Tag Archives: 2012 election

The Frontrunner Turns Into a Newt and other horserace notes

January 23, 2012 – 1:08 pm

I don’t want to make a habit of focusing the Sift on the horserace for the Republican nomination. I often criticize the corporate media for indulging in the horserace’s drama and conflict (as if democracy were really all about personalities) and ignoring the serious business of governing the world’s most powerful nation (as if public issues were just bludgeons for candidates to swing at each other). I don’t want to fall into the same trap.

But then a week like this past one blows away all my virtuous intentions.

After New Hampshire, Mitt Romney’s nomination was supposed to be inevitable, and South Carolina was about to give him the final stamp of approval. But by Saturday, Carolina’s landslide winner had turned into a Newt. And by this morning the witchcraft is nearly complete and Gingrich is leading the first post-SC poll of Florida as well.

InTrade still gives Romney a 62% chance of being the nominee, but that’s crashing from over 90%. If that first poll holds up and Gingrich really does win Florida, he’ll be the frontrunner.

A number of things came together to cast this spell: Gingrich turned a devastating personal story into a counter-attack against the media. He also effectively dog-whistled to racists, taking advantage of an almost all-white SC primary electorate. Plus, Romney fumbled the tax-return issue (Ruth Marcus said he was “choosing to pull off the Band-Aid with excruciating slowness”) and did a poor job of parrying attacks related to health care and abortion.

In the short run, Sarah Palin was right about ABC’s interview with Gingrich’s ex-wife on Thursday. Mrs. Gingrich II claimed that Newt asked for an “open marriage” so that he could continue his affair with the future Mrs. Gingrich III. Palin said the interview would

incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction, because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more.

Gingrich played it that way in Thursday evening’s debate, launching a crowd-pleasing counter-attack against CNN’s John King. Gingrich already had momentum, but that debate performance locked up South Carolina for him. His anti-media tirade was the lead on all the news shows (even though I thought Rick Santorum had a much stronger debate overall).

Remember, though, that the sexual harassment charges against Herman Cain also gave Cain a short-term boost. In the long run, I think the “open marriage” phrase will stick in the public mind and be a slow-but-steady drag on Gingrich. At a minimum, his rivals have a new rhetorical hook to use. Expect to hear metaphors about Newt’s open relationship with the truth, with conservative principles, and with anything else opponents want to raise doubts about.

Rush Limbaugh may think “everybody has an angry ex-spouse“, but it’s equally true that every woman has a man who done her wrong. (For at least three women, that man is Rush Limbaugh.) If they start identifying Newt with that guy, it’ll cost him.

The NYT’s Charles Blow:

Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift.

In short, Gingrich has been dog whistling. He doesn’t openly say: “Lazy blacks expect you hard-working white taxpayers to support them.” But if you believe that already, you listen to Gingrich and think, “That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about!”

Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates responds to Gingrich by quoting Jane Austen:

when people are determined on a mode of conduct which they know to be wrong, they feel injured by the expectation of anything better from them.

Hence the sense of injury when politicians like Gingrich are accused of pandering to racists, when in fact they are and know that they are.

A few facts about Gingrich’s “food-stamp president” rhetoric and the way he tries to make the issue food stamps vs. paychecks:

  • White food-stamp recipients outnumber blacks almost 2-to-1. Percentage-wise, blacks are more likely to be on food stamps than whites, but it’s not a black issue.
  • About half of food-stamp households with children already have jobs.
  • Nationwide, the average per-person food stamp benefit is $134 a month. That might keep you from starving, but it’s not going to replace a job.

In short, there’s no reason to believe that cutting food stamps would motivate people to get jobs. And looking at the causality the other way, liberals also hope for a job-rich economy that makes food stamps unnecessary. The question is how to get there. If conservative policies created jobs, we wouldn’t have been on the brink of a depression at the end of the Bush administration.

Meanwhile, open marriage (or polyamory) is topical again. Salon explores the ups and downs, and the NYT has a free-for-all.

Meanwhile, the Republican establishment is freaking out. Josh Marshall explains why with Gingrich’s national favorable/unfavorable graph (which doesn’t reproduce here).

As he galvanizes the most extreme elements in the Republican electorate, Gingrich’s unfavorability with the general electorate is spiking. Nate Silver referenced the same graph while saying Gingrich “would be one of the most unpopular candidates ever to be nominated by a major party.” (Gingrich’s favorability numbers have only gotten worse since Nate dismissed his chances last March.)

