A loaded gun on the table

Before I get into this, let me first say that I would agree with some reasonable conservative critiques of the legislative process related to healthcare, that people are not as informed as they need to be on the different proposals on the table. I agree that a sweeping overhaul of the systems that govern 17% of our GDP represents an immense undertaking that should be pursued very deliberately. I agree that President Obama overestimated the capacity of the American public to conceptualize the legislative process. I also agree that the President has done real harm to healthcare reform's chances at passing in a reasonable time frame because of a failure to get out in front of some of the more ridiculous lies and smears. That such a large percentage of Americans now view this bill as an imminent threat to their health instead of an imperfect and evolving improvement to our system is deeply troubling.

The problem is, unfortunately, that I'm not sure what I would have had the President do differently aside from getting out in front of the smears faster. In '93, when Clinton dictated a bill to Congress, they freaked. So this time, Obama decided to let Congress do it's constitutionally-authorized job, only to be criticized for not exercising leadership. So I think we're seeing some real structural problems with our civil society that can't really be reduced to "if only Obama had" or "if only Obama hadn't."

I wonder what is salvageable in the current hysterical climate. Can the President wait for comprehensive bills to reach the floors of the House and Senate before swooping in with his own plan - maybe one that incorporates some GOP standards like TORT reform? Will members of Congress just decide that these town hall mob scenes won't sway them from voting for something really critical for the short term health and long term wealth of the country?

I'm not sure.

I just know that I'm getting increasingly, well, frightened by the hysterical lying about the President's plan - and not just by the outer fringes of the right win - but by members of Congress and by veteran GOP talking heads.

It's not just Sarah Palin claiming the end of life counseling clause (an idea offered by Republican Rep. Charles Boustany of Lousiana, by the way) would result in death panels that would kill off her parents and child; it's also Newt Gingrich refusing to repudiate that remark on national television and instead highlighting by parsing together some obscure old speeches by Rahm Emmanuel's brother.

It's not just Glen Beck joking around about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, it's Representatives actually getting death threats at their offices. There have been fistfights at town halls and at least one instance of someone bringing a concealed gun to a meeting.

These people aren't angry because they don't think the bill being debated by the House Energy Committee doesn't quite strike the right balance between cost controls and extended coverage; it's because they've been heinously mislead to believe that the government is going to make it more difficult to receive coverage than it is now, cut medicare, or worse, send death panels out to kill old people.

A lot of these same people have also been lead to believe that President Obama is not a legitimate elected leader. There is an all-too casual invocation of Nazi Germany and Hitler.

Add it up.

We've had people going out in record numbers since election day to purchase weapons. We've had a growing movement to discredit the President's legitimacy as an elected leader. We have a shameless push to convince people that his moderate initiatives to stabilize the economy represent dictatorial socialism. We now have a transparent effort by GOP leaders - role models for some - to trick already frightened Americans into the belief that healthcare reform will literally bring about some form of medical genocide. And we are also witnessing seemingly unchallenged efforts to invoke the personification of evil (Hitler) in describing what this healthcare bill represents.

It is vile and sickening. It even makes me afraid.

We have really dark history of racism and violence in this country and it appears as though GOP leaders are ginning up unrest amongst the kinds of people who have been alienated because of their resistance to the progress we've made in our society.

And it doesn't seem like anybody in the Republican Party leadership cares about the tipping point.

Rachel Maddow had a really jarring segment on this last Friday that I think everyone should watch in entirety.

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If you can't spare the 15 minutes, skip ahead to 7:55 and watch Rachel talk to Frank Schaeffer, an original founder of the political evangelical movement who has since repudiated his past views.

I was really struck by Mr. Schaeffer's alarm and after sleeping on it for two nights to pass it through the hyperbole scan, well... he's got me quite on guard.

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If the default position of 100% of the Republican Congress wasn't just to kill whatever healthcare reform proposed by the President or by Congressional Democrats, it would be a lot easier to have a civil discussion about the best way to achieve sustainable reform.

But most elected Republicans and the conservative base aren't at all interested in that.

The GOP is oriented to fight any healthcare reform bill 'by any means necessary.' But it's scarier than that. The GOP is oriented to fight any progress possible.

As Mr. Schaeffer puts it, the GOP strategy is to leave a loaded gun on the table, stop just short of calling it honorable to halt Obama's policies with violence, and walk away.

I'm not sure GOP leaders know how to stop the hideous monster they've reanimated.

This is the America the world fears; not the America the world respects.

--

Organizing For America has unenviable task of trying to cut through all this BS with actual information about the actual reforms being debated in Congress.

They have an office here in New Orleans and they really need our help.

842 Camp St. in the CBD.

There are phone banks every Tuesday and Thursday from 6:00PM to 8:30PM and they canvass on Saturdays.

Their number one priority is to reach individual voters and to attempt to disabuse them of the baseless lies being spread about healthcare reform.

If you want to get involved, e-mail BayasW@dnc.org or call the HQ at 504-302-0802.

Call the senior citizens in your life.

Go to www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck to arm yourself with tools you can use to debunk the lies.

Local Racist Now A National Racist

Let me second Oyster's congratulations to Audra Shay with the following quote from an article called Do NOT elect a racist:

"The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions over and over again and expecting different results. What exactly do the Young Republicans expect to achieve by electing a 38-year-old woman who thinks racial epithets are acceptable? Also, did I mention that she’s 38? And she’s going to be the leader of an organization with the word “young” in the title? Is it so implausible that people in their 20s (or even early 30s) could join the Republican Party—or have we just completely given up on their vote? Are we expecting “young” people in the Republican Party to soon be entering their 40s?"

-- Meghan McCain.

Update: Is it just me or does it seem like an inordinate number of nationally-known racist politicians and political hacks come from the GNO area?

Does the Left care about progressive reform in the South?

I flagged a number of blog posts from two weeks ago about Texas Governor Rick Perry's secessionist rhetoric. If you're not familiar or not quite remembering, Perry spoke to one of those tea party things in Texas:

"There's a lot of different scenarios," Perry said. "We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we're a pretty independent lot to boot."

Perry is facing a tough reelection road. Not only might Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson challenge him in the GOP primary, but some pretty strong Democrats (Tom Shieffer maybe?) could be waiting in the wings in the general. As a result, many viewed his foray into the world of organized tea bagging as a pretty predictable pandering to the ultra conservative base that he'll need to beat Hutchinson in a possible primary.

