Those who read the January/February issue of the Washington Monthly probably recall that much of it established a Republican presidential victory this November is likely to move American government in a profoundly more conservative direction. As Paul Glastris noted, this cuts against a deeply held belief central to the Beltway conventional wisdom:

The attitude of official Washington is that politicians will behave like politicians and avoid extreme actions that will lose them the next election—and if they do overreach, the other party will win and take corrective action. But what the Beltway elite doesn’t understand is that the Tea Party only needs two years in power to make the changes they have in mind—changes that would be destructive, far reaching, and in many ways tamper-proof. Even if they then lose, their antigovernment agenda will live on.

It’s noteworthy, then, that the columnist who often defines the Beltway Conventional Wisdom, WaPo’s Richard Cohen, has a column today arguing against any supposition that Mitt Romney has the motivation or the capacity to “move to the center,” as a candidate or as a president:

The forces that shaped him in the primaries and caucuses will not go away. He has been clay in the hands of the political right, and this will not change.

Wow. When an unconventional proposition passes the Richard Cohen test, you know it’s got a lot of power.

Today we have the incomparable Lucinda Williams performing “Essence” in 2007. My wife took me to see Lucinda at the Fillmore Auditorium as a birthday present, and I’m hoping to see her next month at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur. Enjoy.

Hard to believe Corey Booker was at the top of my favorite news aggregator all day long. It’s a good, sad example of how conservatives can dominate a news cycle, without a hint of conscience or perspective, when they try. On that sad note, here are a few things that got lost in the shuffle today:

* Norquist compares efforts to reign in tax expats to Nazis and apartheid-era South Africans. He should know the latter’s policies well, since they were his allies in the fight against “communism” in Angloa, Namibia and Mozambique back in the day.

* Addendum to my last post about Romney and Bain, from Ezra Klein: “As head of Bain, Romney fired a lot of workers who were perfectly good at their jobs, who were committed to their companies, who had families they needed to support. That was his job as head of a private-equity giant. But his job as president of the United States would also be to look out for those workers.”

* Kornacki says this could be Pelosi’s last campaign if Dems fail to retake House.

* Hatch primary opponent going all out to demand TV debates. Incumbent is 78 years old and not pretty.

* Sen. Bob Corker decides he wants six more years of “watching paint dry,” declares for reelection.

And in non-political news:

* George Jones hospitalized for 100th time, cancels 200th concert date. But I love the old buzzard.

Ran late today; will try to start early tomorrow. But it’s real dark and cold at 4:00 a.m. PDT.

Selah.

The president shot back late today at the Romney campaign’s claims that his criticism of Mitt’s record at Bain Capital is a “distraction” from discussion of his own economic record as president, reports TPM’s Benjy Sarlin:

President Obama defended his campaign’s attacks on layoffs at Bain Capital under Mitt Romney’s ownership, telling reporters at a NATO summit that Romney’s business experience is critical to evaluating his qualifications as president.

Obama declined to criticize Newark Mayor Cory Booker, a supporter who on Sunday called attacks on Bain “nauseating.” Booker is an “outstanding mayor,” Obama said. But the president made clear that he thought Bain was not only fair game, but essential to the process of determining the next president.

“It is important to recognize this issue is not a distraction,” he said. “This is part of the debate we will be adding in this campaign about how do we create an economy where everybody from top to bottom, folks on Wall Street and Main Street, have a shot at success.”

“If your main argument for how to grow in the economy is, ‘I knew how to make a lot of money for investors’, then you are missing what this job is about,” he said.

That’s all true, but Obama needs to connect a crucial dot here: Romney is not simply claiming that his ability to “make a lot of money for investors” is a personal credential for his competence or his understanding of how the economy works. It’s his belief that “making a lot of money for investors” is all that’s involved in making the economy work, or in giving the rest of us an opportunity to succeed, that’s the real problem. Making money for your rich peers and paymasters at Bain Capital is one thing. Believing that’s exactly the same job you’d take on at the White House is another altogether, but best as we can tell, that’s how Mitt would perceive his responsibility. And that’s even if you like or trust him!

I swear I tried to ignore the Cory Booker “story” today, since I can’t really imagine why a toss-off comment defending private equity firms from a guy who may be running as a “centrist” for governor of a state that’s half in the New York media market is surprising or matters a whole lot. But then Harold Ford piled on, unfortunately playing to type, and apparently Team Mitt is talking about nothing else. Hell, the RNC, in a move that may not please Chris Christie, is circulating a “I stand with Corey!” petition.

