As the November 23 deadline for congressional action on a “supercommittee” package to reduce budget deficits by $1.2 trillion and avoid automatic domestic and defense cuts approaches, conservative activists have been steadily ramping up the pressure on supercommittee Republicans to hold a hard line against any tax increases. This missive from Heritage Action for America is pretty representative of the drumbeat:
Unfortunately, the “super committee” is veering off course and the odds are growing that massive tax hikes will be part of a final deal. Even worse, not all Republicans are willing to take massive tax hikes off the table. According to news reports, more than 100 House members–Republicans and Democrats alike–sent a letter to the “super committee” urging a “big, grand bargain–taking nothing off the table.” In Washington, that is code for a tax increase.
A few anti-supercommittee conservatives are willing to come right out and say that allowing across-the-board defense cuts to be enacted is an acceptable price to pay for avoiding tax increases. The most common rationalization is that these “sequesters” would not take effect until 2013, and a newly triumphant Republican president and Congress could fix the problem after the 2012 elections. Using the same kind of arguments, many activists have long claimed that a “grand bargain” that included major changes in federal retirement programs in exchange for tax increases would be unacceptable on grounds that Democrats would never keep their promises on spending in the future.
At an earlier point in the process, it appeared conservatives might allow some “wiggle room” for the supercommittee on taxes by considering the idea of a package that includes base-broadening “tax reforms” without raising actual rates on the wealthy or any major category of corporations. But the renewed popularity of sweeping, radical tax system overhauls, as reflected in the adoption of variations on the regressive “flat tax” idea by presidential candidates Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, has undermined what little support existed on the Right for revenue-raising elimination of “loopholes” under the general framework of the current tax code.
The same wingnuts who are having little trouble sticking to their no-compromise guns on deficit reduction are having a bit more trouble settling on a presidential candidate. A week ago, the big debate in Republican political circles was whether presidential polling front-runner Herman Cain would transform himself into a serious if unconventional candidate with a real organization and a consistent presence on the campaign trail, or instead would fade in the wake of either a comeback by Rick Perry or a sort of resigned acceptance, first by conservative elites and then by the rank-and-file, of Mitt Romney as the nominee. The betting line was not in Cain’s favor.
Then came Politico’s October 30 bombshell story revealing that the National Restaurant Association had settled two claims of sexual harassment against Cain during his presidency of the trade group in the last 1990s, and a couple of days of shifting stories from Cain and his campaign in reaction to the allegations.
Although the mainstream media has concluded from almost the very beginning that the Politico story means curtains for an already implausible Cain candidacy, it looks very different from Wingnut World. Though a few conservative opinion-leaders (mostly those thought to be friendly to Mitt Romney) have either kept their mouths shut or suggested Cain should come clean, the general reaction has been to defend him, with varying degrees of heat. The most common conservative media meme, one that Cain himself has encouraged, is to compare him to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as an outspoken African-American conservative who is being smeared by the “liberal media” and “the Left” generally, who are fearful that he will liberate his people from the “plantation” of subservience to Big Government and the Democratic Party.
Beyond the chattering classes, the very initial evidence is that rank-and-file conservatives are inclined to give Cain the presumption of innocence, and perhaps of innocence persecuted. Politico itself posted a headline today reading: “Iowa yawns at Herman Cain allegations.” The story attached to it had this very revealing passage:
Gregg Cummings, the Tea Party Patriots’ Iowa state coordinator, said among tea partiers the story of Cain’s sexual harassment allegations pales in comparison to the desire to have a conservative—“not Romney”—win the caucuses and the nomination.
“Hardly anybody is talking about it,” he said. “It’s not a big issue, in other words. I think the urgency of making sure that we get a conservative candidate to win the primaries is of greater concern to most of the tea party folks right now.”
More tangibly, the first poll taken entirely after the original Politico story broke, by Rasmussen in South Carolina, showed Cain with a ten-point lead over Mitt Romney and the rest of the field, his best showing to date in any South Carolina poll.
Sometimes damaging information about candidates just takes a while to build up steam in an array of media outlets and then penetrate the public’s consciousness. So Cain is hardly out of the woods, aside from the fact that more graphic details of his behavior, or indications of a cover-up, could soon emerge. But given the impulsive reaction in Wingnut World, it’s also possible, ironically, that this is exactly what the Cain campaign needed to distract attention from his lack of interest in world affairs, his waffling on abortion, or the details of his tax plan, and instead make him a martyr to the “constitutional conservative” cause that is still in search of a champion against Mitt Romney.
Photo credit: roberthuffstutter
