Bachmann surges past Romney in Iowa

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The RCP Average still has Romney on top in Iowa, if only barely, but a new poll by The Iowa Republican has Bachmann in the lead for the first time, 25 to 21 over Romney, with Pawlenty and Cain well back at 9.

To some of us -- Richard Barry and me, for example -- this isn't at all surprising. We have long thought that Bachmann has impressive political skills (whatever her right-wing craziness) and could do well in this race, particularly in the absence of another viable candidate on the right. And she's doing well generally in a one-on-one race against Romney, a race without, say, a Perry or a Palin to drain some of her conservative support.

Romney is still the frontrunner and perhaps the favourite. He has a solid ground campaign across the country, will win New Hampshire, has the support of much of the establishment (and monied interests that back the GOP), and is a solid if uninspiring candidate, particularly with the economy at the center of the debate.

But Bachmann could easily win Iowa, surprise with a strong showing in New Hampshire, and then, should she be more or less alone on the right, cruise into South Carolina with the wind at her back.

The concerns for Romney are many, but one of them may be that he has a fairly low ceiling. He has about one-quarter support of Republicans nationally right now, but what if his ceiling isn't all that much higher than that? What if the opposition to Romney is so strong, mainly from the grassroots (Tea Party, "social conservatives," etc.), that he just can't get over the hump in a one-on-one race against a more bona fide conservative like Bachmann? And it's possible that it will eventually turn into just that, if Pawlenty fails to emerge as a compromise candidate and if the conservative vote isn't divided (that is, if Perry and Palin don't run and if the conservatives in the race now, namely Gingrich and Santorum, continue to lag way behind with little support). (I'm counting Huntsman out altogether, though in my opinion he's by far the strongest of the bunch.)

Indeed, as Jon Chait noted yesterday, Bachmann is a bit like Obama in 2007:

Obama trailed badly in the national polls throughout 2007. But he had high favorability and seemed to do well among those voters most attuned to the campaign, which suggested that as elections neared and voters paid more attention, he had the potential to win over voters who were not paying attention months and months before any vote.

And, indeed, Bachmann's "lead expands when the sample is confined to voters paying a lot of attention." Which is to say, Republicans like her more the more they get to know her, with her support coming to a great extent from those who are most engaged in the process -- the people, that is, who decide primaries, the hardcore grassroots.

Will this continue? Maybe not. Maybe Bachmann has her own ceiling. Maybe another big-name conservative will get in the race. Maybe Romney would beat her in a one-on-one race. But what's evident, it seems to me, is that Bachmann is for real.

The tragicomedy of Sarah Palin

By Nicholas Wilbur

Sarah Palin turns heads, particularly those decorated with swinging tea bags on tri-corner hats bobbling atop the corpulent bodies of elderly white folks whose granny arms flap in such furious spasms of patriotic applause every time the Mama Grizzly barfs up another profound prophesy of Obama-doom that they'd fly off into the dawn's early light if it weren't for that extra fifty pounds of adipose tissue they gained after making a public stand against government intrusion by scarfing a pallet full of Wal-Mart's Great Value fudge mint cookies during the season finale of Sarah Palin's Alaska.

Palin, on Fox News discussing the potential

 of a 2012 presidential run.

And then there's the Left – the professional, elitist snobs – who so desperately want to ignore the Palin pop-celebrity buzz but can't, and so must justify their addiction by taking the intellectual high road and reading the gossip via a magazine of national repute like The Atlantic.

The very presence in a left-leaning political magazine of a has-been limelight junkie like Palin proves not only the staying power of the Bible-thumping caribou Barbie in this bizarre new political carnival of America but also the selling power of the Palin brand in the high(ish)brow world of publishing. (The Atlantic advertised Joshua Green's feature, "The Tragedy of Sarah Palin," with a gold teaser on the all-black June cover.)

The deep-but-pathetic roster of potential Republican presidential nominees, and the recent announcements by Mike Huckabee, Donald Trump, and Haley Barbour not to seek the nomination, gives the media due cause to turn the cameras back on the 2008 vice presidential nominee. For political junkies afflicted with a shameful lust for sleazy right-wing conspiracies but reluctant to scroll through through Palin's Facebook and Twitter posts for dirt, the media's half-hearted crawl back into North Star territory provides us with the sick-but-somehow-comforting reminders of how this country might have looked had soccer moms and NASCAR devotees outflanked sanity in the '08 election.

