A Tale of Two Brackets

It is an axiom in presidential politics that national polls are meaningless (ask Rudy Giuliani) -- the states select party nominees, and the states elect the president.  However, since large slices of the political establishment buy into national polls, a candidate's standing there affects his or her ability to raise money and gain attention that can be translated into votes in the critical early primaries.

The national polls fall into something larger and deeper, though.  The rank a candidate holds in national polls is far less important than which of two brackets the candidate falls into: Bracket 1) the top three who net double digits, and Bracket 2) everybody else.

Over the weekend, Politico ran a story by Alex Isenstadt about the "failures" of Tea Party candidates. This article reads more like DC-based myopia. Movements don't transform at the federal level or statewide level first. Simply creating the network with the skills to execute huge campaigns is hard and takes time.

The place to go to see the successes are things like county parties, congressional district conventions, state legislative, and municipal seats. Those are races where a little bit of money and a little bit of energy go a huge way. They are also races with relatively low name ID. And they are the entry-level races for future leaders.

One of races that showed me that something was going on was the November election of Dan Halloran to the New York City Council. He is also the chairman of the New York chapter of the Republican Liberty Caucus. (recall that RLC is the branch of the Ron Paul movement that believes in integration with the GOP party infrastructure)

Similarly, anyone who has been following local party politics knows that tea party supporters and Ron Paul and RLC organizations have had a huge impact on local party organizations. I wrote about this in response to Ken Cuchinelli's crushing convention victory to become the Republican nominee for Virginia's Attorney General.

It is easy to miss what is going on in American politics and to the American right if you focus on Washington.  It isn't happening in Washington. What is happening will lead to the Washington-based leadership being overturned by a generation of new leaders.

After the March 2nd Texas primary, CNN proclaimed "Tea party changes tone, but not outcome of Texas primary." Politico's Jonathan Martin asks, "Is the tea party movement a paper tiger?" Locally, a San Angelo, Texas paper framed the result as "GOP incumbents held seats against Tea Party."

This is a classic straw man, and a dramatic misreading of the tea party's political objectives. 

Somehow, national media types got it into their heads that the tea party movement was the magic elixer for the kinds of unknown, underfunded and largely unskilled candidates who run in every race to claim the mantle of "tea party candidate" and knock off incumbents. A perusal of the Texas results at the Congressional level shows that the over/under for random, unknown unchallengers (a/k/a "tea party candidates") to incumbents was about 14%. This is basically the "none of the above" vote that materializes in every primary. When a prohibitive frontrunner has a semi-credible challenger, the frontrunner usually wins 70-30. Even when the challenger is unknown or unacceptable, 15 or 20 percent is doable. Convicted felon Lyndon LaRouche got that in some Democratic primaries against Bill Clinton in '96. 

Beyond that, the subtext is also that the tea party empowers uniquely conservative candidates, with Rubio/Crist as the model for every primary in the country. 

Again, no. 

It's clear that there is a lot more primary activity than there was in '06 and '08, largely because the prospects of getting elected as a Republican this year are so good. And in those primaries, proclaiming oneself a "tea party candidate" is about as fashionable as proclaiming oneself a "social media expert."

Going state by state and district by district, the case for conservative ascendancy in primaries is muddled at best. For every Rubio/Crist, there is a Mark Kirk walk-in-the-park. The '08 primaries showed that Republican primary voters are if nothing else pragmatic. 

A few basic misconceptions underlie the expectation that the more conservative the primary candidate, the better their chances are at winning. And the main one is that conservatives are uniquely advantaged this year because the tea parties show the party is moving right. 

This notion would require one to believe that the grassroots base of the GOP -- not its leaders, but its base -- was somehow un-conservative prior to '09 and '10. There's no evidence for that. Fueled by Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, 1994 was a conservative year. In fact, 1994 probably marked the end of the shift in the ascendancy of conservatives over moderates in Republican grassroots politics, a shift that started with Goldwater. Ever since '94, the ideological change within the Republican Party has been marginal at best.

