So? Or who is the information economy candidate (or party)?

September 4, 2007 – 5:54 am

So, it is the day after labor day, and I am catching up on the news, including some big labor endorsement news from John Edwards, via Marc Ambinder:

In Pittsburgh this morning, ex-Sen. John Edwards will proudly receive the endorsement of the United Steelworkers and the United Mineworkers of America, giving him the largest bloc of union endorsements so far.

USW claims 1.2M current members and retirees, including nearly 9,000 in Iowa.

Perhaps it is because I just read Nick Gillespie’s great review of Matt Bai’s new book, but I have to ask one question. So?

I mean, isn’t the modern economy an information (capital) and services (the new labor) economy? Is John Edwards the candidate of yesterday’s economy? Shouldn’t the debate be about how to maximize the upsides of today’s and tomorrow’s economy while minimizing the downsides, including transition? Who will be the candidate of tomorrow’s economy? When I asked this question several thoughts occurred to me.

First, the answer should be, at least on the GOP side, Mitt Romney, if only because of his experience as a VC. But he is not pushing those issues and is instead pushing his more corporatist worldview and pandering to the base. Perhaps in tribute to the problems faced by the GOP, the questions that we debate in the primary are not of interest to the general electorate. The Dems debate healthcare and getting out of Iraq. We debate tax reform proposals that are mostly DOA and staying in Iraq.

Perhaps the more interesting question is which party is the party of the information economy and in what way? Historically speaking, the GOP was the party of economic innovation during the last fundamental shift in our economy, the industrial revolution. Certainly our voters were northern industrialists and their employees. But on a policy level our issues were larger than that. We were the party of the Homestead Act, of national railroad and canal infrastructure, etc.

Clearly in an information (and services) economy, the primary form of capital is human capital. Now revolutionary productivity increases are coming through management, education, etc., not industrialization and mechanization. Shouldn’t the GOP be on the side of encouraging and facilitating those radical increases in productivity? Of developing and maximizing human capital through education?

Have there been any proposals offered on education by candidates on either side? I don’t think that I’ve seen any, but I’ve missed a lot. Reviewing websites from Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, there are commitments for more accountability (Romney) and teachers (Clinton), but nothing of any substance.

Shouldn’t this be the question?

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Different models for the future of the GOP?

September 2, 2007 – 10:50 am

Ross Douthat ends a discussion of Mike Huckabee with:

The most important thing, to my mind, is that a Huckabee-Giuliani-Romney race would be a lot healthier for the GOP than a Thompson-Giuliani-Romney race, which is reason enough to wish the Huckster well.

Now, assuming that these aren’t battles over personality, what are these candidates running as or, perhaps better, as?

Rudy Giuliani could be viewed as either a candidate of social moderates or as the national security candidate. I think that it is more fair to view him as the candidate who represents the resurgence of national security issues in the GOP. I have argued that his candidacy would have a transformative effect on the party. It also seems to me that the Fabrizio poll "Elephant in the Mirror" indicates that there is a "national security first" part of the party that could form the basis of a coalition, along with economic conservatives, that could be enough to win.

Mike Huckabee is certainly the most articulate and credible social conservative in the first or second tier. He is also the least conservative candidate on economic issues, as typically understood. Huckabee is the candidate who will make the most explicit attempt to maintain the party’s margins in the working class. The question is whether he will be able to get them to vote in a primary for him. Perhaps, more controversially, he is the candidate of a broader Christian agenda, including worrying about poverty, education, global warming, etc. Moderate and liberal evangelicals and Catholics have been swing votes in the recent national elections, and you can see him making a strong play for those. However, with his economic positions, one wonders how he will keep suburban voters. Hillary Clinton could become the candidate of share holders, when compared to Mike Huckabee. He would also be a transformative candidate for the party.

Fred Thompson, in his current form, seems to represent the status quo coalition, at least in the sense of the interest groups. This could shift with his "big ideas" talk and his seeming openness to raising taxes.  Earlier, it seemed that conservative groups were on the verge of tying the knot with Thompson. It is not as clear that they are at that point now. One can only imagine that the next couple of weeks is going to see a large amount of oppo begin to fall. Some of that is going to be muted by the Iraq debate in Congress.

