Category: Republicans

Frum vs Erickson on Huntsman candidacy

I have to admit that Erick Erickson’s post in which he vows to not support Jon Huntsman’s candidacy — short of voting for him if he’s the Republican nominee — is surprising and somewhat bizarre. Erickson basically questions Huntsman’s loyalty to America and to President Obama because he started pivoting towards a presidential run while still serving as US Ambassador to China in the Obama administration.

Today former Bush administration official David Frum opens up both barrels in an attack on Erickson and Erickson’s post on Huntsman. Frum characterizes Erickson’s critique:

What matters is fighting the socialist Muslim Barack Obama with all weapons that come to hand! Any politician who can find any area of cooperation with a president of the other party – why such a figure is the worst of the worst.

Except that is a very dishonest reading of what Erickson is actually saying:

John Huntman’s disloyalty to the President of the United States, regardless of the President or to which party the President belongs, should not be rewarded by any patriot of this country.
…
The reason I will never, ever support Jon Huntman is simple: While serving as the United States Ambassador to China, our greatest strategic adversary, Jon Huntsman began plotting to run against the President of the United States. This calls into question his loyalty not just to the President of the United States, but also his loyalty to his country over his own naked ambition.

I’m as shocked as anyone that Erickson would publicly espouse this view about requisite loyalty of administration officials towards the President. I think it’s likely a cheap cover for the fact that Huntsman is too liberal for Erickson. But the argument he’s publicly making is pretty much the opposite of how Frum characterizes it. Erickson’s argument against Huntsman in this post is about loyalty *to country* as distinct from loyalty to party or, as Erickson sees Huntsman’s choices, loyalty to self.

Frum may be right that the overarching philosophy of Erickson and his RedState.com brethren is loyalty to the Republican Party and conservative talking heads over non-partisan patriotism. But that really isn’t the case Erickson has made in the slightest. I’m open to the notion that Erickson himself is being dishonest about why he is opposing Huntsman, but this post does not provide Frum with grounding to criticize Erickson for not supporting Huntsman due to a lack of loyalty to conservative partisanship.

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

On Birtherism

I really agree with David Dayen and Baratunde Thurston (see above) in their analysis of the President releasing his long form birth certificate yesterday and what it means about the state of affairs in our country.

Dayen:

And I do think the spectacle of an American President having to debase himself to confront conspiracy theorists registers as a low moment in American politics and a signal of US decline. Not just because of what it says about the media, and the hash they’ve made of the public square over the years. The press is nuts, and they’re not even the press – if by that term you mean the organizations who disseminate important information to ensure a well-informed citizenry.

But more important, I think that this marks the end of anyone calling this a post-racial society. Because this entire issue revolves around race, about the alien aspect of a black man in the White House. The comments telling Obama to get off the basketball court is part and parcel of the same thing. Basically, you have a subset of this country who will never see a black man as an American.

A number of people pointed out that yesterday felt like a return to the Clinton years, where any charge against the President would be treated as valid and worthy of widespread discussion in the media. But I think Baratunde makes clear that while that is certainly happening, the racial backdrop of it happening to this President in this day is much more tragic. This isn’t about politics, it’s about race. I never bought the idea that the election of Barack Obama made America a post-racial society, but I’m sure plenty of people not only held it but were comforted by it. We have a lot of work to do and I think no small part of it will involve shaming the racists and bigots who carried out this campaign against the President and the hacks who pushed it to drive up their ratings or their bosses approval rate.

Nate Silver on the Trump surge

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Following yesterday’s CNN poll which showed Donald Trump tied for the lead nationally with Mike Huckabee, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight takes a hard look at the Republican race and sees a very flawed field. First, Silver makes a fairly useful distinction between the parts of the primary field who are approved by Beltway Republicans (Romney, Pawlenty, Huntsman, Barbour and Daniels) and those who are seeking to run through Tea Party and social conservative support (Palin, Bachmann, Ron Paul, Gingrich and Trump). Silver calls the first group the Fairfax Five and the second the Factional Five (left uncategorized are Huckabee, Santorum and Giuliani).