But by using the language of secession, Perry made national headlines. Maybe Perry was just being flip but politicians in former Confederate states that raise the specter of dissolution of the union should probably know to expect that comments like those he delivered are going to cause a commotion. That's not even addressing what it means when that rhetoric is used because the nation's first African American President wants to increase the marginal tax rate on the top 1 or 2 percent of income earners back to the rate it was under Reagan. Suffice it to say, the optics are horrendous if one cares about what anyone outside of the base of the Texas GOP thinks about you.

Obviously, I was pretty disturbed by Perry's rhetoric and other instances where professional conservatives have seemingly embraced the language of insurrection.

But I was also not particularly pleased with the reaction to Perry's comments by some of the more respectable progressive bloggers out there.

For instance, Matthew Yglesias:

Honestly, though, I agree with Mike Tomasky that if Texas wants to leave the union we should probably just let them go and I’d say the same for other southern states that feel oppressed by our efforts to use federal tax money to help them take care of their unemployed citizens. Back during the Civil War, the cause of keeping the union together was intertwined with the cause of fighting the great evil of slavery. But assume we just welcome migrants from the Republic of Texas with open arms if they want to flee north, there’d be no comparable problem with letting Texas leave.

A day or so later, he went into a longer policy-based rant about how secession might be handled.

Another favorite, Nate Silver, responded to Perry as follows:

Then he rattled off a series of points about how much better off the Democrats would be without Texas.

I don't think that Nate Silver or Matthew Yglesias actually believe that Texas should secede from the union or that the US would be better off without Texas or any of the other former Confederate states whose Senators and Governors have mounted stunningly politicized opposition to stimulus funding that would help their own states' flagging economies.

Yet, there's something quite unfortunate about their dismissive tone that's indicative of a larger pervasive and insidious national attitude toward the South. The problem is not just that people are too insulated in the culture of the Beltway or the major media centers of New York, LA, and Chicago; it's that for so many on the Left view the South derisively as purely a symbol of extremist conservatism while expressing so very little empathy for the people of the South who actually are suffering from the consequences of this kind of GOP-inspired institutionalized poverty.

For instance, let's take the stimulus bill.

When you really distill down what has happened, you basically had a bunch of ultra-conservative Southern governors and senators screaming bloody murder because the Obama Administration was giving them money that they could use to improve institutions, infrastructure, and services. While conservatives of course would argue that improved institutions, infrastructure, and services represent larger more intrusive government, the reality is that these are the poorest and least developed states in the country with huge populations of impoverished residents and minorities saddled with the most institutionally dysfunctional justice systems in the industrialized world.

When viewed using this lens, the resurgence of the extremist rump of the GOP has absolutely nothing to do with an ideological opposition to government spending, pork, or the national debt.

Instead, it is more indicative of a long-standing ideological refusal by wealthy Southern elites to do anything at all that might address the really messed up dynamics of race and class that are still disproportionately omnipresent throughout the old Confederacy compared to other regions of the country.

The attitude exemplified by Yglesias and Silver reaction to Perry's ridiculous secessionist rhetoric wasn't about bolstering an ongoing meme about how Southern politicians were working against the interests of their own constituents and how to help the residents on the ground that are fighting for reform from within.

Instead, it was about how obstructionist these politicians are and how best to usher their states clean out of the union.

That anything resembling secession would spell doom for the huge population already bearing the disproportionate negative impact of being born in the wrong region of the country didn't seem to cross their minds.

Rather than discussing how the mechanics of secession might work to the Democrats' advantage, I think it would be much more helpful to the majority of people from Texas, the rest of the old Confederacy, and to the nation at-large if progressives instead concentrated on how best to enact policies that will improve conditions in the nation's most at-risk communities and how best to organize for grassroots progressive reform from within.

The whole pervasive good riddance attitude is something that people in the South have become really sensitive to, consciously or not, and it alienates many that otherwise would really benefit from and support progressive public policy.

Update: Hendrik Hertzberg does the same thing starting at 9:00 in.

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And more eloquently in this column.

Sad

Link

Some of those on the Right who have been so flippant about giving mainstream credibility to fringe conspiracy theories need to more think more seriously about what they say. This guy was obviously unstable all by himself but given the stresses that this economy is already putting on people, some of the more ridiculous secessionist rhetoric needs to be toned down. I think a little self-censorship might be appropriate, don't you? A little bit. I think elected Republicans should voluntarily publicly disassociate themselves from some the nonsensical fear-mongering as a way of marginalizing the tin-foil hatters that are clearly getting some people irrationally paranoid.

Nobody wants this or anything like it to happen again.

Jindal Declares GOP Problems Solved

This is some combination of hilarious and pathetic.

From his speech tonight at a fundraiser for House Republicans, according to CNN:

"Let’s agree on this tonight, the time for talking about the past is now over," Jindal told 1,200 people attending a House GOP fundraiser here in Washington. "It has been healthy for Republicans to look in the mirror. It has been healthy for us to realize and admit the mistakes of the past. We have done that quite a bit. I personally have done that quite a bit since the election last fall. It’s now been close to five months since the last election.

It seems to me that acknowledging the disconnect with the American people that precipitated two straight electoral blowouts is precisely the thing that Republicans are incapable of coming together to do.

But I guess just saying that the Party has already changed is pretty much the same as actually thinking about what those changes . . . um . . . would have needed to have been?

This is weird but I'm about to blog about Meghan McCain

The other day, I happened to be watching Rachel Maddow's consistently excellent television program. Meghan McCain was a guest. At first, I thought that this was an odd choice.

I knew she had some blog during the campaign but I hadn't realized that she'd started writing for the Daily Beast nor had I heard that she'd just blasted Ann Coulter of all people in one of her columns.

Turns out that Meghan McCain kind of rocks.

The interview was incredible. In it, she discusses her decision to remain in the public eye in order to stand up for the moderate wing of the Republican Party. She is exceedingly brave, refreshingly honest, and totally authentic.

I didn't trust my own reaction the next day so I had to watch it again.

It holds up.

She's not always completely articulate but I've got to give her a full round of applause for being a badass chick with lots of heart.

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Since this interview, conservative talk radio host Laura Ingraham, an alleged grownup, went after Meghan for her weight - and Meghan has already appropriately destroyed her in another column.

--

It is so fucked up that there are so few Republicans out there willing to face down the far far right that 24 year old Meghan McCain is all of a sudden being looked to as a national spokesperson for a decent, reasonable, and inclusive GOP.

In what kind of reality are some of these people living where Meghan McCain is to be scorned but Joe the fucking Plumber is to be mined for new ideas?