Then there is Mitt Romney. What is he? The best that I can see is the candidate of the corporatist wing of the party. His staff seem primarily drawn from there., and his volunteers seem to be the country club set. His experience, family, and geography places him at that wing of the party. And his proposals on things like health care smack of the compromises that the Chamber of Commerce is willing to make to get the government to take costs off their hand. Clearly he is playing up his social conservative credentials to find other votes, getting a lucky break with the new Iowa gay marriage debate, but that is a stretch in light of his flip-flopping.

So back to Ross’s point about what the healthiest fight for the party is. You can restate the point as the "national security (Giuliani) versus economic moderate (Huckabee) versus corporatist (Romney)" or the "status quo (Thompson) versus national security (Giuliani) versus corporatist (Romney)". It is clear that the Huckabee candidacy represents a new addition to the debate in the GOP, and in that way, it is clear that it could be more healthy. I think that Ross would make the further point that the Huckabee direction is the most likely to keep Reagan Democrats in the game.

But are any of these winning, long-term coalitions?

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More of my thoughts on Huckabee (long)

August 17, 2007 – 12:35 am

Reihan Salam responds to one of my recent posts about Mike Huckabee. I had said:

On a deeper level, I hear in Huckabee an instinct towards the isolationism that Eisenhower fought against.  …

Reihan responds:

I say "somewhat strangely" because Eisenhower was the peace candidate (i.e., the one who pledged to end a foreign war), and he is widely remembered as a staunch critic of the military-industrial complex. I find it very difficult to believe that Eisenhower would find much to criticize in Huckabee’s remarks, particularly since they are very much in the historical mainstream of conservative foreign policy discourse.

Reihan is referring to a different part of the Eisenhower legacy than I am.  Paul Gigot summarized the part that I am referring to:

[The GOP] was an isolationist party for a long time coming up to the 20’s and 30’s and into the 40’s and cost them at the presidential level. Ike changed that in the 50’s and then Goldwater, the conservative from the West became the anti-Communist candidate and the right moved to an internationalist position.

From that point on, the GOP was the party of internationalism on everything from intervention to trade, and the Democrats took the old isolationist GOP position.  Indeed, a friend of mine, Lorelei Kelly, who writes for Democracy Arsenal and informally advises the House Progressive Caucus, once noted that today the GOP "is the real internationalist party," much to the shock of her liberal friends.

There is another quote that I can’t find right now (and I have an early flight so I won’t be able to track it down until next week) in which Eisenhower says that his highest priority was to not let the GOP be the isolationist party. In fact, Eisenhower’s internationalism was precisely his most party-internal divisive characteristic, later being accused of being a communist, among other things, by radical Birch and other elements of the GOP.

So what does this have to do with anything? Gigot continued:

There’s a faction on the right that has moved back to the old isolationist wing - these are the Buchanan Republicans, the McGovern Republicans, if you will. And they wouldn’t appreciate that reference but I think it is apt.

There are several inter-related components to whatever a Buchanan/McGovern Republican would be, among them isolationism, protectionism, and "culture war," a phrase that Buchanan actually used with pride. It is clear that, right now, international intervention will continue to be part of the GOP platform. It is less clear that globalization will, especially in light of the revolt against the Bush administration’s attempt to liberalize the movement of labor, that is, immigration reform. Note that I also accept the moral argument for the imperative of immigration reform; in fact, I think it is primary.

In the end, this is my fear. Would Huckabee care about the international trade agenda and continued globalization? Would Huckabee invest political capital in a renewed Doha round and some level of regulatory coordination with, for example, the European Union? On a deeper level, is he a populist? This would be bad. Or is he merely attuned to the need to address some of the dislocation caused by economic liberalization? (and pay for it by increasing the rate of liberalization) After all, in my issues for a new movement, I wrote:

Massively increase skills-based educational opportunities at the state level. Stronger community colleges. Probably increase tax breaks for this kind of stuff. …

[W]e have to recognize that protectionism and healthcare concerns are grounded in concerns about economic insecurity. This is important because we need to have a credible economic story to offer the working class. …

My suggestions were, basically, that we need to offer real plans for managing human capital through healthcare, education, and retirement and pension reform, among others. In this way, I feel like I share a lot with David Brooks, who said:

But today, many of those old problems [the problems Reagan faced] have receded or been addressed. Today the big threats to people’s future prospects come from complex, decentralized phenomena: Islamic extremism, failed states, global competition, global warming, nuclear proliferation, a skills-based economy, economic and social segmentation.