What’s more interesting is Silver’s observation that Trump’s surge comes through the counterintuitive path he has set out for himself as a candidate.

If Mr. Trump were going to run for president, it might have been more natural for him to do so as a social moderate but fiscal conservative, touting his executive experience and the virtues of free-market capitalism. Instead, he’s run far to his right, giving voice to false and misleading claims about Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, and reversing his prior, more moderate positions on gay rights and abortion.

Silver then looks at polling for the race and sees what we’ve pointed out here repeatedly: the Beltway approved candidates largely do not play well outside of the Beltway. Trumps rise has come at the expense of Romney and Palin. While Intrade betting markets give the Beltway approved candidates a better chance than polls currently suggest, they are hardly determinative. Instead, the current polling and Trump’s rapid rise by embracing Birtherism suggest the inadequacy of how most of the field is running.

If Mr. Trump, with such a cynical strategy, can rocket up in the polls so quickly, that suggests that the Fairfax Five and the Factional Five are both flawed in their own way. Instead, I suspect the value bets in markets like Intrade — and by extension, relative to conventional wisdom — are those candidates who belong to neither group.

The key to all of this analysis is that Mike Huckabee is at the top of the average of three national polls and Silver hasn’t fit him into either core of candidates. Huckabee doesn’t fit as easily into the boxes Silver sets out, in part because he’s already a well-known commodity among Republican voters. He doesn’t have to come to DC to get approval from George Will to be recognized by voters. He also doesn’t have to dive deep into Birtherism to get a media hit. If Huckabee decides to run, something which is by no means a certitude today, he will be able to avoid a lot of the baggage both of Silver’s cohorts have to deal with in order to pursue the nomination. If Mike Huckabee reads Nate Silver or this blog, I’m guessing he will be encouraged by what he sees.

Ryan’s Austerity Budget

Duncan Black seems to be the only person who regularly tries to remind people that Republicans won big in 2010 by criticizing Democrats for trying to take away Medicare.  What’s so bizarre about Ryan’s budget plan, which includes a massive privatization and the effective destruction of Medicare for everyone under 55, is that it ignores what was for the GOP good politics in favor of a policy agenda rife with political risk. Duncan writes:

For some reason only crazy liberal bloggers watching political campaign ads on the teevee in their basements noticed that GOP candidates’ only semi-substantive issue in the last election was an attack on Obama Medicare cuts. And they went hard on it. And old people freaked.

David Brooks says the Ryan budget, “will become the 2012 Republican platform, no matter who is the nominee.” As Ryan moves his plan forward and it becomes the center of debate, Democrats have the opening to basically do exactly what the GOP did in 2010. Dems can run on defending Medicare and while correctly attack Republicans for wanting to take it away.

Ezra Klein points out that even if Ryan doesn’t get everything he wants, a “compromised” version of his plan would still be a huge win for Republicans seeking to destroy social programs in the US:

Ryan is beginning the debate far to the right. He won’t get everything he wants, but if he gets 50 percent of what he wants, or even 35 percent, it’ll be the most dramatic victory that conservatives have scored against the social safety net in a generation — larger, at least in dollar terms, than anything done to welfare in 1996.

The one wrinkle in this is that for the most part would be an outcome the White House would be fine with. After all, it was the president who put together a deficit commission, which Paul Ryan served on. The details on what a solution look like may be different, but Obama and Ryan do share the belief that entitlement spending is a problem that needs to be solved now. As Atrios wrote a few days ago, “one party says big spending cuts are necessary but sorta sad, one party says spending cuts are necessary and awesome.”