Winger Cells

CNN gives it the aww cute treatment but maybe we should start taking statements like these a more seriously, at least when we're talking about what the conservative base is and the GOP's loyalty to it.

“I may run for president of Texas,” Norris wrote Monday in a column posted at WorldNetDaily. “That need may be a reality sooner than we think. If not me, someone someday may again be running for president of the Lone Star state, if the state of the union continues to turn into the enemy of the state.”

The actor claimed “thousands of cell groups will be united around the country in solidarity over the concerns for our nation” and said that if states decide to secede from the union, that Texas would lead the way.

Jokes aside, Chuck Norris is now a pretty heavily involved right wing nutcase. You may recall the ads he shot on behalf of Mike Huckabee's Presidential campaign. Lately he's been pimping Glenn Beck's "We Surround Them" campaign in which tons of other seriously disturbed people will gather at house parties together to watch Glenn Beck ratchet up the paramilitary rhetoric.

It's not enough to say that the consistent and increasing use of this kind of violent, insurgent language is over the top. I mean the way gun sales went up around the Inauguration, I really do worry about the manipulative power of some of these guys like Beck. There are a lot of crazy people out there. I'm not suggesting any real armed resistance but a bunch of Waco-style tragedies seem all too plausible.

That the elite GOP leadership chooses to embrace, let alone publicly denounce this kind of rhetoric just goes to show how out of touch the whole Party is with mainstream human reality.

Cannibals

I haven't really believed that the GOP civil war was as serious as it now appears. I saw new right wing alliances forming between guys like Newt Gingrich, Eric Cantor, Bobby Jindal, and Michael Steele. I assumed, wrongly, that the GOP rank and file would be quick to defer on matters of political strategy to unofficially organized conservative blocks like the ones I've suggested and others I haven't.

But it ain't like that, not yet.

It's a total free-for-all.

Steele is clearly way crazier than anybody really thought and has become something of a disaster. I knew he'd developed a media ego during his time at Fox but I thought that cons liked him so much because he actually had some policy/organizing chops. Instead, we've been introduced to a bizarre caricature of a Republican politician.

But I think nothing sums up where the GOP is than this spat between former Bush speechwriter David Frum and the incredibly crazy Mark Levin, who must have the world's smallest penis.

The background is that Frum wrote a column in which he soberly explains why Democrats are so glad to continue to make Rush Limbaugh the head of the GOP. He's dead-on in his analysis.

Levin got real upset and has been blasting Frum all week.

Then they spoke on Levin's show. It ain't pretty.

You must be this crazy to ride the Republican roller coaster I guess. All descend, no climb.

Cao: New Orleans Shafted!

Given how little we know about precisely how the stimulus will work around the nation, to start making job projections for individual Congressional districts seems silly, more so when one realizes that so much of that the allocation of much of each state's haul is still up for negotiation between governors and legislatures.

So I wouldn't get too indignant about the details of this article in today's Times-Picayune. The problems in New Orleans are so vast that a more direct infusion of federal attention is to be expected, and it is highly unlikely that more stimulus money would have been procured at the cost of special attention later.

Nonetheless, Joe Cao would have you believe that the real reason he voted against the stimulus package was that it didn't include enough jobs for the 2nd Congressional, which does indeed rank last on the Obama administration's estimate of jobs created or saved per district. On Monday, he unveiled this line in an op-ed penned to the Times-Picayune. Yesterday, he was flogging this talking point at a joint event held with Steve Scalise at the Port of New Orleans.

However, we know very well that the jobs per district number is misleading. More useful would be a calculation of jobs per capita or per 100,000 residents. The 2nd Congressional district lost a huge percentage of its population as a result of, well, you know.

But that's not really the important point.

The questions I have are:

Where the hell was Joseph Cao when the stimulus bill was being written?

Was he on the phone daily between the Regional Planning Commission, the Regional Transit Authority, the City of New Orleans, the Recovery School District, the State Department of Transportation and Development, and the Port of New Orleans?

Was he talking to traditional friends of New Orleans in Congress like Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, Judicial Committee Charmian John Conyers, Committee on Education and Labor Chair George Miller, or Chair of the Congressional Black Caucus Barbara Lee?

Was he working with other fiscally conservative moderates who were working on maximizing returns for Louisiana and New Orleans like Rep. Charlie Melancon or Senator Mary Landrieu?

Did he try to leverage his highly coveted vote as a Republicam moderate to try to win extra spending on projects important to his district? The Democrats were bending over backward to try to get some GOP support. Did Joseph Cao try to use that?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Cao went the other way. He didn't put the pressure on Democrats to tailor the bill to help his residents.

He got pressured by conservative wing nut Republicans. He's alternatively had Newt Gingrich, Steve Scalise, Eric Cantor, and others whispering into his ears while stepping on his feet.

Take this revelation from the Politico:

He told reporters an hour or two before the vote that he was strongly considering a vote in favor of the stimulus measure after rejecting an earlier version – “At this point, I’m leaning ‘yes,’ but I’m not absolutely certain.” He reasoned that his heavily Democratic district could use the money with many of his constituents still struggling to rebound from Hurricane Katrina.

Beforehand, Cao acknowledged that Republican leaders had put “pressure” on him to oppose the package, and the party’s chief deputy whip, California Rep. Kevin O. McCarthy, stood near Cao during the entire vote.

“They encouraged me to vote ‘no,’ but they understand the needs of my district,” Cao said.

Does Joseph Cao understand the needs of this district?

Something tells me that the deregulation/kill government/fundamentals are strong/let'em drown crowd doesn't understand the needs of this district AT ALL. Nobody representing the leadership of the Republican Party has any credibility to talk about the needs of New Orleans.

So Joe Cao better decide quickly who precisely he's representing.

Seeking, Buffering: GOP strategy @ 48.8 bps

Some interesting leaks this weekend regarding GOP strategy as it relates to stimulus, Obama, and Congressional Democrats.

1. Elana Schor documents GOP triangulation against Pelosi and Reid.

But don't tell Republicans that it's Obama's stimulus plan they're rejecting. GOPers are subtly aiming to capitalize on two very different numbers: the Democratic Congress' sub-30% approval rating and Obama's impressive 64% approval.

"The problem lies squarely with congressional Democrats," House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) told reporters after the vote. "My conversation with the president was clear; he said, 'it's the Speaker [Pelosi] and the Leader [Reid] running these chambers, they have the ability to control this process.'"