In fact, I suspect that I share a lot with Reihan and Brooks, his mentor. Perhaps on a deeper level, my policy inclinations derive from two sources: my (Old?) Whig-ish economic instincts and my moderate-to-liberal religious instincts. These don’t so much come in conflict (in a reason versus faith way) as they mutually inform how these would be implemented. Call me a libertarian-moderate evangelical, if you will. Huckabee’s economic statements sound, sometimes, in opposition to my economic preferences. And his roots in the conservative movement of the Southern Baptist Convention raise alarm bells for my religious and theological preferences.

Finally, there’s a political analysis. As Reihan noted, I quoted Jim Antle saying:

I’d also point out that the fusion of economic populism and social conservatism has generally been a losing strategy in Republican politics, …

I don’t mean to put words in Jim’s mouth, but I think that he’s saying that there’s a political logic to fusionism. Economic conservatives and social conservatives are (or least have been) different constituencies, at least within Republican politics. The person who can put both together gets more votes. In the broader coalition of the party, emphasizing social conservatism brought significant people and energy into the party. And, as both Joe Carter and Pat Hynes have noted, often people will enter the party as social conservatives and acquire (some or more) economic conservatism over time. (there is also a pattern that moves in the other direction as people assimilate to their peers)

In conclusion, I see a lot of unanswered questions in Mike Huckabee. Here are a couple:

  • Is Huckabee an economic populist? (I consider this a bad, backward, and immoral thing) Perhaps stated more precisely, does he embrace the new globalized and liberalized economy but believe that some of its problems must be alleviated? Or must the underlying process be reversed? I rarely hear the man from Hope talk about hope. His main economic policy, the Fair Tax, seems like a gimmick.
  • While I am sympathetic to his "life doesn’t begin at conception and end at birth" line that incorporates education, health care, etc., without an economic analysis to incorporate it, this too looks like a gimmick.

Perhaps fundamentally, I fear that Huckabee is just a Baptist pastor. He thinks deeply about morality and conscience, but is he shallow about economics?

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Another perspective on the conservative movement

August 16, 2007 – 7:31 am

Yesterday, I wrote a response to Peter Beinart’s op-ed about the Republican Party and the conservative movement. I got some very positive feedback. My friend Patrick Hynes wrote on a related topic. Patrick’s thesis is basically:

First, let’s be clear, American conservatism has devolved from a movement into an identity group.

Patrick continues by pointing out that our constituencies are shrinking and we are not adding new ones:

So we’re closing the door on Hispanics and losing White Catholics. Oh, and as both Greenberg and The Economist note, we are bleeding Independents. What are we getting in return? Younger voters? Nope: Pollster Tony Fabrizio claims the share of voters aged 18-34 that calls itself Republicans has falling to 17%. Veterans, yet another reliable segment of Republican electorate—one that goes unremarked upon by Greenberg at The Economist—is in rapid decline as a percentage of the voting population and will not be replaced by today’s downsized Armed Forces.

One way to turn this around would be to motivate a new set of voters with issues, but he is not seeing where this comes from:

As for other issues? It’s difficult to understand what other issues are going to matter. Pat Ruffini is doing great work trying to build a “Movement 2.0,” but I don’t see any issues in his recent post titled “What’s the Agenda” that can alter the trajectory of the conservative movement.

This is a point that I tried to make yesterday:

After 20 years of transforming America and the world, the GOP is running low on ideas. And the conservative movement is fighting yesterday’s wars. …

It is time for a renewal. It is time to build something.

I share nearly all of Patrick’s analysis, but I am looking this as an opportunity. We can build technologies. We can hold policy workshops. We can support various candidates who are pushing different models for the future of the GOP — electoral experiments! This will take time, but this introspection will start the process now.

It is time for a conservative renewal. It won’t look like it does today. A new generation will be involved.