What has changed in the last two years, is that Republicans are now unshackled from having to defend the Bush Administration and the mood of the country, and inside the Republican Party in particular, has grown more solidly anti-establishment. Those changes alone can explain the emergence of the tea party movement. 

While the case for conservative ascendancy in primaries is muddled, what isn't muddled is this: run as the milquetoast candidate of the arrogant establishment, and you lose. 

Practically every electorally relevant example points in this direction. 

NY-23? Check. 

Florida Senate? Check.

Massachusetts? Check. 

Texas Governor? Check. 

In Texas, the tea party candidate was not Debra Medina. It was Rick Perry, whose political fortunes were revived around the Tax Day tea parties last year. That points to a movement that is much more broadly relevant than the marginal nutjob candidacies that media is holding up as an example of the movement's failures. I know that one can point to Medina strength among the organizers -- and I've certainly played up the role Ron Paul's brigades have played in that effort -- but there is a convincing case that the rank-and-file attendees and their compatriots who followed from the radio dial or Fox News were solidly with Perry. And that's who matters when delivering votes in a primary, as opposed to a straw poll. 

But more importantly, the movement was aligned against Kay Bailey Hutchison, who barely disguised her sense of entitlement at holding not one, but two statewide offices. Strike one was trying to elbow aside Perry with a blatant "It's my turn" appeal not to run again, and then going ahead with a challenge. Strikes two and three were the Texas Two-Step around resigning her office, which, quelle surprise, will likely end up with Hutchison holding on to public office against her word. 

The KBH fall is of a piece with the staggering fall of "All About Charlie" Crist, who ran on a sense of entitlement before he finished the job voters elected him to do. Only a few words need to be said about Charlie Crist: pride before the fall. 

And NY-23 was a similar case of an arrogant establishment attempting to oppose its will against that of primary voters, and getting pwned in the process. 

Do you see a pattern here? 

Yes, each of these cases was one of a "conservative" beating a "moderate" -- but each also had the essential ingredient of a particularly noxious stench of self-entitlement on the part of the losers. 

As ever, public servants need to place the emphasis on the latter part of that title: servant. Those advantaged by a long career of winning elections need to be particularly humble and even servile to the will of the electorate, especially in this environment. Votes cannot be assumed. They must be earned. 

There is no easy template for tea party victory in a Republican primary. Saying you are Marco Rubio does not make you Marco Rubio. Rubio's success is due as much to Crist's arrogance and the movement-like aura Rubio has been able to build around himself as it is to a simple ideological contrast. Those whose job it is to run and win elections quickly learn that attributes -- those pesky personal qualities like honesty, integrity, intelligence, and authenticity -- matter a whole lot more than issues, even in primaries. This is not diminish the importance of principle but to acknowledge the reality that it alone is not enough, and having a good, plausible candidate, campaign, and message still matters a whole lot. 

The Los Angeles Times reports today:

The fate of healthcare legislation turns on the endgame skills of two Democrats who bring vastly different assets to the task: President Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi....Under the Democrats' strategy, the House would pass the Senate's version of the bill. Then both chambers would approve changes under the budget reconciliation process, which could pass the Senate with a simple 51-vote majority. Democrats hope to finish by the end of the month.

 This is a complete delusion. In the immortal words of Jesse Montgomery III, "No and then."

There will never be any reconciliation process. The White House is desperate for any bill to pass so that they can then immediately pivot to anything else (probably jobs). No intelligent person believes, that after the House passes the Senate bill, that there will be any serious push to pass a reconciliation bill. It would be the exact same as completely starting over on health care. And the White House has been very adamant that that is the last thing they plan to do.

The White House is trying to frame this "last" push for health care reform as an up-or-down vote on health care. But we already have an up-or-down vote set up in the House. The Senate is irrelevant. Conservatives shouldn't even entertain the possibility of the Senate passing a reconciliation bill until that bill exists. And right now, it doesn't. Not in the House. Not in the Senate. Nowhere.