2. Rep. Cantor is the real leader of the House Republicans these days. He's been considered a rising star for some time and his name was bandied about when John McCain was looking at potential running mates this past summer. Now, as head whip, he's really started to realize his influence on GOP politics. He's BFF with Newt Gingrich and they talk on the phone several times a week about the latest sitcoms and dramas.

You can start to see a new generation of leadership crystallizing around some of the organizing and messaging principles laid out by Newt Gingrich since 2006ish. I've tracked this on and off since the election but it's worth bringing full-circle. Gingrich and Bobby Jindal are clearly cozy and the two employ a very similar rhetoric about "solutions." Gingrich also not-so-quietly supported Michael Steele's campaign for the GOP Chairmanship. And now the Gingrich protege Eric Cantor represents the 'anointed one' in Congress.

Watch those four names very closely: Cantor, Gingrich, Jindal, and Steele. I'm curious to see who else is looking to do business with master Newt.

3. Getting back to point 1, Josh Marshall interprets Elana's digging:

In fact, it even goes deeper than this. As Elana noted yesterday, the plan of the congressional GOP -- to the degree they have one -- is to faux cozy up to Obama and say that they both face a common foe in the Democratic Congress. The idea being that since "Congress" is really unpopular they can run against Congress.

But there's a very big problem with this strategy above and beyond the absurdity of the argument. "Congress" may be really unpopular. And the Democrats now control Congress. But politics is a zero sum game. At the end of the day, in almost every case, you've got to pick a Republican or a Democrat when you vote. And if you look at the numbers, congressional Democrats are pretty popular. And congressional Republicans are extremely unpopular. If you look at the number, the Dems are at about 50% or higher in most recent polls, while the GOP is down in the 30s.

From my armless chair, I trace a lot of this weekend's recalibration as it relates to interpreting GOP strategy to Andrew Sullivan's reaction to overall GOP tactics related to the stimulus vote and the Gregg withdrawal.

Their clear and open intent is to do all they can, however they can, to sabotage the new administration (and the economy to boot). They want failure. Even now. Even after the last eight years. Even in a recession as steeply dangerous as this one.

I think an abundance of disbelief related to Andrew's dark assessment has caused a lot of pundits to convince themselves of a contrived GOP triangulation against Congressional Democrats.

The GOP is really just kind of using a stumble upon strategy, reevaluating their position at the end of every tactically-contrived media cycle.

Maybe they have indeed come up with a medium-term plan to work against Pelosi and Reid in lieu of Obama. But this is most certainly NOT something that the wingnut base is going to endorse.

4. And for all the stories about the death of bipartisanship and the unpatriotic GOP war of insurgency, there's this from Arlen Spector:

"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today," said Specter, "one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.'"

Specter, along with centrist Maine Republican Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, joined with Democrats last week to move the stimulus bill forward. Specter said he doubted there would be any more Republican votes than those three Friday night.

"I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation," he said.

Specter was asked, How many of your colleagues?

"I think a sizable number," he said. "I think a good part of the caucus agrees with the person I quoted, but I wouldn't want to begin to speculate on numbers."

Now Arlen has a certain way of making a tactical lie seem like refreshing candor but it's worth taking note. I wonder how this changed the printout coming from the Marshall and Sullivan Megapolitics3000 supercomputer.

---

So basically I think that Obama needs to continue doing exactly what he's been doing as far as political strategy is concerned. It's amazing how often I'll read thousands of words from people freaking out left, right, and center and ultimately conclude that Barack Obama's game plan is generally the right way to proceed. Pick the issue, reach out to skeptical parties, make a couple of changes, pass the law.

Birth Pangs of Opposition

RNC picks Michael Steele, former Lt. Governor of Maryland as new Chairman.

I've been saying that this represents the smart choice for the GOP but given how contentious things have been within the caucus, I'm not sure that conservatives will unite behind the decisions Steele makes to substantively change tactics or expand the coalition.

I've also said that this 'helps' Republicans in the mold of Newt Gingrich and Bobby Jindal.

What are we worried about?

Maybe it's not such a bad thing that Republicans have been outnumbering Democrats on TV over the last few days...

Mike Pence is supposed to be one of the face cards in the House GOP deck, isn't he?



Not to mention Dick Armey on Hardball tonight. Watch that clip (start at about 9:30 in), not to rubberneck at Armey's sexist remark but to listen to Joan Walsh's defense of Democratic principles in response to Armey's insults.

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RNC: Rock Bottom Coming Any Day Now

For whatever reason, I've been following the race for the new Chairman of the RNC especially closely. Many bloggers have found that little campaign to be an exercise in unintentional comedy - and I'd have to agree - but I think it also happens to be fascinatingly microcosmic of the GOP's larger need to reorient given the new political environment.

I was almost certain after the election that Michael Steele, the African American former Lt. Governor of Maryland, was a sure thing. I felt this way because the Republican brand had become such poison to the minds of... well pretty much everyone outside of Southern White Men.

I figured, because it was statistically evident, that Republicans would realize that they couldn't continue to hemorrhage Latinos, white Catholics, and suburbanites from their caucus. I imagined that, if only out of the need for self-preservation, that RNC voters would elect someone that could help reinvent the GOP as a legitimate national party.

Steele, in addition to being a token minority in the GOP, also happens to be pretty smart and charismatic. He's also from a 'northern' state, one with a huge suburban population that has become non competitive for the GOP.

Given the leadership vacuum in today's GOP, Steele seemed like a sensible choice, one that would have mirrored (image-wise, to become a national party) what the DNC did (substance-wise, to become a national party) under Howard Dean after Kerry's loss in 2004.

After Gingrich opted out of the RNC race to sort of? back Steele, I figured Steele's chances had only improved. Gingrich is a huge mark for Bobby Jindal and it seemed intuitive that RNCers would start orienting themselves to take advantage of some of their younger rising stars.

But that's not what has happened at all...

Nobody's getting whipped into line for this. In fact, the race has seemed to grow more fractious over time.

On one end you have nonmember candidates like Steele and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. On the other you have several current or former heads of state party organizations including Saul Anuzis (Michigan), Katon Dawson (South Carolina), Mike Duncan (Bush's appointment, formerly head of the Kentucky GOP), and Chip Saltsman (Tennessee).