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Beinart compares GOP and old-Dems; Times are a changin’

August 15, 2007 – 10:49 am

Peter Beinart, fomerly of The New Republic and a victim of the anti-war online left, wrote an interesting op-ed in today’s WaPo. Basically, he compares the state of the GOP with the state of the Democrats in the 80s:

Imitation may be flattering, but in this case, it comes with a large scoop of irony. Because while Democrats are enrolling in GOP 101, the GOP itself is in free fall. According to a recent NBC-Wall Street Journal poll, only 28 percent of Americans view the party positively. Asked which party they’d like to take the White House in 2008, respondents favored the Democrats by almost 20 points. To recover, Republicans will have to do something they haven’t done in decades: learn from the other guys.

Democrats 101 starts with a little history. In the 1980s, it was Democrats who were politically radioactive. They were hemorrhaging swing voters, especially independents and the young. And on such issues as welfare and crime, the party’s activist base imposed litmus tests that rendered Democratic presidential candidates unelectable in most places south and west of Harvard Square.

I agree with parts of his comparison to the 1980s Democrats. But there has been a fundamental shift. The conservative movement brought on a real ideological re-alignment of our country. They did it with an incredible infrastructure, as Beinart notes:

In the past few years, Democrats have gotten pretty good at mimicking Republicans. They’ve been training college activists, establishing think tanks and, more generally, trying to turn their party into a movement — just what conservatives did during their years in the pre-Reagan wilderness. As John Podesta, head of the left-leaning Center for American Progress, told the New York Times Magazine a while back, "I describe myself as having a master’s degree in the right-wing conspiracy."

The Democrats had no such thing. What is going on as I see it, is the final stage of realignment, combined with dramtic successes of the GOP. I still don’t hear the Democratic Party having an agenda that is substantially different from that of the 70s and 80s. They have universal healthcare (completing the Great Society). They have withdrawal from a war (Iraq, not Vietnam). They have higher taxes and redistribution. They are more afraid of trade, and still afraid of Asian competition. (then Japan, now China) Instead of civil rights crusades, which they borrowed from religious leaders and Republicans, they pander to ethnic groups. Perhaps the most significant change since the 60s-80s is the shift of social liberals into the Democratic Party, today being organized primarily by the online left. For example, a person with this bio was almost certainly a Republican back in the day:

Bush was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. Bush was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

This is Prescott Bush, the President’s grandfather and former GOP US Senator from CT. Now this is clearly the bio of Democrat. On the other hand, religious traditionalists (although, on theological grounds this term is both incoherent and ahistorical) have renewed their involvement in politics as a driving force.

While I agree with the dour assessment of the GOP, I think that his analysis needs real correctives.

First, the GOP has (had?) succeeded for nearly 20 years at really critical points.  The Cold War was won. Welfare rolls were cut and poverty fell. Tax rates were cut nearly 50%. Inflation has fallen by nearly 10 times and is, by many estimates, a problem of the past. The standard of living has improved dramatically. (yes, I know about the stagnating wage, but can you really doubt that the life of someone on the median income is not dramatically better?) America is still the economic leader of the world. We are the only country that is willing to invest blood and treasure in our values around the world.  After 20 years of transforming America and the world, the GOP is running low on ideas. And the conservative movement is fighting yesterday’s wars.

Second, the leaders of the conservative movement are getting old. They have been fighting for 40+ years with tremendous success.  For example, Morton Blackwell was a floor leader in the convention fight that led to the Goldwater take over in the Young Republicans in 1963. He later was a co-founder of Heritage and the Leadership Institute. And while they have changed with the time, there is a limit to the amount that you can ask of these people.

Third, as the major bullet-points of the agenda have been implemented, the organizations, people, etc. that supported these changes have become transactional and, in some cases, corrupt.

There is no question that the conservative movement needs a renewal. It needs new ideas, new organizations, new people, and new technologies. This is a natural transition. The point is that a new group of leaders needs to step up. We need ideas, politics, etc. Most fundamentally, we need to start answering the questions of today and tomorrow, not refight Reagan’s fight. After all, nearly all of the great evils of his day are dead: the Soviets, confiscatory taxes, confiscatory inflation, outrageous moral decay, etc.

So my biggest problem is with this sentence from Beinart:

That’s the problem with a party becoming a movement. For decades, Republicans have built institutions that empower conservative activists and marginalize everybody else.