All of this adds up to a bizarre situation where politically Democrats are in a position to protect Medicare and other entitlement programs, while ideologically the people controlling the Democratic Party seem unlikely to actually use this political advantage, as they too want to see spending cuts. It’s not shocking to me that Republicans want to speed up the transfer of wealth from working people to wealthy elites; this is who they are and they’ve never been shy about it. What is incredibly frustrating and disempowering is the extent to which Democrats will, in some way or another, end up going along with this because they too want the same outcome, they’ll just feel a bit worse about it. Sure, they’ll want to be seen as opposing it, but unless the counter-offer from Democrats is not only making no cuts, but expanding spending for the social safety net, this opposition will be based on the premise set by the Republicans that there is a budget crisis and a deficit crisis and cuts must be made (but never raising revenues!). I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not ready to be optimistic about how Ryan’s budget will be fought against.

Anti-business Tea Party?

An article in today’s New York Times by Mike McIntire about the close relationship the Tea Party movement has had with American business is pretty damning. It highlights a string of bizarre synergy between a supposedly populist movement and business interests around things like keeping Asian paper tariff free, opposing net neutrality, and commercial space travel. Amidst some really good reporting on the Tea Party’s fealty to big corporate interests, McIntire includes this paragraph:

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government. Yet an examination of the Institute for Liberty shows how Washington’s influence industry has adapted itself to the Tea Party era. In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.

I honestly don’t know what makes McIntire think “The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.” The Tea Party has been largely engineered by money from rightwing corporate donors like the Tea Party. The actual activists have been funneled towards activities that protect corporate interests and fly in the face of any claims to populism.

More to the point, the Tea Party has never been anything other than the same old Republican dead enders who stood by the Bush administration while they turned a massive budget surplus into our largest deficits ever. None of these grassroots Republicans said one word about the Bush administration’s fiscal irresponsibility. Only when a Democrat occupied the White House did these self-described deficit hawking populists remember they cared about the deficit.

McIntire’s piece is otherwise quite good. It goes deep into the realities of the Tea Party and exposes the “movement” as being run by corporate Republican operatives, funded by corporate Republican businessmen, and used as a tool to further corporate Republican interests. The only thing which McIntire isn’t able to report is why grassroots Tea Party activists actually let themselves take part in this sort of shilling against their own economic interests.

Is the presidency beneath Palin?

Benjy Sarlin at TPMDC has a post up about the fascinating effort by movement conservatives to spin the idea that the presidency is actually beneath Sarah Palin and being elected would be a waste of her time. This is a remarkable idea and it’s being floated by conservative media figures like Andrew Breitbart and Ann Coulter. Somehow appearing with fringe Republican groups, nodding along on Fox News and posting the occasional Facebook rant is more important than being the leader of the free world. On the one hand, this spin clearly seems to be an effort to proactively protect Palin’s relevance in the event that she either fails to win the GOP nomination or fails to win the White House. It can’t be such a loss if it’d be a step down for someone as iconic as Palin…right guys? Right?

But on the other hand, this narrative demonstrates a sickening lack of regard for the institution of the presidency and the American project. This goes well beyond conservatives wanting to shrink government to a size where it can be drowned in a bathtub. Breitbart and Coulter are pushing a narrative that says the office of the President of the United States of America is not worthy of a fellow Fox News contributor’s time. It is a public assault on patriotism and national service (what would Reagan say?). It is an attack on the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers for three coequal branches of government (what will the tri-corner hat wearing, Gadsden flag-carrying Tea Partiers say?). That this spin is being put forth in order to hedge the relevance of a marginal political intellect who poses a limited grasp of anything beyond the politics of resentment just makes it even more reprehensible.

Cross posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

Haley Barbour: Reduce troops in Afghanistan

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field

David Dayen finds something you won’t see every day: a conservative Republican expressing doubt about the US mission in Afghanistan. In this case, it’s Haley Barbour:

(Barbour) also said that the U.S. should consider reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan. “I think we need to look at that,” he said when asked if the U.S. should scale back its presence.

But he said his reasoning isn’t financial.

“What is our mission?” Barbour said. “How many Al Qaeda are in Afghanistan. … Is that a 100,000-man Army mission?”

“I don’t think our mission should be to think we’re going to make Afghanistan an Ireland or an Italy” or a Western-style democracy, he said.