Real Clear Politics’ average of national polls has Obama narrowly ahead of Romney (47%-45%), while crushing Gingrich (50%-40%). But in the CNN exit polls, the South Carolina primary voters mainly looking for an Obama-defeating candidate picked Gingrich over Romney by a wider margin. He got 51% of those votes compared with 41% overall.

This is what happens when people believe their own propaganda. Tea Party Republicans claim they’re not a far-right fringe, they’re mainstream America. Believing that, they think mainstream America hates President Obama like they do. Gingrich does the best job of inspiring and channelling their hatred, so they think he must be the best candidate to send into the general election.

They’re kidding themselves. In the real world, even people who doubt Obama’s competence tend to like him personally. So going after Obama (or his wife or his kids or his dog) with nasty and racially polarizing rhetoric will backfire on the national stage. And while Republicans love to make fun of Obama’s teleprompter— another dog-whistle about the intelligence of blacks — Obama actually thinks on his feet quite well. In a debate, he won’t be the punching bag Gingrich supporters imagine.

Despite his disappointing showing in South Carolina and low national poll numbers, Rick Santorum is right to stay in the race. Here’s his scenario: Gingrich will crash again, Romney will be damaged goods — and then it’s Santorum or a brokered convention, which hasn’t happened in half a century.

Through the magic of video editing, Mitt Romney debates Martin Luther King.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Truth Vigilantes and other short notes

January 16, 2012 – 11:50 am

The most clueless post of the week came from the NYT public editor Arthur Brisbane: Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante? Brisbane was

looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.

So if a “newsmaker” says the sky is green, should the Times let that stand? or explain to its readers that the sky is actually blue?

That post drew 327 comments and countless responses from bloggers and other pundits, almost unanimously (except for National Review) saying: If you have to ask that question, the Times is in worse trouble than we thought.

Brisbane wrote a follow-up claiming that we had all misunderstood the question, which prompted another avalanche of responses saying that we understood it perfectly.

Greg Sargent sums up current practice, which is to print a fact-check column once (maybe), but not reference it when a false claim gets repeated again and again. Result: “any Times customer reading [the false claims] comes away misled.”

Glenn Greenwald translates newsmaker to mean “those who wield power within America’s political and financial systems” and points out that critics of the newsmaking elite get a different treatment: “their statements are subjected to extreme levels of skepticism in those rare instances when they’re heard at all.”

Jay Rosen gives a long-term perspective:

Something happened in our press over the last 40 years … the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false.

Salon’s Marcus Cederstrom asks the question I’ve been wondering about for weeks: What if Tim Tebow were Muslim?

In all the uproar about American Marines urinating on Taliban corpses, one point hasn’t gotten much attention: All the way back to George Washington, America has tried to maintain a code of honor for its troops. (We didn’t always succeed, but we always tried.) Why?

Here’s why: The American ideal is the citizen soldier who eventually rejoins civilized society. America’s fighting men and women are not supposed to be packs of jackals that we unleash on our enemies and then forget about. They are us, and when they’re done with the disagreeable job of war, we intend to welcome them home.

So when Dana Loesch says, “Come on, people, this is a war“, she may think she’s supporting our troops, but she isn’t. By implying that barbaric behavior is normal in our military, she’s undermining our soldiers’ eventual re-integration into civilian life.

If this is how Loesch pictures Marines, how will she feel when an ex-Marine moves in next door or wants to marry her little sister? Or has the distance between Marines and media stars grown so great that such possibilities are unthinkable now?

While I enjoy Jon Stewart’s pokes at our political system from the outside, nothing tops the way Stephen Colbert demonstrates its abusrdity from within.

When it became clear that unaccountable Super-PACs were going to dominate the 2012 election cycle, Colbert started one: Americans United for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. It’s a stunt, but it’s not just a stunt. He really raised money and put ads on TV in Iowa.

This week, Colbert demonstrated the absurdity of Super-PACs that are devoted to one candidate (but allegedly don’t co-ordinate with that candidate’s campaign) by transferring his Super-PAC to Jon Stewart and then announcing his own candidacy for president. Colbert and Stewart worked out their “non-cooperation” agreement on national TV.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

And now, the Super-PAC has the absurd anti-Romney attack ad Mitt the Ripper on the air in South Carolina: If Romney really believes corporations are people, then he was a serial killer during his time at Bain Capital.

