Romney Has No Path To Nomination

I think it's shocking that the media considers Mitt Romney a frontrunner in the Republican nomination battle. I don't mean this is the Jon Stewart-style "They're can't be a front runner when no one has voted." I mean that the fundamentals of the Romney campaign are incredibly weak.

Romney's perceived strength is that he is running the only fairly moderate campaign (besides John Huntsman, who is hardly running a campaign at this point). He has the entire center of the Republican party to himself. Tim Pawlenty was the only other serious contender for the middle (serious contender in that he was focused on that segment of the ideological specturm; he polled miserably). Romney clearly has the support of the Republican establishment, including the traditional conservative media. The feeding frenzy around Rick Perry over the last three days in the conservative legacy media and blog world has surprised right-watchers. Bachmann has received less opprobrium for similar morsels, probably because the conservative establishment never considered her a serious candidate (for a possible explanation see: gender). There's also the numerous pictures of Perry appearing to fire a gun in the air in the middle of a city.<

The Republican field is crowded far to Romney's crazy flank with no one to Romney's center. Huntsman is probably a little more conservative than Romney, but has no profile at this point. That should be good news for Romney. Conventional wisdom about the Republican party-as-stool holds that it has three legs: business interests, puritan social voters, and civil libertarians.

The Republican primary fight so far has been fought primarily among candidates among the latter two 'legs.' Bachmann, Perry, Santorum, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich all have supporters in both camps. They simultaneously argue that government involvement in personal lives is always bad, but that it should aggressively enforce conservative social ideas. The crush to the right in the primary field has left Romney alone with a wide ideological spectrum to appeal to.

The problem for Romney is that few Republican primary voters occupy that spectrum. Romney consistently places at 20% in the national GOP primary polling. His support is remarkably stable, and doesn't seem to be buffeted by other candidates' exits and entrances. Romney is in a similar position as Ron Paul. He has a group of core supporters, but little upside outside of that group. His voters likely won't turn out for another candidate, and the other candidates' supporters won't vote for Romney.

Debt Ceiling Navel Gazing

Kevin Drum decides that the awful spending bill that Republicans extorted through Congress is liberals' fault. The premise of the article is kind of correct:

I think this is roughly correct. Public opinion is everything. Ronald Reagan was successful because public opinion supported him: he wanted to cut taxes and raise defense spending and so did big chunks of the public. He was leading in a direction that they already wanted to go.

But no matter how many times we try to kid ourselves with one poll result or another, liberals just don't have that advantage. The public is mostly in favor of raising taxes on the rich — though I suspect its support is pretty soft — but on the bigger issues they mostly aren't on our side. They think deficits are bad, they don't trust Keynesian economics, they don't want a higher IRS bill (who does, after all?), and they believe the federal government is spending too much on stuff they don't really understand. Conservatives have just flat out won this debate in recent decades, and until that changes we're not going to be able to make much progress.

When I say partially true, I mean that the things that Washington liberals talk about is not what local liberals talk about. Washington liberals talk about macroecomic Keynsian spending. Local level liberals talk about jobs programs, food bank supply levels, and schools.

Conservatives have a more shallow profile of issues, allowing for broader organizational reach and the ability to mobilize public support efficiently. The Tea party (originally stanidng for Taxed Enough Already), is a relatively simple organization. Despite apparent differences in goals among groups (social versus fiscal, anarchist versus corporatist), organizers have been able to convince them all that they suffer from the same ailment of high taxes.

Democrats, progressives, and liberals have been playing defense since 2010, and it's taken a huge toll on their ability to mobilize support. Labor stands alone as the one force that has been able to out-organize the Republicans this year, despite some decent mobilizations targeting Republican congerssional offices during the debt-ceiling hostage crisis.

Progressives need a broad statement of their current political direction. If Republicans can all unite behind 'taxed enough already,' Democrats can unite behind another raison d'etre. What united grassroots Democrats against Bush was the obvious failures of the administration to govern in an enlightened statesman tradition. From the invasion of Iraq based on poor intelligence and false pretense to the abandonment of New Orleans to the failure to address any real problems like climate change, health care reform, or preventing the Bush recession, the common strand was a feeling that Americans are 'under-served by government.'

Taxed Enough Already has a certain ring of truth to it. Everybody grumbles about their taxes. Everybody also grumbles about the inevitability of bad service at the DMV or opaqueness in dealing with Social Security benefits, or treatment at VA hospitals. Americans are under-served by their government.