No. The problem with the movement is that its logic is spent. (for now)

Now, the Beinart’s medicine is that Republicans need a Republican Leadership Committee (recently set up) to be a Republican sister organization to the Democratic Leadership Committee:

Republicans should be taking notes. There is a Republican Leadership Council, but like other moderate Republican groups, it lacks intellectual heft and political muscle. Today’s GOP needs an organization strong enough to fight the hegemony of the Iowa caucuses, where hard-right activists dominate and centrist candidates go to die. It needs think tanks that offer serious answers on global warming and universal health care, where conservative orthodoxy is increasingly detached from political reality. And it needs to open up more primary voting to independents, the people who powered John McCain’s crusade against the party base in 2000.

Like the DLC, this could be an important transition strategy. However, the deeper problem is that we need to re-evaluate and re-configure our core issues so that they appeal to 60-70% of the American people. After all, and as I have noted, you cannot win elections without independents. Right now the Dems are winning because the GOP is not competing. "You can’t beat something with nothing."

It is time for a renewal. It is time to build something.

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Ideas for a new movement

August 9, 2007 – 12:22 pm

Patrick Ruffini takes up my challenge to put some meat on the ideological bones. While I agree with most, I would re-emphasize. First, we have a set of broad principles:

  • Win the War on Terror and advance human rights around the world
  • Embrace globalization and economic competitiveness as a way to improve the lives of Americans and others
  • Enhance American economic security, in the context of globalization, with new education, healthcare, and retirement options
  • Renew a faith in American institutions through enhanced openness and transparency.
  • Help parents raise their children in a safer, stronger environment.

Clearly, there will be a slurry of policies to achieve these. But here are some:

  • Foreground human rights in our international relations. This gives us moral high ground and, therefore, a lever over other people. This would include:
    • Raising human rights in China on a high level and at a grassroots level. Also gives us an additional lever to beat them with.
    • Continuing on the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and expanding to things like the ONE campaign
    • Increasing our public diplomacy massively to communicate this
    • The Union of Democracies, including much stronger relations with India, including as a counter-point to China.
  • Embrace the opportunities of global economic competition:
    • Increase skilled labor immigration to the United States. Probably also need more unskilled labor, but that’s more controversial.
    • Lower the corporate tax rate to be competitive
    • Massively increase skills-based educational opportunities at the state level. Stronger community colleges. Probably increase tax breaks for this kind of stuff.
    • Simplify the tax code. (Probably can’t do a fair tax if you are doing all these tax expenditures. But you might be able to just grant money to do some of these things)
  • Economic security. I think that we have to recognize that protectionism and healthcare concerns are grounded in concerns about economic insecurity. This is important because we need to have a credible economic story to offer the working class. Some ideas:
    • Allow people to buy into large national pools based on some community factor. Unions and corporations have these, but technology and economics are making it inevitable that economic actors come in smaller units. How about other communities like neighborhood associations, churches, professional associations, etc.?
    • Private accounts in retirement
    • Private accounts in education like New America Foundation’s Kids Savings Accounts.
    • Good healthcare deregulation.
  • Faith in American institutions:
    • Ethics reform in Congress
    • Redistricting reform (so voters pick their politicians rather than vice-versa)
    • Open APIs (essentially an updated FOIA)
    • Background checks for Congress (you need them to serve in the administration and handle classified information, but why not Congress? But who actually holds the information?)
  • Helping parents raise kids. Not sure what to put here.

Just some thoughts

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What’s a movement? Do we have one?

August 8, 2007 – 9:25 am

Patrick Ruffini wants a "Movement 2.0." While I agree with the sentiment, I want some specifics. Ruffini starts with:

A common thread is that the other shoe won’t likely drop until we have Hillary to unite against. I’d like to pick apart that assumption.

The basic assumption is sound. The online right was ascendant in the Clinton years, just as the online left was in the Bush years. Opposition galvanizes political movements, and not just online.

Is that a movement? Ruffini answers the question at the end:

And, finally, is there any way this gets started without Hillary Clinton? I’ve read the same history books, and I don’t think the New Right was built on personal animus towards JFK and LBJ — and it thrived in power in the ’80s.

