Publication

This marks the first of a series of semi-weekly columns (on Mondays and Fridays, whenever possible) I’ll be doing for ProgressiveFix summarizing and digesting political news from around the country as we head towards the November midterm elections and inch inexorably towards the 2012 presidential cycle.

I will periodically do reports on the various regions, and will also regularly give readers the gist (without a lot of charts, graphs or wonkery) of current polling that is of interest (those interested in charts, graphs or wonkery should visit pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com). I will also make every effort to lift horse-race analysis from isolated snippets on specific campaigns into a general sense of political trends, and give a taste of the strategic debates that are going on in both major parties.

This weekend’s major political event was the Southern Republican Leadership Conference (SRLC) in New Orleans, which rivals February’s CPAC conference in Washington as an unofficial “kickoff” event for the 2012 presidential nomination contest. Naturally, SRLC featured a lot of speakers who are on the 2012 “mentioned” list, along with a couple of underlying stress points.

The stress points were (1) the widespread unhappiness with unhelpful news from Michael Steele’s Republican National Committee, which no one in New Orleans explicitly mentioned, but which was clearly a subtext (Steele’s own speech quickly emptied the room), and (2) the debate on whether Republicans should or should not be satisfied to be thought of as “the party of no,” more interested in obstructing Barack Obama’s agenda than in offering their own.

My take is that you can forget what the various SRLC speakers explicitly said on the “party of no” meme; they generally, for what it’s worth, spoke out of both sides of their mouths, first denying a hardcore negative message and then endorsing it in every rhetorical and policy specific. Newt Gingrich, for example, emphatically said the GOP had to become “the party of yes,” but then called for an appropriations-driven government shutdown to force major concessions from the president if Republicans win control of Congress this November — which is pretty amazing considering how well that strategy worked for Speaker Gingrich back in 1995 (if you are really young or new to politics, take my word for it: it bombed disastrously).

But the real rhetorical champion (and crowd favorite) of the conference was Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose speech called for a war not just on Democrats (or “liberals” and “socialists,” as he preferred to call them) but on government itself:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says Republican congressional candidates must say “no” — no to President Barack Obama, and no to anything that makes Washington relevant to the American people….

He said GOP candidates should tell voters, “Elect me and I’m going to Washington, D.C, and will try to make it as inconsequential on your life as I can make it.”

Now that should give GOPers a good positive agenda!

Meanwhile, Perry’s only real rival as crowd favorite, Sarah Palin, said Republicans should be the party of “hell no” when it came to health reform, and reprised her usual approach of personally baiting the president, particularly on energy and nuclear policy.

GOP: Smaller Tent Needed

The other big repetitive theme at the conference was what might be called a rather unnecessary demand that the GOP rebrand itself as relentlessly conservative. Probable 2012 candidate Rick Santorum, who’s been under attack during recent Iowa appearances for having endorsed Arlen Specter against Pat Toomey in 2004, tried to argue that his step was aimed at ensuring pro-life Supreme Court justices, not at accepting any “big-tent” thinking on issues like abortion:

You questioned my judgment, and you have every right to do so. But please don’t question my intention to do what’s right for those little babies.

There was, of course, a 2012 presidential straw poll in New Orleans, and it was a bit of a surprise that Mitt Romney’s vote-buying exercise beat Ron Paul’s, by exactly one vote. Paul, as you might recall, won the February CPAC straw poll by packing the seats with young, readily mobilized supporters. Romney (who, unlike Paul, didn’t show up in New Orleans) utilized a group called Evangelicals for Romney that bought up a bunch of tickets and offered them for free to all comers, and then pre-spun the media by predicting defeat to Paul’s hordes.

Palin edged Gingrich among the presumably non-stuffed boxes (though Palin’s PAC did offer caribou-on-a-stick to attendees), and everyone else trailed badly (notably, Rick Perry took himself off the ballot). As Tom Schaller noted, however, Romney and Paul had limited “second-choice” support (as the straw poll allowed attendees to indicate), so effectively it was a four-way wash. Invisible Primary monitors Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin of Politico adjudged the straw poll as pretty much a nothing-burger.

Poll Watch

A new poll from Dem-leaning Kos/R2K has Democrat Roy Barnes narrowly leading the three most prominent Republican candidates for governor of Georgia; Republican-leaning Rasmussen has all three major Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire leading Democrat Paul Hodes.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs on Mondays and Fridays.