Matt Yglesias

Early 2012 Polling

Gallup takes an early look at potential Republican contenders for 2012. Mike Huckabee, who doesn’t get the press coverage of a Sarah Palin, seems to be in the best shape:

As general election contenders, however, this crew all seems to be in bad shape:

Of course what looking at these polls doesn’t tell you is whether the answers to these questions this far out have any real predictive value. My guess would be that the answer is no, and that if Huckabee became the Republican nominee and the economy continues to be in bad shape that he’d win notwithstanding the tendency of a majority of Americans to say they wouldn’t even consider voting for him. That said, this definitely does underscore the basic fact that much as the conservative base may love Sarah Palin, the broader public hates her. Maybe—maybe—a Palin nomination would break the rule that the fundamentals matter most to presidential election outcomes.

Petraeus’ Indifference Problem

Peter Beinart has a pretty clever column about how it would be good if David Petraeus ran for President as a Republican in 2012. It’s clever in the sense that he uses the conceit to make various smart points. But the conceit itself is dumb. Alex Massie makes some good points about this. But the larger issue is that there’s no evidence that the public cares at all about Petraeus’ signature issues. Stroll over to Polling Report’s problems and priorities page. A recent CBS News poll indicates that . . . nobody cares:

If you expand the choice set offered to people, you get somewhat different answers. For example, an August CNN/Opinion Research poll let people say “education” and it turns out that just as many people think this is the most important issue as think Iraq and Afghanistan is:

As it happens, former Bush administration Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is, like David Petraeus, an example of a Bush administration official who you can find Democrats who’ll praise. But I don’t see anyone touting her as a likely presidential contender. Because, you know, she was a second-tier cabinet member working on a second-tier issue.

The Case for Mormon Moderation

It seems Zvika Krieger was already at work on a profile of Utah Governor Jon Huntsman before he unexpectedly agreed to take the Ambassador to China job. His conclusions about that business—partly politically motivated on Obama’s part, but it works because Huntsman’s so well-qualified, and it works for Huntsman since he doesn’t think a moderate can win unless the GOP gets a thrashing first in 2012—are probably correct, but not all that new and interesting. What is interesting is this theory of why Huntsman started drifting into the reform camp in the first place:

Huntsman seems to have learned another lesson from the Romney campaign: A Mormon, no matter how conservative, cannot win amongst the right wing of the party–particularly evangelicals. Romney thought he could win their favor by becoming a drum-beating social conservative, underestimating the deep-rooted antipathy many evangelicals have toward Mormons. A recent Pew poll found that 39 percent of evangelicals hold negative views of Mormons–a sentiment Mike Huckabee used against Romney. Though RNC Chair Michael Steele was lambasted last week for saying “the base … rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism,” he wasn’t that far off: According to a study by John C. Green and Mark Silk, the size of the evangelical community was one of the best predictors of Romney’s success or failure in each state; without the evangelical vote, they argue, Romney probably would have won in four of the five southern states he lost. In light of Romney’s experience, the more likely base for Huntsman would have been the moderate wing of the party, which is less concerned with religion in general (and the LDS church specifically).

I’m not sure that Huntsman’s really hit on a “solution” to this problem. It seems to me that given evangelicals’ large numbers, the tendency, come what may, will be for an evangelical-friendly candidate to win. Which is to say, a Protestant Christian who favors banning abortion and is hostile to claims of gay and lesbian equality. Of course given the winner-take-all nature of most GOP presidential primaries, it’s always possible for an unlikely Republican candidate to prevail against a divided field. But a Mormon intrinsically has a steep hill to climb.

How Long? Not Long

Bruce Bartlett has a column lamenting the poor outlook for the Republican Party that concludes with this:

Eventually, Republicans will tire of being out of power just as Democrats did, and they will do what it takes to win. But I fear that Republicans will have to at least lose in 2010 and again in 2012 before they start to come to their senses. Perhaps by 2014, some leader with maturity, resources, vision and discipline will find a way of leading the GOP out of the wilderness. But I see no one even in a position to start that process today.