As I have tried to point out repeatedly, the online left is really more about basic politics, constituencies, etc., rather than technology. Sure, the technology was innovative, but if you were designing a tech-savvy movement today, you would do what they did, just better. After all, if you started a business today, you wouldn’t use Windows 95, you’d buy Vista. (I recognize that using a desktop operating system analogy when talking about infrastructure, is poor, but it is comprehensible to everyone) What the online left did is:

  1. Organized a new voting bloc into activists. The voting bloc is upper-middle-class, mostly white, mostly social liberals. Often, they are former Republicans (Kos?) who left the GOP for particular reasons (war, social conservatism, secularism, etc.) and harp on those reasons.
  2. These people were organized using tools that are relatively more appropriate to their context. The New Right did this with direct mail, which was both innovative, but it also opened up avenues of political participation for people who couldn’t participate for a lack of time, mobility, etc.
  3. It organized around a certain ideological position. (opposition to Bush and, to some extent, the war) I shouldn’t go so far as to call this an idea so much as an organizing principle.

This has had a dramatic effect on the party. The voices have gotten even more rich and more white and WASP. (Terry McAuliffe, a Catholic, was replaced by the WASP Howard Dean, scion of an investment banking family from the upper east side)

So what would it mean to have a movement in the GOP? Certainly, we can develop tools to do our jobs better. The GOP is better at that than Democrats anyways. That’s just productivity, lowered transaction costs, etc. But it won’t be transformative until we can attach these tools to a constituency. What are our options?

  • New pro-war voters. Recall from the Elephant in the Mirror that 1/4 of the base is now basically pro-war voters. This would be a clear base for a Rudy Giuliani or John McCain nomination. (in the case of Giuliani, that is a base that could, perhaps, overcome his potential losses, in a primary at least, amongst social conservatives, another important part of the base. More on this later) While this is probably not a complete answer, as long as there is a war on terror — and perhaps diffuse security threats in the context of globalization and various clashes against modernity — this will probably be part of the answer.
  • There might be a special subset of these, people who politically came of age and conservative with 9-11. I bet an awfully large number of those are using Facebook…
  • Yesterday, one of the stand-ins at Andrew Sullivan’s blog argued that perhaps we could add African-Americans through railing on immigration. I, personally, find the idea both morally repugnant and unlikely to succeed. We want to get African-Americans back by increasing racist sentiment? Probably not a winner. Nevermind that we would lose our Hispanics, so it might not even add votes. And business wouldn’t tolerate a protectionist agenda.
  • Another option would be to continue to play for the working class, as Bush so incredibly succeeded in 2004, with "the party of capital" winning the white working class vote by 23%. The problem is that we lost a bunch in 2006, and we are unlikely to succeed in 2008. However, that would be the strategy of the Sams Club Republican advocates.
  • Another would be to try to organize and reach out to Hispanics.  Bush tried that with immigration, and the party revolted. (wrongly, in my opinion)
  • Another option would be the resurgence of a reformist movement in the GOP.  This would be a strategy for holding on to the upper-middle class and appealing to students. There would be process reforms like earmark reform, which is clearly a Republican issue, and ethics reform, which could be. There are more complicated parts like redistricting, which is a Republican issue in California, but Democratic in places where GOPers lose from it.  There’s actually a natural technological niche here with things like the Sunlight Foundation, Ruffini’s open API stuff, etc. There is a historical antecedent in the TR Progressive movement, and it doesn’t damage the existing coalition too much. Right now, this is a post-partisan issue rather than a partisan one. But once the Democrats take charge, it will quickly become a partisan one. It is already starting. In fact, we could use the cover of a Hillary Clinton presidency to co-opt the anti-Hillary anger into a constructive direction.

I am most inclined towards the last, but it is, perhaps, too post-partisan for many. I am sympathetic to the first, but I am not sure how it works politically.

So perhaps we need other ideas. But you can’t organize a movement without bodies or ideas. You can cheat, as the Democrats are doing, with anger directed at a person, but it only works for a little while. What are they going to do when they have Hillary Clinton to defend?

In the end, I could see a future clash in the party between potential reformers (Bobby Jindal and Charlie Crist) and future Sams Clubbers (Tim Pawlenty) over this question.