This Perry Bacon Jr. article in the Washington Post indicates that RNC voters are reluctant to vote in a nonmember. It also says that Chip Saltsman's 'Barack the Magic Negro' giftbag has effectively killed his chances, contrary to reports of a reactionary boomlet in favor of his candidacy after news of the giftbag leaked. That leaves Azunis, Duncan, and Dawson. (Never mind that Dawson has struggled to explain his long-standing membership in an all-white country club. Guess it hasn't been as big a media-issue as the Saltsman CD)

How interesting it is that so many RNC voters have decided to disqualify the two African American candidates. The rationale for Steele I stated above. Blackwell, for his part, recently racked up the endorsements of many of the major influentials of the conservative movement including James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Toomey, Phyllis Schlafly, etc.

But none of that seems to matter since RNC voters have decided to discriminate against nonmember candidates, regardless of qualifications, conservative credentials, potential effectiveness...

Why do you think that is?

Giggle away.

Corker: Bush and UAW In Cahoots

One of the theories coming out of the failure of the auto bailout in the Senate is that when Dick Cheney met with Senate Republicans last week and imparted the administration's commitment to saving the big three, he was essentially freeing them to vote as they'd like. Why would the Senate GOP take it as a chance to breakout? Because Cheney's posturing basically confirmed that the administration would step in and use the TARP to help the auto industry if Senators refused to vote for cloture.

Senate Republicans from the South ended up whipping enough votes together to kill the bill, apparently because organized labor had refused to accept a definitive date by which their members' middle class salaries would be drawn and quartered. Another sticking point for holdout Republicans was that they wanted the blue collar employees of the Big 3 to agree to a salary reduction to the same levels as foreign manufacturers, whereas there was some degree of bipartisan support for a language that required salary reduction to "competitive" levels.

The GOP holdouts then went on a PR blitz to explain why the bill failed, funneling all blame squarely onto the shoulders of the UAW. Countdown obtained a GOP talking points memo that illustrates their view of this battle as a critical part of a larger war against organized labor.

This is the democrats first opportunity to payoff organized labor after the election. This is a precursor to card check and other items. Republicans should stand firm and take their first shot against organized labor, instead of taking their first blow from it.

For me, it's pretty difficult to picture organized labor being able to pitch the passage of the bill as any kind of victory, given the massive wage and benefits cuts they'd agreed to, but I guess that's beside the point now.

Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee appears to have spearheaded bill negotiation for the Republicans. He went on Face the Nation yesterday and pitted blame squarely on the shoulders of the UAW, but with an interesting new twist.

Corker: They (UAW) knew the White House had these TARP funds and there was really no reason for them to agree to this.

Scheiffer: So they had gotten word from the White House that they were going to do it anyway and that's what killed the deal in the Senate?

Corker: Well, they knew they had the funds. I'm not blaming the White House but they knew that the White House had funds that they could put forth without any strings.

Carl Levin tried to cut in but Schieffer went to a break.

Seems kind of ridiculous to me that Corker would offer that the White House had been sending signals to the UAW about this thing. Seems like it's a lot more likely that the Republican White House was talking to their own Republican Senators about their intention to use the TARP, so that Southern Republicans could use the vote to score media points against organized labor for later use. Just saying.

Anh Cao Goes to Washington

Oyster's piece yesterday was excellent.

It's not easy to be comfortable with the prospective mentors lining up at his door and Cao's preference for the House Ways and Means Committee seems comically naive, if it wasn't originally intended to be a joke.

Today, the Times-Picayune's Jonathan Tilove touched on the various GOP talking points on Cao's victory. RNC Chairman Mike Duncan and Minority Leader Boehner waxed on and on about Cao's race as symbolic of the upcoming GOP phoenix.

At first, I simply thought that Cao's victory was just being massaged by GOP messengers as a matter of routine. Cao provides cover to boost the morale of the troops, to win a day in the media. The GOP's got to take what it can get.

I remember when the Dems got massacred in the 2002 midterms but Mary Landrieu was able to win in a December runoff. The same sort of thing happens. Party leaders need some happy stuff to put into the quarterly newsletter, you know?

So they simply exaggerate the symbolism of the victory and the potential of the victor.

But at the same time, this GOP is in such disarray that it's not so implausible that Cao could find some room to maneuver. Or, put another way, some of Cao's mentors might find some room for him to maneuver.

Cao has two things going for him, in terms of political opportunity within the GOP.

First, in a rhetorical sense, one way the GOP will attempt to rise is by putting their best foot forward on ethics. Something something about absolute power corrupting something something. The Democrats got a lot of mileage out of the ethical missteps of their GOP colleagues and the GOP will try to do the same.

According to the Hill, Republicans are already salivating. The article features a lot of GOP ejaculations over the Blago arrest in Illinois but it also touches on the expanded allegations into Charlie Rangel of New York. More:

The stream of bad news for Democrats on the ethics front shows no sign of letting up anytime soon.

Just Monday, the Chicago Tribune broke a story about Rep. Luis Gutierrez’s (D-Ill.) questionable real estate deals involving a developer and a longtime political donor that netted him $420,000. In the past week, The Village Voice also reminded readers that Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), the top candidate to chair the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, was videotaped accepting a bribe back in the 1980s.

“There is just a torrent of this stuff — it seems like it’s never-ending,” gushed one GOP aide.

I think it's fairly certain that we're not done discovering GOP skeletons, as a probe into Senator Coleman is casting a wider net, but I do think that the fractured GOP will fight back on matters of congressional ethics and honor in terms of perception and portrayal. Joseph Cao is a shiny new trophy for the caucus to be photographed with.

It's a no-brainer talking point effort for Republicans, who are fairly divided on matters of policy. It's something they can get the caucus around for demonstrations of unity while the fundamentalist and pragmatist wings of the party duke it out for future control.

The second thing Cao might be able to use is the aforementioned GOP civil war. Guys like Mike Duncan and Newt Gingrich are competitors for the RNC chair. Duncan is hoping to stay on while Gingrich is backing Michael Steele from Maryland. There are a number of other candidates for that job. The Republicans in the House have already decided to keep Boehner at the top, so there are few positions from which to reform the GOP.

Cao can play politics here. He has a higher profile than most freshman GOPers because of the nature and timing of his victory. He represents token diversity in a party that has none and he also represents one of major issues on which the GOP will use to try to climb back to respectability.

Still, the Ways and Means Committee?

That would take some kind of political savant. From Cao's "jokes" the other day, it's pretty hard to see that. We'll find out soon, I guess.

--

I was also going to call out Bill Jefferson for not congratulating Mr. Cao but I realized that I hadn't offered any congratulations myself.

Congratulations to Anh Cao for his victory. I wish him the best of luck and I am curious to see what he's able to accomplish.

--

I almost went on a speculative tangent when thinking about the GOP leadership vacuum, the RNC, etc. I'll do that now. This is bad analysis, poor speculation. It borders on a wanton prediction. But it's fun to do this stuff.