This line of argument is uncomfortable for a progressive. Modern liberalism uses political tools to address the problems of inequality of opportunity. Yet this line of argument attacks the efficacy of government to deliver on its promises. This tension is a fiction, however. Just because Republicans attack the legitimacy of government action doesn't mean that progressives must defend government. Liberals are broadly interested in leveling the playing field and removing systemic inequality. Much of that inequality results from market failures, for which government is a solution. Much of that inequality results from the historical (or modern) political process. Government is simply an institutional arrangement of political power.

If that political power was vested with either the intent or incident of creating barriers to equal opportunity, liberals should not be afraid to call out that undemocratic arrangement of power. While democratic, progressive, and liberal activists focus on increasing public goods, they would do well if they were more pragmatic with where they begin. When liberals argue for a single-payer health care system or an adjustment of capital gains taxes, they leave the public behind. The public agrees with the premise that Americans are under-served by government, roughly treated by the market, and ignored by the powerful. Let's start the conversation there.

The public supported Regan's wish to lower taxes and spend on defense, (arguable), but they didn't necessarily agree with his push to lower the top marginal tax rate or his Star Wars boondoggle. Democrats can get the same broad support from the public if they can articulate a common cause that unites their various policy solutions:

We are under-served by government and abused by some bad corporations. Creating a single payer health care system will help government serve us better and prevent that abuse. We are under-served by government. It doesn't have the resources to stremline the VA system to better serve our veterans; we should raise the funds for this by taxing capital gains taxes an extra half percent.

The laundry list appraoch to politics doesn't work. Having 20 agenda points coming into office is a terrible way to hold a coalition together. Progressives need a unifying theme to bring them together if they're going to have any real impact on mass politics.

Harold Camping and the Tea Party #Rapture

It would be difficult to resist the urge to comment on the people who believe that May 21 represents the end of the world. So I won't. I'm looking forward to this weekend when Doomsday experts will have to pack up their crazy tent and go home. Harold Camping, will face transparent rebuttal from the universe, followed by the abandonment of most of his followers. Like many (but not all), false prophets, he'll become a footnote in the long history of also-ran Messianics and cult leaders.

You have to feel sorry for the friends and relatives of the Rapturists, who have to put up with a futureless nihlism:

Kino Douglas, 31, a self-described agnostic, said it was hard to be with his sister Stacey, 33, who “doesn’t want to talk about anything else.”

“I’ll say, ‘Oh, what are we going to do this summer?’ She’s going to say, ‘The world is going to end on May 21, so I don’t know why you’re planning for summer,’ and then everyone goes, ‘Oh, boy,’ ” he said.

Everyone else knows that their actions have consequences; the Rapturists will not be influenced by possible outcomes of their choices, leaving their friends and family members to manage their affairs as much as they can. This must be at least an annoying burden for the non-believers.

The relationship clearly parallels the dynamic tearing apart the Republican electoral coalition. Radical anti-government Tea Party voters, activists, and elected officials have little to no regard for consequences. John Boehner and classic Republican leadership have an interest in the continuation of the GOP as a viable party. They're like the religious family members of the Rapturists. They share the same belief structure of faith in the free market, but they haven't allowed their ideology to carry them out of this world. They still believe in consequences, but need to appease the crazy family members in order to feel secure in their own belief. Democrats are Kino Douglas here; they're willing to believe in the free market insofar as the belief doesn't actually impinge on the freedoms, dignity, and wellbeing of the country.

Christianity is many things to the Republican party, and while the religion's actual teachings on social responsibility don't seem to factor into GOP policy positions, the rapture framework certainly predicts Republican behavior. The radical anti-responsibility of the Tea Party makes a lot of sense if (and only if) policy doesn't have consequences. George Bush can run up a $10 trillion deficit and launch a recession because the nation doesn't need to survive past 2011. Climate change can continue unabated because it won't cause any problems for at least 20 years (excpet for the record tornado season and flooding this year). Tea partiers are asking, "Why are we talking about paying for Medicare and Social Security in 2035 when the world ends tomorrow?" At least family members of Rapturists will be able to get on with their lives when their loved ones return from the destructive path of self-righteousness. Americans might not have the same luck with the Republican leadership.

Footnote: I vaguely remember a story that George Bush cited the coming apocalypse/rapture as a tenet of his beliefs, but haven't been able to verify that exactly. I did, however, find that Bush White House officials reached out to Rapture preacher Jack Van Impe in 2004 in hopes of shaping contingency strategies based on biblical apocalypse scenarios. Ironically, of course, they overlooked the story of the great flood and totally mismanaged Katrina.

