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By most analysts’ account, the most illustrative moment in last night’s GOP presidential candidates’ debate occurred when a backpeddling Rick Santorum defended his vote for No Child Left Behind legislation on grounds of “team” solidarity:
I have to admit, I voted for that, it was against the principles I believed in, but you know, when you’re part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake.
At the New York Times, Charles Blow noted that this line got heartily booed by the Mesa audience, and explained that with polling data on the relative distaste of rank-and-file Republicans for legislative compromises:
Santorum’s take on compromise was actually one of the more reasonable things he’s said lately. Compromise is the way government is designed to work. But having a working government has become less important to conservatives than rigid doctrinal adherence.
According to the neo-conservative orthodoxy of extremism, any thing that bends must be weak, and weak is a four-letter word.
And that weakness may well be one of Santorum’s.
That’s all entirely true, but I think Blow misses something else that is very important about conservative attitudes towards the GOP domestic policy record of the Bush/DeLay era, totally aside from any matter of “compromise:” They think GOP “liberalism” is why Barack Obama became president in 2008. And that’s why the Republican Party, virtually in its entirety, made the historically unusual decision to move away from the political center after losing two straight elections in 2006 and 2008.
The idea that there is a hidden majority in the electorate for a militantly conservative agenda that Republican politicians have failed to tap is, of course, a hardy perennial in the conservative movement, but it’s become the conventional wisdom for GOPers in the last few years. It’s a convenient way not only to explain away electoral setbacks, but to disassociate Republicans from the deep unpopularity of George W. Bush without repudiating conservative ideology. It’s precisely the same psychology that led so many conservatives to decide that Richard Nixon failed less because he was crook than because he was a “liberal”—just months after conservatives were cheering Tricky Dicky and his soon-to-be-disgraced vice president Spiro Agnew as culture-war heroes.
The strength of the contemporary idea that alleged Republican “liberalism” caused the 2006 and 2008 debacles is best shown by earlier attacks on Santorum by Romney surrogates:
“Mitt Romney has a much more comprehensively conservative record that Rick does,” said Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO), who argued that Santorum’s voting record on fiscal policies “shows he’s been in the liberal wing [of the party].”
Talent argued votes for the No Child Left Behind education reform package and against “right-to-work” legislation that would constrain unions underscored his liberal tendencies.
Campaign surrogates repeatedly pointed to Santorum’s 18-percentage point loss in his 2006 Senate re-election campaign, arguing that voters had punished Santorum for abandoning conservative ideology.
“The reason he got beat, I think, was that he moved so far way from his fiscal conservative principles,” Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) argued on the call.
So it’s not just “compromise” conservatives are condemning when they boo Rick Santorum for voting for a Republican president’s central domestic policy legislation: it’s the ideology they think the legislation represents. Having done well in 2010 after tacking hard right, they are convinced these are the political keys to the kingdom. And while the rest of the country may look at Rick Santorum and think it’s just hilarious to call him any kind of “liberal,” it’s no laughing matter to conservatives who don’t mind “taking one for the team” if and only if the team is strictly faithful to The Cause.
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MattF on February 23, 2012 10:07 AM:
An additional reason that Republicans moved away from the center and compromise is that Obama is a centrist and a compromiser-- and the one constant theme in Republican campaigning is that everything Obama does is wrong.
Diane Rodriguez on February 23, 2012 10:15 AM:
Seems like the only difference between GOP debate audiences and the townsfolk chasing Frankenstein are torches and pitchforks.
Peter C on February 23, 2012 10:22 AM:
If words have meanings, calling Santorum 'liberal' is as absurd as calling George W. Bush liberal'.
Sadly, for these zealots, the only 'words' which have 'meanings' are the ones in the bible, and even for THOSE, they are convinced by 'faith' that the 'meanings' are what they have been told they are.
The conservatives got EVERYTHING they wanted from 2001 to 2007. They took budget surpluses and spent them like drunken sailors. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A FISCAL CONSERVATIVE who was a Republican from 2001 to 2007!
... if words have meanings, that is.
DAY on February 23, 2012 10:28 AM:
The 99% do not understand nuance, compromise, and Getting Things Done.
And all three of those things are what makes a Democracy work.
Anonymous on February 23, 2012 10:41 AM:
Mitt Romney has a much more comprehensively conservative record that Rick does,” said Sen. Jim Talent (R-MO)
So it looks like Romney's term as governor of Massachusetts has vanished down the same GOP memory hole as the entire GW Bush presidency.
June on February 23, 2012 10:42 AM:
Why are otherwise thoughtful commentators helping conservatives obscure the reason they won the 2010 mid-terms, vis a vis Kilgore's "Having done well in 2010 after tacking hard right...."
