This observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.

Here is how Roy frames his preferred approach to reducing spending:

The ideal candidate, in fact, combines thoughtful policy proposals, persistence in the face of partisan opposition, wisdom in picking the most productive political battles, and the ability to persuade moderates and liberals to join the cause.

This sounds good in theory – I might phrase it rather differently, but that’s not far from how I’d formulate the best way to get major legislation passed – but the problem, as I have noted previously, is a persistent GOP failure to follow through on doing this to reduce federal spending.

In response to my point that Republicans have only once (in the case of welfare reform pushed by Newt Gingrich in the mid-1990s, accompanied by reductions in federal spending as a percentage of GDP) ever actually made any headway in doing anything of the sort, what does Roy choose as his example of how his preferred approach would work in practice? Obamacare. I swear I am not making this quote up:

Did President Obama loudly campaign for single-payer health care in order to pass Obamacare? Quite the opposite: he sought to reassure voters that nothing would change for them. What succeeds in politics is to persuade moderates of the moderation of your positions, while laying the groundwork for longer-term structural reform.

The most cynical Democratic partisan would have difficulty coming up with a more tendentious retelling of the passage of Obamacare. As anyone who followed politics in 2009-10 could remind you, Obamacare was passed on a strict party-line vote, in an act of pure political muscle over the objections of an outraged citizenry, via a combination of procedural shenanigans, obfuscation of the contents of the bill, and bald-faced bribery. Nor did Obama obtain the large majorities needed to enact this show of political force by the methods Roy suggests; his victory in 2008 was triggered primarily by a financial crisis having nothing to do with health care, by public fatigue with his predecessor having nothing to do with health care, and by appeals to the “historic” nature of his racial identity as a candidate having nothing to do with health care.

There are three basic models for pushing major legislation. At one end of the spectrum is cooperation, which happens when both sides of the aisle have a common goal, and must put aside partisanship and mutual suspicion to work towards it. At the other – represented by Obamacare – is annihilation, which happens when one side wants something the other cannot possibly agree to, and wins by gaining sufficient power to make changes without the other party’s consent (this is not necessarily improper – elections have consequences – but it becomes problematic when fleeting majorities are used to enact permanent changes). But a lot of legislative business falls in the middle ground: negotiation, what happens when the two sides have opposing interests but it is not impossible to move one or the other off their intractable opposition.

Roy seems to believe that reductions in federal entitlement and other spending can be achieved through cooperation, but this has no basis whatsoever in reality. Anything that reduces federal spending is diametrically opposed to the interests of the Democratic Party. Oh, you may be able to find the odd Democrat willing to offer bipartisan cover, but look at how the party responds to Ron Wyden’s tepid efforts at outreach:

[H]is critics – and they are legion in Democratic ranks – say he’s a political opportunist promoting himself at the expense of the party and its values.

Asked if there was frustration among Senate Democrats with Wyden over Medicare, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told POLITICO: “I’ve heard that sentiment expressed.”

But he quickly added that he’s also heard “some say that initiating a bipartisan conversation that will preserve Medicare is worthwhile. So let’s see if the Ryan-Wyden approach meets that test.”

Privately, the criticism is more biting.

“Democrats believe in Medicare and, rather than bolster it, Wyden undermined a great issue for us all so he could grab a couple of headlines,” one furious Democratic source said. “Just embarrassing.”

At the opposite end, I would agree with Roy that annihilation of the Democrats’ power of resistance on Medicare reforms is unlikely and not even necessarily desirable, as the example of Obamacare suggests how unstable a program can be when the opposition party, backed with majority public support, remains dedicated to overturning the result.

That leaves negotiation, which is ordinarily how the sausage gets made in Washington and most state capitols: one side has the votes to get close to the goal line, then uses a combination of public pressure, threats and inducements to drag out enough bipartisan support to get a bill passed. Roy’s analysis, in addition to ignoring history and the current situation on Capitol Hill, fails to grasp the essentials of how a negotiation works.

As anyone who has ever participated in a negotiation knows, you bring the other side to the table by having positions that are both strong (you stand firmly on something clear and defensible) and credible (it’s believable that you would go to war for your position). Maybe you get everything you want, but if you don’t, standing on principle is a position of strength. It’s a truism of political brinksmanship that candidates who campaign on principle deliver compromise; candidates who campaign on compromise deliver squat. If you advertise your willingness to take a deal, any deal, you get what George H.W. Bush got in 1990: the tax hikes Democrats wanted, and a bunch of illusory promises in return about meaningless budgetary firewalls. The historically minded will remember that it was this deal that catapulted Newt Gingrich to prominence as a critic of Bush’s betrayal of his “read my lips” pledge.

A candidate who is unwilling to make the case for a principled position on the campaign trail is unlikely to convince anyone in a negotiation that he will stand on that position – he will get rolled the same way Mitt Romney got rolled in the health care negotiations in Massachusetts. Which is precisely how my argument about trust relates to the current presidential race. On the one hand, you have Newt Gingrich, who has a record of actually accomplishing entitlement (welfare) reform; Newt had his successes and his failures negotiating with the wily Bill Clinton, but he at least has has the experience of not coming away from the bargaining table empty-handed. (As Erick has noted, George Stephanopoulos wrote in his memoir that the Clinton White House was within 24 hours of caving to Newt on the government shutdown when Bob Dole caved and cut a deal for a separate peace.) Newt has been willing to talk about his substantive proposals on the stump, and despite the many reasons why a Newt campaign seemed implausible, his audiences have come away impressed by his substantive policy detail.

On the other hand, you have Mitt Romney, who campaigns in gassy generalities, recites his favorite patriotic songs on the stump, is quick to attack from the left any opponent who has the temerity to suggest entitlement reforms, and promises his audience:

“I understand a few of you here are on Medicare. Is that true? [Laughter]

“That being the case, I hope you tell your friends who always fear that Republicans somehow might go after Medicare. You can tell them a couple things. Number one: We will never go after Medicare or Social Security, we will protect those programs. But also, you make sure and tell them this. There’s only one president in history that’s cut Medicare 500 billion dollars. And that’s Barack Obama. And guess what he did it for? He did it to pay for Obamacare?

“So if I’m president, I will protect Medicare and Social Security for those that are currently retired or near retirement, and I’ll make sure we keep those programs solvent for the next generations coming along. We will protect America’s seniors and America’s young people with programs that are designed to keep them well and safe. And I will make sure that we protect Medicare and Social Security.”

This is not exactly how you build a mandate for entitlement reform.

Roy somehow manages to survey this landscape, ignore the actual records in office of Romney and Gingrich, ignore both candidates’ behavior on the trail, and pronounce that “[o]f the four Republican Presidential candidates who remain standing, the one who most comprehensively lacks the[] qualities [needed to accomplish spending cuts and entitlement reform] is Newt Gingrich.” Roy seems to have forgotten his own critique of Ron Paul, a critique I agree with: “Ron Paul votes against everything, knowing that he can, because his votes are inconsequential. Indeed, Paul actively detracts from true entitlement reform by claiming that we can balance the budget solely by slashing defense.” But even that aside, the fact that Romney is unwilling to sell voters on the need for, or benefits from, entitlement reform is proof positive that he is the candidate least likely to muster any popular consensus for anything other than massive tax hikes to prop up the system. At least Gingrich has a record of getting things done on Capitol Hill, a realistic sense of how to do so, and a willingness to take his case to the voters.

Roy’s proposed recommendation for conservative voters unwilling to trust Romney’s approach is to talk about Mitch Daniels, who is not even running. I like Mitch Daniels and respect what he’s done in Indiana, although I soured on him as a presidential candidate because he didn’t seem interested in running (and ultimately didn’t run), because he had a tin ear for major factions of the party such as social conservatives, and because his monotone delivery seemed unlikely to keep the public engaged in listening to him. If we’re talking hypothetical candidates, it may be my Northeastern-Irish-Catholic-lawyer speaking, but I’d prefer the approach of Chris Christie, who tells hard truths bluntly and confrontationally and wins the public’s respect by his willingness – like that of Newt, and unlike Romney – to engage in substantive argument about both policy and political philosophy.

(You don’t need Christie’s eloquence to follow this model; Scott Walker has gotten a lot done in Wisconsin by a willingness to take large political risks and the iron resolve to back them up at the negotiating table).

What’s more, Christie illustrates the real difference between getting significant reforms passed in a naturally red-leaning environment and a more politically difficult climate. The hardball of Washington today, where annihilation has made cooperation nearly extinct, is far more comparable to the challenges of governing a state as fractious and divisive as New Jersey than it is a state that has voted for a Democrat presidential candidate just twice since 1940. There are many things to like about restrained leaders of the past – but as politics has become more combative, and the press more willing to peddle falsehoods for their favored side, their utility on the national stage has decreased. I’m uninterested in a candidate who brings a white paper to a gun fight.

I have no doubt that Roy believes, in good faith, that simply embracing thoughtful written proposals and working with the same old personnel is sufficient to bring about bipartisan compromise in the nation’s best interests. But six decades of American political history argue that his solutions are doomed to grief without significant changes in the GOP’s willingness to do political combat to restrain spending. Anti-Establishment voters may not always have candidates equal to that task, but they nonetheless represent the last, best hope for forcing our political system to face the crisis at hand before it is too late.

The most sustained critique comes from sometime National Review contributor Avik Roy, writing in Forbes. Roy calls Redstate a “bastion of populist conservatism,” which is true even if I’m not exactly anybody’s idea of a populist. He says that Ben Domenech is “one of the best conservative writers on health care issues,” which is certainly true, and faults the rest of us at RedState for not developing “serious proposals for entitlement reform,” in contrast to NR’s columnists – which should be unsurprising to Roy if he thinks about the fact that most of us have day jobs, to say nothing of the fact that RedState’s principal role is activism rather than think-tankery.

Roy seems most upset at my references to National Review, which is a shame, because as I said I have nothing against NR, and I agree with Roy that NR as a whole still provides an awful lot of good punditry, analysis and advocacy (and I remain a big fan of many of its long-time writers); I was just trying to explain precisely why so many people on the Right were agitated at it. In any event, Roy misses some crucially important points that undermine his entire argument.

To begin with, Roy completely ignores everything that has happened on Capitol Hill since, well, ever. There’s a reason I started by citing the Boehner-McConnell divide as the front lines of the current schism, yet Roy doesn’t even bother to discuss the current dynamics in Congress, let alone the long and dolorous history of efforts to get Congress to restrain the growth of spending, entitlements and the size of government.

This is related to the larger failing in Roy’s analysis, which is to equate having position papers with being serious about reform:

National Review has been the leading source of detailed conservative proposals and thoughtful conservative opinion on entitlement reform. People like Yuval Levin and Jim Capretta, who write regularly for NR, have effectively dedicated their careers to the cause of entitlement reform.

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The rhetoric of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum may be less inflammatory, but it is backed up with real proposals that stand a chance of getting passed by an actual Congress.

As anyone with a passing familiarity with Republican politics over the past four or five decades knows, conservative magazines and think tanks have been making detailed entitlement reform proposals for most of those years, and Republicans running for offices high and low have been running on platforms of reducing the size and cost of government for just as long. And then nothing happens.

That’s why Congress’ battles over the debt ceiling and related issues provide such a potent example. Basically all Republican Senators profess to be in favor of smaller government, and yet so few are willing to go to the barricades to make it a reality. Now, I’m a realist – there are limits to how much we could expect even a completely united GOP to bring home as long as Obama is the President and Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader. But the repeated spectacle of leading pundits and Beltway Republicans tut-tutting Boehner and company for even trying to use their leverage to exact real concessions is a sign that the message Republican voters have been sending is not getting through to everyone.

(I will leave aside for the moment the detailed arguments over policy alternatives, except to make the obvious point that, to the extent Roy is framing of the debate as one about deficits and how to “fix Medicare” and “compromise with the dastardly forces of statism” with plans like Ryan-Wyden rather than how to reduce the overall footprint of public spending in relation to the private sector economy, he is illustrating rather than responding to my argument.)

The related point here – and one that says much about why RedState has put so much energy into intra-party primary battles rather than the production of white papers – is that personnel is policy. The ideas are already there; what is lacking is the necessary corps of people with the will to fight for them. As the other presidential contenders have faded by now, in the case of the presidential race I’ll focus at this point on Romney (the candidate who unquestionably has drawn the most loyal support from elected officials, NR editorials and other spots on the commanding heights of Republican politics) and Gingrich, who I previously identified as a sort-of-Outsider (albeit not as fundamentally as Rick Perry) and who has (like Perry) drawn a disproportionate amount of scorn from people who you might think of as allies to his cause.

It’s true that if you plow through Romney’s gazillion-point plans you will find things worth fighting for. The problem is convincing anybody that Mitt Romney, of all people, would actually go to the mattresses to get them done. Besides noting that “Romney is saddled, as we know, with Romneycare,” Roy gives the element of leadership short shrift, yet it is at the center of the disquiet with Romney and his actual record in office. It’s why it is troubling to see talk from Romney backers about replacing rather than repealing Obamacare, and positively alarming to see senior Romney advisor Norm Coleman say

“We’re not going to do repeal. You’re not going to repeal Obamacare… It’s not a total repeal… You will not repeal the act in its entirety, but you will see major changes, particularly if there is a Republican president… You can’t whole-cloth throw it out. But you can substantially change what’s been done.”