Mike Huckabee recently said Haley Barbour was “possibly the most brilliant political mind in America.” I found that assessment of someone with a sketchy history of statements and positions on race to be laughable. But it’s hard not to respect what Barbour is doing now. Barbour is breaking with Republican orthodoxy and in so doing creating contrast between himself and his primary opponents. The break isn’t as dramatic as you’d think in an environment where despite two-thirds of America wanting to end the war, it’s been escalated by a Democratic President. Add in that Huckabee himself expressed doubts last month about how we get out of Afghanistan and Barbour’s position is slightly less remarkable. That said, calling for an exit from Afghanistan is a popular position in America that is not often stated by politicians who wear a “D” after their name. We’ll see how much Afghanistan becomes an issue in the 2012 Republican primary. I’d be somewhat surprised if either Barbour or Huckabee push their chips in on ending war their base has cheered for nearly a decade.

Conventional Wisdom keeps solidifying against Palin

Jonathan Martin and John Harris write a Conventional Wisdom-defining piece at Politico about Sarah Palin’s penchant for playing the victim card and how it is a sign that she will not be the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

Among those taking aim at Palin in recent interviews with POLITICO are George F. Will, the elder statesman of conservative columnists; Peter Wehner, a top strategist in George W. Bush’s White House, and Heather Mac Donald, a leading voice with the right-leaning Manhattan Institute.

…
But Palin’s skeptics said a successful presidential candidacy would need to be buoyed by genuine policy vision, not merely grievance. For now, however, Palin’s appeal is now largely rooted in the sympathy she’s gleaned from her loudly voiced resentments toward the left, the news media and the GOP establishment.

“The appeal of conservatism is supposed to be people taking responsibility for their own actions,” said Labash. “But if you close your eyes and listen to Palin and her most irate supporters constantly squawk or bellyache or Tweet about how unfair a ride she gets from evil moustache-twirling elites and RINO saboteurs, she sounds like a professional victimologist, the flip side of any lefty grievance group leader. She’s becoming Al Sharpton, Alaska edition. The only difference being, she wears naughty-librarian glasses instead of a James Brown ‘do.”

Let’s leave aside the amount of sexism and racism laced through Labash’s quote and notice that this is a damning critique of Palin that is echoed in more artful ways by both the left and right. Labash later describes Palin’s victimization routine in a more artful way: “cocked-fist self-pity.” This better reflects the Palin modus operandi. Add in the fact that she has not used one moment of her time in public life since the 2008 election to expand herself intellectually or adopt a policy to gain expertise on and you arrive at the analysis of the ultimate Beltway Conventional Wisdom maker, Mike Allen:

Playbook facts of life: Sarah Palin has shown no capacity to evolve, grow substantively, or expand her base of support. If she had spent her time studying education reform, like Jeb Bush – or developing a signature issue of any sort – a Palin candidacy would look much more promising. She resigned as governor in July, 2009 — a year and a half that has been squandered, used only to make money rather than to reintroduce herself to the American middle.

I’ve been saying for years that it’s pretty near impossible to identify Conventional Wisdom is, in fact, correct. But this may be a time when the Beltway prognosticators and reality in the rest of the country line up closely.

One thing that I wonder is if any of the 2012 GOP presidential candidates will start making similar attacks on Palin as we’re seeing from Beltway pundits and conservative opinion writers. Whoever does so first will likely enjoy a pretty heavy dose of Palin’s “cocked-first self-pity,” which may be the whole point for Palin. By drumming up her victimization schtick for two and a half years, any opponent will clearly know that a direct attack on her will not be taken lightly. Palin may not be performing well in primary polls, but does Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty really want to go head-to-head with Palin while the whole press is watching? I doubt it. The flip side of this, which Allen gets at, is that being a one-trick pony clearly hasn’t won Palin strong support with base voters yet. For her to become viable, she has to find a way to reach people that doesn’t include victimization. She has to offer up ideas, at least in so far as any of her opponents will offer up ideas (Personally I don’t think “cut taxes, bash workers” counts as an actual idea, but that’s just me).

Originally posted at AMERICAblog Elections: The Right’s Field