Are memories really that short? No, conservatives didn't do well because they tacked "hard right," -- they did well because of: saturation media coverage of the Freedom Works/Koch Bros. astroturf creation aka the Tea Party; massive disinformation campaigns by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Koch Bros., Karl Rove and every single Republican congressperson and candidate - "death panels," etc., Boehner and Cantor whining everyday, "Mr. President, where are the jobs????," even as they ignored the administration's impressive job creation up to that point, voted against every job creation plan, and did everything in their power to halt job creation; and let's not forget outright racism played a large part in their victories as well; add to it the relentless spread of misinformation and knee-jerk cutting out of the knees of the Democratic Party by so-called progressives and progressive organizations, coupled with calls from these so-called progressives to "teach Obama a lesson" by not voting, etc.
To say the teabaggers gained power into 2010 based on tacking hard right is to provide conservatives too much cover for the despicable tactics they used, and to also ignore the short-sightedness of our own.
Equal Opportunity Cynic on February 23, 2012 10:46 AM:
June: Actually it's a lot simpler. They won because 2008's enthusiastic Obama voters stayed home in 2010.
Rathskeller on February 23, 2012 10:47 AM:
One element I would add here is the presence of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and the smaller forces of right-wing hysterical media. To a greater or lesser extent, all of these media directly profit from fomenting permanent division in America. They can even do better when they are losing electoral battles.
Kathryn on February 23, 2012 10:51 AM:
Rick Santorum believes in the devil actively attacking the United States of America, apparently exclusively, due to our exceptional status. I believe in evil and cannot conjure up anything more evil than the conservative attack machine epitomized by the "cheerful" Newt Gingrich, the "courageous" Rick Santorum and the "resolute" Mitt Rommey. The damage being done by the right wing attack machine and it's spokespeople in elected office, in the media and internet is immeasurable IMO.
Last night, The Daily Show had clips of Rep. Steve King, Wayne LaPierre and John McCain making over the top pronouncements of what horrors awaited the nation if Barack Obama was elected president in 2008. Of course, none of these events happened but in 2012 the claims are more hysterical and paranoid. They are presented to us in the media without acknowledgment of the falseness of the comments and Jon Stewart is labeled a liberal commentator simply for showing actual tapes of the excesses. In what world is it appropriate to ask Franklin Graham if the president is a Christian?
(Of course, there are many examples of worse evil in the world such as the slaughter in Syria and other crimes against humanity).
Mimikatz on February 23, 2012 10:57 AM:
The GOP won in 2010 in spite of their lurch to the right and their absurd candidates in NV, DE and CO primarily because too many voters in the Obama coalition DON'T VOTE IN MIDTERM ELECTIONS. It is sad but nonetheless true that single women and people under 30 vote less in non-presidential elections than in presidentials. Sure there may have been some disaffected high-information voters who stayed home out of pique over some of Obama's policies, but let's face it, there really are many fewer of such voters than we libs would like to believe, and most of did vote anyway. And the older Tea Partiers were rev'ed up about death panels and secret Muslim agents.
But 2012 is a presidential, black voters have a great incentive to protect the Pres, single women and most young people are appalled at the jihad against birth control and Obama seems likely to win all but the 11most conservative states.
Mitch on February 23, 2012 11:07 AM:
I must say that I am both appalled and thrilled by the GOP's ever-growing extremism.
It's appalling to think that so many of my fellow citizens are thoughtless reactionaries with almost insane passion of their dogma (@Diane Rodriguez is on the right track mentioning torches and pitchforks). It's frightening to realize that many people I know and love are trapped in a cycle of vile rhetoric and mindless adherance to the fantasy-land doctrine currently espoused by the GOP.
But it is thrilling because they are trapping themselves inside of a smaller and smaller box. Extremism may very well doom them. Particularly if they lose big this year and tack even harder to the right, as they tend to do. The True Believers in the Cause (like my poor, deluded family in Appalachia) will probably never change; but I have enough faith in my nation to believe that most Americans are not impressed by fanaticism.
Oh, and @June, very well said. It's amazing that so many people can't accurately remember the events of two short years ago.
June on February 23, 2012 11:09 AM:
@Equal Opportunity Cynic - true enough, but it still doesn't mean all the rest didn't happen.
Mitch on February 23, 2012 11:18 AM:
@Equal Opportunity Cynic & mimikatz
I agree with you two and also with June. Midterm elections usually have a low turnout. For some reason the American public generally thinks that voting for Congress is less important than voting for President (which it is NOT).