I think that’s probably right. Then again, I’m not sure that outlook is so bleak. After kinda sorta losing in 2000, some thought the lesson was that Democrats were way too liberal. Folks like Will Marshall and Mark Penn warned that they had to turn much more conservative in order to win elections. Their warnings went only semi-heeded and, consequently, Democrats lost ground in 2002 and lost more ground in 2004. But guess what? By 2008 they had strong congressional majorities and a popular new president ready to support universal health care, tough action to limit greenhouse gas pollution, a public more supportive than ever of equal rights for gays and lesbians, etc., etc.

Looking at the Republican side, the electoral map is just very bad for them in the 2010 Senate race no matter what they do. And the odds are that we’ll be in an economic recovery by 2012 that the voters will credit Obama for and he’ll get re-elected. But by 2014, the Senate electoral map will be bad for Democrats. Who wins in 2016? It has more to do with what’s happening in 2016 than with what the candidate says.

The problem with the conservative positions pushed by Bush and DeLay and Lott & McConnell and now McConnell & Lott and Boehner and Cantor and Pence isn’t that they’re “unelectable” positions it’s that they don’t work as a governing agenda. That’s bad for the country and also means that if they do get back into office, they’ll run things back into the ditch and probably get voted out again.

Newt’s Fake Presidential Run

Newt Gingrich has been in the news an awful lot recently for someone who’s essentially a washed-up has-been. And I think you have to understand him floating the idea of a 2012 presidential run in that context. The idea of a campaign keeps him in the news which helps him with his fundraising. And I’m sure he’s enjoying a very comfortable life raking in some special interest bucks to make occasional TV appearance and launch fake “ideas” that amount to “tax cuts and giveaways to fossil fuel companies.” But as Jason Zengerle says “the odds that Newt runs for president in 2012 are as low as they were in 2008. Still, you’ve got to love the way he carefully constructs excuses he can use for when he ultimately decides not to toss his hat in the ring.”

The latest twist on this is that his consultations about whether or not to run include the delicate sensibilities of his grandchildren. But the whole thing is preposterous. Even back when Gingrich was a powerful officeholder he was hideously unpopular! Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign strategy in 1996 largely revolved around painting Bob Dole as similar to Newt Gingrich. It’s very easy to paint Newt Gingrich as similar to Newt Gingrich. They even look the same. They’ve got the same name. The same voting record. The main’s a Gingrich clone. No, wait, it’s the same guy!

The strange thing, from where I sit, is how much difficulty the GOP seems to be having in finding a white Catholic guy from the Midwest and deciding that he’s the big rising star. It’s clear from the election results that a large number of white midwestern Catholics are Republicans, and that’s the winning identity for a GOP national figure. Instead you get Bobby Jindal, the bizarre Michael Steele, and a procession of warmed-over southern evangelicals.

Fox News Panel Pans Jindal

I thought Bobby Jindal was a weird choice for the SOTU response. Everybody knows these things usually don’t go well. Why make the national introduction of your erstwhile rising star a situation in which he has an 80% chance of sucking? And it’s also strange to give it to a 2012 primary candidate—seems like you’re playing favorites. At any rate, I thought the base might like Jindal’s text, but eve the Fox News panel couldn’t stomach the delivery:

I thought Alex Massie had a great react piece to the main speech, capturing the atmosphere and the larger significance of the moment.

Does the GOP Governors Split Foreshadow the Party’s Future?

Robert Pear and J. David Goodman take to the pages of The New York Times with the provocative notion that the debate between Republican governors over the stimulus package “will go a long way toward shaping how the national party redefines itself in the wake of its election defeats of recent years”.

I’m not really sure how true that is. The issues posed by the stimulus bill are only tangentially related to those of “ordinary” politics. But if this is the future, then it’s a bit hard to see it playing out well for Republicans:

For some — mostly Democrats but also a few prominent moderate Republicans — the bill represents an admittedly imperfect but desperately needed infusion of cash that will help them avert thousands of layoffs.