Gingrich, as I have noted before, is an odd fit with the anti-Establishment movement he now finds himself leading, not only because he is so long inside the Beltway and so steeped in its ways (albeit with a nearly endless list of enemies there) but because he’s not fundamentally a small-government guy. But the anti-Establishment, Outsider, Tea Party movement appears to be rapidly consolidating behind him as a vessel to stop Romney for reasons that are hardly irrational: Newt is a fighter and an iconoclast by temperament and a powerful spokesman for conservative ideas, but he’s also a guy with an actual record. As Newt loves to note, the 1996 welfare reform is the closest we’ve come to actual government-shrinking entitlement reform in living memory. Newt spearheaded a national reform that took millions of Americans off the welfare rolls, cutting caseloads in half by 2000; Romney created an entitlement to add about 400,000 people to the taxpayer-subsidized pool in Massachusetts alone. And, as Josh Kraushaar notes, Newt on the stump is a good deal more substantive in his presentation than Romney. (This is one reason why Newt won out over Rick Perry, an experienced and knowledgeable governor who was never able to communicate his accomplishments and understanding of public policy to voters). Voters may be looking skeptically at campaign promises as opposed to records in office, but they very rationally view a candidate’s willingness to verbalize strong positions as a necessary predicate to carrying them out.

Roy goes on to say:

Conservatives have a well-earned suspicion of anything that comes out of the Northeast, and of Ivy League-educated coastal elites in general. The thinking goes that, since most Northeasterners and Ivy Leaguers are liberals, the so-called conservatives who come out of these places must be liberals also. Conversely, conservatives who come out of red states must be true conservatives.

As a lifelong New Yorker and Wall Street lawyer with an Ivy League law degree, I may not be the best target for Roy’s caricature, but even aside from that, it’s pretty clear that most Tea Partiers understand perfectly that the ability to fight for real change is not about what state you come from but what you do to move the needle in the place you serve. Chris Christie, though basically a moderate Republican, has become a cult hero for his willingness to play hardball with public employee unions; ditto Scott Walker in the Land of LaFollette. I’m hardly alone among current Newt supporters in having once backed Rudy Giuliani for President, because Rudy made major, lasting changes in New York City’s liberal governance that made the city a better place to live – Rudy may have unraveled as the 2008 campaign wore on, but his status for much of 2007 as the national polling frontrunner based on his actual accomplishments in office implies a more nuanced view of the movement that has now swung, at least for the moment, behind a Ph.D. historian.

The point of my essay was not to denounce anyone, but to explain the history and depth of the current popular distrust on the Right of leaders who seem unwilling to lead. The battle to restrain runaway government spending is so much smoke and mirrors unless the people who profess to support it in word are dedicated to it in deed. No wealth of position papers, endorsements and Power Point presentations can demonstrate that. Voters and activists who have figured this out are rightly skeptical of those who don’t seem to “get it”. And they are more than willing to embrace flawed champions – even such a creature of the Beltway as Newt Gingrich – if they demonstrate the willingness to actually do something to stop the runaway train of federal spending. Every time some Beltway figure calls Newt or some Tea Party candidate crazy, voters think again, “he might actually be crazy enough to upset some applecarts to get things done.”

The world of the Right is not divided into pure heroes and villains on this issue, and more than a few people and institutions with as many or more accomplishments in the movement as Newt Gingrich have fallen out of favor (as Newt himself did more than a decade ago), for growing too comfortable with an overgrown Washington – they’ve lived long enough to see themselves become the villain, and the voters have moved on.

Because it’s not about heroes and villains. This is democratic self-government, not theater. It’s about results.

It’s worth noting here the raw numbers. While the categories don’t perfectly describe the candidates or their supporters, it has been generally true that Romney and Jon Huntsman have appealed to the more moderate Republican primary voters; Gingrich, Santorum, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to the more conservative voters; and Ron Paul to the libertarian voters. What we see in the first three states is that in South Carolina, as in Iowa, the conservative vote was a majority:

Iowa: Conservatives 53%, Moderates 26%, Libertarians 21%
New Hampshire: Moderates 56%, Libertarians 23%, Conservatives 19%
South Carolina: Conservatives 57%, Moderates 28%, Libertarians 17%

There will be other states – possibly including delegate-rich California and New York – that will more nearly resemble New Hampshire’s profile; there will be states where Newt is not on the ballot (Virginia), where Romney has a home-field advantage (Michigan, Massachusetts, Utah), or where the confluence of caucuses and a large Mormon population favors Romney (Nevada). But at the end of the day, regardless of desperate efforts to prop up Santorum, it is hard to see any of those structural/organizational factors overcoming the core question: either Newt will unite the conservative vote, or Romney will have to earn a share of it away from him. Which has always been how we needed to pick a nominee. However you describe the GOP “Establishment,” our nominee can and should only be one whom the primary voters – however reluctantly – have decided after reflection and stress-testing to nominate.

Florida won’t be the last test of this, given Romney’s money and organization advantages there, but it will be the first serious one. In Churchill’s phrase, South Carolina was not the end, or the beginning of the end; it marked the end of the beginning.

The answer is a simple one: it’s almost entirely about spending. The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.

And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.

In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

The Background

In a way, the division between confrontation and accommodation with the growth of the public sector is one that dates back to the 1950s, and the historical origins are useful in understanding why National Review, in particular, has found itself caught in the crossfire between its editors and its readership. The great GOP debate of 1933-1956 or so was how to react to the New Deal: try to moderate its excesses, or assault its premises. Dwight Eisenhower, in the long run, won the battle within the party in favor of the former; William F. Buckley, jr., in the long run, won the battle within the conservative movement in favor of the latter (hence the slogan “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”). Yet even Buckley and his magazine spent more effort combatting the status quo in national security policy than on the size of government.

From Goldwater’s failure in 1964 to Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Newt Gingrich’s victory in 1994 and failure in 1995-96, the common thread has been that conservatives win arguments about cutting taxes and restraining domestic discretionary spending, but lose arguments about dismantling the entitlement state created by FDR and LBJ and the auto-pilot budget-bloating processes of the 1970s. George W. Bush cemented this consensus in 2000-05: he could get the public behind cutting taxes and (sort of) restraining the growth of discretionary domestic spending but couldn’t get the public behind Social Security reform and was only able to get elected in 2000 by promising – then delivering in 2003 – a pricey new Medicare prescription drug entitlement. It seemed at the time that conservatives would have to content themselves with winning battles on taxes, national security, social issues/the courts and occasionally discretionary spending, but couldn’t challenge the status quo on the entitlement state and its compulsory collectivist impulses.

Then we got the multiple whammies of 2006-2011, which collectively pushed a lot of people on the Right from a position of accepting that they might be naive about how much change was possible, to being determined that the Establishment was naive about how long the old system could stand:

1. The Congressional GOP got swamped in the 2006 and 2008 elections, casting doubt on the long-term electoral viability of a strategy of modest ambitions in restraining spending, as well as spotlighting the ethical hazards of co-existing with massive federal spending.

2. The U.S. financial crisis left the federal and state governments in an immediately and visibly horrible fiscal position, bringing a renewed focus to the fact that entitlements (both citizen entitlements and public-employee benefit entitlements) would have brought us to this pass eventually and were only getting worse – a fact that otherwise-moderate public officials like Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels were able to exploit to get significant public support behind rethinking the social contract between government and its employees, if not its constituents.

3. The U.S. fiscal crisis paled in comparison to the fiscal crises of Europe. The horrible position of Greece in particular was a radicalizing event, as observant Americans were presented with a vivid example of how an entitlement state unravels. And the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating in the summer of 2011 cracked the complacency of those who assumed such things could never happen here.

4. More broadly, the financial crisis shook the faith of people throughout American society in our leading institutions, public as well as private. It made many people less trusting of experts, and less easily soothed by appeals to the status quo. The Occupy Wall Street movement, in its own way, underscored the fact that the center was fraying from both sides. The growth in support for Ron Paul is likewise a symptom of this dynamic.

5. Barack Obama got elected and pushed the most dramatic expansion of the universal-entitlement state in memory on healthcare, destroying the illusion that Republicans could hold the line by being reactive and awakening many previously sleepy citizens to the danger of comprehensive, compulsory national policies dictating the details of our daily personal lives.

6. The war – the glue that had held together Bush’s coalition – first turned politically toxic in 2006 and then began to recede in importance, almost immediately after both parties chose their presidential nominees in 2008 primarily on the basis of their positions on the Iraq War. Without the war as a unifying political force, it was no longer possible to convince spending hawks to set their concerns aside for the greater good.

7. The success of some – but by no means all – Tea Party candidates in the 2010 elections laid bare the fact that a lot of voters out there were open to the idea that possibly the whole structure of the federal government’s relationship with the voters was unsustainable.

Ben Domenech offers a helpful graph that sums up the impact:

Confronting Leviathan

Where do we go from here?

Congress

The Establishment vs Outsiders dynamic has manifested itself most clearly in the various battles John Boehner – to his credit, despite being temperamentally and by experience a classic establishment figure himself – has attempted to wage on budget issues, most of which have ended with him surrounded and outmaneuvered by a de facto alliance of the Obama Administration, Harry Reid, and most depressingly Mitch McConnell. A line of battle is only as strong as its weakest link, and Boehner has repeatedly gone into battle without being able to depend on McConnell and the Senate GOP to hold his end of the line, making his negotiating position untenable. For the most part, the House-Senate divide has not been about ideology, but about tactics, and the Senate Republicans simply have not been willing to go as far as the House. This is precisely what I mean by “Establishment.”

The small but determined Outsider faction in the Senate, led by men like Jim DeMint and Ron Johnson, will need reinforcements, and all the moreso if – as discussed below – we end up with Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee and possibly the next President. This is why I have stressed, here and here, the importance of continuing to build a counterweight within Congressional GOP to whatever emerges from the presidential race, in particular unbeholden to Romney, and with particular focus on wresting control of the Senate GOP from its current accomodationist leadership. The results thus far have been mixed, although Jim DeMint’s refusal to endorse a candidate before the South Carolina primary is at least a start.

The White House

The presidential race, of course, has been a great disappointment. Of the remaining five candidates, the two Texans are truly anti-Establishment, but one (Rick Perry) has struggled to get traction and is not (despite his impressive record) a particularly persuasive spokesman, while the other (Paul) is limited by the many other ways in which he is unacceptable to the Right and unworthy of significant office. The two Northeasterners are classic Establishment figures on spending: Mitt Romney’s entire career (like that of his father) embodies the Eisenhower-era approach of accommodation, complete with his signing of a huge, costly new entitlement in Massachusetts; while Rick Santorum is in many ways tempermentally more of a populist outsider, his career ended as part of the Senate leadership that lost its way and then its offices in the run-up to 2006. Both have attracted vocal, overlapping cheering sections dedicated to arguing that the tiger must be ridden. In the middle we have Newt Gingrich, who as I have written before, is a mixed bag on these issues; Newt is a believer in finding less confrontational ways to start unraveling the entitlement state, but he’s not fully a small-government guy, and your view of the weight to be placed on his successes and failures in this area may vary.

The contrast can be illustrated by the responses at last night’s debate by Santorum and Romney to Gingrich’s plan to offer voluntary private accounts as an opt-out of the Social Security system for younger workers. Santorum:

[Newt's plan is] irresponsible. And I say that against Newt because there’s nobody for the last 15 years that’s been more in favor of personal savings accounts than I have for Social Security. But we were doing that when we had a surplus in Social Security. We are now running a deficit in Social Security. We are now running a huge deficit in this country.

Under Congressman Gingrich’s proposals, if he’s right, that 95 percent of younger workers [choose to opt-out], there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in increased debt, hundreds of billions of more debt being put on the books, which we can’t simply – we’re going to be borrowing money from China to fund these accounts, which is wrong. I’m for those accounts, but first we have to get our fiscal house in order, balance this budget and then create the opportunity that Newt wants. But the idea of doing that now, is fiscal insanity.

Romney:

Rick is right. I – I know it’s popular here to say, oh we could just – we can do this and it’s not going to cost anything. But look, it’s going to get tough to get our federal spending from the current 25 percent of the GDP down to 20, down to 18 percent, which has been our history. We’ve got a huge number of obligations in this country and cutting back is going to have to happen. I know something about balancing budgets.

In the private sector, you don’t have a choice. You balance your budget, or you go out of business. And we – we simply can’t say we’re going to go out and borrow more money to let people set up new accounts that take money away from Social Security and Medicare today. Therefore, we should allow people to have a voluntary account, a voluntary savings program, tax free. That’s why I’ve said anybody middle income should be able to save their money tax free. No tax on interest, dividends or capital gains.

That will get American[]s saving and accomplishes your objective, Mr. Speaker, without threatening the future of America’s vitality by virtue of fiscal insanity.

Santorum and Romney plainly both recognize that Newt’s proposal would be good for younger workers, but Santorum argues that we need to keep them trapped in the current system to pay for other people’s current benefits, which of course is the self-fulfilling cycle that keeps the system impervious to reform. This is the rationale of Romneycare and Obamacare – compelling individuals to subsidize a collective program – and why such programs are so hard to uproot once they have been in place for a while. More crucially, what both Santorum and Romney are missing – both with regard to Santorum’s pleas for delay and Romney’s offering of an alternative savings system on top of Social Security – is that we already owe benefits to current recipients, no matter how we fund them, but an opt-out system would prevent us from accruing further obligations to younger workers who would then be self-financing their retirements, changing the system gradually from a defined-benefit to a more actuarially sustainable defined-contribution system, as most private employers have in the past few decades and as even state and local governments are beginning to realize they must (Romney, surely, would recognize this if he was dealing with a private business). This is the fundamental philosophical argument that needs to be made if we are going to persuade the American people not only that the spending and entitlement crisis is real – something the public is prepared to accept – but also that the GOP has a more sustainable long-term answer to fixing it so it does not recur.

