Link Banana

While Democrats can always threaten to flee to Canada in the event of an election loss, where can conservatives flee to?

Two people I respect a great deal, Marc Ambinder and David Brooks, both think the failure of the bailout yesterday makes obvious the full-scale meltdown of the GOP. Here’s Brooks:

House Republicans led the way and will get most of the blame. It has been interesting to watch them on their single-minded mission to destroy the Republican Party. Not long ago, they led an anti-immigration crusade that drove away Hispanic support. Then, too, they listened to the loudest and angriest voices in their party, oblivious to the complicated anxieties that lurk in most American minds.

Now they have once again confused talk radio with reality. If this economy slides, they will go down in history as the Smoot-Hawleys of the 21st century. With this vote, they’ve taken responsibility for this economy, and they will be held accountable. The short-term blows will fall on John McCain, the long-term stress on the existence of the G.O.P. as we know it.

Andrew Ferguson, of The Weekly Standard, does something I’ve always been curious to do — watch a party platform in progress — and comes to, among others, this conclusion:

“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”

Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.

Though I question the statistical value of these numbers, Mother Jones’s list of party identification by occupation is full of interesting thoughts. Consider, for example, that 65% of plastic surgeons identified as Republicans, but only 28% of pediatricians.

(via Boing Boing)

Well, for Democratic candidates at least. Not so much for Republicans. The methodology (PDF) is here. There’s also an old-ish LA Times Op-Ed which explains the results. (How’d I miss that?)

Mark Goldberg and Ed Morrisey have a useful and interesting discussion about why so many American conservatives dislike the United Nations. Though I generally share Mr. Goldberg’s views on the UN, Mr. Morrisey makes some worthwhile points.

Ross Douthat engages in what I must admit is one of my favorite acts: attacking out of touch political elites. Although he may not be completely correct, this does resonate:

The failure of conservative voters to fall in line behind Mr. Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity, among others, reflects a deeper problem for the movement’s leadership. With their inflexibility, grudge-holding and eagerness to evict heretics rather than seek converts, too many of conservatism’s leaders sound like the custodians of a dwindling religious denomination or a politically correct English department at a fading liberal-arts college.

Or like yesterday’s Democratic Party. The tribunes of the American right have fallen into the same bad habits that doomed their liberal rivals to years of political failure.

David Brooks has some interesting and important things to say (as usual) about what McCain has to do to win the support of his party and the country come November.

Finally, McCain is going to have to beef up his domestic policy offerings. He has some excellent ideas, like his plan to control health care costs, which he doesn’t explain well. But he has not yet focused sufficiently on the group that is always the key to Republican success or failure — the suburban working class.

Picture a suburban townhouse community filled with families making $40,000 to $60,000 a year. Maybe there’s a single mother in one unit who hates her job but needs the benefits. Maybe there are immigrant parents with associate degrees watching their son drop out of school in another. The definition of being middle class has changed, as many have noticed. It used to be a destination. Now it’s an uncertain place. It’s a struggle just to stay there. Any candidate who can’t talk specifically to these concerns is doomed.

I wasn’t going to link to anything about Florida, as it’s a pretty straightforward story: Giuliani’s done and McCain’s win (and possible Giuliani endorsement) gives him a rather clear path to the Republican nomination. But then John Dickerson’s first sentence was an odd anecdote which became a useful — if still decidedly odd — analogy:

As a fighter pilot in Pensacola, Fla., 30 years ago, McCain and his exotic-dancer girlfriend dropped by the dinner party of some married ensigns and were greeted with “disbelief and alarm.” They left quickly. This week as he tried to crash his way into the nomination of a party from which he has often broken, his mother predicted Republicans would have to “hold their nose” to vote for her son.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has news that’s galling and/or obvious. Bill Clinton got more media coverage last week than any Republican candidate or John Edwards.

Obama edged Hillary Clinton by the narrowest of margins. But her surrogate and husband—whose aggressive attacks on Obama and increasingly conspicuous role have been manna for political pundits—was the third-most prominent newsmaker in the race for President last week, January 21 through 27. That period began two days after the Nevada caucuses and ended the day after the Democrats’ South Carolina primary.

(via The Page)

Paul Krugman wants to bring the rapidly inflating post-partisanship balloon that’s carrying Obama upward in for closer examination. And whether he’s being a realist or a killjoy, he’s got some interesting things to say.

First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).