For others — predominantly conservative Southern Republicans — the flaws partly outweigh the benefits. And for those with presidential aspirations, the strong stance in opposition to the Obama administration may be seen as a way to stand out and stake a claim to leadership.

If it’s true that the only kind of politics that will play in a GOP presidential primary is the kind of politics that plays in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina but not California or Florida (!) then it’s just hard to see how Republicans get to a majority. At the same time, I recall having read a lot of commentary about how the rise of Iraq War opponents such as Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, and Barack Obama was going to doom the Democrats to some kind of big city oblivion. Instead, well, we got what we have.

I think the main lesson this teaches us is of the transcendent importance of events in political matters. Opposition to the Iraq War was fairly unpopular at one point, but as time when on it became a majority position far outside of Vermont and the Bay Area. At the moment, opposition to the stimulus only seems politically tenable in the Deep South and the Mormon belt. But public opinion on the economy is quite different today from where it was 18 months ago. Why? Well, obviously because the actual situation changed. And 18 months from now—and 18 months from then—things will likely change again. They might change in such a way as to make the stimulus skeptics look utterly discredited or they come to seem rather prescient to some people.

But even if the Jindal/Sanford/Barbour line does come to be more popular in the future, there’s still the question of what you’re going to be for along with what you’re against. And as Joe Klein observes, what Jindal seems to be for is tax cuts for wealth individuals. I don’t have that high an estimation of the public’s memory and I could see people yearning for a returning to the failed economic strategies of the Bush years in 2016 or 2020, but I think it strains credulity to think that voters will have forgotten by 2010 or 2012 that this is a governing philosophy that’s been tried and found wanting.

Bobby Jindal’s Hostages

There’s been some talk about a clutch of very conservative Republican governors from the South, led by Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, “turning down” federal stimulus money. This is mostly nonsense—they’re all actually taking the vast majority of the money and in most cases there’s no real option of declining. But Jindal seems to be genuinely putting the meat on the bones of one aspect of this refusenikery by declining to change Louisiana law in such a way as to make its citizens eligible for extended unemployment insurance benefits. The nominal reason for this is that Jindal is claiming that taking the money would lead to a tax increase on Louisiana businesses, but his reasoning is hard to follow. Ryan Powers observes:

But it is not clear why participating in the expanded unemployment insurance program would result in tax increases for business. By Jindal’s own estimate, the recovery package would have funded his state’s unemployment expansion for three years, at which point the state could — if it chose to do so — phase out the program.

As New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin suggested earlier today, perhaps Jindal’s presidential ambitions are “clouding” his judgement. “I think he’s been tapped as the up-and-coming Republican to petition a run for president the next time it goes around. So he has a certain vernacular, and a certain way he needs to talk right now,” Nagin said.

My other thought is that there may be a “beggar thy neighbor” strategy going on here. If Louisiana makes its unemployment benefits less generous than what’s available in other states, then maybe unemployed citizens will leave Louisiana for Texas and other neighboring states, thus creating an artificial appearance of an improved economic situation. It would be the equivalent of Mike Bloomberg fighting poverty by demolishing all the low-income housing in New York and hoping the poor people all move elsewhere.

America’s Next Bush

Make no mistake about it, Jeb Bush will be President of the United States someday. Ryan Powers has the video of Poppy mulling the concept:

Now it’s true that the extreme unpopularity of George W. Bush might be a problem here. But consider the 1992 election:

Bush got 37.45 percent of the popular vote — slightly less than George McGovern. Among major party nominees, only William Howard Taft in 1912 turned in a worse performance. And not only was Bush hugely unpopular with the electorate at large, he was also hated by the GOP base. When the base doesn’t like you and swing voters don’t like you, you have a problem. What’s more, as of 2000 everybody already knew that W. Bush was dumber and less accomplished than his dad or than Jeb. But he got elected anyway. So don’t think the fact that people hate our current president will stand in Jeb’s way.

Besides, what choice does the GOP have? The last time they captured the White House without a Bush on the ticket was 1972 — eons ago. Without a Bush, they’ve got nothing. My guess is that it’ll take until 2016 for it to happen, but it could be 2012 or 2020 depending on how things develop in the world.