Green knows the dismal odds of Palin winning the Republican nomination, which is why he was forced to legitimize the tabloid-esque Palin piece by disembarking from reality and entering a hypothetical universe that focused not on what Palin has become since "going rogue" on the 2008 campaign trail, but what she "might have been" and "what she could have achieved" had she "kept her impulses in check" rather than "obsess[ing] over her image," blaming the media for her own unpreparedness, and eventually abandoning the only real chance she had of one day capturing the presidency: her governorship.

Green's abridged jaunt down memory lane seeks to remind America of this half-term governor's extensive executive experience fighting Big Oil and breaking up the "monopoly of power" by working with Democrats to push through a tax hike. Rubbing shoulders with socialists and increasing taxes in order to boost state revenues may not seem like the type of small government conservatism that the national Republican Party would want to advocate in a presidential race against a so-called liberal, but then that perhaps explains the McCain campaign's decision to downplay Palin's record and fill Sarahcuda's speeches with the same vitriolic "full-throttle assault" against their opponent that landed George W. Bush the White House in 2000 and 2004.

Alas, it could have ended up differently. The alleged maverick of the The Last Frontier may not have lost her credibility, humiliated herself, her family and her country; she may not have returned to Alaska to face a full docket of ethics charges and abuse of power investigations; she may not have seen dollar signs in the wrinkled faces of her fanatical fringe following; and she may not have abandoned public service in order to write two books, pimp her daughter out to Dancing With the Stars, join up with Fox News, and star in her own TV show.

But the fact remains, regardless of a star-gazing magazine writer's speculations, that Palin made a choice. If she wanted to govern, she'd have stayed on as governor. Instead, she left office and spent two-plus years mulling a presidential run on live TV, raking in millions of dollars winking into cameras, "refudiating" the "lamestream media"'s "gotcha journalism" tactics and doing whatever was necessary to continue fueling the ignorant passions of right-wing radicalism with talk-radio rhetoric about our socialist president's "downright evil" policies.

As a result, she's rich, famous and just as unqualified and unpopular as she was in 2008.

There is and has always been only one reason Palin has teased the nation by repeatedly reminding the media of the possibility that she might enter the presidential race, and it has nothing to do with her ideas about America, her eligibility, or her odds.

In his crystal ball search of an alternate reality, Green attempts to validate his investigation into a hypothetically less pock-marked Palin legacy by asking, "What if history had written a different ending?"

It's a rhetorical question, of course. We can't travel back in time and change the course of history. But even if we could – even if McCain hadn't been so desperate that he chose to "shock the world with his vice-presidential pick" in order to have a chance at taking first in the 2008 presidential race; even had Palin never made the humiliating descent into the lower 48 – I doubt American politics would look any different today.

The decomposition of Palin's political career wasn't the sole catalyst for the Tea Party's conception, which is to say that in her absence we wouldn't be suffering a shortage of partisan windbags who earn a living beating the ideological drum of revolution. Rest assured, when Palin finally announces that she won't run – and confirms for us all that she's nothing more than a publicity whore who spent two and a half years dipping her toe into the pond of a potential presidential run only for the cash – someone else will be there to pick up the slack in the provocative political soap opera of populist paranoia. 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Remember 2008?

By Carl 

After eight years of Bush, you may recall, there were Democrats chomping at the bit to get a Democrat in the White House. There were three main candidates -- John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama -- and all three had fervent, passionate partisans. We battled and threw muck and eventually the field winnowed down to one, and the passion the rest of us had went to supporting Barack Obama.

Anybody but Bush('s successor). We had seen the terrible toll he had taken on the nation, and realized that we had to step in and clean up after the children.

Obama, like Bill Clinton before him only writ larger, has tried his best and perhaps has done the best job that anyone could have done given the circumstances. History will have to determine that (and hopefully history will have a way to measure a Hillary presidency and an Edwards presidency, too).

Even the fiercest progressive have to acknowledge the man was dealt a shitty hand. We can argue about how well he played the hand, and even the degree of crapitude he had versus what assets he held as his hole card, but he certainly didn't walk into the same comparatively rosy scenario that Bush did in 2001 or Clinton did in 1993.

Obama will inspire some of the passion he did in 2008, and no doubt many of the progressives who find deep flaws in his administration (like me: I'm still pissed about Gitmo and the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) will rally around him. Indeed, he's already started to mend those fences. 