It was amazing to watch how quickly and effectively the Republican establishment moved to shut down criticism of Romney’s “vulture capitalism“. TPM’s 100-seconds series captured it:

Vodpod videos no longer available.

The point here seems to be that capitalism transcends good and evil. To make any moral comment on Romney’s business practices is beyond the pale, and puts you on the road to Soviet Communism. Such a nihilistic argument is pretty weird for a party that claims to be the natural home of American Christians.

Dahlia Lithwick: “If a Republican successor of Obama gets to replace both Kennedy and Ginsburg, it’s fair to predict that the Roberts Court may include five or even six of the most conservative jurists since the FDR era.” We wouldn’t just see a loss of abortion rights, but “a jurisprudence that skews pro-business, pro-life, anti-environment, and toward entangling the church with the state.”

If you haven’t checked out Vi Hart’s YouTube channel, you’re missing the Internet’s best example of charming geekiness.

It’s always important on MLK Day, to remember just how radical King was. He didn’t promote a vague be-nice message, but took outside-the-current-mainstream stands on major issues.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Also tagged , , | Comments (1)

The Four Flavors of Republican

January 9, 2012 – 12:57 pm

As I’ve explained elsewhere, the news media does a good job at telling us what is new today, but a bad job of explaining the context-providing frames that the insiders have known all along.

That is showing up big-time in the coverage of the Republican presidential campaign. Let a new poll come out or one candidate launch a new sound bite at another, and CNN is all over it, whether it actually makes any difference or not. That’s how we wind up with so much coverage of manufactured events like August’s Iowa Straw Poll, which in retrospect did not even say much about last Tuesday’s Iowa Caucus, which in itself was a bit of a manufactured event.

On the other hand, the background truths that insiders take for granted are never “new”, so they don’t make headlines.

I thought I’d fill in one of those gaps by asking: What is this thing called “the Republican Party”? What are its components? How do they fit together? And how do the various candidates relate to them?

The four components. Republicans come in one of four basic flavors: NeoCons, Corporatists, Libertarians, and Theocrats. I don’t call them factions because the boundaries between them aren’t clear-cut. You can pitch many of the same pitch ideas to all four, but each requires its own spin.

Take global warming. All four flavors are potential climate-change deniers, but each requires its own argument: Tell Corporatists that regulating or taxing carbon will cut profits. Tell Libertarians that global warming is a conspiracy to impose world government. Theocrats will also buy the conspiracy angle, if you emphasize that the plot was concocted by the same evil scientists behind the evolution conspiracy. Tell NeoCons that any carbon restrictions we accept will work to the advantage of the Chinese.

But they aren’t just tribes speaking different languages. Their substantive differences show up most clearly on drugs. Libertarians want to legalize drugs, because what business is it of the government’s anyway? This position is anathema to the Theocrats, who see the government as the guardian of public morality. NeoCons fundamentally don’t care, while Corporatists would happily make money selling either heroin in elementary schools or helicopters to the DEA or both.

Get the idea? Now let’s go through them one by one.

  • NeoCons are the people who gave us the Iraq War. Their highest priority is that the United States remain the top military power in the world, and that we use our power to prevent the rise of any rival powers. Their #1 issue in this election is Iran. When a candidate says we have to do “whatever it takes” to prevent Iran getting a nuclear weapon, he (now that Bachmann has dropped out I’ll refer to candidates as he) is appealing for NeoCon support. Of all the remaining candidates, Newt Gingrich is the clearest NeoCon choice.
  • Corporatists champion the interests of corporations and want to weaken government, unions, or any other power that might resist corporate dominance. Often they borrow the individualistic rhetoric of the Libertarians, but their motivation is different: They want decisions made by individuals because individuals are no match for corporations. Mitt Romney was the corporatist candidate even before he said, “Corporations are people, my friend.“
  • Libertarians want government restricted to defending people and property against crime, defending the borders against invasion, and enforcing contracts. If you don’t want the government to restrict your neighbor’s right to build a nuclear power plant in his back yard, you’re a Libertarian and your candidate is Ron Paul.
  • Theocrats (a.k.a. Social Conservatives or the Religious Right) believe that morality is eternal and established by God, and that society will collapse if it diverges from this God-given script. Therefore the government should promote true morality and punish deviance. They are especially obsessed with anything that changes gender roles: abortion, gay rights, and even contraception.