In The Wilderness

Greg Sargent reports on RNC Chair Mike Duncan’s latest thinking:

In a frank and private memo sent today to Republican National Committee members, the RNC chairman acknowledges that the GOP has grown too addicted to ideology, places politics before policy, and is bereft of ideas — and that it’s imperative that the party shift towards a genuine effort to develop concrete policy solutions to people’s problems in order to rescue itself.

The memo, which we obtained from a Republican operative. was written by RNC chief Mike Duncan to explain the RNC’s decision — first reported by Politico — to create a new in-house think tank called the “Center for Republican Renewal,” which is devoted to coming up with new policies and ideas to chart a new direction for the party after November’s devastating losses.

I think this is a mistake. Ambitious people don’t like the idea that their fate is out of their hands. But an opposition political party’s fate is largely out of its hands. The Democratic Party’s recovery from its low ebb in the winter of 2004-2005 had very little to do with Democratic policy innovation and a great deal to do with the fact that the objective situation facing the country got worse. The time for the GOP to improve, policy-wise, was back then. Had the Bush administration been animated by better ideas, Bush might not have led to declining incomes, rising inequality, and catastrophic military adventures. But since he did, the GOP lost. And now the reality is that it’s the Democrats’ turn to govern. If things work out poorly, the GOP will get back in whether or not they have an ideological renewal, and if things work out well the Republicans will stay locked out.

But the time when it’s smart politics to have smart policies is when you’re governing. The public is okay at assessing results, and not otherwise that impressed by policy arguments.

Pawlenty: Let’s Plunge the Economy Into Depression

Because Republicans are judged by different standards, Tim Pawlenty’s proposal that “The GOP should lead efforts to cut up the nation’s credit card and commit to a balanced federal budget” will do absolutely nothing to harm his support among the business community or the notion that electing idiots like him to office will bolster economic growth. But it’s important to recognize that this neo-Hooverite agenda would, if enacted, likely plunge the world economy into a serious Depression.

At a time of economic slowdown, tax revenues will fall. Pawlenty would have the federal government offer no aid to state and local governments, forcing them to slash services and raise taxes, further deepening the slowdown. And then we’d need to cut the federal budget sharply, even further deepening the slowdown. And then next year tax revenues would come in even lower, and we’d need another round of counterproductive cuts. It’s just staggering that a leader who’s generally regarded as less economically bonkers than your average conservative would put this forward as the centerpiece of his economic vision.

RNC Deliberately Dumping on Sarah Palin?

Intriguing evidence that they are from Stan Collender.

Relatedly, I was talking with colleagues this morning about Sarah Palin’s scheduled rollout of a health care plan and the difficulties of scheduling an event in Alaska that can be well-timed to get news coverage on the east coast. It was a reminder that a governor of Alaska will face some logistical hurdles in trying to remain in the national eye. I also suspect that needing to talk about how falling oil prices are causing economic harship will remind people that experience as the chief executive of an underpopulated petro-state has relatively little to do with big national issues.

The Napolitano Future

There’s some interest in what becoming Homeland Security Secretary would mean for Janet Napolitano’s prospects as a Senate candidate. I would imagine that it will only mean good things. Nothing about running DHS prevents her from running for Senate in 2010 or, indeed, from running against John Kyl in 2012. Indeed, being at DHS is probably better to set up a 2012 run, and given that John McCain says he’s not retiring, that’s her better shot.

But beyond all that, note that she’s getting out as governor of Arizona while the going is still good. Being a governor of any state in 2009 is going to be ugly. It’s going to be all about cutting spending and raising taxes, while dealing with increased demand for public assistance and in all likelihood rising crime rates. Arizona was a major real estate bubble state, so it’s going to be especially unfun. It’s also a state that’s been in some respects benefiting economically from the war in Iraq, making things even worse. She’s very popular right now, though, and if she gets out and manages to bring about some improvements at DHS she’ll stay popular.