So when the President campaign for "his plan" across the country this week, be sure to ask him, "Dude, where's my health care bill?"

As I've noted on two separate appearances on the Rachel Maddow Show, the Alabama Tea Party movement clearly hasn't been usurped by the Republican Party.  Right now, Tea Party activists in north Alabama are leading a bipartisan fight over House Minority Leader John Boehner's scheduled appearance in Huntsville to support recent party swapper Parker Griffith.

This is a bold idea from Utah Republicans.

We propose a modest experiment. As Utah state leaders, we are greatly concerned about the unprecedented expansion of the federal government over many years, and the enormous debt levels being left to our children and grandchildren. We believe the federal government is attempting to do far more than it has the capacity to execute well. [...]

We'd like to relieve some of their burden. We don't believe that 535 members of Congress and the president can educate our children, provide health care, pave our roads and protect our environment as well as the nation's 8,000 state legislators and tens of thousands of local officials.

So please, let us help. Let's select a few programs -- say, education, transportation and Medicaid -- that are managed mostly by Utah's government, but with significant federal dollars and a plethora of onerous federal interventions and regulations.

Let Utah take over these programs entirely. But let us keep in our state the portion of federal taxes Utah residents pay for these programs. The amount would not be difficult to determine. Rather than send this money through the federal bureaucracy, we would retain it and would take full responsibility for education, transportation and Medicaid -- minus all federal oversight and regulation. [...] [T]oday the federal government operates like an old-fashioned mainframe computer, pushing one-size-fits-all mandates out to the states. We believe there is value in intelligent decentralization.

This would be a great agenda for the Tea Party activists.  It combines limited federal government with increased State, local and personal responsibility.  For that matter, it should be a great experiment for the empiricists and policy wonks - both left and right - who want better data on which systems work and which do not.

Let's hope some Republicans will have the courage of their convictions to put political capital behind this idea.  This would be a good agenda item for Tea Party activists to demand of Republicans.

The video speaks for itself. Paul Ryan exposes the accounting fraud used to make the Senate Bill "deficit neutral".

[Blogger's Note: I began this sometime last fall before COP15, but lost track before the holidays; despite my time management ineptitude, these topics are still as timely as ever.]

James Murdoch, son and heir-apparent to conservative media magnate Rupert Murdoch, argued near the end of 2009 in the Washington Post that conservatives and conservationists make natural allies...or at least they ought to. It's a refreshing read, too, because with both major parties playing Alinsky politics it's easy to forget that, aside from the sum of our available natural resources, our future economic growth and cultural-historical legacy are on the line. In the interest of full disclosure, I have been a fisherman since I could hold a rod and reel, I'm a habitual recycler-reuser-reducer, I really appreciate having had the good fortune to visit some really cool places during my short time thus far on the planet, and I firmly believe that there's an economic opportunity here - involving the free market - that we don't (or shouldn't) want to miss.

Follow me: author David Pink argued in one of his books that right-brained people will rule the world one day. Certainly we can't get along without the analytical types, but it's the creative ones - the technological innovators - that have ushered man through various epochs across time and which policy makers seem to agree are the backbone of the American economy (this, by the way is true; small firms' marginal costs of production are lower than those of larger firms). Pink's argument goes something like this (and I'm paraphrasing here, not directly quoting):

Raise your hand if you own an iPod.

Lots of you? Good. Keep your hands up.

Now, keep your hands up if you knew you wanted one before they ever had been invented.

No more hands? I didn't think so.

How could you possibly know you'd want a thing before it came to be? It's the people thinking about what you want before you know you want it who really transform society - these are the people that reshape and redefine paradigms in a society.