Oh well. I know I’ve already quoted Dave Weigel once today, but he really does sum up the hypocrisy of the Romney camp on this manufactured story, and how silly the whole thing is:

Last week, as the Joe Ricketts/Jeremiah Wright storm raged around her, WaPo blogger/Romney sympathizer Jennifer Rubin called on the media to stop falling for the lastest campaign crap. “Unfortunately,” she wrote, “the way the media works, in herdlike fashion, as soon as a major outlet holds up the next ‘shiny object,’ other outlets follow suit. Well, the New York Times is covering it! News judgment goes out the window, and any sense of proportion fades not only for the outlet that first held up the ‘shiny object’ but for the whole news corps.”

My question: Does Bookergate qualify? The Romney campaign is spending all day “messaging” Cory Booker’s Meet the Press comments, raising the stakes with a profoundly dramatic video ad that’s intended to further the “Booker SLAMS Obama” story. Did you know that former congressman and frequent Morning Joe guest Harold Ford is a “key Obama supporter,” and not just a has-been now working for Merrill Lynch?

Hilarious. Next we will probably be told that the Booker/Ford one-two is an indication that Obama is alienating his African-American base, which is famously cozy with Bain Capital.

It’s been a really tough election cycle for Rick Perry. He positioned himself for a presidential run doing what you’d expect to be the Right things. He lined up enough money backing to choke a thousand horses. Sensing the zeitgeist, and perhaps worrying about his failed 2008 effort to become the southern conservative validator for the baby-killing cross-dresser Rudy Giuliani, he did just about everything imaginable to make himself a Tea Party favorite, up to and including repudiations of the entire New Deal and flirtations with nullification and secession. He obtained the blessing of the Christian Right at a sacerdotal event in his home state. To high hosannas, he announced his candidacy in the ultimate right-wing fever swamp of South Carolina, within earshot of conservative uber-commisar Jim DeMint, and before an adoring audience gathered by the epicenter of the wingnutosphere, RedState. In all his early candidate events, he strutted and roared and in general did the full Mussolini (or if it’s offensive to compare him to the original Fascist, let’s say the full Chavez or the full Peron; you get the stylistic idea).

But Perry failed to understand that the Tex-Mex pieties of Lone Star politics made him deeply vulnerable on the immigration issue, and after that crucial stumble he mumbled and paused in debates, and the wheels promptly came off. After a brief flyer with the doomed Gingrich campaign, he returned to Texas a lot worse for wear.

And now his Lieutenant Governor and longtime political ally David Dewhurst is running for the Senate, and he could be in serious trouble in the May 29 Republican primary. Dewhurst is still leading wingnut heartthrob Ted Cruz in the polls, but despite a massive financial advantage, it looks like he may not get over the 50% needed to avoid a runoff, and if so, the heat of a fiery purge could soon consume his candidacy.

Cruz is being backed by most representatives of the national “movement conservative” hordes Perry came so close to leading in his own campaign: the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund, the doom-sniffing opportunist Sarah Palin, and yes, RedState’s Erick Erickson. So Rick’s now appearing in Dewhurst’s ads. If his protege goes down the tubes, Perry’s national political standing could wind up where it was before he did all that pandering to the Right.

Gotta say, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins usefully summarizes a phenomenon that I’ve barely mentioned here, partly because I’ve had a hard time taking it seriously: the constant buzz in right-wing media that African-Americans are unleashing a large wave of politically motivated violence on white folks.

Coppins’ headline tells most of the tale: “In Conservative Media, A ‘Race War’ Rages.” Interestingly enough, it has ranged from breathless moment-by-moment coverage of the Trayvon Martin case from the point of view of establishing George Zimmerman’s total innocence (assumed from the beginning), to complaints of too much media coverage of the Martin case (at the expense of what they ought to be covering, which is black-on-white or black-on-black violence), to assertions that the Martin case has inspired black people all over the country to beat up on white folks. You will notice the common thread, which is even less subtle than the ancient MSM convention of invoking stereotypes of black menace by referring to “roving bands of youths” or “riot-turn streets.”