At present, with Romney in the lead, it seems highly likely that whatever the outcome, the 2012 presidential election will be an enormous lost opportunity to educate the American public on the nature of the crisis and build a mandate for confronting it.

The Commentariat

Perhaps even more depressing has been the extent to which conservative commentators in general, and National Review in particular, have seemed eager to join not only the pro-Romney faction but the counterreaction more broadly against the “Outsiders” and their effort to shake the status quo on spending and entitlements. Thus, we get suggestions that Romney as President should raise taxes on the middle class by “lowering the floor for the top tax bracket” and preserve parts of Obamacare within a new comprehensive national system rather “than to have an emotionally satisfying but probably unwinnable fight over repeal per se.” This would be disastrous in many ways, not least symbolically: no federal entitlement program has ever been repealed wholesale, and the fact that a repeal of Obamacare would be shocking to the system is precisely why – in addition to its fiscal impact – it would be such significant progress in beginning to regain control over the system. And even worse than the economic and partisan impact of a GOP-sponsored middle-class tax hike is the extent to which raising taxes is official Washington’s longstanding solution to avoiding facing the spending problem. NR still employs a number of wonderful conservative and/or Republican writers who serve an important purpose in the world of political journalism, but that purpose is no longer the one that many of its readers so clearly want: a sustained and serious voice of resistance to an Establishment that is unsustainable. Which may say a good deal about why RedState’s following has grown apace these last few years: our corps of mostly volunteer contributors generally can’t match the resources and output of NR or The Weekly Standard (which to be fair has never positioned itself as an anti-Establishment outfit), but we’re giving voice to a message a lot of people want and need to hear and act on.

The States

The future, if Washington (in particular the Obama Administration) doesn’t cut off its freedom of movement entirely, lies in the states, in the example of greater or lesser reforms pursued in Wisconsin, Ohio, Louisiana, Florida, Indiana, and to some extent New Jersey (where the problems are worse) and Texas (where there was less to reform). The states can provide models not only on the wonkier question of how to fix government’s finances, but on the far more significant underlying question of how to win and lose battles to persuade the public that meaningful change can wait no longer. The front lines in the states are primarily battles over public employee pensions, but important as those battles are, they are a dress rehearsal for the larger and more bitter fights to come over entitlements.

The specific outlines of those changes will continue to be debated, but the Republican Party will continue to be riven internally by a collision between the Establishment and the Outsiders until we have resolved the fundamental question of whether or not we are truly serious about spending and entitlements. If you know where you stand on those questions, you know which group you belong to.

Dear Senator DeMint:

By the numbers, we are yet very early in the presidential primaries. 1144 delegates are needed to sew up the nomination, and depending how you count these things, Mitt Romney has maybe 13 delegates after finishing Iowa in a de facto tie with Rick Santorum and thumping Ron Paul in New Hampshire last night. But presidential primary races are often about perception: like wars, you more often win them by convincing the other side that further resistance is futile than by total, to-the-last-man annihilation. And so the coming South Carolina primary is widely recognized as the last realistic chance to stop Romney, or at least visibly slow his momentum and eliminate the divisions among conservative candidates that have thus far precluded a unified opposition. Romney has been lining up endorsements (including SC Governor Nikki Haley), money and favorable press from conservative journalists to create an air of inevitability that he hopes will end this race by Florida, if not South Carolina. I think it is fair to say that a great many grassroots conservative activists view the prospect of a Romney candidacy with varying shades of dismay.

We may yet, indeed, be stuck with Romney. And I know you were one of a good number of conservatives to endorse him in 2008 as a tactical move to stop John McCain, so the pull of some consistency (as well as longstanding disagreements with Rick Santorum) must be drawing you back to support him again. But even if we do end up with Romney – indeed, especially if we do – it will be terribly damaging for the conservative movement if you endorse or in any way assist him while there is still a race on. Let me explain why.

President George W. Bush was perhaps the third-most-conservative president of the past century, behind Reagan and Coolidge, and he commanded significant conservative loyalty for his wartime leadership, tax cuts and social conservatism. But we knew going into his nomination in 2000 that Bush was no friend of small government. In the shadow of war and later a financial crisis, Bush was able to pressure many otherwise conservative Republicans in Congress to back a lot of most un-conservative measures, most notably the expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs. In this, Bush has the help of GOP leadership, as men of conservative inclination and accomplishment like Santorum and Tom DeLay twisted arms to get conservatives to fall into line. Even if these moves were individually defensible under the circumstances, collectively they badly corroded the GOP’s small-government brand, contributing significantly to the loss of Congress and many Governorships in 2006 (including Santorum’s 18-point loss and Romney’s unwillingness to stand for re-election that year). What was needed, and what only began to emerge with your leadership late in Bush’s term, was some voice inside Congress standing up for small government within the GOP.

We have made great strides since then together; the Tea Party movement has sent many conservative reinforcements to Congress, some of them at the expense of long-tenured Republican officeholders. But the battle even within the GOP for smaller government and entitlement reform is far from over.

Mitt Romney, as well all know, is not and never has been a Tea Party or small government conservative; indeed, his signature achievement in his one term in public office was passing a Ted Kennedy-backed universal health care plan that moved the most Democratic state in the nation to the left on healthcare and laid the groundwork for Obamacare. For Romney to win election against Barack Obama, something else will need to be done to motivate the grassroots activists who make up the Tea Party and related movements inside and outside the GOP. And for anything positive to be accomplished in getting our financial house in order during a Romney presidency, there must be an independent body of conservatives not beholden to Romney to apply pressure on him to pull him to the right. If there is one thing we know about Romney is that he is responsive to external pressures in making political and policy decisions. But if Romney’s position in the party is secure and unchallenged, he will never have to give conservative concerns another moment’s thought, and will look – as he did in Massachusetts – leftward.

One by one, the organs of conservative journalism and activism and the leaders of Republican officialdom have begun placing themselves in Romney’s orbit. If they will not stand up to him now, how will they do so later? And how can we convince dispirited activists that their concerns will still be represented in Romney’s Washington?

The answer, if we end up resigned to Romney, is that they will look to you. For now, we can still sell a message to the grassroots: elect more conservatives to the House and Senate, and they will keep Romney honest – with conservatives like Jim DeMint as their leaders. The goal of doing so will help us all: it will keep not-Romney activists motivated to vote and organize and donate at the House and Senate level, most of whom will then hold their breath and vote Romney as well, knowing they have done their part to provide a meaningful counterweight.

But the more those activists see interviews in which you seem to be feeding the pro-Romney inevitability narrative – much less actually endorsing the man – the more they will conclude that you are ready to play Tom DeLay to Romney’s Bush, and that the lessons of 2006-10 will be completely forgotten in the new Washington. That would be a terrible shame, and poisonous to our ability to keep alive an independent movement that stands for something besides Mitt Romney’s political advancement. Don’t surrender your independent credibility when it will be needed most. We are ready to continue the good fight, but we can’t do it without leaders.

We’re far down the rabbit hole of primary season right now, and that inevitably means that charges and counter-charges are flying so fast that the news cycle can change dramatically from morning to afternoon. Naturally, when things are moving this quickly and emotions are running high, people get carried away. This happens to everyone. A lot of people who sit on the sidelines are too quick to say, “oh, so-and-so totally lost credibility with me by making that argument.” But candidates and pundits in particular are making arguments all day long, day after day; they’re going to grab hold now and then of a story they should know better than to believe or an argument they should know better than to make. Like anything in life, the test of character is not the occasional stumble but the long sweep of your record over time – whether you back off when you’ve dug into an untenable position, whether you learn from mistakes.

This comes to mind with yesterday’s confluence of attacks on Mitt Romney‘s business record at Bain Capital and his ill-timed quip that “I like to be able to fire people.” To varying extents, the Gingrich and Perry campaigns and their supporters jumped all over him on both counts. A pro-Newt SuperPAC is rolling out a 27-minute documentary attacking Romney’s Bain record; as Erick notes, Perry’s campaign has been pushing a more modest line of attack against the Bain record, but still one that has something of a whiff of desperation about it. Perry’s camp also pushed a downloadable ringtone of Romney’s “fire” line. With time and some context, both campaigns backed off hitting Mitt on the “fire” comment: Perry’s people pulled the ringtone, and Newt told Fox News that the line had been taken out of context.

The “fire” comment is the easier call. Romney was making a completely valid point: that people should be able to fire service providers like insurance companies if they’re not getting good service. That’s one of the pro-consumer aspects of the conservative message, and where we part company from liberals who think first of protecting entrenched interests at the expense of consumer choice. That being said, the comment fed directly into the most damaging narratives about Romney, and was emblematic of how he’s much like Rick Santorum in terms of his tendency to use cringe-inducingly tin-eared language when he’s making even valid points.

The Bain storyline is a little more complicated, in part because there are a lot of angles to Bain’s business; while Romney’s record, as Jim Pethokoukis notes, includes a lot to be proud of, as Jonathan Last notes, you don’t have to necessarily take that business record as a whole if there are aspects worth defending and aspects worth criticizing.

A fair amount of what businesses like Bain do is to step in and take over businesses that are in bad shape. We have an ongoing debate in this country about what to do with failing businesses, but denying they’re failing is not an option – either you shutter or restructure them or you prop them up, and that raises the question of who gets stuck with the bill for propping them up. One of the great scandals of the past 5 years, which has given rise to the Tea Party and to some extent the Occupy Wall Street movement as well, has been the extent to which the answer to that question has been the taxpayers.

So, I don’t like seeing pro-free-market Republicans attacking the concept of what Bain does, any more than I liked seeing Romney attack Rick Perry from the left on entitlements. But just because the role of red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalists is a crucial and necessary one does not mean that they are likely to be popular candidates in today’s general election environment. Criminal defense lawyers, for example may be crucially necessary to our system of justice, but if they have represented a lot of unpopular clients, they are not likely to be politically viable. I continue to think that Romney’s business record is an under-explored political vulnerability (one Ted Kennedy used against Romney in 1994, but didn’t even use all the ads he cut) that the Democrats will exploit ruthlessly. And Romney’s existing defenses of that record are fairly weak. We should not be caught unawares by this in the summer and fall when it’s too late to pick another candidate. In many ways, it’s like the swift boat story. You’ll recall that the centerpiece of John Kerry’s electability argument in 2004 was his military record – not any policy proposal on national security, mind you, but the simple fact of his biography as a war hero. Given that Kerry had decades-old enemies from his activties as an anti-war protestor, it was unwise for Democrats to assume that this biographical narrative alone would go unchallenged in the general election. But that’s exactly what they did, and the Swift Boat Veterans’ ads (especially the ads using Kerry’s own Senate testimony from 1970) did terrible damage to Kerry.

Romney’s story is much the same. There’s no serious argument that Romney’s record of supporting free enterprise and job growth in his single term as Massachusetts governor is better than the records of Perry, Gingrich, Santorum and Huntsman; his claim to be a job creation specialist is grounded in his record at Bain, and just like Kerry’s war hero biography, this claim is bound to attract scrutiny. It would be foolishness in the extreme for Republicans to demand that nobody talk about this during the time when we’re choosing a candidate. The harder question, for free-market Republicans, is how to have a serious debate on this point without compromising our integrity and our principles.

The fear that Bain, and Romney’s wealth (by birth as well as his business wealth) will be a political liability is hardly fanciful. Look back over the years at the list of wealthy Republican candidates who put their wealth ahead of their limited records in public office. The California GOP has had the worst record: Bill Simon, Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, Michael Huffington, and Bruce Herschensohn all flopped. The positive example is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who proved a disaster for California conservatives in office. Simon, a good and decent man and fairly conservative, faced an opponent with approval ratings so terrible on Election Day that he was recalled just months later – yet the Democrats tore Simon limb from limb with attacks on his private business record. Republicans in other states or at the national level have often found such candidates to be electoral failures or totally unreliable in pursuing our party’s principles in office: Herman Cain, Mike Bloomberg, Carl Paladino, Linda McMahon, Jack Ryan, Pete Coors, Pete Dawkins. (Ron Johnson and Rick Scott being rare exceptions, and Scott only won after a searing campaign against his business record). An understanding of private business is a valuable thing for public officials, but it’s no substitute for experience pursuing good public policies; Jon Corzine was a success in business before he ran New Jersey into the ground, and the most successful businessman ever to be president was Herbert Hoover. It’s entirely valid for Republicans to ask whether we are buying ourselves a similar set of headaches with Romney.