This argument extends to green products, technology, and sustainable services. Glenn Beck may have assassinated Teddy Roosevelt's character on live television at CPAC this year, but like my good friend J.R. Lind (@jrlind on Twitter) at Nashville Post Business once reminded me, sustainability is good business. Something tells me ol' Teddy would be awfully proud of today's Republican Party if they could find a way to get on board with sustainability-as-economic-policy ethos. It's just going to require re-framing the debate to some degree.

Personally, I liked the way President Obama put it in his State of the Union address:

I don’t like the way the President and progressive Democrats are going about shaping and “solving” the problem…but I liked the way the President put it: whether or not the science is settled is not the chief issue here – there’s an economic opportunity to be had, and in the wake of an unemployment around 10%, it’s time for the Congress to act. We on the Right agree that bad science should not inform policy, but it’s equally important to remember that policy activists and elected officials are NOT scientific experts (unless by coincidence), and to paraphrase Dr. Richard A. Muller, PhD (Physics) the falsification of one area of data does not discredit an entire theory en masse. The Right is terrified that going green will mean capitulation to a radical socialist agenda [sic]; the most devout opponents of anthropogenic warming theory will reject any and all green movements. Of course, new regulatory schemes should be opposed, but it’s possible to look at conservation through our own lens.

Republicans won a major concession in the State of the Union, when President Obama included nuclear energy in his energy strategy. Nuclear power plants will help provide safe, renewable energy, and will create some jobs. Wind and solar will take a similar nibble out of the jobless numbers – but wind turbines are expensive and inefficient, and solar panels will get more expensive before they get cheaper.

The Right needs to go further. Falling back on small government and low tax rhetoric, too, simply won’t fill the bill – the average American doesn’t take our high polemic seriously anymore (beyond sharing our disdain for the sitting Democratic government – we should recognize that this could only be temporary). Republicans have plenty of momentum in their favor, and, like Rep. Paul Ryan, can seize this opportunity before sliding backward into campaign mode this year. Here’s the good news: it’s entirely possible to be green and pro-business all at once.

The government contracting apparatus provides the perfect setting for a pilot program to see the benefits of sustainability, with minimal impacts to the private sector. Last fall, President Obama signed an executive order establishing sustainability goals for greening up facilities and processes across the federal government, including prime and subcontractor goods, facilities, and practices. Contracting and procurement reform in this area – since it has to take place anyway in order for businesses to comply with as-yet undetermined standards and definitions – is our chance to establish a tiered, incentive-based approach to green business. Rather than allowing the federal government to bludgeon businesses everywhere by standing up new regulatory apparatuses with cap-and-trade schemes, the Right should prop up a reformed procurement system which gives preference in the awards process to contractors who meet certain tiered sustainability goals.

This is also a nice way for traditionally pro-Big Business Republicans to throw a nice-sized bone to small businesses, since the marginal costs of pollution abatement are lower for small firms than they are for large firms; the costs of risk-taking in green innovation are also smaller. The conclusion of this policy approach is a set of sustainability practices in the contracting environment (no pun intended) which can be voluntarily extended into commercial markets by companies who see real long-term benefits from sustainability in procurement space – just like John Q. Public who never knew how awesome the iPod would be before it was invented. Small businesses thrive, costs are lowered, small and large businesses collaborate, and the government is largely kept out of interfering with commercial markets – we merely reform a legacy process for the purpose of achieving a policy objective that has several fringe benefits. There are long-term political benefits to this strategy as well, as there is clearly a well-expressed demand for green products and investments/practices.

We – and certainly I – are a long way off from having an exhaustive, comprehensive approach for going green, framed within the context of our own ideological narratives. But it’s not altogether impossible with a little bit of creative thinking. We don’t have to agree on the science of global warming, but we should probably start from the same basic assumption that sustainability is good for business. Finally, we need to remember that we have a real chance to wrestle this issue away from the Left, but we have to act quickly and intelligently, and remember that committing to this policy arena is not capitulation if we come to the table with our own detailed approaches. Here’s hoping we have a champion on to take the reins and lead the Right into a new era.