The point is that while there are valid reasons one might support Mr. Obama over Mrs. Clinton, the desire to avoid unpleasantness isn’t one of them.

In an essay with parts that might qualify as “overtly partisan” Michael Barone makes an interesting point:

Americans’ views of the economy are increasingly a function of voting behavior or party loyalty, rather than the other way around. The most succinct evidence of this comes from a January 2006 report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press entitled “Economy Now Seen Through Partisan Prism.” As the Pew report notes, during the1992 campaign year and up through 1994 there was a partisan divide on the economy, with about 20 percent of Republicans and less than 10 percent of Democrats rating it as excellent or good. From 1995 to 1998, with a Democratic president and a visibly aggressive Republican Congress, Democrats and Republicans gave similar ratings to the economy. From 1998 to 2000, Democrats were somewhat more positive about the economy than Republicans, at a time when economic growth was vibrant and inflation low.

David Brooks’s latest column is well worth reading.

But then a great tightening occurred. Conservative institutions and interest groups proliferated in Washington. The definition of who was a true conservative narrowed. It became necessary to pass certain purity tests — on immigration, abortion, taxes and Terri Schiavo.

An oppositional mentality set in: if the liberals worried about global warming, it was necessary to regard it as a hoax. If The New York Times editorial page worried about waterboarding, then the code of conservative correctness required one to think it O.K.

Apostates and deviationists were expelled or found wanting, and the boundaries of acceptable thought narrowed. Moderate Republicans were expelled for squishiness. Millions of coastal suburbanites left the party in disgust.

Slate’s John Dickerson always seems to offer the earliest coherent analysis to arrive in my feed reader after a presidential nominating contest. And though this is probably in part because I don’t like political sites that are overtly partisan (read: all of them), I can’t deny that he does a great job. On South Carolina:

Since 1980, every Republican presidential nominee has won South Carolina. This is the kind of rule Republicans would love to embrace in this topsy-turvy season to just to stop the motion sickness. But it’s too soon to call McCain the front-runner. His South Carolina victory makes the picture only a little clearer heading into Florida, where Rudy Giuliani has been camped out so long in advance of the primary on Jan. 29, he’s likely to greet his rivals wearing Sansabelt pants and a Tommy Bahama shirt. So: McCain is now battling Mitt Romney for the nomination, but Huckabee and Giuliani remain available to confuse everything. […]

McCain now looks like the GOP front-runner because his victories have come in the hard-fought contests in New Hampshire and South Carolina, but he can’t claim that title when it comes to delegate counts. Mitt Romney has more delegates. This probably feels like a mere technicality for McCain, and each time Romney asserts his numerical lead—which he’s likely to do every other sentence for the next few weeks—it will no doubt produce a string of expletives from the Straight Talk Express.

He also has posted a quite respectable summary of the Democrats’ Nevada result.

The Economist’s Charlemagne (Europe) column provides an interesting and useful summary of how the America’s election madness is seen on the continent.

VOTERS of America, well done: you are less racist (or sexist) than Europeans had feared. Remember, though, that you are rather naive: please try to pick a competent president this time. This dismissive summary, combining condescension with distrust, captures all too many European reactions to the duel between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination in this year’s presidential election (and, given the gulf between most Europeans and the Republicans, this is the contest to be Europe’s preferred candidate as well—although a few Europeans retain a soft spot for John McCain).

Tonight, Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary. Slate’s John Dickerson does a great job explaining how. He also explains that this makes the Republican race even more wide open than it was:

So we’re back to square one in the Republican Party. Mitt Romney beat John McCain handily in Michigan, which means there have now been three major GOP contests and three different comeback winners. At this rate, Thompson will win South Carolina and Giuliani Florida. The GOP primary is starting to look like a Pee Wee soccer tournament: Everyone gets a trophy!

Also, in the completely irrelevant Democratic race, Hillary Clinton valliently fought off “Uncommitted,” her chief opponent.

David Brooks’s prescient remarks on Huckabee’s Iowa victory:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

Will Huckabee move on and lead this new conservatism? Highly doubtful. The past few weeks have exposed his serious flaws as a presidential candidate. His foreign policy knowledge is minimal. His lapses into amateurishness simply won’t fly in a national campaign.

He’s also got some great words about Obama’s victory in Iowa. I feel like I’ve recently become a rabid Brooks fanboy. I’m strangely comfortable with that reality.