In the meantime, the technologists in the Republican Party either have to pick an answer or build tools and add productivity.

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Christian right dated Mitt, married Fred?

July 5, 2007 – 1:57 pm

Update: Since writing this, Glen Johnson at the AP has written on the whole Romney/porn story. He quoted Tony Perkins, the head of the Family Research Council. At the very least, this puts an exclamation point on my second point below. Clearly the Focus/FRC operation has engaged for Thompson and against Romney. A very, very bad day for Mitt Romney. And a very, very good one for Fred Thompson.

So, I read three things today that made a thunderclap in my head about the support of the Christian right in the 2008 GOP presidential nomination fight.

First, Focus on the Family ran a segment entitled, "Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, an outspoken critic of pornography, is called to task for his ties to Marriott hotels; a chain that makes money by providing porn to guests." In other words and in reality, James Dobson signed off on an attack on Mitt Romney, something that had not been done earlier. This story had been previously reported by CBN’s David Brody and had been covered by a lot of mainstream press. This is, however, the first time, other than CBN, that it made it into the Christian press. And you can’t beat the Christian radio networks for targeting devoted listeners.

Second, Hugh Hewitt pointed out that the new site Blogs for Fred was founded by Joe Carter, who writes Evangelical Outpost. Joe also works at the Family Research Council where his title is director of Web Communications. Now, I am sure that this is not on behalf of FRC, but….

Third, Dr. Al Mohler, President of Southern Baptist Seminary and an evangelical leader beyond the 30+ million Southern Baptists begins an online debate taking the position that "Mormonism is not Christianity."

My reading? Christian right leaders have found their man in Fred Thompson, after a long, but ultimately unsuccessful courtship with Mitt Romney. This reminds me of the 2003 and 2004 buttons and bumper stickers "Dated Dean, Married Kerry."

If more attacks from the right emerge against Romney, I think that it will be fair to say that this is a push for Thompson.

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Pandering and the movement

June 27, 2007 – 7:49 am

Patrick Ruffini makes an articulate defense of flip-flopping:

It’s easy to turn a blind eye if someone’s flip-flopping in my direction, but that’s not it. Rather, it’s that at some point, you’ve gotta dance with the ones that brung ya. Said another way, the positions Romney et al. are taking now, in the most important campaign of their lives, are the ones they’re stuck with — whether they like it or not.After his public conversion and being pilloried as a flip-flopper, do you seriously think that Romney can walk back his pro-life position without destroying himself? Does anyone actually think that Romney would be so stupid as to advance public funding of elections after running as the enemy of BCRA? If Romney runs and manages to get elected as a conservative, why would he revert to a non-winning position?

I think that there’s a lot of validity to that. Indeed, recently, I have slowed in my attacks on Mitt Romney’s flip-flopping. And, frankly, I have never been bothered so much by the shifting positions of Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani, with a couple of exceptions.  Partly because they are relatively few and far between.

On immigration it is clear to me that all of our top-tier candidates with the exception, possibly but probably not, of Thompson would sign a bill different only in mostly insignificant minutaea from the one that the Senate is debating now. Rudy would add a totally unworkable exit surveillance program that would fail. Romney’s position seems to be to oppose the bill in name, but support it in substance, and just play politics. But they would sign it. So, for me, these people are playing politics, quoting Jeb Bush, "pounding their chests," on the 2nd most important moral issue that will be faced in the 110th Congress. (I find blather about amnesty to be deeply, deeply un-American and un-Christian. And, like Huckabee once said, I see more than a little racism in it. But that’s a digression, and I just had to get it off my chest.)

But, my point wasn’t flip-flopping. It was pandering. So far, the strategy that the various campaigns are following seems pretty clear:

  1. Giuliani will basically keep his old position and shade it a little. On immigration, he would add more surveillance, but maintain the "amnesty". On abortion, he doesn’t think that "strict constructionist" means "pro-life", but you’ll get "strict constructionist" judges, perhaps just like McCain would build a fence?
  2. McCain will just tell you what he thinks, and you may not like it. Unless, it seems, your positions resemble those of an average American rather than a partisan activist.
  3. Romney will mince his words so finely that you won’t know what his saying. His problem is that the base can’t figure out if he is selling conservatism or the same sort of mushy, corporate centrism that he and his father spent their entire careers celebrating. (Gee whiz, sound like Bush, the other Harvard MBA President? How’d that work out for ya?)
  4. Thompson. Who knows? He is still playing games and winking at everyone. I don’t have a clear idea what his policies are other than a sort of channeling of common sense and anger at Washington that you can project your hopes on to.