Cross-posted at IntelligencePlease.com

Young Conservatives need a better publicist, or should I say a better blogger? For far too long the political parties have taken us for granted. Most assume we won’t vote, and even if we did, we’re sure to be Democrats. Republicans seemed content to win older demographics and hope that we would see the red-tinged light as we aged.

After years of being the red-headed step child of politics 2008 was our coming out party. Unfortunately, Republicans had very little to celebrate. The first to truly capture the importance of Twitter, Facebook, and iPhones, the Obama campaign created an excitement amongst Millennials. Again, the Republican Party seemed willing to play the waiting game, confident they would win young adults’ hearts and minds as they grew older.

After a weekend at the Conservative Political Action Conference it was clear Republicans have seen the light on the importance of young adults. As one regular CPAC attendee said,

“I’ve been coming to these for years. This used to be a convention of blue hairs; now it has youthful energy.”

But CPAC is merely the latest symptom of a viral growth in youth support for the conservative movement. Just two years ago, at the height of Obama’s popularity, the Democratic advantage in party affiliation among young voters reached 62% to 30%. This 32% margin was reflective of Obama margin of victory in the 2008 presidential election in which he defeated John McCain amongst young adults by a whopping 68% to 30% margin.

But the tides are turning. A recent Pew Research study found that,

“The “Millennial Generation” of young voters played a big role in the resurgence of the Democratic Party in the 2006 and 2008 elections, but their attachment to the Democratic Party weakened markedly over the course of 2009.”

Beyond the short term benefit of picking up votes in the crucial 2010 midterm elections, the shift represents the ability for Republicans to grow the next generation of conservatives. Contrary to the “wait till their older” approach, studies show that a person’s party identification, once formed, remains remarkably stable. As the influential study “The American Voter” found,

“Persons who identify with one of the parties typically have held the same partisan tie for all or most of their adults lives.”

This surprising truth bears out in the course of history. For instance as political scientist Norman Orstein writes,

“All the research done on the dramatic Democratic realignment of the 1930s shows that the key was young voters, coming of age as the Depression hit, influenced deeply by the contrast between Hoover and Roosevelt . . . those voters became lifelong Democrats.”

A similar trend happened in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan captured the hearts of young adults with a patriotic excitement that extolled American exceptionalism. Those same voters played an enormous part in the Republican Revolution of 1994 and remain the Republican party’s strongest age cohort.

The stability of young voter’s ideology combined with Obama’s landslide victory should have spelled long term trouble for the Republican brand. But we’ve bounced back. As the Pew Research study shows,

29 percent of Millennials describe themselves as liberals, 28 percent say they are conservatives and 40 percent identify themselves as moderates.

This snapshot ignores the momentum that is definitely on the side of conservatives. By focusing on issues that resonate with younger adults – small government and lower spending – Republicans have a chance to create a base of support for years to come. The enthusiasm is there. Spending a day walking the halls of CPAC would tell you that. More importantly, walking the halls of a college campus would tell you that. College Republicans have seen an enormous uptick and support. As a College Republican leader told me this past week, “Barack Obama has been the best thing for recruitment we’ve seen.” Beyond being a divisive figure, Obama has engaged young people in a way other presidents haven’t. But political engagement is only half the equation and College Republicans have cultivated that newfound interest into conservative momentum. We are not only the voice of young conservatives…we are future of the party.

- Brandon Greife, Political Director of the College Republican National Committee

A group made up of some of the biggest names in contemporary conservatism got together a few days ago and crafted what they are calling the “Mount Vernon Statement,” a manifesto of sorts meant to give direction to today’s conservative movement. Put succinctly, it fails to fill the bill.

Taken as a whole this statement is fine as a short history lesson. It explains pretty clearly what the founders had wrought when their basic work was done with the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. But as a statement of principles that might guide today’s discussion I do not think the letter works.