Boehner Cuts

Tea party organizers don't believe that Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner is willing to cut spending:

Boehner, in a May 9 speech in New York, did insist that any increase to the debt limit include "cuts in trillions." But conservatives expect the Republicans will not uphold his demand.

The "I pay enough taxes" party simply doesn't think that John Boehner is good on his word to cut spending from the federal budget. I wonder if they got that idea from the CBO report this week that the Republican budget increased spending this year. After they promised to cut $100 billion from federal spending this year.

Enter into the American political lexicon "Boehner cuts", a noun meaning "rhetorical cuts in spending that increase actual spending."

Liberal Anger in Action

This week, David Weigel called for liberal organizations to provide an outpouring of disgust and anger over Ryan's Folly, the Republican plan to end Medicare in order to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy, similar in scope to the Tea Party organized in the summer in 2009. I was skeptical that the media is capable of portraying the liberal anger against Ryan's Folly in a neutral light, probably defaulting to Republican talking points about 'liberal radicals' to describe citizens asking for basic fairness. Weigel got a little bit of what he asked for as at (ironically named) Daniel Webster's disastrous, angry, no-good, very bad town hall meeting:

Tuesday at the Orange County Agricultural Extension office in Orlando, boos and shouts of "liar" were mixed with angry accusations that Ryan's plan to change Medicare would leave those now younger than 55 without health insurance in their retirement. There also were calls to eliminate the tax cuts first put in place by then-President George W. Bush and to raise corporate taxes rather than cut entitlement programs.

It's a very dismissive portrayal of people upset that their congressman wants to change their Medicare coverage into a yearly check that won't cover the cost of basic health care.

I'd like to say that I'm right, that the anti-anger sentiment is a negative, and the dismissive portrayal of Webster's consituents proves my point. But thinking back to the original 'Summer of Rage,' the coverage started the same.

GOP starting to look more like Democrats

At least in the traditional sense that Democrats can't keep a consistent message to save their lives win an election, the Republican party is starting to adopt their maladaptive tendencies. Tea Party action figure Michelle Bachmann will deliver a rogue response to the President's State of the Union address next Tuesday in addition to the actual Republican leader that the party has asked to deliver a response. The Republican response to the State of the Union Address will be Paul Ryan, the House Republican budget czar.

The Tea Party Express, a national umbrella group funded by Koch Bros Inc., will be live streaming her response. It is unclear whether her response will directly conflict with Representative Ryan's response.

Either way, there is no way this can be good for the Republican party.

Ben Smith on Jared Lee Loughner

Ben Smith manages to put his fingers on three interesting topics in two sentences, and spin them all the wrong way:

Jared Lee Loughner's YouTube and MySpace pages don't offer much evidence that he was drinking from the main streams of American politics. The obsession with the gold standard and the hostility to the federal government resonate with the far right, the burned American flag with the left, but the discussion of mind control and grammar sound more like mental illness than politics.

Diagnosing the psychological, political, and personal (like their separable anyway) states of someone from their social media footprint is like trying to diagnose the health of a coma patient via video. (Not that it stops even The Silly Season from trying.) Attempts to explain a distant patient are more likely to reveal truths about the speaker than the subject.

Ben Smith's basic point is quite right: partisans are likely to see their opponents in the motivations and actions of the deranged. That's why partisans fight against the opposition; the enemy is deranged and is likely to hurt the American public. Any serious threat is categorized alongside the imagined or hyped threat in order to justify the partisan rancor. More importantly, the left-right divide as the media likes to analyze politics does not explain the motivations of normal voters, much less mass murderers. Aberrant violence definitionally does not fit into established narratives about mainstream political thought.

In clumsily getting to that point, Ben Smith offers us a fascinating picture of either his world view or how he believes a journalist must behave. These are the three interesting points that he touches on:

1) The Left hate America. When someone advocates burning or defacing American symbols, they can be categorized as being on the Left. In fact, only someone with Leftist political ties would ever think to burn American flags. Want to burn American flags? You're a liberal, now go sit on that side of the spectrum.

Besides that (and the word of an estranged classmate who hasn't spoken to Loughner in 3 years), there is so far little to tie Loughner to the Left unless you count Brave New World or the Phantom Tollbooth or whatever his list of books includes. But then again, he's also Ben Smith, serious journalist, probably only includes that weak connection in order please the Journalistic gods.