Coppins attributes a lot of this crap to conservative anger about liberal allegations of racism. Whatever. He’s absolutely right, though, that the Martin case has been conflated with random events like the beating of a white man in Mobile by a group of black folks among whom one supposedly shouted someting about seeking “justice for Trayvon,” and more recently an incident in Norfolk where two white newspaper reporters got stomped after a verbal confrontation with black teenagers. As Coppins observes, it took some massaging to make that a major battle in a “race war:”

Local authorities wrote it off as an all-too-routine assault in a city whose violent crime rate is well above the state average. Even the Norfolk newspaper where the victims worked, the Virginian-Pilot, skipped the story, which the editor deemed un-newsworthy. That was before Bill O’Reilly found out about it.

The Fox News host turned the incident into national news by adding one detail: The attackers were black, and the victims were white.

If you’ve spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you’ve probably learned about a slow-burning “race war” going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking — and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.

read more »

Woke up this morning after dreaming it was Saturday. A very rude awakening. Here’s some mid-day news snacks:

*Assortment of Catholic dioceses and organizations sue Obama administration to invalidate contraception coverage mandate under First Amenment, opening a new front in the fight to frame insurance regulartion as unprecedented assault on “religious liberty.”

* Cheney to raise money for Romney. What? He’s not joining Mitt on the campaign trail?

* Politico interviews four pols felled by sex scandals; one discusses impact on his dating life.

* At Ten Miles Square, Sarah Binder reviews Obama’s recess appointments strategy.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer assesses one disgraced college president’s golden parachute.

And in non-political news:

* Bee Gees co-founder Robin Gibb dies of cancer at 62.

Back after a brief break.

It hasn’t gotten a lot of national attention, but the battle over contraception coverage in employer-sponsored health insurance plans may be shifting in a subtle way from the context of religiously-oriented institutions like Catholic hospitals or charities to employers in general. It’s already the position of Senate Republicans, who almost unanimously backed Roy Blunt’s amendment to give any employer claiming a moral objection to contraception a pass on providing it to employees. And now in Blunt’s home state, Missouri, the Republican-controlled legislature has sent a bill to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon defying federal law in the pursuit of this expanded notion of a “conscience clause.”

As Think Progress’ Amanda Peterson Beadle reports, one Missouri legislator is pushing back in the appropriate way:

[S]tate Rep. Stacey Newman (D) said the bill endangering women’s access to health care was more of an attack on “women’s reproductive choices” than a message to the federal government. “This is wrong and I dare you to go home and talk to your daughters … and say, ‘Look, what we’re going to say is that your employers’ religious beliefs matter more than your own.”

Republicans have already gone out on a limb in the past by championing “pharmacists of conscience” who may look sternly across the counter at some young woman without a wedding ring who’s trying to fill a birth control prescription and assert a right to refuse to cooperate in her harlotry. But however you feel about pharmacists second-guessing one’s moral or religious character, “the boss” is often a less than sympathetic figure whose interest in denying employees insurance benefits would not universally be assumed as stemming from high-minded motives. Rep. Newman is onto a potentially fruitful line of inquiry.

Speaking of “alternative histories:”

At TAP, the ever-insightful Paul Waldman discusses the obsession among many conservatives with pursuing a “vetting” of Barack Obama that they claim a sycophantic MSM (and presumably an insufficiently vicious McCain campaign) failed to conduct in 2008. Paul views it as entirely prospective in intent, if retroactive in practice:

The mistake that so many conservatives make is in believing that in some (or all) of these details of his life lies the key to Obama’s undoing. If only we can find the radical mentor, the girlfriend holding on to a decades-old secret, or the revealing document, then Obama will be unmasked, his true horrifying self revealed at last for all to see. Then the scales will fall from the voters’ eyes and they’ll boot him from the office he never deserved to occupy in the first place.