The other point I would make about integrity is that it goes close to the core of why a Romney nomination worries me so much: because we would all have to make so many compromises to defend him that at the end of the day we may not even recognize ourselves. Romney has, in a career in public office of just four years (plus about 8 years’ worth of campaigning), changed his position on just about every major issue you can think of, and his signature accomplishment in office was to be wrong on the largest policy issue of this campaign. Yes, Obama is bad, and Romney can be defended on the grounds that he can’t possibly be worse. Yes, Romney is personally a good man, a success in business, faith and family. But aside from his business biography, his primary campaign has been built entirely on arguments and strategies – about touting his own electability and dividing, coopting or delegitimizing other Republicans – none of which will be of any use in the general election. What, then, will we as politically active Republicans say about him? I was not a huge fan of John McCain’s record, but I was comfortable making honest points about the things McCain had been consistent on over the years – national security, free trade, nuclear power, public integrity, pork-barrel spending. There were spots of solid ground on which to plant ourselves with McCain, and he had a history of digging himself in on those and fighting for things he believed in. But Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see – there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It’s one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years – many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man’s actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for.

The problem is not entirely without its solutions; one of those is that the only real mechanism conservatives would have for keeping Romney honest is to pour efforts into getting more conservatives elected in the House and Senate, and in particular targeting primary challenges at people who have supported Romney. But that’s a desperate measure, and it still doesn’t answer the question of how we make the affirmative case for Romney without losing our integrity. Which is precisely why we need a hard look now at what we’re getting in return.

If you’re familiar with his stump speech, Newt Gingrich routinely argues that Obama is a food stamp president and he’d be a paychecks president – that his economic plan would get more people to work so they wouldn’t be stuck relying on government aid. It’s one of his favorite one-liners about how Obama’s economic policies have failed. This is not an attack on food stamp recipients, especially since one of Newt’s core messages is to tout how he drove welfare reforms in the 1990s that provided more incentives to get work. Newt generally makes the point without referring to the race of the people getting food stamps – indeed, he called it “bizarre” when David Gregory last year argued that it was racist to mention food stamps:

GREGORY: First of all, you gave a speech in Georgia with language a lot of people think could be coded racially-tinged language, calling the president, the first black president, a food stamp president.

GINGRICH: Oh, come on, David.

GREGORY: What did you mean? What was the point?

REP. GINGRICH: That’s, that’s bizarre. That–this kind of automatic reference to racism, this is the president of the United States. The president of the United States has to be held accountable. Now, the idea that–and what I said is factually true. Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps. One out of every six Americans is on food stamps. And to hide behind the charge of racism? I have–I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist.

Another of Newt’s favorite themes is that he’ll go anywhere and talk to any audience – which of course he will, because talking is what Newt does best.

But when Newt combines these two points and says that he’ll take that jobs message to the NAACP if they’ll have him and try to convince black voters that they ought to expect more from Obama – paychecks, not food stamps – he gets branded as racist. The charge is utterly scurrilous and made in bad faith. It’s a textbook example of fraudulent use of the race card.

Here’s how the AP report opens:

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday he is willing to go before the NAACP and urge blacks to demand paychecks, not food stamps.

Gingrich told a town hall meeting at a senior center in Plymouth, N.H., that if the NAACP invites him to its annual convention this year, he’d go there and talk about “why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.”

He also said he’d pitch a new Social Security program aimed at helping young people, particularly African-American males, who he said get the smallest return on Social Security.

To the AP’s credit, it notes the fact that these are both standard, separate themes of Newt’s. Yet we get people like Martin Bashir on MSNBC blaming the totally unrelated murder of a teenager on Newt: “Let’s cut out the food stamps rhetoric right now before things get any worse.” TPM, which is driving this appalling story, got comment from the NAACP, which predictably groused that “It is a shame that the former Speaker feels that these types of inaccurate, divisive statements are in any way helpful to our country.”

What’s next – making it racist to discuss unemployment at all?

That said, the early states are traditionally a test of strength that helps winnow the field to the more serious contenders, especially those with the fundraising ability and appeal beyond a narrow niche to make a serious effort to win the nomination. But three of the seven candidates now in the race are pretty much guaranteed to go beyond Iowa. First, Mitt Romney: Romney would like to win Iowa, and could be embarrassed if he finishes third (lower is very unlikely), but no matter what happens, Romney’s money, his appeal to the moderate wing of the party, and his establishment support will carry him to New Hampshire, where he is heavily favored to win easily. Second, Ron Paul: Paul could do well in Iowa as a protest vote if there are a lot of independents and Democrats re-registering tomorrow on caucus day, but his hard core of support and idosyncratic appeal guarantee that he will be in the race as long as there’s a race, regardless of how he does in any contest, yet with no chance of ever winning. And third, Jon Huntsman: Huntsman has placed all his chips on New Hampshire and already plans on finishing a distant seventh in Iowa. The only effect Iowa has on Huntsman is indirect: if Romney looks weak coming out of Iowa, Huntsman can ratchet up his efforts to convince New Hampshire moderates that Romney is fatally flawed.

Where Iowa could matter a lot, however, is in sorting out the four candidates running as the field’s conservatives: Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the arguments over who can claim the term “conservative”; clearly this is the role in the field all four are pursuing). They represent a caucus-within-a-caucus, and even though they are likely to be separated 1-4 by a relatively small number of votes, their order of finish could have an outsized impact on the race, eliminating anywhere from 1-3 of them from the field.

The reason for this is the basic dynamic of this race: after six years of running for President, the polling and anecdotal evidence is quite clear that Mitt Romney is the preferred choice of only about a quarter of the GOP electorate, and at least two-thirds would clearly prefer a more reliably conservative candidate. Paul, for a variety of reasons, can’t present that alternative, and Huntsman won’t. But just as clearly, Romney can win the nomination by a strategy of divide and conquer: keep the conservative wing of the party from putting its votes and money behind a single alternative. His campaign has pursued this strategy craftily, focusing fire on whoever looked likely to dominate the conservative vote at any given time, and more recently by his allies talking up Santorum, an alternative Romney clearly feels he can defeat. It’s a strategy that has relieved Romney of the need to make any sort of positive argument on anything other than the faults of various conservative Republicans. But it will be his undoing if, as the race proceeds, he fails to prevent the majority faction within the party from uniting around a standard-bearer.

Of the four conservatives, Bachmann is now the most vulnerable to a poor showing in Iowa, assuming that she’s running out of self-interest and not – as some have suggested – as a stalking horse for Romney. Bachmann was born in Iowa, hails from a neighboring state, won the Iowa Straw Poll, has spent a bunch of time in the state, and led the RCP polling average in the state most of the summer with support as high as 27% (higher than Romney has ever polled in Iowa; he’s never cracked 23% after winning 25.2% in 2008), and her social-conservative, evangelical background and message should resonate well in Iowa. Yet, she’s collapsed to single digits and sixth place in most polls, has suffered key organizational losses, she doesn’t have a ton of money in the bank, and – not to be overlooked – unlike the other candidates besides Paul, she actually has to run for re-election in a not-entirely-safe district this fall. If Bachmann finishes fourth of the four, it is hard to see how she justifies staying in the race.

At the opposite end of the scale are the two guys Romney fears: Gingrich and Perry. Newt surged to national and Iowa poll leadership in December on the basis of his massive name recognition and excellent debate performances, and his role as a former Speaker of the House and leader of the 1994 conservative revolution still give him a lot of credibility and goodwill on the Right. Newt could, despite his many vulnerabilities, sustain a campaign with sufficient funding and earned media exposure to beat Romney if he could unite the Right; while polling is somewhat stale at present, he was last seen with significant leads on Romney in South Carolina and Florida, both states in which the other candidates haven’t polled in single digits. Ideally, Newt wanted to beat Romney in Iowa, so he could build the argument that he was the man to stop Mitt. But Newt’s support, much of it cannibalized from the early December collapse of the Herman Cain campaign, is not deeply rooted, and the not-Romney aspect of that support could desert him quickly if he’s shown to be unable to either outpoll Romney or unite the Right. Newt’s poll support in Iowa has dropped in the RCP average from 31 to 13 in a little over two weeks of ceaseless negative TV ads from Romney allies, he’s currently polling fourth, and it’s questionable if Newt has the organization on the ground to capitalize even on that much support. If he finishes far behind Romney and behind Santorum – worse yet, behind Perry as well – Newt’s supporters in the southern states may start taking a harder look at alternatives. It’s hard to see Newt leaving the race without being forced out, but then he’s clearly bitter at Romney right now over the negative barrage; were I Perry (whose last book Newt wrote a forward for), I’d work overtime in the aftermath of a poor Iowa showing by Newt to try to convince Newt to step aside and focus the field.

Then there’s Perry. Let me go out on a limb: if Perry finishes third in Iowa, he’ll be the nominee. He’s the guy best suited by money, organization and resume to capitalize on a strong Iowa showing, which is why Romney’s media allies have been talking up Santorum’s momentum instead. I don’t expect Perry to finish third; he’s polling fifth, and is probably most likely to finish fourth behind Romney, Paul and Santorum. Perry can afford that, if it’s a respectable fourth: if Newt and Bachmann end up out of the race, Perry can make a solid argument that he’s still the only credible alternative to Romney, and his style is clearly more suited to running in southern states like South Carolina and Florida. Perry’s debate stumbles buried him for a while, but more than one candidate in this race has gotten a second look as the wheel continues to turn; but he needs to show that his hard work in Iowa of late has yielded some sort of progress. A fifth place showing behind both Newt and Santorum will put him on the ropes – not out just yet, perhaps, but with a much more complicated road to climbing over both to win South Carolina.

Which brings us to Santorum, the spoiler, only finally drawing attention (and scrutiny). Santorum has almost no campaign outside of Iowa, where he’s spent vastly more time than anyone else in the race, doing endless, weary retail events touting his social conservatism. It’s much harder to envision Santorum scaling up to a national race against Romney than it is with Newt, and just as Newt bears the scars of the GOP’s failures in the 1996-2000 period, Santorum bears those of 2006, a more recent loss when he – as a member of the Senate GOP leadership – lost the Senate majority, lost his seat by 18 points to a colorless opponent, lost the support of party conservatives over his endorsement of Arlen Specter, lost the party’s credibility on spending, and became a lightning rod for gay activists over his various foot-in-mouth moments on social issues. Santorum is an ex-Senator with no executive experience, and Senators are famously terrible presidential candidates, as we saw in basically every primary and/or general election since 1964 (think of McCain, Kerry, Goldwater, McGovern, Dole, Hillary, Kennedy, Bradley, Biden, Tsongas, Muskie, Edwards, Gramm, Dodd, Byrd, Gore, Brownback, Baker, Bayh, Glenn, Harkin, Hatch, Hollings, Hart, Kerrey, Lugar, Specter, Bentsen, Church, Cranston, Bob Smith, and Scoop Jackson) – the only way a Senator can win a presidential election is against another Senator, as Obama did by beating Hillary and McCain. While there may not be time to ventilate all of Santorum’s problems, the greatest of which is his legacy as a loser in 2006, there is little doubt that Romney could and would destroy him once he’s no longer useful in denying oxygen to more capable adversaries. But a top-3 showing in Iowa makes it impossible for Santorum to go away before South Carolina.

The clearest outcome in the conservative primary in Iowa would be for Perry or Newt to win it. The second clearest would be Santorum first and Perry second, which largely deflates Newt and takes out Bachmann. The worst plausible case is Santorum-Newt-Perry-Bachmann, which probably eliminates Bachmann but leaves Newt and Perry both wounded and regrouping for a messy South Carolina showdown.

We’ll finally know more tomorrow.

Rick Santorum, GOP Senate leadership, 2004:

Paul criticized people suffering from AIDS or other contagious diseases for demanding health insurance coverage.

“The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care,” Paul wrote.

In another chapter on the rights of individuals outside of government – the central theme of Paul’s libertarian philosophy – he sharply criticized the “absurdity” of politicians who try to bestow differing rights on various social and ethnic groups.

…”Every year new groups organize to demand their ‘rights,’” he continued. “White people who organize and expect the same attention as other groups are quickly and viciously condemned as dangerous bigots. Hispanic, black, and Jewish caucuses can exist in the U.S. Congress, but not a white caucus, demonstrating the absurdity of this approach for achieving rights for everyone.”

To be sure, Paul’s warnings about the divisiveness of identity-group politics are not terribly outside the mainstream of conservative thought, and to be fair, the state of public information about AIDS in 1987 was not the same as it would be in later years. But the significance of Paul’s book is that sounds an awful lot like the newsletters.

The first point up is how Clarkson’s tweets about Paul are revealing of the mindset of a lot of ‘soft’ Ron Paul supporters. Those of us who write about politics on the internet tend to assume that all of Paul’s support comes from hard-core Ronulans, of the sort who will swarm you on the web with the kinds of barrages of talking points and – often – ALL CAPS and hate speech (or just rambling email manifestos) that carry an overpowering stench of political fanatacism. (This is a major reason why RedState has banned the Paul supporters for years; en masse, they make reasoned discourse impossible).* Even the more polite, otherwise reasonable people who support Paul in web discussions tend to be absolutely immovable in their support, to the point where there’s no realistic chance they could support any other Republican.

But when you do polling and casual discussions with people not following politics all that closely, you discover a fair number of people who have gotten the whitewashed version of Paul and aren’t aware of the full depth of his crazy – people I have to believe are still persuadable that Paul is toxic. And that’s exactly what Clarkson sounds like here. It started with this tweet

I love Ron Paul. I liked him a lot during the last republican nomination and no one gave him a chance. If he wins the nomination for the Republican party in 2012 he’s got my vote. Too bad he probably won’t.

Then:

we shouldn’t try & help/tell other countries how to solve their issues w/the poor when we can’t even solve our own.

and

I am about progress. Ron Paul is about letting people decide, not the government. I am for this.