The GOP and their corporate partners created the Tea Party and stirred up the uneducated voters in 2010 knowing this. The plutocrats are plenty smart enough to know that even a slight rise in GOP votes would bring them a big win in Congress in an "off-year" like 2010.
Thankfully the Tea Party madness has left a soured taste in the mouths of America. The GOP keeps pushing things (particularly the culture war) too far, and they will pay for it.
MCA1 on February 23, 2012 11:29 AM:
@June - Ed hasn't ascribed causation. "Having done well in 2010 after tacking hard right" is not the same as "Having done well in 2010 because of tacking right."
In fact, he's making the same point you guys are: the GOP tacked hard right for 2010 and won mostly in spite of it (typical first-term midterm effects, underexposed obstructionism making it impossible for the President to actually do anything, various political miscalculations and posture/framing losses by the Obama team, disengaged/disappointed progressives, etc.). The point is that the Republicans think they won in 2010 more than anything because of their movement to the right, and that misattribution of success is killing them now, as they keep insisting that moving further and further right and staying there is the formula for increased popularity.
square1 on February 23, 2012 11:50 AM:
They think GOP “liberalism” is why Barack Obama became president in 2008. And that’s why the Republican Party, virtually in its entirety, made the historically unusual decision to move away from the political center after losing two straight elections in 2006 and 2008.
Yes, the stupidity of the GOP's political analysis is historically unusual. Of course the GOP's stupidity is matched by the stupidity of many Democratic Centrists who believe that the reason for the Democrats' misfortunes in 2010 was because the Democrats were too liberal. Notwithstanding that, as a bloc, the Blue Dogs took the strongest beating and that liberal Democrats largely stayed home on election day because elected Democrats failed to adequately stand up for liberal policies.
OOH, the behaviors of the two parties only appears irrational if you believe that they are both striving for analogous, if opposing, political goals. However, this is not the case.
The Democratic Party is largely comprised of traditional politicians: i.e. narcissists and sociopaths who are mostly interested in money, power, and ego-stroking. IOW, they want to get re-elected and grease the wheels for lucrative lobbying and consulting gigs. Policy wins are mostly just a means to an end: boosting poll numbers. And if Democrats can achieve the same poll numbers by simply giving it "the ol' college try" before "compromising" then that is a win.
The GOP, in contrast, has two basic types of politicians: (1) movement/activist types who are leading the party into wacko-ville and (2) corporate whore who could care less about getting re-elected as long as they deliver for their corporate backers and get paid.
What does that mean? It means that the GOP is pretty happy if it can control the House and 40+ seats in the Senate, as long as it is also controlling the political agenda. Let the Democrats control the White House and possibly the Senate Majority as long as Democrats are also willing to continue to compromise with the GOP rump.
Mitch on February 23, 2012 11:50 AM:
@MCA1
"The point is that the Republicans think they won in 2010 more than anything because of their movement to the right..."
Indeed. If they win, they think it is because they grew more extreme. If they lose, they think it's because they haven't grown extreme enough.
Win or lose, they keep moving into a more unreasonable position. It is their achilles heel, and one of the most hopeful things about the current cycle.
June on February 23, 2012 11:59 AM:
@MCA1, I take your first point, but would still argue that in today's environment, the statement is still comes across as being too obtuse in terms of describing what happened in 2010. And I completely agree with your second point.
cmdicely on February 23, 2012 12:07 PM:
I dunno. Why are you doing that?
Apparently.
This much is true.
No, that's not it either. As is usually the case, the major party that wasn't in the White House made gains in a midterm election where the economy was doing poorly. However, compared to other elections where that was the case (and especially considering how bad the economy was performing), Republicans underperformed. So, really, they did "well", insofar as that term applies at all, in spite of all those particular tactical actions (and the "hard right" turn which is simply a higher-level description of the same set of choice), not because of them.
June on February 23, 2012 12:42 PM:
@cmdicely - I'm truly not sure what your first comment means; as to your last one, I'm speaking to what conservatives and the standard media narrative is about "why" conservatives won during the mid-terms. (I also still don't buy that it was "in spite of" rather than "because of" for the reasons I've already talked about.)
Keith M Ellis on February 23, 2012 1:17 PM:
@June, you wrote:
Well, you obviously don't mean that in fact it was "because of". So the only thing you can intend is that you think Kilgore meant "because of". Except clearly he didn't--the whole point of this blog post was that the GOP is deluding itself when it thinks that "tacking hard right" is the means to grabbing " the political keys to the kingdom".
As to cmdicely's first point, he's saying that you, too, are obscuring the true reason the GOP did well in the mid-term elections. You're claiming it was media saturation and racism when, while those no doubt factor in the equation somewhere, there's better-known and well-researched candidates at hand--namely, that when the economy is doing poorly the party that's not in the White House pretty much always does well in a mid-term. As cmdicely wrote, they actually underperformed by historical standards.