It’s possible to organize them on two axes, as in the diagram: Corporatists and Libertarians want weak government, while Theocrats and NeoCons want government strong enough to control your bedroom and tap your phone. Libertarians and Theocrats have a populist/outsider mentality that is suspicious of experts and prone to conspiracy theories. Corporatists and NeoCons have an elitest/insider mentality, believing that people are stupid and need to be manipulated into doing what’s best. Insiders see outsiders as useful idiots; outsiders sense this attitude and resent it.

Trust and volatility. This coalition goes back to Reagan, who virtually invented the useful-idiot theory, using social issues as bright, shiny objects to get Theocrats’ attention, but not actually doing anything about them once in office. As Thomas Frank put it in What’s the Matter With Kansas?:

Values may “matter most” to voters, but they always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won. … Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors, receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists, receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining.

The outsider groups have been catching on lately, which is how they turned the tables in the 2010 elections: The Tea Party was supposedly all about economic issues, but once in office the first priority was restricting abortion.

That’s why the Republican electorate has been so jittery in the 2012 cycle, jumping from candidate to candidate and asking who the “real” conservative is. Everybody is afraid of getting played — except for the Corporatists, who have complete confidence in Romney.

Agree/Disagree. Four groups means six relationships.

  • Corporatist/NeoCon. Agree: Control the world’s oil. Install pro-capitalist, pro-globalization governments. Disagree: Iran (Corporatists want to make money trading with them) and immigration (NeoCons worry about the border, Corporatists want cheap labor).
  • Corporatist/Libertarian. Agree: Cut taxes and regulations, including regulations on campaign contributions. Disagree: convergence of Wall Street and Washington (Libertarians want to abolish the Fed, Corporatists want cheap loans from it).
  • Corporatist/Theocrat. A diagonal relationship; mostly they can co-operate because their issues have so little to do with each other. Agree: oppose anti-poverty programs, see wealth as a sign of God’s blessing. Disagree: globalization.
  • NeoCon/Libertarian. Another diagonal relationship, but more fraught. Agree: on substance, not much. Disagree: foreign wars, civil liberties.
  • NeoCon/Theocrat. Onward Christian soldiers. Agree: American exceptionalism, Pro-Israel, anti-Muslim, no gays in the military. Disagree: NeoCon indifference to social issues.
  • Libertarian/Theocrat. Agree: against liberal judges. Disagree: government as a moral watchdog.

Unifying rhetoric. Talking out of four sides of your mouth is a good trick, even for a professional politician. So spinmeisters have developed variety of rhetorical tropes so that the same words are heard differently by different people.

To give just one example, Theocrats and Libertarians share attitudes, but not policies. Both are nostalgic: Libertarians for the Robber Baron era of the late 1800s, Theocrats for the Great Awakening of the 1700s.

Worshipful rhetoric about the Founders is designed to appeal to both. Theocrats believe the Founders established a Christian Republic, while Libertarians identify the Founders with limited government — too limited to get into your bedroom or your medicine cabinet. So a candidate need only say “the Founders” and each group will fill in the picture it likes.

Fault lines. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush unified the four flavors, but this year no candidate does. NeoCons can’t support Ron Paul, Libertarians can’t support Rick Santorum, and Theocrats can’t support Mitt Romney. That’s why Republican insiders keep having fantasies about some new candidate — it’s basically the same fantasy they had about Rick Perry before he turned out to be an idiot: a tough-talking, pro-business, Christian Reconstructionist who wants to abolish the EPA.

Each non-fantasy candidate exposes a different fault line, so expect Obama to run differently depending on who the Republican nominee is. His increasing economic populism of late is evidence that he expects to run against Romney.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (10)

My Boring Primary Season and other short notes

January 9, 2012 – 12:35 pm

Primary season in New Hampshire has been dull this year. There’s no Democratic race, and Republican candidates conceded the state to Romney a long time ago. Plus, it’s been harder to find out where candidates are, and a lot of their speeches are at business-club meetings or other gatherings the rest of us aren’t invited to.

Ah, the old days. About a dozen candidates campaigned here all through the summer of 2007. It didn’t take effort to see them, it took effort to avoid them. One day I saw a crowd gathering in front of City Hall, and found myself at a Fred Thompson rally. My wife and I went to one of our usual restaurants and discovered that Barack Obama was answering questions behind the divider.

This time around, Republican candidates didn’t arrive in force until this week. I feel like they’re asking me to dance only because prettier girls turned them down.