All of which sounds reasonable enough; Paul is certainly in favor of more liberty at home and a less vigorous American role abroad, and while I regard his brand of isolationism as deeply dangerous, the general concept of getting out of the UN and the ‘world policeman’ role is attractive to an awful lot of people who are not crazy. This is the sort of thing why I run into people – friends, family – who tell me “you know, Ron Paul has a lot of good ideas.” It’s also why some of the saner people in the GOP who have some overlap with Paul’s ideas – from the more conservative types like Mike Lee, to Paul’s son Rand, to the more libertarian types like Gary Johnson – might be better spokesmen for some of those ideas.

Unfortunately, you buy Ron Paul, you buy the whole batty package: the flirtations with 9/11 Trutherism and other conspiracy theories, the “we had it coming” view of anti-American terrorism, the anti-Semitism and pro-Palestinian bias, the racist newsletters, and whatnot, all of which you can find at length in Leon’s posts. And Clarkson, with nearly a million Twitter followers and nearly 3 million Facebook fans and a prior record of trying to keep herself out of political controversies, got inundated with hostility she clearly wasn’t expecting for backing Paul, ultimately complaining about the volume of “hateful” attacks. Thus, the backtracks:

I have never heard that he’s a racist? I definitely don’t agree with racism, that’s ignorant.

I love all people and could care less if you like men or women. I have never heard that Ron Paul is a racist or homophobe?

I have never seen or heard Ron Paul say anything against gay people?

I am really sorry if I have offended anyone. Obviously that was not my intent. I do not support racism. I support gay rights, straight rights, women’s rights, men’s rights, white/black/purple/orange rights. I like Ron Paul because he believes in less government and letting the people (all of us) make the decisions and mold our country. That is all. Out of all of the Republican nominees, he’s my favorite.

(There’s a longer story here, which Dave Weigel has covered, as to why Paul still has apologists among gay liberals despite the content of his newsletters)

Most entertainers tend towards knee-jerk leftism, and even the more thoughtful ones – like Springsteen, who as I’ve discussed is in some ways a culturally conservative figure in his music despite his leftism – are often hard-core liberals or leftists. And the exceptions are sometimes no better; John Mayer came out as a vocal, hard-shell Paul supporter in 2008, and in Mayer’s case that seemed to dovetail with some of his own more unsavory characteristics. One of the reasons I like Clarkson, aside from her music, is that she thinks for herself and is frequently a lonely voice for sanity in the insane world of pop music. Her words on the death of Amy Winehouse was one example of this:

Sometimes I think this job will be the death of us all, or at least the emotional death of us all. Maybe that is why as a little kid in sunday school I learned that God didn’t want false gods or idols. I thought it was terribly selfish of God as a child but I think I get it now. He didn’t want us following people or things that are imperfect and not so much for the followers but for the gods and/or idols who will never be what everyone wishes or needs them to be because we are made imperfect. He knew we wouldn’t be able to handle the pressure, the shame, the glory, or the power the spotlight brings.

Her background ought to make her the kind of swing voter the GOP can reach: raised poor among strict Christian Texas Democrats, Clarkson is something of a stubborn holdout for decency and modesty in pop music, refuses to describe herself as a feminist, owns 9 guns and sleeps with a Colt .45 for protection, and is a self-described Republican but one who voted Obama four years ago:

I just want someone that’s about change, and that’s what [Barack Obama] campaigned on, and that’s what I’m hoping happens. I’m very much a Barack fan.

How’d you celebrate the inauguration?

I was actually with two of my friends here in Texas — we were in my kitchen watching it on TV. We were crying — all three of us. Seeing Aretha Franklin — who in her lifetime has seen oppression and now seeing a black man become President — sing … that in itself is such a beautiful message to the rest of the world.

A lot of people felt that way about Obama in January 2009, but the thrill is long gone, even in Hollywood.

Political coalitions, of course, inevitably involve picking and choosing positions that alienate some people you might otherwise reach. Ron Paul, now 76 years old, will be gone from the stage after this election, but the challenge of how to appeal to people who like some of the themes he projects but aren’t fans of more conventional Republican ideas – people like Kelly Clarkson – will persist.

* – We at RS are by no means the only people in the political sphere to notice this. For a flavor from Twitter across every stage of the political spectrum of horror at the nuttiness of both Paul and his fans, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

But there’s no arguing Newt’s way with words. Enjoy this one from yesterday in New Hampshire, which is full of win on so many levels. For a measure of how good a public speaker Newt is, consider how many laugh lines he gets in a typical appearance. Humor is such a devastating weapon in politics. Aspiring Republican leaders could learn a lot from watching how he does it. It’s just plain fun to watch.

If this website has a purpose – if any conservative website or publication has a purpose – it must begin with electing conservatives to significant public offices. We have the chance to nominate a conservative for president and win the White House in 2012. We can fumble that chance away by settling for a nominee we can’t trust to pursue conservative policies in office, or we can make a stand for the best, most conservative potential president in the field. That’s Rick Perry, and we enthusiastically endorse him to be the 45th President of the United States.

2012 is a year of enormous opportunity for conservatives. The sitting president is deeply unpopular and discredited, the economy is mired in the doldrums, and the public’s trust in Washington and its traditional ways is at an all-time low. Tea Party-backed conservative successes in 2010 show that the public is willing to embrace candidates who dissent from the bipartisan consensus – a consensus that gives us an ever-growing federal government in general and too much federal interference and favoritism in the economy in particular. President Obama’s deep unpopularity with independents, together with the growth of left-wing populist protest movements, shows that dissatisfaction with the status quo reaches far beyond the conservative base. But the failure of some Tea Party conservatives in 2010 is also a reminder that to win, we need candidates who are serious, experienced, and battle-tested. That’s Rick Perry.

The Most Conservative Candidate

Perry is the most reliable conservative in the race. He has made his share of missteps over 25 years in public life, as have all the candidates, but when you think seriously about which of the major candidates would govern in the most consistently conservative fashion, the answer is obvious. Perry hasn’t zigzagged or flip-flopped his way through his career, and he’s not overtaken by a new enthusiasm every week. Neither flights of fancy nor bipartisan consensus for its own sake are in his nature. His long record in office, and his base of support, place him well to the right of Mitt Romney and – on the great issues of the day – to the right of Newt Gingrich as well. Judging the men just by their records, Perry can be counted on to govern to the right of either.

A brief summary of examples of Perry’s lengthy record tells the story of his conservatism:

-67 tax cuts for a total taxpayer savings of $14 billion.

-Fewer government employees per capita than when he took office.

-Perry has consistently scored a solid “B” rating from the Cato Institute on spending.

-Persistent action (not just words) on pro-life issues, ranging from breaking roadblocks to a parental notification law in 1999 to a groundbreaking defunding of Planned Parenthood in 2011.

-The Club for Growth: “Pro-growth conservatives looking for a champion on the issue of tort reform will be hard pressed to find a candidate with a better record than Governor Perry.”

The single biggest issue on which Perry has taken heat from the right is immigration. But there, too, Perry has been on the front lines. Perry is easily the most pro-border security Governor in U.S. history, having spent more than $400 million Texas taxpayer dollars since 2005 to do one of the few duties the Federal Government is obligated to do. Immigration is not the central issue of this election – jobs and the size of government are far more important – but Perry is comfortably in the center of the Republican Party on immigration, and he has consistently shown that he will take seriously the foundational task of securing the border first.

The Best Potential President

Perry is well-prepared by experience and temperament to take on the presidency. He’s the longest-serving Governor in the history of the nation’s second-largest state. He’s a calm, steady hand at the helm, with strong Christian faith and a stable family. He’s come up from humble, rural roots, served his country overseas in the Air Force, and made a living in the private sector as a rancher and cotton farmer. Perry is studious and deliberate in making decisions, and resolute without being unduly stubborn in carrying them out; when he’s erred, as with the Gardasil controversy, he’s backed down, but when he’s right he sticks to his guns. He’s been tested by crises in office, including Hurricane Rita in 2005 and Hurricane Ike in 2008 (as well as the 300,000 refugees sent into Texas by Hurricane Katrina) and 2011′s wildfires. And he’ll appoint conservatives aplenty to his administration: a look at who he will owe his nomination to, if he pulls this out, tells us that. Armed with conservative convictions and surrounded by solid conservative advisors, Perry has the necessary experience and temperament to get the job done.

The one knock on Perry is that his poor debate performances and periodic campaign trail gaffes will open him to the same vulnerabilities in office as President Bush: an inability to respond to criticism or explain his own policies. That’s a fair concern, but it should not be overstated. First, Perry’s reputation in Texas is very different from Bush’s. Bush was all about bipartisan bonhomie; Perry has left the state littered with the political corpses of people who stood in his way. Remember Jim Hightower, the left-wing talker who coined the phrase “the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos”? Perry ended his political career 21 years ago. Maybe Perry’s not Demosthenes, but he knows how build a team that gets his message out and go after his foes.

Second, debating skill takes on outsize importance in the primaries, when candidates have to stand out on a stage crowded with 7 or 8 people who all agree with each other 80-90% of the time. All Rick Perry needs to do is step onstage and everyone will know how he’s different from Barack Obama.

Third, the main job of the president is making decisions, not talking, and Alex Kaufmann makes a great point regarding how guys like Perry get things done:

Until yesterday, I wasn’t completely sure why I liked Rick Perry so much. I have a list of reasons, but none of them really got to the root of why I like him.

Yesterday the reason finally dawned on me. I watched this wonderful 11-minute video from Ben Howe entitled “The Rick Perry I Know”…

… and I had a revelation: Rick Perry is just like my Dad.

…Like my Dad, Rick sees the population of the world in three categories: Innocent people, and the good guys, who protect them from the bad guys. This sort of man has a profound and selfless love for the first group; a great admiration and willingness to work with the second; and if you’re the third group… God help you. A few people fall into the category of “I haven’t figured you out yet“, and are treated skeptically but fairly. This might be a simplistic worldview, but it’s an admirable and pragmatic one which has served our species well for a very long time.

Perry Can Win

Some will complain that Perry does not appear electable right now. But he can still win the nomination; this has been a wildly unpredictable primary season, and it’s not over yet. Romney can still be defeated – there remain 75-80% of GOP primary voters who have been listening to Romney for five years and still are not sold on him as the nominee. Gingrich can still collapse – he carries enormous political baggage of every imaginable kind, and lacks Perry’s organization. The other candidates (Huntsman, Paul, Bachmann and Santorum) could still enjoy a surge in an early state, but lack the organization or broad base of support to advance to the top tier. If one of the two current front-runners crumbles, Perry is best-positioned to make this a two-man race that could last through June, like the Obama-Hillary slugfest of 2008.

And after Iowa and New Hampshire, the terrain shifts to turf that more naturally favors a Perry revival. The remaining two January primaries are in South Carolina and Florida. Arizona is one of just two primaries (in addition to several caucuses) in February. And if he ends up in a two-man race with Romney, 10 of the 23 states that vote in March – controlling 60% of the delegates selected that month – are likely to be distinctly friendlier territory for Perry than Romney: Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Kansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri and Louisiana. Perry should easily have the money to carry the fight through these states and take the lead in the race, if he can make his case.

Yes, Perry has fallen back in the pack. But he is not to be written off lightly: he’s won more statewide elections than the rest of the GOP field put together, and has never lost one. Sure, Texas is a Republican state – but it wasn’t when Perry started running for office, and he’s part of the reason that changed.

As for the general election, there is no reason to believe that either Romney or Gingrich would be a significantly stronger general election candidate. Both have multiple major vulnerabilities. In Romney’s case, he’s won one election in 17 years of running for office, he’s transparently insincere and has flip-flopped on nearly every issue you could name. His signature achievement is Romneycare, a bill that drew Ted Kennedy’s approval and set the stage for Obamacare. Truthfully, the campaigns have only scratched the surface of his vulnerabilities arising from his wealth and business practices, something that will not be so easily looked over by the Obama campaign. In Gingrich’s case, he’s never held executive office or won a statewide election. He was – not so long ago – perhaps the most unpopular politician in living memory, and his marital and other problems are likely to dog him throughout the election. Are both men miles better than Obama? Yes. Could both win? Yes, against this president in this year. But both have such severe electoral vulnerabilities that preferring either to Perry solely on grounds that they’d run better in a general election is a fool’s errand.

The Jobs Governor For A Jobs Election

Perry’s greatest asset is that he has a tremendous story to tell about the success of the Texas economy. When it comes to the Texas economy, it is important to start with what Governor Perry has not done. He has not micro-managed the Texan economy with a heavy hand. During his ten years in office, Gov. Perry has instead encouraged and protected the pro-growth and small-government policies and attitudes that are widely considered to have caused the record boom in the state’s population, not to mention a remarkably quick recovery from the recession that the rest of of the country seems to be still mired in. The Texas state budget is projected to have a surplus next year, thanks largely to increased sales tax and energy revenue (Texas has no state income tax); and has largely gotten back the jobs lost in the recession. Whether or not you credit the governor for the situation, consider this: Rick Perry’s political experience has been in an arena where not interfering in the economy for the sake of interfering has been shown to work. This is a valuable trait all in its own.

And the Texas jobs record is impressive, swimming upstream against a nation where Washington has hemorrhaged money on shovel-ready rhetoric while the economy burns. Two graphs from Will Franklin tell the story more eloquently than words:

In Texas, Rick Perry’s style of governance has gotten the jobs done. Conservatism is about what works. Texas, under Rick Perry, works. We owe America the chance to do the same. Rick Perry for President.

