (though not with the Paulists, of course).

Still, there are plenty of ideological tensions on the contemporary Right, even if they tend to be muted at gloat-and-attack-fests like CPAC. You have to wonder how many of the attendees who cheered Mitt Romney’s attacks on Obama have really forgiven him for championing a Massachusetts health plan that’s eerily similar to what they all savage as “ObamaCare.”

Ideological fault lines tend to get exposed and widened in presidential nominating contests. No matter who wins the straw poll this weekend, it’s likely that the 2012 battle for the GOP nomination will show that the post-Bush pirouette-to-the-right of the Republican Party and the conservative movement wasn’t as elegant as it looks at CPAC.

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Peter Beinart has a must-read in Time on the rise of what he calls “vicious-circle politics”: the Republican strategy of using government gridlock and failure to win control of government. Beinart points out that GOP obstructionism in the Obama era has its roots in the Gingrich Congress, when congressional Republicans turned into an art form the use of polarization to stymie government and make the case to a frustrated public that they needed to evict the party in power.

He tracks its origins to the “great sorting-out,” the post-’60s alignment of party, region, and ideology that purified both parties, with conservative Democrats from the South and moderate Republicans from the North gradually switching sides.

But it wasn’t until the Republicans were knocked out of power in the 1990s that vicious-circle politics became an active GOP strategy. Beinart writes:

In the Clinton years, Senate Republicans began a kind of permanent filibuster. “Whereas the filibusters of the past were mainly the weapon of last resort,” scholars Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky noted in 1997, “now filibusters are a part of daily life.” For a while, the remaining GOP moderates cried foul and joined with Democrats to break filibusters on things like campaign finance and voter registration. But in doing so, the moderates helped doom themselves. After moderates broke a 1993 filibuster on campaign finance, GOP conservatives publicly accused them of “stabbing us in the back.” Their pictures were taken off the wall at the offices of the Republican Senate campaign committee. “What do these so-called moderates have in common?” conservative bigwig Grover Norquist would later declare. “They’re 70 years old. They’re not running again. They’re gonna be dead soon. So while they’re annoying, within the Republican Party our problems are dying.”

In Clinton’s first two years in office, the Gingrich Republicans learned that the vicious circle works. While filibusters were occasionally broken, they also brought much of Clinton’s agenda to a halt, and they made Washington look pathetic. In one case, GOP Senators successfully filibustered changes to a 122-year-old mining act, thus forcing the government to sell roughly $10 billion worth of gold rights to a Canadian company for less than $10,000. In another, Republicans filibustered legislation that would have applied employment laws to members of Congress — a reform they had loudly demanded.

With these acts of legislative sabotage, Republicans tapped into a deep truth about the American people: they hate political squabbling, and they take out their anger on whoever is in charge. So when the Gingrich Republicans carried out a virtual sit-down strike during Clinton’s first two years, the public mood turned nasty. By 1994, trust in government was at an all-time low, which suited the Republicans fine, since their major line of attack against Clinton’s health care plan was that it would empower government. Clintoncare collapsed, Democrats lost Congress, and Republicans learned the secrets of vicious-circle politics: When the parties are polarized, it’s easy to keep anything from getting done. When nothing gets done, people turn against government. When you’re the party out of power and the party that reviles government, you win.

In the Obama era, with the congressional Republican caucus smaller and purer than it has been in a long time, the GOP has pursued vicious-circle politics on steroids. It’s a depressing — and depressingly familiar — picture that Beinart paints.

While Beinart acknowledges that Democrats might one day use the same strategy to stonewall a Republican administration, he notes correctly that the tactic fits better in the GOP playbook: “Winning elections by making government look foolish is a more natural strategy for the antigovernment party.” That observation raises another frightening prospect: absent filibuster-proof majorities, can major legislation only pass now with a Republican administration and Congress? Because all the moderates are now on the Democratic side, and because progressives — moderate or liberal — are less likely to see gumming up the works as a desirable end in itself, is it possible that only Republican-driven initiatives that could get moderate support will be the only way major legislation gets passed?

Beinart offers some solutions to break the vicious circle: opening more primaries to independents (like in New Hampshire); more Crossfire-style programs to counteract the ideological ghettoization on cable news; more Ross Perots who can light a fire under both parties to break the gridlock.

Whether you think them effective or not, those proposals will take years to enact. The Democrats need to govern now. And here’s the thing: they can. There are 18 more of them in the Senate, over 70 more of them in the House — not filibuster-proof, but certainly enough to get some things passed through reconciliation. Here’s what it all boils down to: In the face of a unified opposition bent on making sure they don’t get anything done, will Democrats band together, fight back, and govern proudly? Or will they shrink from the challenge and, in fact, get nothing done?

One of the frustrating things about contemporary political analysis is the frequency with which key terms get used in a very sloppy manner that reflects highly biased or inaccurate assumptions. A perpetual example is the use of “independent” and “moderate” as interchangeable words for unaffiliated voters. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling explains why this can be so misleading:

One of the media mistakes that drives me the most nuts is when ‘moderates’ are conflated with ‘independents.’ This is most commonly a foible of TV news.Democrats are in trouble with independents right now. They are not, however, in trouble with moderates.