2) Seek balance at all costs. People have drawn the connection between the gold standard stuff and right-wing thought because unlike flag burning, the gold standard is a live issue with a defined group of politicians and their supporters. There are no liberals who want to return to the gold standard. There are conservatives who want to return to the gold standard. There is a visible group of people who supported Ron Paul and run a lot of the internet infrastructure for the tea party who support the return of the gold standard. It would appear very odd to me for a person to independently develop an interest in the gold standard without contact with right-wing thought. A huge chunk of Glenn Beck television and a broader range of talk radio programming is also dedicated to a return to the gold standard. The individualist creation of your own currency, as Loughner's video suggests, is in response to the government making "a secret currency" to undermine the normal economy. The paranoia over the gold standard is ripped from the pages of Glenn Beck's book. But of course, he also wants to burn American flags, so it's probably equal money that he's a pro-health care liberal.

3) Ignore all evidence and context. "... But the discussion of mind control and grammar sound more like mental illness than politics." I agree with Mr. Smith here. Those are outlandish claims that sound like the ravings of a lunatic. But they also sound exactly like Conservative rhetoric over the last three years. Remember when President Obama gave a televised address to school children urging them to focus on their studies and do well in school? And do you remember when conservatives claimed it was indoctrination, brainwashing, and fascist? FOX News advised parents to keep their kids out of school that day. No sane person could believe that American schools are brainwashing children, so Ben Smith's point is well taken. The Right has been espousing sentiments "more like mental illness than politics." The Right has been engaging in high-visibility, publicized mental illness, becoming indistinguishable from Loughner. For what it's worth, the opening paragraph of Glenn Beck's book:

“They're changing the books so that in a generation from now almost nobody will remember what this country used to be. They've got the economy set up to fall like a house of cards whenever they're ready to tap the first one at the foundation. They've got the controlled media all lined up and ready to carry out their PR campaign. And they've got people so indebted and mind-controlled and unprepared, they'll turn to anybody who says he's got the answer…They're going to stage something soon to get it all started.”

Ben Smith is right. That does "sound more like mental illness than politics."

The paranoia and anti-centralization sentiments that are evident in Loughner's writing are, however, not unique to the modern Conservative tea party crowd. Hysteric paranoia is as American as apple pie. The original silver-standard populist, William Jennings Bryan, almost rode a wave of anti-banker-Washington paranoia into the White House in 1896. That's what makes the American Political Tradition such a great read. The explicit calls to arms from all corners of the political spectrum (though, honestly, have you heard any calls to arms from the Left in the past thirty years?) are unacceptable. They normalize violence, inviting a gunman to bring a pistol and two loaded extended clips with him to a political gathering, indiscriminately firing into a crowd of fellow citizens. By the way, news reports now suggest that as heroic men tackled Loughner to the ground, he wasn't retreating; he was reloading.

Minnesota Majority Voter Suppression Tactics

In the absence any evidence that enough voter fraud exists in America to turn any election, conservatives are pouring money into "uncovering" instances of voter fraud. Last night, I was able to attend an event with one of the foot soldiers of the voter intimidation effort in Minnesota, the blogger over at Fightin' Words, North Star Tea Party Patriots Media Relations Director Walter Hudson. In prepared remarks, he identified two goals for his tea party group this year: elect judges and stop voter fraud. He willingly acknowledged that there is no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud; so it is incumbent on the coalition of Minnesota Majority, the North Star Tea Party Patriots, and Voters Alliance to manufacture that evidence. Conservative paranoid delusion holds that the 2008 Minnesota Senate race was stolen by fraudulent Democratic votes.

When pressed on exactly what the Minnesota Majority tactics would be, Mr. Hudson gave this answer:

1) His group would wear buttons asking elections officials to ID the wearer. A federal judge yesterday instructed that this counts as electioneering and could not be done in a polling place. 2) The group would be flagging any buses which delivered voters to the polls, as the conservative groups believe that buses of voters vote multiple times at multiple locations 3) Staffing a hotline to help document cases such as these.

Obvious problem with point #2 (explicated at 1:58 in the video) is that there is no obvious way to tell if a bus carrying "a bunch of voters" is engaging in double-voting. The Minnesota coalition of conservatives pursuing this "voter fraud" story will clearly presume that any organized group of voters is engaging in voter fraud. After all, the warrant for believing that voter fraud was being perpetrated by ACORN despite evidence of an absence was the fact that they were registering low-income voters.