Perhaps that’s all there is to it, but it’s worth acknowledging that conservative activists are almost as interested in rewriting history as they are in influencing the future; indeed, many view the two projects as intimately connected. For all sorts of reasons that could keep psychologists occupied for years, it’s important to them to depict the last forty years of American politics as a Long March by the conservative movement to permanent majority status—a march interrupted only by Republican betrayal and Democratic co-optation. Jimmy Carter became president because of Watergate, Gerald Ford’s use of incumbency to narrowly turn back Ronald Reagan’s first big, and Carter’s own cultural-conservative credentials. Bill Clinton became president because Poppy Bush raised taxes and Republicans split their vote between Bush and Perot. Clinton won a second term by “stealing conservative ideas,” getting assist from Republicans who nominated the man Newt Gingrich labeled the “tax collector for the welfare state,” RINO Bob Dole. Returned to their rightful position of power in 2000, Republicans threw away their majority by “betraying conservative principles” under Bush 43, supporting comprehensive immigration reform, creating a new health care entitlement, and pandering to swing voters with “compassionate conservatism” instead of insisting on the original, uncompassionate variety. Even then they might have won in 2008, had not John McCain refused to mobilize the conservative base of the GOP by going after Obama with hammer and tongs.

So it’s not just a matter of marshaling new evidence to make the case against Obama prospectively; the 2008 defeat needs to be rationalized in terms of anything, everything other than conservative ideology or the associated policy failures. But it’s nothing compared to the exercises in revisionist history and RINO-hunting we’ll witness if they can’t defeat Obama this year. On November 7, 2012, Mitt Romney will either become President of the United States and putative leader of the next stage of the Conservative Ascendancy, or a truly hated figure on the Right who once again allowed the Secular Socialst Party to stake an illegitimate an unearned claim on power.

I was relieved to learn from Dave Weigel, who has been closely following the John Edwards trial, that I really haven’t missed a thing. Why? Because when the local Borders’ was closing down last year I bought a copy of The Politician, Andrew Young’s tell-all book about his relationship with Edwards, for about two bucks in some Final Clearance Stack, anticipating a long flight. And according to Weigel, virtually all of the testimony the prosecution is using in its effort to imprison Edwards for campaign finance law violations was fully present in Young’s book.

It’s all reasonably simple: one person who is dead (famed trial lawyer Fred Baron) and another who is 101 years old (Bunny Mellon) gave what most of us (though not their fabulously wealthy selves) would consider a lot of money to cover “personal expenses” for Edwards that turned out mainly to involve an amazingly elaborate and ultimately unsuccessful ploy to keep his largely inscrutable relationship with Rielle Hunter secret. This whole crazy thing was playing out against the background of two events in Iowa: Edwards’ famous $250 haircut in Dubuque in 2007, which led Mellon to open a vast line of credit for the kind of expenses that shouldn’t show up in campaign expense disclosure materials, and then, less than a year later, Edwards’ loss in the Iowa Caucuses, which effectively ended his presidential ambitions.

You get the sense that the government could have saved a whole lot of taxpayer money by simply entering Young’s book into evidence; letting the judge instruct the jury on the very limited questions of fact they were to resolve about the intentions of Baron and Mellon; and then going straight to closing arguments. Sure, it’s ironic that Edwards himself, whose meteoric rise in American politics was based on his reputation as sort of the Wayne Gretzky of trial attorneys, never took the stand to talk the jury out of sending him to the hoosegow. But it’s in keeping with the anticlimactic nature of this entire proceeding.

The main perceived victim of all of Edwards’ lies, Elizabeth Edwards, is long gone. Some profess to be outraged that a man of his character came within a handful of votes in Ohio from attaining a position “a heartbeat from the presidency,” but given the character of the man he lost to in 2004, it’s hard to get exercised about that. When the whole Hunter saga first went public in 2008, a lot of Democrats were horrified by the realization that had Edwards somehow won the nomination, the general election might have been forfeited. But at some point the saga drifts off into the mists of alternative history, one in which 75-year-old President John McCain might be defending 12 years of disastrous Republican rule in Washington against the hope-and-change candidacy of second-term Democratic senator Barack Obama, assuming McCain survived a right-wing primary challenge from his Vice President, Sarah Palin, who resigned after a year or so in office.

It’s pretty hilarious to listen to RNC Chairman Reince Priebus complain that Republicans are the victims of media attention paid to the Ricketts/Davis ad story, or that Obama is to blame:

I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.

Now best I can tell, Priebus is an unusually intense advocate of the idea that the best way to exhibit “message discipline” is to sound as blitheringly stupid as is possible: just stare at the camera with the eyes of a goat and repeat your talking points whether they are in any way relevant to what you are supposed to be talking about or are the least bit persuasive. So it doesn’t surprise me all that much that he’d have the chutzpah to insist that a leaked discussion between a major GOP donor and the all-time superstar conservative media consultant about exactly how much racism and religious bigotry they can get away with in a political ad represents an effort by Obama to change the subject.