Independents as a group of voters are somewhat conservative leaning. Our last national poll found that 56% of independents were moderates but that among the rest 33% were conservatives to just 11% liberals. Overall independents were planning to vote Republican for Congress this year by a 40-27 margin. But break that out a little further and while conservative independents are tending toward the GOP by a 68-7 margin moderate independents are tied up at 33. And among all moderates — since moderates continue to identify more as Democrats than Republicans — Democrats lead 46-31 on the generic ballot.

It’s a similar story when it comes to moderates and independents and Barack Obama’s approval rating. Independents are split 48/48 on Obama. But moderates approve of him by a 62/34 margin.

Now there are also inherent problems with conducting political analysis based on self-identification of party or ideology; many “conservative” independents actually favor progressive policy views but call themselves conservatives for some essentially non-political reason; and many “independents” are actually reliable partisans who don’t like to be thought of as such. But if you are going to use such terms, Jensen is right, it’s important to keep them straight. And in terms of current political conditions, people who consider themselves “moderate” don’t seem to think President Obama is some crazy socialist.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A variety of luminaries representing various “wings” of the conservative movement joined together today near George Washington’s Mount Vernon home to sign—with appropriately atavistic flourishes—a manifesto they are calling the Mount Vernon Statement. The allusion made in the title is to the 50-year-old founding statement of the long-forgotten ‘60s right-wing youth group Young Americans for Freedom, the Sharon Statement (so named because it was worked out at William F. Buckley’s estate in Sharon, Connecticut). And that best illustrates the insider nature of the whole exercise, since most rank-and-file conservatives have probably never heard of YAF and don’t much need manifestos to go about their political business.

Three things immediately strike the reader about the document itself: (1) it’s very abstract, with no policy content at all; (2) it’s overtly aimed at reviving the old-time “fusionism” of economic, cultural, and national-security conservatives; and (3) it’s overlaid with Tea Party-esque rhetoric about terrible and longstanding threats to the Constitution. It’s sort of like a 50-year high school reunion at a homecoming game (which fits, because the statement was released on the eve of this year’s Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington).

It’s the third aspect of the document that’s most peculiar. Consider this passage:

In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The self-evident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Hmmm. This has happened in “recent decades,” not just during the Obama administration. And ‘smatter of fact, that’s true: the landmark Supreme Court cases that paved the way for the expansion of the federal government to its current scope of responsibilities date back at least to the civil rights era, and in some respects, to the New Deal and even earlier.

That’s interesting in no small part because most of the original signatories of this document were powerful and enthusiastic participants in the political and policy enterprises of several Republican administrations that made robust use of expanded federal power—most notably the administration of George W. Bush, which championed virtually unlimited executive powers, aggressive preemption of states laws that were thought to hamper businesses, and extensive limitations on individual liberty. In addition, the choice of the estate of the notorious isolationist George Washington to issue a manifesto that endorses a foreign policy of “advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world” is a mite strange, as Daniel Larison has pointed out.

Still another anomaly is the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins signature on a document that does not mention the rights of the “unborn” or “marriage” or “traditional families.” But you figure he was bought off by the reference to the Declaration of Independence as virtually coequal to the Constitution as a founding document, and presenting “self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God.” This is Christian Right code for suggesting that natural law and biblical principles, which conservatives interpret to mean things like bans on abortion and homosexual behavior, have been incorporated into the Constitution.

All in all, this statement represents an effort by yesterday’s and today’s hard-core conservative establishment to stay together and try to be relevant to the political discourse in an era in which the Republican Party is considered dangerously liberal, and the Constitution is thought to clearly ban everything “liberals” espouse. We’ll see how this works out for them.

It is to Evan Bayh’s enormous credit that he never settled comfortably into the Washington political scene. His decision to pack it in, after 12 years, is a loss to his party, and even more to his country. Most of all, it’s a withering rebuke to Congress, which seems to have lost the knack for governing.

If anyone could have been expected to make a seamless transition to the national political stage, it was Bayh, the handsome, dutiful son of former U.S. Senator Birch Bayh. But from his arrival here in 1998, Bayh seemed frustrated with the ideological and partisan hothouse that is contemporary Washington.

Maybe that’s because Bayh was a popular, two-term governor of Indiana who built a solid record of progressive reform in a fairly conservative state. He isn’t the first ex-governor to bring an executive temperament to Congress, only to feel stymied in an institution where partisan power struggles and the evasion of hard choices often trump public problem-solving.

Bayh nonetheless has distinguished himself as a leader of his party’s pragmatic wing, as a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council and key organizer of an influential group of centrist Senate Democrats. In the Senate, he has championed the economic prospects of working Americans, like the many who have lost jobs in Indiana’s troubled manufacturing sector. He has been a stalwart for fiscal discipline, echoing the Jeffersonian view (best articulated by John Randolph of Virginia) that elected officials should spend every public dollar as if it were their own. And Bayh has filled a critical vacuum in the Democratic Party for credible, tough-minded voices on national security and foreign policy.