Aaron Gardner
Ben Howe
Brad Jackson
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Dan McLaughlin
Neil Stevens
streiff
Russ Vought
Lori Ziganto

Elite: Time to find a new national standard-bearer, Republicans. But not somebody dumb, like George W. Bush.

Grassroots: We love Sarah Palin!

Elite: She’s dumb. You can’t have her.

Grassroots: We love Michele Bachmann!

Elite: She’s dumb. You can’t have her.

Grassroots: We love Rick Perry!

Elite: He’s dumb. You can’t have him.

Grassroots: We love Herman Cain! And you’re not allowed to call him dumb!

Elite: He’s…Ok, you got us there. But he doesn’t know anything. He’s ignorant.

Grassroots: So, you want smart, educated, knowledgeable, good in debates? That’s your criteria?

Elite: Absolutely. Go find somebody like that. We have a pretty good idea what we have in mind.

Grassroots: You asked for it, bro. We love Newt Gingrich, Ph.D, historian and mad scientist! We love his debating style and his enormous head and his 24 books and his moon mining schemes! He’s gonna lecture you guys until you beg for mercy!

[A few months later]

Elite: We give up! We can’t take it anymore! Send us back that Perry guy! We have carpal tunnel from taking so many notes! We’re sick of looking up obscure battles on Wikipedia and ordering out-of-print books on eBay to do fact checking! The pages of our thesauruses are falling out! We just want to ask a simple question without having our premises fundamentally challenged! Uncle!

Ideas don’t run for president; people do. That’s as true today as it was four years ago. So, it is understandable that much of the press and blog coverage of the 2012 GOP primary race has focused on the personalities, experience and record of the candidates rather than their ideas. In fact, until you know the candidates by their actions, you cannot meaningfully judge what their words will mean in practice. Mitt Romney is the prime example of this, having so inconsistent a record that it’s impossible to take seriously the idea that he’s guided by any sort of coherent political philosophy.

But as it happens, we do have three candidates in this race who stand for a distinctive philosophical approach to domestic policy. One of those, Ron Paul, espouses a radical constitutionalism that exists on the periphery of the conservative movement. Rick Perry, while his issue stances are more conventionally (but not always uniformly) conservative, can best be understood through the lens of his guiding principle as a Texas nationalist – a belief that a significant amount of the powers now wielded by the federal government should be returned to the states. And then there’s Newt Gingrich. Newt generates so many new ideas – he develops more firmly-held political convictions before breakfast each morning than Romney’s had his entire life – that it’s tempting to view them as essentially random. But there is a method to the madness. Setting aside for a moment Gingrich’s personal attributes, let’s look at his ideas, with particular attention to two recent interviews he did – one with Ben Domenech, Brad Jackson and Francis Cianfrocca at Coffee and Markets, the other with Glenn Beck. Both provide a keen window into how Newt views domestic policy issues. In the interests of length, I’ll pass over one of the three pillars of Newt’s worldview (his futurism and faith in new technologies), which has been written about extensively, and focus on two others: his gradualism and his revival of what I call “Reform Conservatism.”

I. The Gradualist

Newt’s penchant for apocalyptic rhetoric, revolutionary slogans and promises to fundamentally rethink things tends to get him branded as an agent of bracing changes; even Jonah Goldberg frames the contest between Newt and Romney as a question of whether Republican voters are in the mood for radical overturning of the status quo. The DNC has echoed this theme by calling Newt “the original Tea Partier,” suggesting – as it did in the 1990s – that Newt wanted to do too much, too fast in ways voters couldn’t stomach.

But that’s Newt’s reputation and rhetorical style; it’s not how he actually looks at domestic legislation. He is, in many ways, a gradualist, a temperamental conservative – not one who resists change for the sake of resisting change, of course (precisely the opposite, as I’ll discuss below) but rather an ardent believer in the idea that policy proposals need to be modest and incremental enough to gain a large share of public support. In this regard, a Gingrich presidency would mark a departure from Karl Rove’s “50 + 1″ approach as well as from the bitterly divisive, passed-over-voter-objections approach to Obamacare. Going back to the Contract with America, Newt has long preached the value of “60% issues” or even more dramatically “80/20 issues,” on which a politician can target his proposals to what a large majority of the public actually wants (thus, in the 1990s, welfare reform, congressional reforms, balanced budgets and a capital gains tax cut). In 2009, we had Newt’s Platform of the American People, complete with Newt’s view of the polling on each issue:

1. English should be the official language of government. (87 to 11)

2. We want our elected leaders in Washington to focus on increasing the energy supplies of the United States and lowering the cost of gasoline and electricity. (71 to 18)

3. The option of a single-rate system should give taxpayers the convenience of filing their taxes with just a single sheet of paper. (82 to 15)

4. Every worker should continue to have the right to federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether to organize a union. (79 to 12)

5. Keeping the reference to “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is very important. (88 to 11)

6. Congress should make it a crime to advocate acts of terrorism, violent conduct, or the killing of innocent people in the United States. (83 to 12)

7. We should dramatically increase our investment in math and science education. (91 to 8.)

8. We believe that if research indicates we could build clean coal plants in the United States with no carbon emissions, it would be important to build such plants as rapidly as possible. (71 to 8.)

9. Illegal immigrants who commit felonies should be deported. (88 to 10)

10. We support giving a large financial prize to the first company or individual who invents a new, safer way to dispose of nuclear waste products. (79 to 16)

Ditto Newt’s philosophy of persuading the public, which dovetails with his “happy warrior” approach in this campaign:

1. Select positive messages.

2. Learn that message.

3. Discipline yourself to stay positive.

4. Make your fights on p

]]>

Ideas don’t run for president; people do. That’s as true today as it was four years ago. So, it is understandable that much of the press and blog coverage of the 2012 GOP primary race has focused on the personalities, experience and record of the candidates rather than their ideas. In fact, until you know the candidates by their actions, you cannot meaningfully judge what their words will mean in practice. Mitt Romney is the prime example of this, having so inconsistent a record that it’s impossible to take seriously the idea that he’s guided by any sort of coherent political philosophy.

But as it happens, we do have three candidates in this race who stand for a distinctive philosophical approach to domestic policy. One of those, Ron Paul, espouses a radical constitutionalism that exists on the periphery of the conservative movement. Rick Perry, while his issue stances are more conventionally (but not always uniformly) conservative, can best be understood through the lens of his guiding principle as a Texas nationalist – a belief that a significant amount of the powers now wielded by the federal government should be returned to the states. And then there’s Newt Gingrich. Newt generates so many new ideas – he develops more firmly-held political convictions before breakfast each morning than Romney’s had his entire life – that it’s tempting to view them as essentially random. But there is a method to the madness. Setting aside for a moment Gingrich’s personal attributes, let’s look at his ideas, with particular attention to two recent interviews he did – one with Ben Domenech, Brad Jackson and Francis Cianfrocca at Coffee and Markets, the other with Glenn Beck. Both provide a keen window into how Newt views domestic policy issues. In the interests of length, I’ll pass over one of the three pillars of Newt’s worldview (his futurism and faith in new technologies), which has been written about extensively, and focus on two others: his gradualism and his revival of what I call “Reform Conservatism.”

I. The Gradualist

Newt’s penchant for apocalyptic rhetoric, revolutionary slogans and promises to fundamentally rethink things tends to get him branded as an agent of bracing changes; even Jonah Goldberg frames the contest between Newt and Romney as a question of whether Republican voters are in the mood for radical overturning of the status quo. The DNC has echoed this theme by calling Newt “the original Tea Partier,” suggesting – as it did in the 1990s – that Newt wanted to do too much, too fast in ways voters couldn’t stomach.

But that’s Newt’s reputation and rhetorical style; it’s not how he actually looks at domestic legislation. He is, in many ways, a gradualist, a temperamental conservative – not one who resists change for the sake of resisting change, of course (precisely the opposite, as I’ll discuss below) but rather an ardent believer in the idea that policy proposals need to be modest and incremental enough to gain a large share of public support. In this regard, a Gingrich presidency would mark a departure from Karl Rove’s “50 + 1″ approach as well as from the bitterly divisive, passed-over-voter-objections approach to Obamacare. Going back to the Contract with America, Newt has long preached the value of “60% issues” or even more dramatically “80/20 issues,” on which a politician can target his proposals to what a large majority of the public actually wants (thus, in the 1990s, welfare reform, congressional reforms, balanced budgets and a capital gains tax cut). In 2009, we had Newt’s Platform of the American People, complete with Newt’s view of the polling on each issue:

1. English should be the official language of government. (87 to 11)

2. We want our elected leaders in Washington to focus on increasing the energy supplies of the United States and lowering the cost of gasoline and electricity. (71 to 18)

3. The option of a single-rate system should give taxpayers the convenience of filing their taxes with just a single sheet of paper. (82 to 15)

4. Every worker should continue to have the right to federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether to organize a union. (79 to 12)

5. Keeping the reference to “One Nation Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is very important. (88 to 11)

6. Congress should make it a crime to advocate acts of terrorism, violent conduct, or the killing of innocent people in the United States. (83 to 12)

7. We should dramatically increase our investment in math and science education. (91 to 8.)

8. We believe that if research indicates we could build clean coal plants in the United States with no carbon emissions, it would be important to build such plants as rapidly as possible. (71 to 8.)

9. Illegal immigrants who commit felonies should be deported. (88 to 10)

10. We support giving a large financial prize to the first company or individual who invents a new, safer way to dispose of nuclear waste products. (79 to 16)

Ditto Newt’s philosophy of persuading the public, which dovetails with his “happy warrior” approach in this campaign:

1. Select positive messages.

2. Learn that message.

3. Discipline yourself to stay positive.

4. Make your fights on p

]]> http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/12/14/taking-newt-gingrichs-ideas-seriously/feed/ 134 http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/22/election-day-in-louisiana/ http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/22/election-day-in-louisiana/#comments Sat, 22 Oct 2011 15:52:25 +0000 Dan McLaughlin (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/?p=966
It’s Election Day today in Lousiana:

[T]he electorate will settle increasingly nasty bouts for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and the state board of education. Local ballots are dotted with contested legislative matchups, a handful of judicial contests in New Orleans, and parish offices in Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist.

Voters also must navigate a gaggle of state constitutional amendments and several local tax issues at the parish and municipal level.

Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Any voter in line by 8 p.m. should be allowed to vote. Louisiana requires voters to present valid identification.

The big national name on the ballot is Bobby Jindal, up for re-election to his second term as governor; Jindal, the nation’s first Indian-American governor, turned 40 in June.

In Louisiana’s idiosyncratic system, Jindal needs 50% of the vote today to avoid a runoff. He enters the day a prohibitive favorite:

Jindal, who easily won his first term in 2007, has raised over $11 million for his bid, trumping his nearest rival, Democrat and Clairborne Parish teacher Tara Hollis, who has raised only $40,000, of which $18,000 came in the form of in-kind contributions.

Jindal has been leading in recent polls, coming in at 57 percent in a WWL-TV poll earlier this month, with Hollis polling at five percent.

Louisiana, as a socially conservative Southern state, has trended Republican at the national level for decades, but only after 2005′s Hurricane Katrina left the state’s Democratic political elite badly discredited did Republicans really break through – Jindal won the Governor’s mansion in 2007 and in 2010 gained the first GOP legislative majority in the state since Reconstruction. The inability of the state’s Democratic machine to mount a credible challenge to Jindal is symbolic of those shifting fortunes in the state and the region, and also of Jindal’s status as a rising star in the national GOP: Jindal is the same age as Mitt Romney in 1987, Rick Perry in 1991, Barack Obama in 2001, and Ronald Reagan in 1951. We will be hearing a lot more from him in years to come.

]]>
It’s Election Day today in Lousiana:

[T]he electorate will settle increasingly nasty bouts for lieutenant governor, secretary of state and the state board of education. Local ballots are dotted with contested legislative matchups, a handful of judicial contests in New Orleans, and parish offices in Jefferson, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, St. Tammany, St. Charles and St. John the Baptist.

Voters also must navigate a gaggle of state constitutional amendments and several local tax issues at the parish and municipal level.

Polls open at 6 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. Any voter in line by 8 p.m. should be allowed to vote. Louisiana requires voters to present valid identification.

The big national name on the ballot is Bobby Jindal, up for re-election to his second term as governor; Jindal, the nation’s first Indian-American governor, turned 40 in June.

In Louisiana’s idiosyncratic system, Jindal needs 50% of the vote today to avoid a runoff. He enters the day a prohibitive favorite:

Jindal, who easily won his first term in 2007, has raised over $11 million for his bid, trumping his nearest rival, Democrat and Clairborne Parish teacher Tara Hollis, who has raised only $40,000, of which $18,000 came in the form of in-kind contributions.

Jindal has been leading in recent polls, coming in at 57 percent in a WWL-TV poll earlier this month, with Hollis polling at five percent.