Newt’s New Ideas

I think I’ve made this point before, but for added conservocredibility take note of Ross Douthat’s post on the scant grounds for thinking that Newt Gingrich has any “new ideas” to offer:

If you find Newt’s manifesto – which urged Republicans to “overhaul the census and cut its budget radically,” to “implement a space-based, GPS-style air traffic control system,” and to double down on porkbusting, among other ideas – to be a plausible blueprint for a Republican revival, then he’s your man.

At his best, Gingrich is good at dressing up an interest-group agenda (let us drill more places) as something somewhat more ennobling. Which is, in the right circumstances, a useful skill for a politician to have. But it’s not where actual new ideas come from.

Jindal Says No

Interestingly, it seems Bobby Jindal was being seriously considered for the Veepstakes but decided to say no in part because they feared that he might “be caught up in what they believed to be a less-than-stellar campaign that could pin a loss on Jindal without much ability to change or control the direction of the contest.”

Ross Douthat says this shows Jindal’s smarts. And perhaps so, though I actually have a hard time seeing a VP seriously taking the blame in a situation like that. It was never really my sense, for example, that John Edwards’ 2008 primary campaign was in any sense hampered by people blaming him for the loss of the Kerry-Edwards ticket.

Either way, I’m actually a bit skeptical of Jindal’s 2016 prospects. Discussion of this tends to begin and end with talking about whether the GOP is really ready for a non-white standard-bearer. I think a bigger issue may be that the next few years aren’t shaping up to be an especially promising time to be a governor. A governor presiding over an economic boom can cut taxes while increasing spending, and thus develop a reputation as a popular can-do pragmatist. Think of George W. Bush, George Voinovich, Christie Todd Whitman, and other classics of the 1990s. This also works if your state government is mostly financed by oil revenues and you’re in office amidst a commodities boom — Sarah Palin comes to mind. Louisiana does share some of Alaska’s petrostate attributes, but it’s not really the same situation, and right now he’s looking at the need to cut $1 billion in spending. Not his fault (though the decision to make up the budget shortfall with a mix of 100% service cuts and 0% tax cuts reflects the intellectually and morally bankrupt nature of contemporary conservatism) any more than the “free money for everyone” governors of the nineties were really geniuses, but it’s going to make it difficult for him to rack up the sort of Record Of Accomplishments that you’re usually looking for in a presidential candidate.

New Leadership for the Past

I’ve heard some rumbling in progressive circles that Newt Gingrich was seriously attempting a comeback as a presidential candidate. I didn’t really believe it. But somebody got Robert Novak to write a column touting the former Speaker who resigned in disgrace over his stupendous leadership failures as the man the GOP needs.

Apparently he has “dynamism.” More seriously, the view is that Gingrich offers a “constant stream of ideas, an important commodity in a party that appears to have run short of ideas during the Bush years.”

I’m not really sure how key ideas are to conservative political revival. But what Gingrich offers doesn’t really qualify as ideas. Instead, call them “ideas.” Instead of thinking about ways to solve problems in people’s lives, Gingrich is good at offering ways to package predetermined special-interest priorities as solutions to things that arise. As an opposition gambit, I think this probably works fine. It’s good for raising money, so it ensures that you can stay in the game. And it gives you talking points to go on TV with. Eventually the governing party will screw up, and in you’ll come. But at the same time, the considerable shortcomings to this approach as a governing philosophy is precisely what brought the GOP to this point — it leads to catastrophic screw-ups that prompt massive public disapproval.

Wingnuts Prepare to Wind the Cocoon Tighter

Fox News’ Carl Cameron reports that Sarah Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent:

Red State’s Erik Erikson plans a purge of those committing crimes against Palindom:

RedState is pleased to announce it is engaging in a special project: Operation Leper.

We’re tracking down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to Carl Cameron and others. Michelle Malkin has the details.

We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you’ll see us go to war against those candidates.

So far, Steve Schmit, Mike Murphy, and Nichole Wallace are all on the leper list.