Guys like John Boehner and Mike Duncan seem to me to be fairly responsible for recent GOP congressional massacres. I think they're kind of in the same boat together as far as their organizing principles and messaging strategies.

Guys like Michael Steele and Newt Gingrich have been on the sidelines shooting spitballs from cushy perches as analysts for the media. They've been able to be conservative while also having the wiggle room to distance themselves from the excesses of the Bush years. I think guys like Gingrich and Steele are all about setting things up for the conservative 'solutions' of outsider Bobby Jindal. I think guys like Boehner and Duncan are all about Mitt Romney or something.

GOP McCarthyism

Interesting frame from which to study the rise and fall of the Right. I'm not as convinced that the Republicans can only veer further rightward, I'm not sure we know who's on what side in the GOP.

Via TPM

Four Years Wandering: The Ascension of Bobby Jindal

I guarantee an article titled similarly to this one will be written by some reconverted academic conservative at some point on or before election day 2012.

This isn't that article. But it is coming. And you won't like it.

Oyster continues to insist that there will be all kinds of hilarious moments and opportunities for blog snark along the way. He also says that conservative desperation will be such that Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal could be prematurely elevated to movement figurehead in 2012, before political opportunity structures - preconditions for GOP victory - have sufficiently developed.

Here's where I think we agree:

1. National political dynamics are such that Republicans can't win anything until 2016 at the earliest, no matter how quickly or effectively the reconstitute their party to appeal to moderates, independents, Latinos, young people, etc OR how effectively they're able to quickly catch up to the Left's emerging mastery of the internet. Nor does the narrative work. As Oyster says, "Running against an incumbent Obama, the whole 'smart, young, fresh face with broad appeal and exciting dose of pigment' angle suddenly has much less traction." He's right. It wouldn't do much against an incumbent Barack Obama.

2. Bobby Jindal is being anointed as the savior of the conservative movement with such repressed fervor that there is little chance he'll be on the sidelines through 2012 even though that cycle may be politically inopportune.

We disagree elsewhere. While we both think that neither he nor any other Republican has a realistic shot of defeating an incumbent Barack Obama, I don't believe that this will truly 'complicate' anything for Jindal over the long term, at least not to the degree that I'm interpreting from Oyster's posts.

He's twice brought up the idea that running for reelection to the Governor's mansion in 2011 would prove difficult when he's spending every other weekend in New Hampshire or Iowa or South Carolina. Here I explained how I believe that assumption misreads the oppressive political opportunity structure Jindal and his GOP bankrollers have cultivated for the native son.

I made this under appreciated joke that John Neely Kennedy would be the only Democrat dumb enough to think he'd be able to compete with Jindal for control of Baton Rouge and I think it still stands. I made that comment before Election Day, which largely turned out to be a bloodbath for Louisiana Democrats. Though Senator Landrieu easily disposed of the anemic JNK campaign, rising star Don Cazayoux was pulled out of Congress and Obama lost ground to the GOP compared to 2004. Though Democrats can name a strong challenger to take on the vulnerable Senator David Vitter in 2010, the GOP establishment will not take Jindal's reelection campaign lightly. The Boysie Bollingers and Joseph Canizaros of the local Swift Boat establishment will see to it that Bobby Jindal has everything he needs. He'll also certainly be able to attract as many $2000 bills from the national base being cultivated on his behalf as he needs to intimidate any big name Democratic thinking of taking a stab.

Shorter: Jindal cruises to reelection. Cruises.

The other half of this is the national conservative movement's search for a savior and what kind of campaign they'll have organized for 2012.

One thing we can safely say since McCain officially went down in flames last week is that conservatives do indeed realize that they have a lot of work to do. They understand that they've cannibalized critical pieces to their past electoral coalitions and alienated key blocs they'll need in future elections. They understand that their organizing infrastructure needs to be revolutionized online.

And they're going to slowly work on these things. Here young GOP faithful put forth a plan to make up ground on the internet. RNC leadership is going to work to expand the tent and rebuild grassroots organizational structure in the Ken Mehlman style with either Michael Steele or Newt Gingrich.

Of course these infrastructure improvements take time and cannot compensate for a failed vision or a lack of rhetorical narrative but it doesn't take conservative movement consensus to get the ball rolling on those longer term investments. They can't move whatever message they settle on if they haven't set the train tracks in advance.

Will they have a cogent message for the nation in 2012? Will they be able to articulate a vision?

No. Democrats will trounce the GOP in 2012.

But I do think the GOP nominee can be more than a sacrificial lamb or a placeholder.

Rather, I envision a GOP being able to patch together a fairly responsive 'progressive' platform in which they applaud the competence of the Obama administration while nitpicking away at little differences here and there. The vision I have in my mind is that they'll run against Obama like Al Gore ran against George W. Bush in 2000.

"Actually my opponent and I are not all that different. We both supported the health care bill that passed Congress but I think that it needs to allow for more blah blah blah."

"In fact, we worked together to pass national broad band infrastructure bill X but now he's for blah blah blah whereas I think we really need to get back to blah blah blah."

"There's no question we're winning the war on terror but Obama made a mistake when he didn't blah blah blah."

"Argument is good. Debate is good. We have serious disagreements about how we can continue to solve our nation's problems. They want to do it in a partisan, ideological fashion. We're about reaching across the aisle. We've broken our backs to do so for this administration but we haven't seen the kind of blah blah blah that we need."

"Blah blah blah the next step in healing this economy is small business growth blah blah blah. Obama wants to tax them more but I have a plan at blah blah blah dot com that outlines exactly what I would do"

My opinion is that the GOP will not be able to run a fear campaign in 2012. They're going to need to campaign on some sort of conservative pragmatism platform. Doing so not only puts them in the best position to not make fools of themselves in 2012 but also poises them to take advantage of any Democratic missteps for the 2014 midterms and finally for the 2016 free-for-all.

The GOP won't run further to the right with Palin or some other nutjob in 2012. They'll just repackage what they currently have to draft off of Obama's unstoppable momentum. Jindal will run for President and he'll stump for the type of pragmatic conservatism that I've discussed. Whether or not he wins the nomination, settles at the VP slot, or stays out entirely, his narrative or one greatly influenced by him will ultimately guide the GOP's medium-term trajectory.