Bayh’s earnest centrism and refusal to put partisanship over considerations of national interest have not endeared him to the Democratic left. Some self-appointed commissars of ideological correctness are even saying “good riddance” to the Indiana Democrat. This is monumentally dumb.

If Democrats want to become the nation’s majority party again, it can only be as a broad coalition of pragmatic centrists and liberals, including a large dollop of the independent voters who have been drifting away from the party since the 2008 election. However overrepresented they may be in the chattering class, liberal purists constitute less than a quarter of the national electorate.

In fact, Democrats should worry plenty about Bayh’s decision. With the midterm election looming, the last thing they want to do is give the impression of a party hostile to pragmatic centrists and independents who have similar views. And the departure of a serious, public-spirited leader of Bayh’s caliber can only deepen the public’s jaundiced view of Congress.

“There is too much partisanship and…too much narrow ideology in Washington,“ Bayh said in explaining his decision not to seek reelection. “Even at a time of enormous national challenge, the people’s business is not getting done.”

That’s right, and it’s a big problem for the governing party.

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The big political news from the President’s Day weekend was the surprise retirement announcement of Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh. According to reports, the decision was so sudden that even some staff members were taken by surprise.

The peerless Nate Silver has come up with an analysis of what this means for Democrats:

Of the 59 Senate Democrats in the current Congress, he was the 2nd most conservative after Ben Nelson, according to the DW-NOMINATE database. Nevertheless, because he comes from a fairly red state, Bayh was reasonably valuable to his party, ranking about in the middle of the pack among all Democratic Senators based on his roll call votes.

Throughout his career, Bayh has come under fire from the left for his resolutely centrist positions. But such criticisms almost always leave out the political context in which moderates like him operate. As Silver points out, Bayh was representing a generally conservative state (it’s R+5 according to the Partisan Voting Index) in which the chances of a Democrat being elected are about 40 percent. And yet, according to Silver’s analysis, Bayh’s voting record was actually more liberal than the Indiana norm.

Complain all you want about his unreliability as a Democratic vote, but the fact is that Bayh was to the left of the median voter in his state. Considering the constituency that he had to represent, Bayh was actually a relatively valuable member of the Democratic caucus. Of course, it’s not impossible for Democrats to run a more liberal, populist candidate in Bayh’s place who could win. But the likelier possibility, especially in this environment, is that a Republican far more conservative than the incumbent will take the seat, and an iffy vote for Democrats now becomes a reliable “party of no” vote.

“[T]he fact is that over time, the median voter theorem tends to prevail, and that electing someone slightly to the left of center is usually a win for the liberal party in a slightly-to-the-right-of-center jurisdiction,” Silver concludes. That seems obvious, but it’s a lesson that progressives tend to forget. Indeed, Bayh’s departure has been met by cheers of “Good riddance!” from some progressives. If the objective is to make the progressive tent a little smaller and the conservative one a little bigger, then yes, good riddance indeed.

Finally, someone has taken a public opinion survey that provides something better than a vague, distant glimpse of the Tea Party movement. A new CBS/Times poll drills down below the surface and reveals that the movement is not exactly the vastly popular political behemoth we have been led to believe it is. And it’s mostly composed of conservative Republicans and conservative independents who never liked Barack Obama to begin with, who dislike him now with an unusual intensity, and who have policy views that are well to the right of national public opinion.

The poll shows 18 percent of Americans identifying themselves as Tea Party supporters, with fully 43 percent saying they don’t know enough about it to have an opinion, or have never heard of it at all. (In a separate question, 55 percent of respondents say they know “nothing” or “not much” about the movement). There’s no straightforward report of party ID among tea partiers, but the composition of the various partisan components indicates they are roughly two-thirds Republicans, one-third independents, with a very small smattering of Democrats. For all the talk of tea partiers being equally hostile to both major parties, 62 percent of them have a favorable view of the GOP, while only nine percent have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. Eighty percent have an unfavorable opinion of President Obama.

Are tea party enthusiasts anti-corporate “populists” who could theoretically be attracted to a more left-bent, populist Democratic Party? Doesn’t look like it, since tea partiers are much more likely than Americans as a whole to oppose increased bank regulations, and nearly twice as likely to think Obama is prejudiced in favor of poor folks (not a compliment, given their general hostility to him). They are also much, much less likely to attribute the federal budget deficits they hate so much to the Bush administration. Nearly half of them erroneously believe the Obama administration has already raised taxes (again, not a good thing in their eyes).

There’s a lot more we could learn about tea partiers from a more detailed survey of their opinions on economic and cultural issues, and for that matter, on foreign policy. Since the activist-leadership of the movement includes both Ron Paul veterans and Christian Right culture-warriors, there may be less unanimity on some subjects.

But the more I learn empirically about these folk, the more I’m inclined to my original feeling that they are mostly very conservative 2008 McCain-Palin voters who have been radicalized by various events of the last two years. They are not anything new under the political sun, aside from the intensity of their beliefs, including counter-factual beliefs such as the conviction that Barack Obama has raised their taxes. As such, they mainly represent a force pushing the Republican Party to the right, which is where the Republican Party was headed anyway.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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