Louisiana, as a socially conservative Southern state, has trended Republican at the national level for decades, but only after 2005′s Hurricane Katrina left the state’s Democratic political elite badly discredited did Republicans really break through – Jindal won the Governor’s mansion in 2007 and in 2010 gained the first GOP legislative majority in the state since Reconstruction. The inability of the state’s Democratic machine to mount a credible challenge to Jindal is symbolic of those shifting fortunes in the state and the region, and also of Jindal’s status as a rising star in the national GOP: Jindal is the same age as Mitt Romney in 1987, Rick Perry in 1991, Barack Obama in 2001, and Ronald Reagan in 1951. We will be hearing a lot more from him in years to come.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/22/election-day-in-louisiana/feed/ 47 http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/04/david-brooks-likes-the-crease-of-mitt-romneys-pants/ http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/04/david-brooks-likes-the-crease-of-mitt-romneys-pants/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 18:00:49 +0000 Dan McLaughlin (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/?p=961
I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead.

Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for:

[T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that no president since Reagan has been able to reform the tax code. There’s a reason no president save Obama has been able to pass health care reform. These are complicated issues that require a sophisticated inside game – navigating through the special interests, building complex coalitions. They are issues that require executive expertise.

Now, I don’t discount the idea that a good “inside game” is important, and indeed is one of the reasons why we generally look for presidents with some record of executive political leadership – indeed, for presidents with more of it than Romney brings to the table from a single term in office. But notice who is missing in this picture? The voters.

Brooks ascribes no importance whatsoever to the president’s role in persuading the public of anything (a critical factor in Reagan’s tax cut and tax reform fights); he simply assumes that backroom deals can be cut that make the public’s role moot:

He could probably work well with the leaders of his own party. If Romney were to be elected, he would probably share power with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House speaker, John Boehner. These are not exactly Tea Party radicals. Instead, they are consummate professionals and expert legislators who could plausibly work together.

What about Romney’s ability to sway voters?

Romney can be dull. Political activists like exciting candidates. But most people, who have lower expectations from politics and politicians, just want them to provide basic order. They want government to be orderly so they can be daring in other spheres of their lives. Romney is the most predictable of the candidates and would make for the most soporific of presidents. That’s a good thing. Government would function better if partisan passions were on a lower flame.

This is all well and good if the government is set on a reliable course and needs no alterations, and if the partisan opposition was vanquished once and for all; you pick a technocratic manager to run the big machines well. (We’re talking domestic policy; Brooks makes no mention of national security or international relations). But none of that is true: Brooks gives lip service to the idea that we have real problems with an unsustainable spending and entitlement state, but he is too happy with the status quo to admit to himself that fixing the country’s genuine fiscal problems will require real, wrenching changes and an obstinate determination to see things through (let alone to survive the bruising fights that will loom over the next Supreme Court nominations, which are similarly a major inflection point). Nor does he address the thick hide a new president will need to make genuine reductions in the regulatory burdens that currently weigh down business, or to withstand the now-perennial calls for new bailouts (the next big ones on the way will be bailouts of the Postal Service and the State of California).

Let’s turn to how Brooks misunderstands the nature of the challenges ahead:

[T]his is not a party riven by big ideological differences. This is not Reagan versus Rockefeller. Whoever wins the nomination will be leading a party with a cohesive ideology and a common set of priorities: reform taxes, replace Obamacare, cut spending and reform entitlements. The next president won’t have to come up with a vision, just execute the things almost all Republicans agree upon.

This vision of a bloodless party dispute over technical competence sounds good, although of course this is what the Rockefeller/George Romney side of the party has been saying for decades. It’s true that the big differences within the party these days are less about ideology per se than about strategy and tactics, but they are no less divisive for being so (hence, Romney echoing his own father’s attacks on Barry Goldwater in his campaign against Rick Perry).

Note the crucial word choice “replace Obamacare.” The word is not chosen by accident, and it carries enormous ideological freight. The great health care divide in the party for some time has been over whether Republicans need to accept a comprehensive and universal approach to health care, rather than leave the system as is and tinker piecemeal, by trial and error, around the edges seeking improvements. And Mitt Romney is the high priest of the former faction – the centerpiece of his agenda in his single term in office was passing a “comprehensive” and “universal” health care plan built on a foundation of individual mandates. Rather than a masterful inside game, what happened in that case was that Romney got rolled, badly, by Ted Kennedy and his state-level allies into a plan that has driven up insurance premiums in Massachusetts and laid the political groundwork for Obamacare.

Romney was warned of these consequences by conservatives at the time, and ignoring those warnings was the most significant decision, and largest strategic error, of his political career. But to Brooks, Romney’s failure on his signature issue counts as a feather in Romney’s cap because a big, complicated bill got passed with the support of a lot of interest groups. Consequences – and voters – be damned.

What does it mean to “replace” Obamacare? The next GOP president should make it a goal on Day One to repeal the bill and go back to the drawing board. Certainly, that should include a plan to follow repeal of the PPACA with the introduction of new, more modest proposals to improve the health care system in this country; nobody argues that our system is perfect, nor that it is such a libertarian utopia that government has no role in fixing problems that are in many cases the creation of government.

But the largest strategic error that can be made is for the next president to link repeal of Obamacare to passage of some equally “comprehensive” plan to “replace” it – thus dissipating political momentum on passage of a new, complex bill that may prove equally unpopular (especially at a time when the president will have to be busy with many other economic issues). And Romney’s record and pronouncements thus far have indicated nothing to give confidence that he wouldn’t fall into precisely such a trap (his emphasis on suspending Obamacare by executive order, while not a bad thing by itself, suggests the worrisome possibility that he might not put a full effort into getting it entirely off the books before the White House and its power over executive orders falls back into Democratic hands).

Time and again the past five years, David Brooks has been impressed by the supposed erudition of Barack Obama, and time and again he has been disdainful of competing virtues more important to democratic leadership and popular sovereignty. His ode to Romney demonstrates how little Brooks has learned from his own errors, and how far removed Romney’s appeal is from those virtues.

]]>
I could hardly sum up more pithily the problem with Mitt Romney’s candidacy in four words than “David Brooks loves him.” Brooks’ column today is revealingly out of step with the party and the nation Romney is seeking to lead.

Let’s start with what’s missing from Brooks’ description of the job Romney is applying for:

[T]he challenges ahead are technically difficult. There’s a reason that no president since Reagan has been able to reform the tax code. There’s a reason no president save Obama has been able to pass health care reform. These are complicated issues that require a sophisticated inside game – navigating through the special interests, building complex coalitions. They are issues that require executive expertise.

Now, I don’t discount the idea that a good “inside game” is important, and indeed is one of the reasons why we generally look for presidents with some record of executive political leadership – indeed, for presidents with more of it than Romney brings to the table from a single term in office. But notice who is missing in this picture? The voters.

Brooks ascribes no importance whatsoever to the president’s role in persuading the public of anything (a critical factor in Reagan’s tax cut and tax reform fights); he simply assumes that backroom deals can be cut that make the public’s role moot:

He could probably work well with the leaders of his own party. If Romney were to be elected, he would probably share power with the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House speaker, John Boehner. These are not exactly Tea Party radicals. Instead, they are consummate professionals and expert legislators who could plausibly work together.

What about Romney’s ability to sway voters?

Romney can be dull. Political activists like exciting candidates. But most people, who have lower expectations from politics and politicians, just want them to provide basic order. They want government to be orderly so they can be daring in other spheres of their lives. Romney is the most predictable of the candidates and would make for the most soporific of presidents. That’s a good thing. Government would function better if partisan passions were on a lower flame.

This is all well and good if the government is set on a reliable course and needs no alterations, and if the partisan opposition was vanquished once and for all; you pick a technocratic manager to run the big machines well. (We’re talking domestic policy; Brooks makes no mention of national security or international relations). But none of that is true: Brooks gives lip service to the idea that we have real problems with an unsustainable spending and entitlement state, but he is too happy with the status quo to admit to himself that fixing the country’s genuine fiscal problems will require real, wrenching changes and an obstinate determination to see things through (let alone to survive the bruising fights that will loom over the next Supreme Court nominations, which are similarly a major inflection point). Nor does he address the thick hide a new president will need to make genuine reductions in the regulatory burdens that currently weigh down business, or to withstand the now-perennial calls for new bailouts (the next big ones on the way will be bailouts of the Postal Service and the State of California).

Let’s turn to how Brooks misunderstands the nature of the challenges ahead:

[T]his is not a party riven by big ideological differences. This is not Reagan versus Rockefeller. Whoever wins the nomination will be leading a party with a cohesive ideology and a common set of priorities: reform taxes, replace Obamacare, cut spending and reform entitlements. The next president won’t have to come up with a vision, just execute the things almost all Republicans agree upon.

This vision of a bloodless party dispute over technical competence sounds good, although of course this is what the Rockefeller/George Romney side of the party has been saying for decades. It’s true that the big differences within the party these days are less about ideology per se than about strategy and tactics, but they are no less divisive for being so (hence, Romney echoing his own father’s attacks on Barry Goldwater in his campaign against Rick Perry).

Note the crucial word choice “replace Obamacare.” The word is not chosen by accident, and it carries enormous ideological freight. The great health care divide in the party for some time has been over whether Republicans need to accept a comprehensive and universal approach to health care, rather than leave the system as is and tinker piecemeal, by trial and error, around the edges seeking improvements. And Mitt Romney is the high priest of the former faction – the centerpiece of his agenda in his single term in office was passing a “comprehensive” and “universal” health care plan built on a foundation of individual mandates. Rather than a masterful inside game, what happened in that case was that Romney got rolled, badly, by Ted Kennedy and his state-level allies into a plan that has driven up insurance premiums in Massachusetts and laid the political groundwork for Obamacare.

Romney was warned of these consequences by conservatives at the time, and ignoring those warnings was the most significant decision, and largest strategic error, of his political career. But to Brooks, Romney’s failure on his signature issue counts as a feather in Romney’s cap because a big, complicated bill got passed with the support of a lot of interest groups. Consequences – and voters – be damned.

What does it mean to “replace” Obamacare? The next GOP president should make it a goal on Day One to repeal the bill and go back to the drawing board. Certainly, that should include a plan to follow repeal of the PPACA with the introduction of new, more modest proposals to improve the health care system in this country; nobody argues that our system is perfect, nor that it is such a libertarian utopia that government has no role in fixing problems that are in many cases the creation of government.

But the largest strategic error that can be made is for the next president to link repeal of Obamacare to passage of some equally “comprehensive” plan to “replace” it – thus dissipating political momentum on passage of a new, complex bill that may prove equally unpopular (especially at a time when the president will have to be busy with many other economic issues). And Romney’s record and pronouncements thus far have indicated nothing to give confidence that he wouldn’t fall into precisely such a trap (his emphasis on suspending Obamacare by executive order, while not a bad thing by itself, suggests the worrisome possibility that he might not put a full effort into getting it entirely off the books before the White House and its power over executive orders falls back into Democratic hands).

Time and again the past five years, David Brooks has been impressed by the supposed erudition of Barack Obama, and time and again he has been disdainful of competing virtues more important to democratic leadership and popular sovereignty. His ode to Romney demonstrates how little Brooks has learned from his own errors, and how far removed Romney’s appeal is from those virtues.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/10/04/david-brooks-likes-the-crease-of-mitt-romneys-pants/feed/ 45 http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/30/reagan-did-not-wait-until-the-last-minute/ http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/30/reagan-did-not-wait-until-the-last-minute/#comments Fri, 30 Sep 2011 16:45:28 +0000 Dan McLaughlin (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/?p=958 The 2012 presidential election season has not been a normal one in many ways. History teaches us that every election season brings something new we haven’t seen before – but also that progress in electioneering, as in most walks of life, is more gradual than people are wont to predict. The candidate who says “this time, everything is different” or “the old rules don’t apply” or promises “new politics” or “fundamental change” is almost always selling a bill of goods to his or her supporters, and often to himself or herself. As conservatives, with a belief in experience as mankind’s best and only teacher, we should know better. One need only look back to 2010, when a popular wave brought victory mostly to candidates with the attributes and experience of traditonally successful candidates (Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey) and defeat to candidates who were genuinely unorthodox or similar to past losing campaigns (Sharron Angle, Carly Fiorina, Christine O’Donnell). The terrain shifted and new opportunities were created, but the basic rules of the game remained the same.

Even now, with the leading GOP contenders pouring money and manpower into the early primary states and the filing deadlines only a month away, we still have pundits and eager activists telling us that it’s not too late for new candidates to jump in. Please, Sarah Palin. Please, Chris Christie. Etc. It’s certainly true that a late entrant could yet generate enough support to shake up the fundamental dynamics of the race. It’s even possible that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney will prove vulnerable enough that a new entrant could still win. But let us not kid ourselves: the old rules still matter. It would be deeply unprecedented for a candidate in the modern (post-1972) age of presidential primaries to win the nomination without having laid any foundation of a national organization as late as the October before the primaries.

Some would have you believe that Ronald Reagan, who officially declared himself a candidate in November 1979, ran such a race. This is nonsense and historical ignorance.

Let me offer as Exhibit A an excerpt here from a portion of page 613 of Steven Hayward’s magisterial book The Age of Reagan, which documents the rise of Reagan from 1964 to 1980, and which I highly recommend. Hayward describes how Reagan began to plan for his run with a meeting of his senior staff in September 1976:

Hayward goes on to detail other steps Reagan took to prepare, such as beginning in 1978 to have aide Martin Anderson prepare task forces of issue experts to brief Reagan (Hayward notes that by the time of the 1980 election, there were a total of 461 people, experts in numerous policy areas, on these various issue task forces), and dinner parties with leading figures on the Right to drum up support. Ben Domenech cites Reagan’s 1978 foreign policy debates with William F. Buckley.