Wednesday I stirred myself to go hear Newt Gingrich in Manchester, and he didn’t even answer audience questions. (John McCain spoiled me. The whole point of his NH campaign was to demonstrate his amazing ability to answer unscripted questions 12 hours a day.) Here’s what I learned: Newt doesn’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon; in spite of George W. Bush’s 8-year failed experiment, he still believes in supply-side economics; and he talks a lot about Reagan but never mentions Bush.

Stop the presses.

I suppose I’d still like to see for myself whether Rick Santorum is as scary as he seems on TV. But it’s got to be today or tomorrow, and my heart isn’t in it.

Nate Silver is giving Mitt Romney a 98% chance of winning tomorrow. Sure. Why not?

David Waldman demolishes the “Mitt Romney, job creator” myth and coins the great phrase locust capitalism. Several of Romney’s business take-overs resemble what Tony Soprano used to call a “bust out“: You borrow a bunch of money in the company’s name, take it, then declare the company bankrupt and fire everybody. Mitt is a great businessman because he figured out how to do a bust out without breaking the law.

Looks like it’s not just liberals making this point.

Once again in December: Private sector employment up, public sector down. Where is this huge expansion of government the Republicans keep talking about?

The Obama jobs record in a nutshell: During the first six months of his administration, the continuing Bush downturn destroyed 3.1 million jobs. Since then, 1.2 million jobs have come back.

As I pointed out two months ago in Jobless Recoveries Are Normal Now, it’s hard to either credit or blame Obama’s economic policies for this, because although this recession is deeper than the last two (and was already on Inauguration Day) the shape is the same. That pattern is continuing.

A popular Republican talking point is that they represent “equality of opportunity” while Democrats want government to guarantee “equality of outcome”. More accurately: Both sides want equality of opportunity, but Democrats regard inequality of outcome as evidence of inequality of opportunity, while Republicans believe the poor deserve their fate.

Paul Krugman makes two points that can’t be repeated often enough:

  1. America has less equality of opportunity than “socialist” countries like Canada.
  2. Republicans are against any attempts to make opportunity more equal.

The Economist adds this comment on the politics of the opportunity/outcome argument:

The risk in Mr Romney’s position is that, to the extent that people recognise that the staggeringly rich keep getting wealthier while regular people aren’t getting anywhere, arguing that this represents “equality of opportunity” is saying that regular people don’t deserve to get ahead. The reason Mitt Romney is fabulously rich and you aren’t, on this telling, is that he deserves it and you don’t.

Try telling that to this couple.

Want to explain “socialism” to your conservative friends and family? Let Nurse Pam help.

I love Keith Olbermann — not the least for giving Rachel Maddow her big break — but do you get the impression he might be hard to deal with?

I keep waiting for somebody to draw the right lesson from the death of Kim Jong Il: Kim had nuclear weapons for the last 3-5 years of his life and never used them.

Every time the NeoCons beat the drum to attack another country (as they’ve doing with Iran for years now), the message is: “Their ruler is crazy. Deterrence won’t work with somebody like that.” We heard it about Saddam, and now we’re hearing it about Ahmadinejad.

This is great framing for the warmongers, because it tempts peaceniks to defend the sanity of somebody the American public doesn’t like. “Saddam/Ahmadinejad/the-next-villain is saner than you think” isn’t a winning political message.

Now we have a better response: “Is he crazier than Kim Jong Il?”

Rick Perlstein: To Rick Santorum, “freedom” means owing your soul to the company store.

My prediction of a Santorum victory in Iowa was off by eight votes. Or was it?

Montana’s Supreme Court just made a direct challenge to Citizen’s United. I’ll try to explain better after I read the decision.

When banks become hot investments, watch out. Good banking is boring banking.

By weeklysift | Posted in Short Notes | Comments (2)

Your 2012 Deep Background Briefing

December 12, 2011 – 1:48 pm

2012 is an unusual election year. Some elections revolve around a single issue: 1860 was about slavery, 1932 about the Depression. 2002 (and to a lesser extent 2004) was about terrorism. 2006 was about the Iraq War. 2010 was about rising government spending and debt.

Some elections, particularly re-elections of incumbent presidents, are ratifications of a general direction, like Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign from 1984 or the Democratic landslides of 1964 and 1936.