The Republicans, however... 

Only those possible contenders who regularly appear on television — or have made bids before — are well known enough to elicit significant views from their fellow Republicans. And of that group, only one, former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, is viewed favorably by more than half of the Republican electorate.

The poll would seem to reflect the late start to the Republican primary season, with many of the major likely candidates seeking to hoard their money and avoid making any missteps that they might have to live with later, when voters go to polls or caucus rooms.

While it may not be unusual for voters' attention to be focused elsewhere at this stage of a campaign, the survey at the very least provides a reality check for a race that has received frenetic coverage at times on cable news and the Internet even though nearly 60 percent of Republicans cannot point to a single candidate about whom they are enthusiastic, according to the Times/CBS poll. 

In case anyone still has doubts about Obama's chances in 2012.

Indeed, John McCain may have picked precisely the wrong election to run in. He could easily have kept his "heir apparent" crown into this election cycle, and probably picked up the nomination with far less difficulty from the likes of Huckabee and Romney (who either would have been the defeated candidate in 2008 or exhausted their personal resources trying), and Sarah Palin (and, by extension, Michele Bachmann) would have been kept off the radar completely. In my opinion, McCain would have been the only viable contender to unseat Obama, à la Reagan in 1980.

This is frankly an astounding poll, when you think about it: Anger at Obama should be at an all-time high, what with the agenda he managed to pass (or shove down the throats of Teabaggers), and as we saw in 2008, that usually means at least one candidate gets the coalescence of that backlash.

Here, we see....nothing.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

An open letter to Newt Gingrich

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Dear" Newt:

How exactly could you have "a secular atheist country... dominated by radical Islamists"?

Do you not see the contradiction? Or are you just so deranged that you can't see anything clearly anymore, if you ever could?

And yet it's hardly surprising that you continue to sink into the morass of anti-Muslim bigotry. You were there fearmongering over the Park51 community center, and, like many in your party (e.g., Peter King) you choose to scapegoat Muslims as the dangerous anti-American Other.

But this isn't just anti-Muslim bigotry that you're tapping into. You said this at John Hagee's church in Texas. Back in 2008, John McCain refused Hagee's endorsement because of ugly remarks the extremist evangelist made about God sending Hitler to hunt the Jews.

"Obviously, I find these remarks and others deeply offensive and indefensible, and I repudiate them," McCain said at the time. And yet you, Newt, happily appear at Hagee's side, praising him profusely for his inspiration and "dedication to serve."

Did you, do you, find Hagee's remarks offensive? What about Hagee's many other similar remarks? Or has your bigotry, directed mostly at Muslims, overtaken you?

Just wondering -- you know, because you may be running for president and are widely considered, including by the media, to be a leading Republican.

Rather insincerely,

Michael Stickings

Sarah Palin thinks she might just have won in '08

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Take a seat. And a deep breath. And try to keep your sides from splitting as you read this:

Republicans would have been more successful in the 2008 presidential elections if she was at the top of the ticket, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suggested Saturday.

Speaking at the India Today Conclave in New Delhi, Palin was asked why the GOP ticket did not defeat then-Sen. Barack Obama (D). Palin said that Obama ran a strong campaign and effectively billed himself as a change candidate.

Pressed by India Today editor Aroon Purie that she also represented change, Palin replied, "I wasn't at the top of the ticket, remember?"

The 2008 vice presidential nominee said she was not claiming she should have been the nominee over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), but her comments provide a glimpse of her potential appeal to voters should she choose to run for the nomination in 2012.

Okay.

First, why was Palin invited to speak in India? What could she possibly have to say? I suppose her "star" is her appeal, but I doubt she's ever given the slightest thought to anything Indian, with the possible exception of outsourcing and, perhaps less possibly, food.

Second, she may not have been said she should have been at the top of the ticket, but you don't have to read too deeply between the lines -- her message is clear. She thinks the McCain campaign disrespected her and that it failed in large part because it kept her on the sidelines. She is nothing if not a massive egotist, after all, a self-aggrandizing, self-glorifying fool. And just imagine what it would have been like had she been at the top. She wouldn't have been able to hide from the media after those embarrassing interviews with Katie Couric et al., and she would only have embarrassed herself further. At least McCain had some legitimate bona fides as something of a maverick (however faux) and had some credibility on foreign policy. Palin had nothing, and it was only a matter of time, a short amount of time, until that initial burst of popularity blew up.