He can lose in 2012 without sandbagging his own chances in 2016. If Obama succeeds in enacting his agenda through 2010, the GOP will run an uncharacteristically congenial campaign in 2012, even if it's not any more centrist ideologically. What is your list of viable GOP candidates in 2012? Would any of them represent more of the same tear-down fear-monger style? Could that work against any popular Democratic incumbent?

Here is my list of likely GOP candidates in 2012:

1. Jindal
2. Romney
3. Huckabee
4. Palin
5. Daniels

On that list, only Palin would run a wacko campaign. All of the others would push a more confident, intellectually curious, amicable, articulate, and patriotic GOP.

And as we've seen, party elders have already thrown Governor Palin overboard.

The bottom line is that the mainstream media is already gobbling up the Jindal-as-next narrative. They love the taste of geeky wonky conservatism. Chris Cillizza has written about Bobby Jindal more than I have over the last few weeks. He's going to spend the next 4 years ranking Bobby Jindal in the top 3 on his Friday GOP nomination line. Conservative academia loves him, he passes enough litmus tests of the religious base, and he symbolically represents a 21st Century GOP through his youth and ethnicity.

Oyster thinks it's going to be a lot of fun to watch Jindal run that gauntlet. I don't think it will be a comedy of errors even if he and the GOP in general will continue to flail at a national message. Jindal's strength, in my mind, is that his youth allows him to be malleable on all sorts of Obama initiatives that might garner unbridled popular support without alienating his GOP base.


Update: Something just brought me back to this piece written last May by the Newt. In it, Gingrich expresses the understanding that attack politics couldn't work for Republicans in the current political environment:

The Republican brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti- Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail.

This model has already been tested with disastrous results.

In 2006, there were six incumbent Republican Senators who had plenty of money, the advantage of incumbency, and traditionally successful consultants.

But the voters in all six states had adopted a simple position: "Not you." No matter what the GOP Senators attacked their opponents with, the voters shrugged off the attacks and returned to, "Not you."

The danger for House and Senate Republicans in 2008 is that the voters will say, "Not the Republicans."

After that, Newt proposes a new platform of "winning" issues that is impressively narrow and one-dimensional considering the width and depth of our nation's challenges.

Gingrich is incredibly conservative and incredibly partisan. A Gingrich-controlled Republican Party would be further to the right than that which John McCain represented this cycle. However, that isn't synonymous with this idea that the GOP would run a more extremist campaign. Rather, I think Newt's article rather bolsters my argument that the minority GOP will run a congenial and unimaginative 'these are our issues' campaign in 2012 that allows them to grope toward a vision and hold the coalition without inflicting further damage to the brand name.

From Prison?

Tom DeLay looks forward to rebuilding the Republican coalition he helped destroy. Oh why oh why can't the Chamber of Commerce, the NRA, and the National Right to Life Committee just get along?

Big tent, huh?

Jindal Career Counciling

Oyster aptly assesses Bobby Jindal's prospects for national office after Mitt Romney fluffs the governor on local radio:

Running for Prez in 2012 would be difficult for Bobby. He'd have to gear up while running for Gubernatorial re-election in 2011, which would be sort of farcical. Also, displacing a sitting President isn't an easy thing to do. 2016 would make the most sense for him. He'd still be young and fresh, but would have more "executive experience"... etc. And after eight years of Obama and a Democratic powergrip on Congress, the GOP will be looking for a political savior to lead them out of the wilderness.

I agree to an extent. The McCain campaign exemplifies an erosion of the Republican coalition and message that will take more than one election cycle to halt. The GOP will have a very difficult go of things in 2012 for a wide variety of reasons. It is a lot easier to picture a successful "savior" campaign in 2016 when memories of recent history have been sufficiently erased.

My disagreement is with Oyster's assumption that the 2012 campaign would complicate his 2011 reelection bid. Running on a 'the work's not done' message would only be slightly more complicated when questioned about his habitual getaways to Iowa and New Hampshire. I do not foresee any challenge that Bobby Jindal's astronomical approval rating cannot withstand. His core donors are extremely wealthy and have been extremely generous on his behalf. While some might tap themselves out propping up the Vitter campaign in 2010 there will be something left in the tank for the Governor, if what I've learned about Vitty Cent's diminished support within the base is true. Plus, given that Bobby Jindal has already being introduced to the national kingmakers, he'll have no problem glad-handing his way to an enormous reelection war chest.

What Democrat in Louisiana will consider it worthwhile to go up against an exceedingly popular incumbent governor with overflowing campaign coffers?

Will the promise of a couple of TV ads worth of "duh, den why he all in Iowa?" be enough to convince a high profile Democrat to go all-in?

For my money, Mitch Landrieu, Charlie Melancon, and Don Cazayoux are the only Democrats with the credibility to run a statewide campaign. Either Melancon or Cazayoux will defeat Vitter in 2010 and the remainders are smart enough to realize that it's much wiser to consolidate Democratic power by locking down and expanding reach into the various congressional seats.

The only democrat dumb enough to campaign for governor in 2011 is John Neely Kennedy.

In other words, Jindal has nothing to worry about if he wants to go all-in for 2012.

However, to go back to the first point about the national political climate in 2012, my guess is that Jindal will go all-in on a bluff. It will be very much worth his while to campaign hard in the early primary states in 2011 in order to build an infrastructure for the real thing in 2016. The other possibility is that the Republican primary voters get it together to nominate somebody with the sense to remake the conservative message. For instance, should Mike Huckabee continue to make a play for young evangelicals with a message of charity, environmental responsibility, and the Earth is 6000 years old. . . well Bobby Jindal might find it helpful to slide into the VP slot. If Rudy Giuliani is the GOP nominee, Jindal might find it helpful to soak in the national security credentials rub.

Whatever the outcome, Jindal will almost certainly have his sights set on the 2012 GOP primary. However, his intention will be to run, not to win. If he is to seek the Presidency in 2016, if he is to even consider it, he'll need to have some semblance of a national grassroots infrastructure already in place. He can afford to prime the pump in 2012 because the 2011 gubernatorial reelection will be nothing more than a pesky mosquito.

The death of the GOP's rhetorical advantage or just a perfect storm?

UPDATE: Stupid Josh Marshall basically echoes my points - only more succinctly. Bastard.


Not to be presumptuous but it fairly reasonable to assume that Barack Obama will emerge as the President-elect of the United States in two weeks. The campaign certainly is not over but it is plenty appropriate to examine our evolving national discourse assuming a Democratic ascendancy that has been broadly demonstrated by polling.