State Legislatures

State Legislature majorities are the deep foundations of national politics. They control congressional redistricting, which is important, and because they also control their own redistricting, control can be hard to reverse. Last night, “Democrats won new majorities in the Delaware House, Ohio House, Wisconsin Assembly, New York Senate, and the Nevada Senate.” That gives them control of both chambers in New York, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Delaware and shifts Ohio to an even split. Nevada and New York will be important redistricting opportunities after the next census, and given the opportunity to redraw the State Senate districts in New York it will be very difficult for the GOP to ever mount a comeback in Albany.

Going Rogue

Sarah Palin won’t let campaign staff end her press conference:

It’ll be interesting to see how she tries to keep her national profile up from the vantage point of Alaska.

The Waning of the Culture War?

Peter Beinart says public interest in “culture war” issues is on the wane, not just as a transient phenomenon of the financial crisis, but as a turning of the great wheel of history. He says this isn’t the first time:

This won’t be the first time a culture war has come to a close. In the 1920s, battles over evolution, immigration, prohibition and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan dominated election after election. And those issues played into that era’s version of the red-blue divide, pitting newly arrived, saloon-frequenting, big-city Catholics against old-stock, teetotaling, small-town Protestants. In 1924, the Democratic convention split so bitterly over prohibition and the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Then, says Beinart, that era came to a close in the 1930s driven to an end by a combination of economic problems and generational turnover. Beinart says something similar is happening today:

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and “issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage” down to only 6 percent. It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

I think we should be suspicious of arguments that seem to assume that US political history operates as a series of repeating long cycles. Realistically, the number of cases Beinart is working with here are somewhere between one and two, not nearly enough to use as the basis for meaningful predictions. It’s definitely true that the economic downturn is making GOP culture war attacks relatively ineffective. But something similar was true in 1992. Elections that take place during recessions are dominated by a desire to punish the incumbent party. But that doesn’t mean people don’t care about these issues anymore. What’s more, I would say that part of the reason the McCain-Palin camp’s culture war politics seems so lame is that McCain’s record has left him unable to campaign on Federal Marriage Amendment or the need to rounp-up immigrants and deport them. Unlike praise of small towns and vague condemnations of “fake” Virginia, those are real issues — genuine subjects of legislative activity that I can imagine people running and winning on. Not, to be sure, amidst a recession and with a hugely unpopular conservative incumbent. But I have a feeling both of those issues will be back soon enough.

What to Fear

Starting Wednesday I think we can expect a boom market for op-eds and television commentary darkly warning that if Democrats take advantage of winning the election to implement the agenda they outlined during the campaign, they’ll be punished, punished, punished at the polls. And not just from Republicans, but from loathesome creatures like Bob Kerrey and now Doug Schoen:

If the Democrats govern as if there is no Republican Party, they are likely headed to the kind of reaction that Bill Clinton faced when he made the same misjudgment after the 1992 election victory, following a meeting in Little Rock, Ark., with then Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and House Speaker Tom Foley.

This is a pretty odd view of what Clinton did in 1993-94 (NAFTA, anyone?) but that aside, I just think it’s pretty blinkered to act as if the electorate has a deep commitment (or lack of commitment) to bipartisanship or some finely nuanced conception of moderation. Rather, voters tend to re-elect incumbents when things seem to be working out okay whereas they tend to punish incumbents — and those closely associated with incumbents — when things seem to be going poorly. What Democrats need to do if they want to prosper in 2010 and 2012 is deliver the goods. In other words, return the economy to prosperity, avoid terrible foreign affairs calamities, etc.

People will disagree, naturally, about the best way to do that. But the point is to try to get it right. If ex post conditions in the country look bad in 2010, then it’s not going to matter at all whether or not Obama’s decisions in early 2009 were ex ante popular. Conversely, taking some ex ante unpopular votes in 2009 that pay off in terms of making things much better by election day will be rewarded. Spending your days pondering what, exactly, the election constitutes a mandate for isn’t going to get anyone anywhere.

The Murky Future

I think I I agree with Ross Douthat that whatever one makes of the occasionally ugly and xenophobic nature of attacks on Barack Obama, there’s no particular reason to believe that brown skin would prevent Bobby Jindal from securing the 2012 GOP nomination.