Third, the "change" Americans wanted in '08 wasn't the sort of change Palin was offering, which really wasn't change at all but more of the Bush-Cheney same with a bit more social conservatism thrown in and much less of an appreciation for reality (not that Bush and Cheney appreciated reality all that much, but at least they had a sense of the world -- yes, even Bush).

Fourth... oh, enough Palin for now.

Once again, all we're getting is the same old maybe-maybe-not bullshit about running for president. But her popularity has plummeted. He still has her ardent admirers on the right, in the deepest recesses of the GOP base, but pretty much everyone else, including not just independents but once-mainstream Republicans and establishment conservatives, wants her to go away.

She won't, of course, but her days as a legitimate contender, if she ever was one, are well behind her.

The straw that broke the liberal's back?

By Nicholas Wilbur

A band of liberal revolutionaries is storming the Capitol, hip-checking elderly Tea Party activists and snatching the anti-Obama protest signs right from their arthritic hands. They're chanting, screaming, wailing – "Traitor," "Vile Betrayer," "No-bama, No-bama..." – and tearing the cloth from their breasts in agony as they fall to their knees, pound the earth with clenched fists, and curse the gods of progressivism for the posturing con artist occupying the White House. American flags burn in the background. Hope and Change T-shirts burn in the foreground. Blue flames crisscross like daggers in the sky as the ominous clouds form like cyclones above the White House. The governors who have gathered with Obama inside the State Dining Room are all smiles and nods as the president explains his openness to the idea of letting individual states create their own health-care laws in lieu of the ever-unpopular "ObamaCare" legislation, while everyone outside hoists pitchforks and decries the unraveling of populism, not as they know it, but as they imagine it.

When I saw the headline from The Hill, "Obama backtracks on health mandate, wants to allow earlier opt-out," this was the fantasy my conscious mind created as it envisioned the reaction of the news from left-wing diehards, bleeding hearts, and feverish bloggers.

The already fine line between fantasy and political reality draws paper thin the more time President Obama spends in the White House. The details don't matter to the extremists on the left who envisioned Obama during the campaign as a messiah of modern American leadership. Politics today is less about policy than it is about perceptions, and the president's admission that his health-care law could be altered or amended if such adjustments helped the country implement across-the-board reforms serves only to ignite the flames of doubt and fuel the fires of intra-party betrayal in the eyes of uncompromising liberals.

He's already guilty of compromise, negotiation and capitulation – the trifecta of evil that is embodied, historically, by those whose souls are either sold to the powerful deal-makers within Washington or bought by the corporate lobbyists without. We saw it first when he gave up on the single-payer health care option. We saw it a second time in his deal with Republicans to cut taxes for the rich. We're seeing it again with this appeal to bipartisanship over implementation of what is arguably the most historic piece of social legislation enacted in Congress since civil rights.

For the lefties who voted for, campaigned for, and prayed to their Wiccan goddesses for a progressive panacea to the Bush era, this may prove to be the straw that broke the liberal's back.

And yet it means nothing to the pragmatists who understand that consensus is key to any law and that popularity is paramount to any successful legislation.

Twenty-five governors – representing half the country – have filed suit against the series of reforms included in the 2010 legislation that conservatives refer to as "ObamaCare." Polls consistently show an equal division of opinion on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is good or bad for America. And minds are still unmade as to whether repeal of "ObamaCare" is better than the health insurance company abuses that plagued the country before such protections were put in place.

If it is disappointing to a certain faction of the American public that Obama has decided to continue his efforts to improve the law that will most likely define his presidency, then that in itself is disappointing. It is, after all, the liberal class in America that boasts of top placement on the intellectual hierarchy of the political – and social – ladder. They should be the first not only to understand but to appropriately analyze the limitations of bureaucracy, the stalwart opposition to change, and the restraints of progressivism. They are not only its advocates but its victims.

The president's abandonment of the single-payer option nearly split the Democratic Party in two, even if it was consistent with his campaign promise to lead by consensus, not with an iron fist. His capitulation on tax cuts nearly severed his ties not only to liberals but to fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and he accepted that blowback as a consequence of his suddenly treasonous promise to reach out, whenever possible, to his opponents in Washington. It's worth mentioning that all of his alleged "capitulations" polled well for him, as the general public seemed to appreciate that a national leader tried to unite the country with a willingness to compromise rather than to divide the country by refusing to listen to the opposition.