There’s always a chance that an emergency will take over an election.  No matter what anybody had planned in 2008, everything changed when the economy started collapsing in late September. Obama probably would have won anyway, but the election turned into a landslide because the country wanted a calm voice and a steady hand. McCain’s “maverick” image was suddenly exactly wrong.

Barring an emergency, 2012 is about a mood: anxiety.

Obviously, President Obama can’t run a ratification campaign in a year when there is a large and growing sense that the country is on the wrong track. But at the same time, this isn’t an issue election. Unemployment, inequality, debt, corruption, national security, health care, climate change, moral decay, and so on are all serious concerns for many voters, but in 2012 they are mainly screens onto which to project a much more diffuse fear that our country is broken — that whatever the issue, we are no longer capable even of grappling with it, much less solving it.

By its nature, anxiety is full of contradictory impulses: Any program that isn’t radical seems like re-arranging the Titanic’s deck chairs, but any particular radical change seems like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. We want a hero to ride in and save us, and yet we are cynical about heroes on horseback. We look back fondly to a brighter, more confident era, and yet we resonate with Jack Burden’s cynical challenge to a nostalgic Anne Stanton in the classic political novel All the King’s Men:

What you mean is that it was a fine, beautiful time back then, but I mean that if it was such a God-damned fine, beautiful time, why did it turn into this time which is not so damned fine and beautiful if there wasn’t something in that time which wasn’t fine and beautiful? Answer that one.

Parties. An anxiety election is an opportunity for the party out of power, but which party is that?

A Democrat is president, but Republicans control the House and have the Senate blocked up with filibusters. An activist Republican majority on the Supreme Court keeps inventing new rights for corporations. Several swing states went Republican in 2010, and the radical programs of the new governors are wildly unpopular.

What makes Americans most anxious is that no one seems to have power. We spent the summer agonizing about the debt ceiling and how to lower the deficit, but in the end that issue got punted to the so-called supercommittee, which deadlocked. Neither party can force its view on the other, yet attempts to compromise also fail.

The Republican presidential opportunity. The challenger has an advantage in an anxiety election, but seizing that advantage requires threading a needle. You have to be on both sides of several contradictions: You are an outsider, but you are experienced; you’re a scrapper who will do whatever it takes to win, but you don’t fight dirty; you’re uncompromising but not rigid; principled but pragmatic; radical but not dangerous; able to get something done in Washington, but not willing to play the old game.

A Republican wins the presidency in November if he (we’ll ignore Michele Bachmann) represents Do Something Different and makes Obama represent Keep Doing What We’re Doing. That vague referendum would be a landslide for Do Something Different.

So the ideal Republican message would create the illusion of specificity without actually being specific. It could embrace a subtly self-contradictory slogan (like Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” from 2000) and embody vague themes (like the Hope and Change of Obama’s 2008 campaign). The perfect message would resemble Nixon’s in 1968: He confidently claimed to have a plan to get us out of Vietnam, but had reasons for not revealing its details.

That’s basically what worked in 2010: Republicans promised to “cut spending” without saying which spending. They implied that the federal budget was full of bridges-to-nowhere that could be eliminated without hurting anybody, but didn’t have to identify them.

Unfortunately for Republican candidates, that perfect November message flops completely in the primaries. The party is firmly in the hands of its radical base, to whom even the Republican establishment represents Keep Doing What We’re Doing.

The base is afraid of compromise and wants to nail candidates down on specifics. So it’s not enough to endorse a theme like traditional American values; a candidate has to oppose same-sex marriage and gays in the military. He can’t just be religious, he has to be a strong Christian who wants kids in the public schools to pray and learn creationism. Environmental pragmatism and balancing short-term economic interests against long-term environmental harm — that’s not good enough. The candidate must promise to abolish the EPA and agree that climate change is a scam.

Social Security and Medicare are so complicated that they are perfect for a Nixonian I-have-a-plan claim, but even Mitt Romney has been driven to endorse Paul Ryan’s voucher system for Medicare.

The Republican base is showing its own symptoms of anxiety. Again and again they have jumped at the vague idea of a hero on horseback, but then been disappointed when they tore into the details of the person and the plan. As long as Rick Perry was “the Jobs Governor” or Herman Cain was an inspirational biography plus a 9-9-9 plan, they rode high. Closer inspection has been fatal to both.

How Obama Can Win. Obama’s calm manner is well suited to an anxiety election, but it won’t be enough, even if his opponent looks scary. Even a radical challenger (like Reagan) could win in a year with a big wrong-path majority (like 1980).