Nor was Reagan coy or private about his preparations to be the next Commander-in-Chief. How do I know? Because one of the many ordinary citizens to whom he signalled his interest in running was my father, the recipient of this letter in the fall of 1978, now reprinted at page 517 of Reagan: A Life in Letters:

I’m only scratching the surface here of the labors Reagan undertook to prepare himself and the public for his candidacy, to travel around the world meeting with foreign leaders and inspecting U.S. military installations, and to build a professional campaign staff, fundraising apparatus and ground organization. The point is that anyone who tells you that Reagan simply came out of the blue in the fall of 1979 wasn’t there and hasn’t bothered to learn the history from anyone who was.

]]> The 2012 presidential election season has not been a normal one in many ways. History teaches us that every election season brings something new we haven’t seen before – but also that progress in electioneering, as in most walks of life, is more gradual than people are wont to predict. The candidate who says “this time, everything is different” or “the old rules don’t apply” or promises “new politics” or “fundamental change” is almost always selling a bill of goods to his or her supporters, and often to himself or herself. As conservatives, with a belief in experience as mankind’s best and only teacher, we should know better. One need only look back to 2010, when a popular wave brought victory mostly to candidates with the attributes and experience of traditonally successful candidates (Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey) and defeat to candidates who were genuinely unorthodox or similar to past losing campaigns (Sharron Angle, Carly Fiorina, Christine O’Donnell). The terrain shifted and new opportunities were created, but the basic rules of the game remained the same.

Even now, with the leading GOP contenders pouring money and manpower into the early primary states and the filing deadlines only a month away, we still have pundits and eager activists telling us that it’s not too late for new candidates to jump in. Please, Sarah Palin. Please, Chris Christie. Etc. It’s certainly true that a late entrant could yet generate enough support to shake up the fundamental dynamics of the race. It’s even possible that Rick Perry and Mitt Romney will prove vulnerable enough that a new entrant could still win. But let us not kid ourselves: the old rules still matter. It would be deeply unprecedented for a candidate in the modern (post-1972) age of presidential primaries to win the nomination without having laid any foundation of a national organization as late as the October before the primaries.

Some would have you believe that Ronald Reagan, who officially declared himself a candidate in November 1979, ran such a race. This is nonsense and historical ignorance.

Let me offer as Exhibit A an excerpt here from a portion of page 613 of Steven Hayward’s magisterial book The Age of Reagan, which documents the rise of Reagan from 1964 to 1980, and which I highly recommend. Hayward describes how Reagan began to plan for his run with a meeting of his senior staff in September 1976:

Hayward goes on to detail other steps Reagan took to prepare, such as beginning in 1978 to have aide Martin Anderson prepare task forces of issue experts to brief Reagan (Hayward notes that by the time of the 1980 election, there were a total of 461 people, experts in numerous policy areas, on these various issue task forces), and dinner parties with leading figures on the Right to drum up support. Ben Domenech cites Reagan’s 1978 foreign policy debates with William F. Buckley.

Nor was Reagan coy or private about his preparations to be the next Commander-in-Chief. How do I know? Because one of the many ordinary citizens to whom he signalled his interest in running was my father, the recipient of this letter in the fall of 1978, now reprinted at page 517 of Reagan: A Life in Letters:

I’m only scratching the surface here of the labors Reagan undertook to prepare himself and the public for his candidacy, to travel around the world meeting with foreign leaders and inspecting U.S. military installations, and to build a professional campaign staff, fundraising apparatus and ground organization. The point is that anyone who tells you that Reagan simply came out of the blue in the fall of 1979 wasn’t there and hasn’t bothered to learn the history from anyone who was.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/30/reagan-did-not-wait-until-the-last-minute/feed/ 31 http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/27/job-creation-and-the-rich-the-facebook-story/ http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/27/job-creation-and-the-rich-the-facebook-story/#comments Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:13:20 +0000 Dan McLaughlin (Diary) http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/?p=955 President Obama is on the prowl for new targets for (1) raising more tax revenue and/or (2) demonizing “the rich” for campaign purposes. Among Obama’s proposals, besides raising taxes on high-income individuals generally, is to more than double the tax rate paid by many private equity and venture capital investors from 15% to 35%, by reclassifying sales of their businesses (or shares in their businesses) as ordinary income rather than capital gains (more detail here and, drawn from prior versions of the proposal here and here). A common trope being retailed in some form or another by Obama and his allies is that taxing the wealthy and private equity and venture capital has no impact on job creation. As is common to liberal arguments, rather than argue that they are proposing a worthwhile tradeoff, liberals deny even the possibility that their policies involve any tradeoffs whatsoever. As well they might: the voters are hardly going to accept anything right now that impedes the growth of private sector businesses and jobs.

Now, there are a lot of economic angles to this argument, which have been ventilated in more detail elsewhere. But a concrete example may be useful in illustrating how wealthy individuals, private equity and venture capital contribute to the growth of businesses and jobs: the story of Facebook.

Facebook, as you may recall, was largely the brainchild of 20-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, and – to simplify a story that has involved a lot of acrimony and litigation – was founded by Zuckerberg and his roommate Dustin Moskovitz in February 2004 to provide a way for Harvard students to interact online. The company was not created in response to any consumer demand to spend money on such a product (seven years later, it still doesn’t cost you anything to have a Facebook account, and the company’s revenue comes mainly from advertising and similar streams). It was created because the founders thought it was a good product and that creating it would generate its own demand (the antithesis of demand-is-everything Keynesian economic theory). They were right – they got 1,200 subscribers within 24 hours, and the user base of Facebook has grown like wildfire for years since, to over 800 million today.

But while they were not exactly paupers – each invested about $1,000 at the start, and later $10,000 – there were limits to how far Zuckerberg and Moskovitz could spread their business idea without investment. Enter the money. First came Eduardo Saverin, also a Harvard student, the son of a wealthy Brazilian businessman; Saverin had reportedly made some $300,000 investing in oil futures, and put a stake in Facebook to become one-third owner and the company’s first CFO. That got the venture off the ground, born from the start in commodity trading profits. (Saverin was later bought out to resolve litigation)

Just four months after the company’s founding, in June 2004, it got a major investment: $500,000 from Peter Thiel. Thiel had been running his own multibillion-dollar hedge fund since 1996, and had made $1.5 billion in 2002 from taking PayPal (which he founded) public and selling it to eBay. Once again, an investor flush with cash from hedge fund profits and the sale of a new business provided the rocket fuel that allowed Facebook to take off from dorm-room startup to major online network. (Thiel reportedly received a 7% stake in the company, now worth well over a billion dollars).

As a startup, Facebook needed constant inflows of cash. The company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto around the time Thiel invested, and spent $200,000 in mid-2005 to buy facebook.com (its prior domain name was thefacebook.com). It cost money from the very beginning to defend against lawsuits. And the company seems to have lost millions in its first two years of operations.

Yet the product itself grew and grew, expanding overseas by the fall of 2005, and the constant inflow of capital kept it able to sustain that growth. Venture capital firm Accel Partners put $12.7 million into Facebook in April 2005, followed by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million that same year. By 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in exchange for just a 1.6% stake in the company, implying that the whole enterprise was now worth $15 billion. Today, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and expects to grow that to 9,400 employees by 2017.

Anecdote is not the singular of data, and like most stories of individual companies you can overdraw the policy implications from Facebook’s growth. Yes, Facebook is an extreme example. Yes, Facebook grew in the shadow of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, but it also grew up in high-tax states like Massachusetts and California, and of course I couldn’t tell you the particular tax rates paid by the various wealthy investors in the company. But Facebook’s story, and thousands of others like it (if less dramatic) illustrate three timeless truths:

(1) Growing businesses need capital;

(2) Capital for risky startup ventures – especially ones with as steep an upward growth trend as Facebook – tends to come primarily from wealthy individual investors and from the venture capital and private equity vehicles they fund (the business career of Mitt Romney is full of examples of this); and

(3) The more of that capital you have, and the better the after-tax returns it can earn, the more seed corn there is to grow still more of those businesses.

You would think that President Obama – who at least in 2008 drew a lot of support from Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley ilk – would appreciate this concept. But Obama remains the same man who in the primary debate in 2008 in Philadelphia told Charlie Gibson that he wanted to raise the capital gains tax “for purposes of fairness” regardless of whether it brought in more revenue. Even as the economy has stagnated and dragged down his own political fortunes with it, Obama seems unwilling to even consider the importance of private capital in any recovery. Investors in new businesses, consider yourselves unfriended.

]]> President Obama is on the prowl for new targets for (1) raising more tax revenue and/or (2) demonizing “the rich” for campaign purposes. Among Obama’s proposals, besides raising taxes on high-income individuals generally, is to more than double the tax rate paid by many private equity and venture capital investors from 15% to 35%, by reclassifying sales of their businesses (or shares in their businesses) as ordinary income rather than capital gains (more detail here and, drawn from prior versions of the proposal here and here). A common trope being retailed in some form or another by Obama and his allies is that taxing the wealthy and private equity and venture capital has no impact on job creation. As is common to liberal arguments, rather than argue that they are proposing a worthwhile tradeoff, liberals deny even the possibility that their policies involve any tradeoffs whatsoever. As well they might: the voters are hardly going to accept anything right now that impedes the growth of private sector businesses and jobs.

Now, there are a lot of economic angles to this argument, which have been ventilated in more detail elsewhere. But a concrete example may be useful in illustrating how wealthy individuals, private equity and venture capital contribute to the growth of businesses and jobs: the story of Facebook.

Facebook, as you may recall, was largely the brainchild of 20-year-old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, and – to simplify a story that has involved a lot of acrimony and litigation – was founded by Zuckerberg and his roommate Dustin Moskovitz in February 2004 to provide a way for Harvard students to interact online. The company was not created in response to any consumer demand to spend money on such a product (seven years later, it still doesn’t cost you anything to have a Facebook account, and the company’s revenue comes mainly from advertising and similar streams). It was created because the founders thought it was a good product and that creating it would generate its own demand (the antithesis of demand-is-everything Keynesian economic theory). They were right – they got 1,200 subscribers within 24 hours, and the user base of Facebook has grown like wildfire for years since, to over 800 million today.

But while they were not exactly paupers – each invested about $1,000 at the start, and later $10,000 – there were limits to how far Zuckerberg and Moskovitz could spread their business idea without investment. Enter the money. First came Eduardo Saverin, also a Harvard student, the son of a wealthy Brazilian businessman; Saverin had reportedly made some $300,000 investing in oil futures, and put a stake in Facebook to become one-third owner and the company’s first CFO. That got the venture off the ground, born from the start in commodity trading profits. (Saverin was later bought out to resolve litigation)

Just four months after the company’s founding, in June 2004, it got a major investment: $500,000 from Peter Thiel. Thiel had been running his own multibillion-dollar hedge fund since 1996, and had made $1.5 billion in 2002 from taking PayPal (which he founded) public and selling it to eBay. Once again, an investor flush with cash from hedge fund profits and the sale of a new business provided the rocket fuel that allowed Facebook to take off from dorm-room startup to major online network. (Thiel reportedly received a 7% stake in the company, now worth well over a billion dollars).

As a startup, Facebook needed constant inflows of cash. The company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto around the time Thiel invested, and spent $200,000 in mid-2005 to buy facebook.com (its prior domain name was thefacebook.com). It cost money from the very beginning to defend against lawsuits. And the company seems to have lost millions in its first two years of operations.

Yet the product itself grew and grew, expanding overseas by the fall of 2005, and the constant inflow of capital kept it able to sustain that growth. Venture capital firm Accel Partners put $12.7 million into Facebook in April 2005, followed by Greylock Venture Capital, which invested $27.5 million that same year. By 2007, Microsoft invested $240 million in exchange for just a 1.6% stake in the company, implying that the whole enterprise was now worth $15 billion. Today, Facebook has over 2,000 employees, and expects to grow that to 9,400 employees by 2017.

Anecdote is not the singular of data, and like most stories of individual companies you can overdraw the policy implications from Facebook’s growth. Yes, Facebook is an extreme example. Yes, Facebook grew in the shadow of the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, but it also grew up in high-tax states like Massachusetts and California, and of course I couldn’t tell you the particular tax rates paid by the various wealthy investors in the company. But Facebook’s story, and thousands of others like it (if less dramatic) illustrate three timeless truths:

(1) Growing businesses need capital;

(2) Capital for risky startup ventures – especially ones with as steep an upward growth trend as Facebook – tends to come primarily from wealthy individual investors and from the venture capital and private equity vehicles they fund (the business career of Mitt Romney is full of examples of this); and

(3) The more of that capital you have, and the better the after-tax returns it can earn, the more seed corn there is to grow still more of those businesses.

You would think that President Obama – who at least in 2008 drew a lot of support from Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley ilk – would appreciate this concept. But Obama remains the same man who in the primary debate in 2008 in Philadelphia told Charlie Gibson that he wanted to raise the capital gains tax “for purposes of fairness” regardless of whether it brought in more revenue. Even as the economy has stagnated and dragged down his own political fortunes with it, Obama seems unwilling to even consider the importance of private capital in any recovery. Investors in new businesses, consider yourselves unfriended.

]]> http://www.redstate.com/dan_mclaughlin/2011/09/27/job-creation-and-the-rich-the-facebook-story/feed/ 24