The funny thing is that pretty much every partisan comes up with elaborate theories, often conspiratorial, to explain perceived trends in elections when, in fact, the historical data indicate that the voters who decide most elections are low-information voters who vote on the basis of mostly economic factors that they don't really understand and they do so in predictable ways.
The one thing that Kilgore doesn't mention in this post is that it's a pretty widespread belief on the bonafide Left of the Democratic Party (among which I am included, though I don't share this belief) that the party would do much better if it...you guessed it...tacked hard to the left. That the GOP did well in 2010 was attributed to many people I know to Obama's failure to be the leftist savior so many people thought he would be (but that he never claimed he'd be). Rather than, you know, the worst economic calamity the US has suffered since the Depression.
And so it goes. I've been pretty sure that Obama would win the coming election all along, but it's interesting to me to see how resistant many people are to admitting that his improved numbers are 70% about the improving economy, 20% about the horrible GOP field, and maybe some small portion of the remainder about anything to do with Obama himself. It's not just the conservatives who spin fanciful and self-serving tales to explain poll numbers.
Mitch on February 23, 2012 2:00 PM:
@Keith M Ellis
I rather enjoyed your in-depth analysis. Thank you. :)
Although I think that the horrible GOP field counts for more than 20%, though not quite 50%. Even the most hard-line conservatives that I know are very disappointed by their candidates (except for members of the Cult of Ron Paul). You are correct that it's mostly about the economy.
Many people do not know, or care, about politics at all. And many of those people were easily caught up in the Tea Party madness of 2010.
So, take the millions of non-political junkies who are either stagnating or suffering financially, add the conservative spin machine and the cash of backers like the Kochs and the general ennui that affects the electorate during midterms, and you have the TP/GOP getting an easy ride to more seats in Congress.
It's not a conspiracy theory; it was intelligent planning by the GOP and their allies. The fact that they didn't win more than they did is a credit to the American people.
One last thing. You said:
"... it's a pretty widespread belief on the bonafide Left of the Democratic Party ... that the party would do much better if it ... tacked hard to the left."
In my opinion the economy would do better if the Dems tacked more to the left. It's impossible, now that the GOP has enough control to block everything, but in 2009-2010, they could have done so. I understand and applaud the desire to be "post-partisan", but it is impossible to do so when the other party is willing to hurt the nation to win elections.
June on February 23, 2012 2:06 PM:
Okay, @Keith - So, the massive disinformation campaigns mounted by Republicans to capture low-information voters are now a conspiracy theory. Oh, and the GOP actually steered clear of racist overtones and dog whistles during the lead-up to the mid-terms, did they?
As for your last paragraph, the economy was recovering during the mid-terms, too, but Republicans not only lied about it, they did everything they could to slow it down. Of course, the economy will figure heavily in the election cycle - you seem to imply I'm resistant to that premise - I am not.
Area Man on February 23, 2012 2:11 PM:
So Santorum lost by 18 points in 2006 because of a Republican education bill he voted for in 2001.
I wonder how these people explain Bush's reelection.
Wally on February 23, 2012 3:33 PM:
My Republican California university educated friends (who I knew in a frat) voted and funded extreme Republicans in 2010 because they believe Obama overreached by using government solutions to fix the deficit, the economy and healthcare and because he raised taxes. Well, of course he did not do the latter but the former provides them with the supposed evidence that he really is doing the latter. These quite wealthy guys are as intentionally ignorant on taxes or deficits or climate change as any Limbaugh listening unemployed blue collar guy. Why? I think because they just want to keep having their taxes cut and will rationalize ANYthing to have that done. They are insatiable about taxes that they don't feel directly benefit them. These guys vote for school bonds when their kids are in school and vote against them when the kids graduate.
What is troublesome is that this is not the culture of their parents. Their parents were mainly moderate and pitched in. These guys are pretty much rationalizers and are fed the rationalizations by Drudge, Fox, and ESPECIALLY anonymous chain emails. E.g.
http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/Barack_Obama.htm
The most damaging emails are sent between say a bunch of real estate developers and say things like "14% of the citizens pay 75% of the taxes!" That they all make gazillions more than their paretns does not impede their outrage. These closed circle emails - even more than Fox or Drudge - create a closed systemic feedback loop where scions of generations of moderate Republicans now support extreme Republican or Libertarians, for personal income reasons.
beejeez on February 23, 2012 5:33 PM:
It's "backpedaling," not "backpeddling," Ed. Otherwise, you go, girl!