Usually, though, an incumbent president facing a big wrong-path majority also faces a damaging primary campaign, like Carter’s against Ted Kennedy in 1980 or Johnson’s against Gene McCarthy in 1968. But not this year. The Left hasn’t been happy with Obama (see my own Barack, Can We Talk?), but after seeing the Tea Party governors like Scott Walker, few liberals are willing to risk helping the Republicans win the presidency.

Ditto for liberal third-party challengers like Nader in 2000 or Henry Wallace in 1948. Even those of us who lament the corrupting influence of Goldman Sachs or how many War-on-Terror abuses Obama has ratified — we can’t claim that it makes no difference which party wins.

So even if the Left is not happy, it will be united and even motivated in the fall.

Assuming a less-than-perfect Republican challenger, Obama’s winning message has these pieces.

1. I’ve done more than you think. The model here is an op-ed in Tuesday’s LA Times, in which a woman apologizes to President Obama for turning against him.

I’m sorry I didn’t do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us.

The reason? She was diagnosed with breast cancer and discovered that the Affordable Care Act makes it possible for her to get health insurance. Pre-ACA, she would have been uninsurable and might well have lost everything.

For decades, health care has been like the weather — everybody talked about it, but nobody succeeded in doing anything. You could wish for more or better than the ACA, but against the alternative of continuing to do nothing (and all the Republican proposals amount to doing nothing), ObamaCare looks pretty good. Voters may have hated the horse-trading process of passing the ACA, but they will love the personal stories of the people it is already helping.

In foreign policy, Obama ended our combat mission in Iraq and finally nailed Osama bin Laden. He helped the Libyans overthrow Gaddafi on their own and didn’t involve us in another Iraq-style mess. The trump card of Bush defenders was always to say, “He kept us safe” after 9-11. Well, we’ve been equally safe under Obama.

Obama gets his lowest marks on the economy, but even there he looks good if you remember just how bad things were when he took office. Expect to see more of this graph:

2. I’m on your side. Preventing big cuts in Social Security and Medicare, wanting to raise taxes on millionaires — people support that stuff. It’s going to help a lot that swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida have seen how Republican governors grind down the working class and favor the wealthy.

3. You like me. Even surveys that show a low job-approval rating show that people like Obama personally. The Republican base — the folks who forward emails about his Kenyan birth and his Muslim faith — want to see red-meat attacks against him. But swing voters don’t.

4. I’m running against Congress. This was the Truman strategy in 1948. Obama’s approval ratings hover in the 40s, but Congress’ are in the teens. And if voters blame Congressional Republicans for the gridlock in Washington, then Obama becomes the do-something-different candidate.

5. My plans are better than their plans. This is where the Republican’s nomination battle is going to work against them. If Obama can make the Republican candidate stand for the specific policies he endorsed to get nominated, rather than Do Something Different, he’ll win.

A lot of moderates who aren’t usually single-issue voters will discover that certain Republican positions are deal-breakers. Can you really vote for a candidate who wants to do nothing about global warming? Or roll back gay rights that already exist and don’t seem to be hurting anybody? Or take away collective bargaining rights? Undo child labor laws? Automatically treat Hispanics or Muslims like suspects? Define a fertilized ovum as a person, which turns a doctor-patient discussion of abortion into a murder conspiracy? Or privatize Social Security and replace Medicare with a voucher program?

How far do they go? A lot hinges on how long the Republican nomination stays in doubt, and how far right the nominee has to go. Their ideal winning scenario — that an early consensus would form around a candidate with an ambiguous record like Romney’s — is already not happening.  If candidates are still competing for Tea Party votes in April and May, they’ll have a hard time coming back to get moderate votes in November.

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Horse Race 2012

August 22, 2011 – 12:13 pm

I’m usually reluctant to write about the presidential horserace, because it already gets over-covered in the corporate media, at the expense of covering who the candidates are and what they propose to do.

On the other hand, the media also tends to get the horse race wrong, which tempts me to comment. Recently, for example, pundits have been analyzing “what went wrong” with Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, never admitting that it was a mistake to give him so much coverage in the first place. In truth, they could just as fruitfully analyze what went wrong with your candidacy or mine, since neither of us is going to be president either.

(I wrote about Pawlenty because his campaign videos illustrated an important propaganda technique.)

So (with proper apologies and promises of future restraint) I’m going to plunge into some horserace coverage about the 2012 election.