Where are the promises and commitments that Patrick is talking about? Where’s the substance?

Returning to my point in the previous post, my concluding question was:

Is that a healthy way for a political party or a political movement to behave? What does this say about our intellectual class?

The answer may be "yes". Our party seems to operate by deciding on what we think and then figuring out good ways to communicate it. Perhaps our primaries do not select the "most electable conservative" so much as they select the best communicator of conservative ideas. This would give us a sort of beauty pageant style because we are looking for advertising expertise. Reagan was "the great communicator." Bush’s "compassionate conservatism" bottled up mostly old ideas in significantly new packaging, but he did add in education and immigration reform. And isn’t a beauty pageant really what this primary is looking like?

(In contrast, the Demcrats seem to operate by using issues to build coalitions. Sometimes, but rarely, this looks reasonable. More often it just looks unprincipled, or worse, a sort of legalized public corruption of using the treasury to buy votes by passing legislation. Unions get to raise prices on consumers to cover for the fact that their workers don’t have the skills to compete. Trial lawyers get their broken legal system to get rich off of. Minority "leaders", but not their constituents, get on-the-books and off-the-books bribes and subsidies, allowing them to maintain their political machines but provide little-to-no value to their constituents other than identity politics. And more, more, more spending for this or that group that "needs" help. Etc.)

This works if the people, or even the base, really likes the package. But what is Thompson’s, and to some extent McCain’s, real message? That the people don’t trust Washington anymore. The base doesn’t trust the party. Whether it is spending, immigration, or Iraq, they just don’t believe any of us, Republican or Democrat. But most of "the movement" in Washington seems to think that if we recycle the packaging, that should be enough. But isn’t that transparently false?

At the same time, the partisan or ideological press seems to be sitting it out or shilling for their candidate of choice. Has anyone mentioned that 3 of the 4 major candidates do not fit the criteria for a pro-life endorsement in most states? At the very least, that is an interesting article on the transformation of the pro-life movement. Has anyone pointed out how clearly politically silly it would be to push to repeal BCRA? (And how much money some Romney think that a corporation ought to be able to give to the RNC anyways? $100m? $200m?)  Why do we tolerate people people attacking closing a tax loophole by calling it a tax increase and then praising Romney’s not cutting taxes by saying at all the revenue measures just closed loopholes? Is it now acceptable to be politically and/or intellectually empty as long as you are saying the right words?

If the pandering was accompanied by honesty, then perhaps I could stomach it. But as policy expertise and politics have been replaced by punditry, what are we left with? Who knows, in our consumerist age, perhaps marketing is all it takes. Perhaps the inspiration for our candidates should be Tommy Hilfiger for whom the only difference between a golf player and a gang banger is how you cut the ads.

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Pandering better than authenticity?

June 26, 2007 – 10:51 am

Jennifer Rubin, over at Race42008, wrote a summary of the 2008 candidate responses to yesterday’s SCOTUS decision. At one point, she said:

Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani issued statements applauding the decision. Romney made no mention of prior support of campaign finance reform but his ringing endorsement of the Court’s decision was clearly welcome news to the conservative base which seems less concerned with consistency than with vocal support for their favored positions. Giuliani delayed comment until he had actually read the opinion and only after a review issued a careful statement making clear that on this point – issue ads in the heat of campaigns– he sided with the Supreme Court. As he did on partial birth abortion he seems to be taking reasoned steps which strengthen his position with conservatives without a wholesale repudiation of prior views.

Like support for comprehensive immigration reform, prior to running for President, all the major candidates were supportive of BCRA-style campaign finance reform. Indeed, Mitt Romney even went much, much farther. Now all but John McCain have backed away. And many conservatives pundocrats have demanded that he pander and flip-flop too.

So the pattern is clear. Run on some positions your whole life, then change them to win the nomination. Then what?

Is that a healthy way for a political party or a political movement to behave? What does this say about our intellectual class?

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