It seems not every Democrat in America is liberal. (Somewhere in the world, a bird of idealism dropped dead from surprise.) 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

All out of Joementum: Lieberman announces he won't run in 2012

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Perhaps it was inevitable, but now it's official -- or will be soon enough.

Joe Lieberman, once a major player in the Democratic Party (a veep candidate, no less!) and now a quasi-Democratic independent senator from Connecticut, will not seek re-election next year.

He will make the announcement later today.

Why inevitable? Because the writing was on the wall. There was no way he was going to win. In fact, he never would have gotten out of the Democratic primary.

He's unpopular with everyone, but especially with Democrats, and of course Connecticut is a heavily blue state.

And it's not like Republicans would have backed him given his return to the Democratic fold post-2008 (even if Democrats should have given him the boot), with votes for health-care reform and DADT repeal. And there certainly aren't enough genuine independents to propel him to victory -- and, regardless, they don't much care for him either.

Perhaps we haven't heard the last of him. Perhaps Obama, always eager to reach out (and to irritate the left), will appoint him to some cushy post. Perhaps he'll continue to make the talk-show rounds as an "independent." Even if voters don't like him, the news media do, just as they liked McCain for so long, until he lost his marbles.

It's always been about him, and about his shameless career-minded opportunism, but he's managed to convince many in the media, and many in Washington, that he's a go-to spokesman for bipartisanship. This is ridiculous, of course, but it will allow him to remain a visible public figure spinning his self-aggrandizing nonsense should he choose to go that route.

Either way, at least he realizes that his time in the Senate is up.

**********

So... good riddance, Joe.

I once wrote that the Democratic Party should be a big enough tent to include the likes of you, but you did all you could to be a thorn in Democrats' sides, including being a (pro-Bush) Republican for all intents and purposes, culminating in your despicable pro-McCain smear campaign against Obama in 2008, and perhaps you realize now that the Republican Party, moving further and further to the right, certainly has no place for you, nor even for your pal McCain.

And your retirement means that your seat will be easier for the Democrats to win, and to win with a far more progressive candidate than you ever were.

As I joked back in 2009, when you were trying to position yourself as a bipartisan deal-maker on health-care reform (as long as it didn't include a public option and was generally Romney-style Republican), borrowing a hilarious joke from Stewie Griffin (originally directed at Meg):

In an attic somewhere, there's a portrait of Joe Lieberman getting prettier.

That likely won't change, even in retirement.

Au revoir, Joe. 

(photo 1, photo 2)

Did Bob Anderson Help Michele Bachmann or El Tinklenberg in 2008?

Taxpaying Liberal believes Bob Anderson helped El Tinklenberg:

To view the real effect of the IP vote you should look at the results of the up ticket candidates.

In the 2008 race this means looking at Obama and Tinklenberg compared to McCain- Bachmann.

I did have time to go to the SOS website so I may be off a little on the totals but Tinkleberg received more votes than Obama by a couple of percentage points. Bachmann underperformed McCain by about 7% Anderson underperformed Barkley by almost 10%.

What does this mean? It means that El got the entire base and almost no vote defected to Bachmann and 7% of the Republican vote defected from McCain to IP.

If IP had received 3% more vote it is likely we would be Bachmann free.

Bachmann knows this. That may be why you see her courting the “Ron Paul” vote.

Now I know that some will look at this and say that if Anderson wasn’t in the race then those McCain drop offs would have moved to El and maybe you’re right, but they would have had to vote over 2 to 1 in that direction and that is unlikely to have occurred.

And if Bachmann had received 54 to 55% of the vote instead of the 50.04% her seat would be considered safe or safer this election and far less likely to be as much of a target has it clearly will be this election.

For those of you who think that it was an IP voter that voted for Anderson let me once again go to the up ticket and compare Anderson to Barkley. Barkley received almost double (once again I didn’t look up the exact number for this post) the votes for Anderson. Here again is an example of major ticket splitting.

There are a lot of factors involved and its fun to run the numbers and speculate about them.
But the biggest factor is as Amy proved the candidate that is the most important factor. Bachmann can be beat and running a good race against her and being for something are going to be the biggest reason we win or lose.
taxpaying liberal