But the larger point here is pretty important for progressives to understand: the GOP is running a two-track campaign this year, one with a fiscal/economic message, and the other with a cultural message, and they have a lot invested in making sure the persuadable voters the first message is aimed at don’t hear the second. That would, as Priebus suggests, in fact be a “distraction.” But blaming the “distraction” on the very target of their own cultural attacks is entirely in line with the attacks themselves: Obama and “liberals” are always described as the aggressors in cultural conflicts. Is the Obama administration reluctant to carve out large areas of public policy where religious conservatives are allowed to do whatever they want? Then they are assaulting religious liberty! Do they suggest Americans still suffer from discrimination? Then they are racists! So it’s clear Obama’s “suspicious” background, whether it’s where he was born or how he got into this or that college or what his former pastor said in thirty years of sermons, is just an intolerable provocation to conservatives. How dare he distract the people who hate him!

Get used to it. We’ll hear this every single time Republicans get caught pursuing the cultural prong of their campaign strategy.

One thing last week’s brouhaha over Joe Rickett’s RFP for a nasty anti-Obama ad provided was a peek into the new relationship that could soon begin to dominate politics, at least among the Republicans who are taking to Super-PACs like ducks to water: big-dollar donors and the “strategists” and ad-crafters who want their money. What’s missing from the picture? Candidates and the conventional campaigns that normally make most of the decisions about what voters see on television.

Nick Confessore of the New York Times has expored this relationship in one of those odd “sympathy for the devil” articles in which the fiendish tribe of political consultants talk about how much easier it is to cut out the middle-man and work directly for the people writing the checks:

In the insular but fast-growing world of super PACs and other independent outfits, there are no cranky candidates, no scheduling conflicts, no bitter strategy debates with rival advisers. There are only wealthy donors and the consultants vying to oblige them.

It’s particularly interesting that Confessore managed to get Fred Davis on record discussing the improved lifestyle associated with working for a Super-PAC, since he’s the guy whose name was all over the Jeremiah Wright ad proposal for Joe Ricketts that nobody wants to take responsibility for:

“You don’t have to go anywhere,” Mr. Davis said in an interview this month, before details of his proposed campaign against Mr. Obama became public. “You don’t have to get on a small prop plane to New Hampshire. You don’t have to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. You can stay home and manage everything during normal office hours.”

Even the morally depraved, it seems, prefer to service presidential campaigns indirectly, keeping themselves away from the rolling ball of madness that many campaigns become.

“You don’t have kitchen cabinets made up of well-intentioned friends and neighbors who don’t know what they’re doing but eat up a lot of your time,” said Bob Schuman, who ran a super PAC called Americans for Rick Perry during the Republican presidential primaries. “Super PACs don’t have spouses.”

But it’s ultimately all about the money:

While many Republican and Democratic candidates are forcing consultants to accept flat fees and smaller advertising commissions, independent spending also offers a rapidly expanding market. Through mid-May, outside groups had spent more than $124 million in this election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, double the rate four years earlier.

We shouldn’t be too naive, though, about the “independence” of Super-PACs from the campaigns they assist. An enormous amount of energy will go into maintaining the fiction of “non-coordination,” less on legal grounds than for reasons of plausible deniability. You will note that Ricketts’ progress towards selecting an appropriately evil attack ad on Barack Obama ended about two minutes after Mitt Romney was forced to repudiate it. Had the backlash been slightly less severe, Mitt would have probably shrugged and disclaimed any responsibility for what some rich guy in the midwest was doing with his money (which is precisely how he acted when his favorite Super-PAC, Restore Our Future, came under fire during the primaries for hatefulness and mendacity), and we’d be watching Davis’ ad or something worse before long.

In many respects Super-PACs are just more convenient for everyone: the donors who want fewer limits and more control over their investment; the candidates who don’t want their fingerprints on nastygrams; and most of all, the “creative” folk like Davis who would drag American politics to the bottom of hell in fifteen minutes if it boosted his bottom line, gained him the adulation of his peers, and spared him the ignominy of spending nights at a Holiday Inn Express.

For no reason other than my affection for the song, here’s Sleater-Kinney performing “Sympathy” at the Coachella Festival in 2006.