President Obama. President Obama’s job approval rating hit an all-time low of 40% this week. Still, he is polling well — or at least not badly — against his potential 2012 opponents: In three states a Republican challenger needs to win — North Carolina, Ohio, and Colorado — Obama is “edging Mitt Romney and keeping clear leads on the rest of the field”.

So Obama’s approval-rating slump seems less of a personal rejection than a symptom of a general wave of pessimism with the economy and disgust with American politics following the debt-ceiling debacle. Things are bad and the President seems to have no solution, but neither does anybody else.

Nate Silver (who I consider the best poll interpreter in the country) is struck more by the breadth of Obama’s slump than its size. During 2011 his approval rating has fallen among all income groups and in all regions of the country; among whites, blacks, and Hispanics; among conservative Republicans as well as liberal Democrats.

The drop among liberal Democrats is fairly small — about 3% — something you would never guess from progressive blogs like Hullabaloo. Nate sums up like this:

Although many leading liberal voices were unhappy with the debt ceiling deal that Mr. Obama struck with Republicans this month (justifiably, in my view), this just isn’t showing up in a big way among the liberal rank-and-file.

One thing to keep in mind is that if most liberal Democrats had strongly approved of Mr. Obama’s performance before, then a “downgrade” in their views of him might be toward less enthusiastic approval, rather than to outright disapproval. Although these liberal Democrats might not vote against Mr. Obama, less enthusiastic support could translate into reduced turnout, volunteerism and fund-raising for the president’s re-election campaign.

Count me among that number. I’ve gone from an enthusiastic Obama supporter to someone who says “at least he’s not batshit crazy”.

The Republican Savior Search. Republicans are currently going through what Democrats suffered in 2004, when Bush seemed beatable, but we lurched from one “savior” to the next because we just couldn’t find the right person to run against him. Howard Dean was going to save us, and then he wasn’t. Wesley Clark was popular until the exact moment he entered the race, and then we started longing for Hillary Clinton or Al Gore.

This year, Rick Perry is playing the Wesley Clark role. He was supposed to be the answer for Republicans who think that Michele Bachmann is unelectable (like Howard Dean), Mitt Romney is too establishment and too phony (like John Kerry), and (in spite of previous boomlets for Donald Trump and Herman Cain) everybody else just seems too small or too boring.

Then Rick ruined it all by announcing his candidacy. Suddenly he was every bit as crazy as Bachmann, a corrupt crony capitalist, a Shariah sympathizer, a porno investor, “an idiot“, a proponent of “big government overreach” and somehow simultaneously “the second coming of George Bush” and at war with the former Bushies. [In fairness: Think Progress explains why the porno charge is overblown.]

So now Republicans daydream of new saviors: Jeb Bush, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan.

The Republican problem in a nutshell is that no actual candidate polls as well against Obama as the generic Republican. This is similar to the phenomenon that generic spending cuts are popular, while specific cuts aren’t. The generic Republican candidate runs on a generic platform that cuts spending without cutting anything important. Actual candidates have to be more specific.

The path to beating Obama is clear: He’s vulnerable on the economy, which everybody is disappointed in. The Republican candidate needs to talk about creating jobs while obscuring the fact that none of the Republican ideas created jobs when President Bush tried them. That’s why I was briefly worried when Perry cast himself as “the jobs governor”. The we-did-it-in-Texas message is deceptive, but it could fly.

The Republican problem is to get a candidate nominated without taking far-outside-the-mainstream positions, particularly on social issues. You can’t run against the gays any more. Prayer is good, but urging the public to pray for rain is wacky (especially if God turns you down). And abortions are strangely like guns: Most Americans think there are too many of them, but they still want their family to be able to get one as a last resort.

Other red-meat conservative issues fail nationally, too. People may not want to make big sacrifices to avoid global warming, but Perry’s scientists-are-frauds claim or Bachmann’s promise to “lock the doors” and “turn off the lights” at the EPA are going to scare more people than they attract. Illegal immigration worries many whites, but Republicans can’t win without at least 1/3 of the Hispanic vote.

So a winning Republican needs to wink-and-nod to the extremists while not scaring everybody else. Only Romney (OK, Huntsman also, for all his chances are worth) is trying to walk that line, and I think he could beat Obama if things continue to look bad economically. But the only way he wins the nomination is if Perry, Bachmann and maybe Palin split the wacko vote in the primaries.

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