But thinking about this mostly reminded me that though super-premature 2012 speculation sure is fun, it’s really, really, really dumb to be getting too involved in this. To state the obvious, who’ll be well-positioned to secure the nomination is going to have an awful lot to do with which actual events occur in the world. So I’d say rather than speculate on Jindal or Palin or Huckabee or America’s Next Bush it makes more sense to focus on what the world would have to be like for such-and-such a candidate to win.

To take Palin as an example, one possible scenario for 2009 involves big Democratic wins inducing a certain amount of panic among Republican legislators. You could see Senators Collins, Snow, and Specter plus to a lesser extent guys like Gregg, Grassley, and Voinovich agreeing to somewhat watered-down versions of the main items on the Obama agenda. That’s the kind of thing that build the anger on the base that helped fuel Howard Dean’s rise in 2003-2004, and I think it’s the kind of thing that would incline the conservative base to tune out criticisms of Palin by lumping them in with a whole goulash of selloutery. But things could also go in a very different and less Palin-friendly direction instead.

Upping the Ante

These guys know the way to winning young voters over to the Republican ranks:

In skirmishes around the country in recent months, evangelicals and others who believe Republicans have been too timid in fighting abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration have won election to the party’s national committee, in preparation for a fight over the direction and leadership of the party.

On immigration, I think this is wrong but it’s not totally absurd. Given John McCain’s record, it’s really possible that he left some votes on the table that adding some anti-Hispanic demagoguery to the mix of the anti-black and anti-cosmopolitan demagoguery could, in principle, have helped him grab. On gay marriage, though? No way. The right has been pushing this issue about as hard as it can be pushed for the past five years. It’s done them some good, but also wrecked their brand with younger and more tolerant voters, and it’s clearly a topic that’s going to be less and less useful over time.

Scheunemann: Obama Was Palling Around With Terrorists

Marc Ambinder reported this morning that there’s an anti-Palin faction developing within the McCain campaign composed, I suppose, of people who think that Mitt Romney’s deep pockets are the way to go for 2012:

This faction has come to believe that Palin, perhaps unwittingly subconsciously or otherwise, has begun to play Sen. McCain off of the base, consistently and deliberately departed from the campaign’s message of the day in ways that damage McCain. (”palling around with terrorists” was a line that escaped HQ’s vetting… Palin’s criticism of the campaign for pulling out of Michigan was greeted by anger internally… Palin’s expressed opinion that Rev. Wright is a legitimate issue — which subtly knocks McCain for not raising it — was perceived as an attempt to preemptively blame McCain’s wobbliness for his loss, which would theoretically enhance Palin’s standing with the base.) The complaints extend all the back to Palin’s vice presidential vetting. Major disclosures, issue positions and associations did not come up, and the campaign was so overwhelmed with new information early on, it largely abandoned an effort to defend them individually. This is the claim, anyway. For the record, senior adviser Mark Salter, accurately identified everywhere as the aide who is closest to McCain, calls this scenario “bullshit.”

By contrast, Randy Scheunemann, chief McCain foreign policy adviser, C-List neocon, and lobbyist for foreign powers, writes in to Ambinder to clarify that he agrees with me and Salter that Palin is likely to be the 2012 nominee:

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

I think the claim that having a passing acquaintanceship with Bill Ayers is well-described as “palling around with [multiple] terrorists” is hard to defend. Of course it would be interesting to compare the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of Ayers’ actions with the number of innocent people who died violently as a result of George W. Bush’s policies. We can even restrict the Bush analysis to the number of people tortured to death in contravention of international law (“[o]ver a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions”) and I’m still pretty sure Ayers comes out ahead.

Join Rudy 2012?

It’s not hard to register a domain name, but JoinRudy2012 has a look of authenticity about it.

Meanwhile, I agree with Ambinder that I think Sarah Palin should be understood as the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination. I would also further note that the McCain campaign’s idiosyncratic ideas about which states are the battleground states in this election has taken her to Iowa and New Hampshire.