The Nixon-Atwater-Rove model for GOP victory centered on the overall resonance of very familiar issues involving minority groups, their rights, and taxes. While long-deflected by Democrats as "wedge" issues, the genius of GOP message-makers was in weaving culturally divisive side issues into a broader political vision that allowed conservatives politicians to provoke reactionary and economically self-defeating voting behavior without doing so in such a way that offended the mainstream (media) borders on acceptable discourse.

For my money, the most concise discussion of the political history of the dissolution of the New Deal coalition and the ascendancy of the modern GOP is (and I think I've said this before) Chain Reaction by Thomas Edsall and Mary Edsall. In it, the Edsalls describe how the GOP seized upon white fears and frustrations as the civil rights movement radicalized in the mid and late 1960s by billing itself as the party of temperance and order in the face of cultural upheaval and increasingly militant demands for the expansion of rights and economic repair. As competing rights movements - women's, gay, Latino, etc. - flexed their muscles on the street and within the rapidly fracturing and inarticulate Democratic Party, the GOP effectively applied the fear inspired by sensational media coverage of direct action campaigns and the overall generational conflict to populist economic policies and the expansion of liberties sent down by Earl Warren's Supreme Court. The issue was not "big government" - it was that "big government" was perceived as only benefiting minority groups. While clearly this is a vast oversimplification of an extremely detailed history, consider some emblematic cases as the GOP monopoly evolved. Nixon's 1968 election on 'law and order' followed the urban civil unrest and the Warren Court's decision on Miranda rights. Reagan's ascendancy seized upon a history of symbolic welfare queens to popularize a supply-side economic approach in which Americans voted against their own financial interests. George H. W. Bush's exploitation of Willie Horton and other similarly coded issues such as the death penalty can be seen as contributing to his victory over Dukakis, who had been lead in the polls into August of that year. But really, by that time, the whole rhetorical package employed by the GOP had been fully developed.

Democrats largely failed to articulate their stances on different policies into an overarching political vision that ordinary citizens could digest and relate to when knowledge of the specifics of a particular issue were lacking. President Clinton was an exception, but part of his success derives from his willingness and ability to co-opt Republican rhetorical frames and policies into his own agenda, welfare reform being the most obvious example.

Concurrent to the development of entrenched GOP rhetorical superiority was the absolute medium dominance by television and the emergence of widespread infotainment-based reporting. Again, this is a vast oversimplification, but Rove was able to feed the television media a steady diet of image points while candidates Gore and Kerry failed to articulate a vision. In 2004 especially, Bush overcame seemingly long odds by using the threat of terrorism as a substance-less fear wedge while Rove built a strong turnout machine in key states by recalling the old anti special rights frame for state amendments banning gay marriage.

But what's happening this year? Is anything different?

Certainly, the last eight years of nearly absolute rule by the GOP has proven disastrous and the Democrats have nominated an inspiring candidate that has been able to advocate for center-left policies within an overarching progressive vision. But is it just Obama's eloquence and the stronger DNC organizing abilities that have brought us to this point? Is it just McCain's various shortcomings as a campaigner and the fractured GOP base that have given the Democratic message such a boost?

After watching this campaign unfold, I think it is reasonable to examine whether or not part of John McCain's problem is that the traditional GOP rhetorical vision no longer resonates with the electorate. Let us try to set some variables equal. Let us assume equal campaign coffers and generic Republican and Democratic candidates. That is, we should take race, age, and personal likability off of the table - because certainly those things are significant factors in this year's election. If we were able to control some of these other factors, would the traditional GOP tactics or vision gain traction with the electorate?

I don't believe so.

Let's examine a couple examples of traditional GOP tactics as employed in this election.

1. Bill Ayers

The McCain campaign has made Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers a centerpiece of their campaign over the last few weeks. It's a very typical GOP-style smear: generic Democrats are soft on terror. One would imagine a much more powerful resonance with the American public in Obama's case because of the spread of various other-based lies regarding his racial/ethnic background and religious upbringing. Yet despite a truly enormous media push, the numbers demonstrate that the attack has fallen flat. This recent Fox poll indicates that only a third of the electorate has said that the Ayers connection makes a difference for them. In a recent ABC News and WaPo poll, 60 percent of respondents believed that the Ayers relationship was "not a legitimate issue."

2. Taxes

Polling data on whether or not Americans believe the Democratic nominee will raise taxes is striking. The Republicans have been able to go to the tax well for decades, applying the 'tax-and-spend' label to generic Democrats across the board, regardless of the fact that the GOP's tax cuts always went to the wealthy. Not so much now. This CBS poll found that more respondents believe it is more likely that John McCain will raise their taxes than Obama. Those polled by WSJ/NBC this week found Obama to be "better on taxes" by a 48% - 34% margin. A month ago, before the financial crisis, McCain still only had a marginal 41% - 37% advantage. And again, this is striking even accounting for Obama's charismatic appeal since the GOP has historically couched their opposition to progressive taxation in racially evocative terms and because Barack Obama is being very explicit about his intention to raise taxes on the wealthy. This week's McCain campaign line about Dems wanting to raise taxes on those who pay taxes to give breaks to those that don't pay taxes is good example of traditional GOP coupling of taxes to welfare and/or the myth of the willfully unemployed.

These examples work to illustrate the rejection of the traditional Republican tactics because McCain's team has invested incredible resources into these two attacks specifically, somewhat levelling the spending playing field on these two issues. Additionally, as I've said, Obama would seemingly be more susceptible to the tactics than a generic Democrat because of the racially-evocative foundation of these GOP strategies.


Finally, other key aspects of the traditional GOP argument against the Democrats seems not to be as potent as in past elections. After having widely exploited homophobia to boost turnout in 2004, gay-baiting seems to be only a peripheral tactic in localized elections where incumbent GOPers face surprisingly tough reelection battles in socially conservative districts. The generic anti big government pitch is less credible than it has been in forty years following the bailout of the financial sector. Railing against activist judges doesn't work now that the Supreme Court is largely conservative. The typical 'soft on crime' attack, demonstrated this week by a new Giuliani robo-call is less salient as introduced to the current political environment but may have been a more legitimate factor had it been a centerpiece of the McCain campaign all along.


Now certainly nothing laid out here represents conclusive evidence beyond a reasonable doubt. There is no way to separate the failure of the Republican message to resonate from the current set of political circumstances - Obama's unique campaign and the cartoonish failures of President Bush.

But I do see evidence that the conservative coalition's rhetorical vision has lost overall relevance regardless of the immediate economic crisis and the temporary Obama ad blitz.

Perhaps later this week, I'll explore why the traditional rhetorical GOP vision is failing.