Andrew:

Yes, they are, for the most part, emphasizing economic and fiscal issues, which is wonderful, even though they have no actual realistic plans to cut spending by the amount they would have to if taxes are not to rise. But that does not mean they have in any way forsaken the social issues substantively. Name a tea-party candidate who is pro-choice. Name one who backs marriage equality. Name one who wants to withdraw from Afghanistan beginning next year. Name one who has opposed torture. Name one who has the slightest qualms about police powers. Name one who would end the military ban on gays serving openly, and take even the slightest political risk on any of these subjects.

This sets things up in such a way that very few Tea Partiers or their sympathizers would ever be considered acceptable. Of course, Rand Paul opposes torture, and for that matter he opposes the PATRIOT Act, which suggests that he probably has more than “qualms” about police powers. I don’t know for certain, but it is probable that a lot of Tea Partiers are more likely to welcome such a withdrawal than most of the mainstream and establishment Republicans they are opposing. Does B.J. Lawson in North Carolina count as a Tea Party candidate? He has certainly spoken to Tea Party gatherings, and he has received the endorsement of Ron Paul. Rep. Paul said in his endorsement:

B.J. will be a stalwart defender of the constitution and individual liberties. In 2008 I supported his campaign because he was talking about the Constitution, limited government and reducing our global police force [bold mine-DL], I encourage everyone to stand with me in supporting him again in 2010. We need more people of Dr. Lawson’s caliber in Washington D.C.

We certainly do, and it appears that Lawson may have a chance of upsetting Rep. David Price in NC-04. That is a very Democratic district, so he has his work cut out for him, but as Sean Scallon noted on the main blog Lawson is competing by providing a credible Campaign for Liberty alternative. If you look at Lawson’s website, you will find that he is also pro-life and opposed to immigration amnesty, which makes him more or less exactly like Ron Paul on these questions. By the standard Andrew sets up here, Lawson wouldn’t be acceptable. I have many reservations about the direction of the Tea Partiers, and I don’t assume that all or most of them are always going to advance an agenda that I want, but we shouldn’t dismiss all of them or all of their candidates simply because many of them have had the bad judgment to associate with Palin and Beck.

Rather like Brink Lindsey’s denunciation of contemporary conservatives over the summer, all Tea Partiers are taken to task here not just for their acceptance of the security state and jingoism (which ignores the substantial number of them that really are firmly anti-Bush, civil libertarian and antiwar), but also for being social and cultural conservatives. They aren’t going to pass a test that shows they are suitably “moderate” or liberal on immigration, abortion or homosexuality, which Lindsey insisted was a deal-breaker for libertarians. Alliances of left and right against the warfare state always seem to founder on these cultural differences, because when it comes down to it most people prefer tribalism and shallow identity politics to their stated political goals, which is one of the most important reasons why there isn’t ever any meaningful resistance to the warfare state.

P.S. Check out B.J. Lawson’s candidate questionnaire from his previous run in 2008:

Our founding documents established a government of, by, and for the people, specifically designed to protect the individual’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This premise means protecting the individual’s opportunity to prosper and create value for one’s community through free enterprise and exchange, not smothering it with the rapid accumulation of debt and doling out special privileges to corporations. It also means protecting fundamental civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution, not ignoring them in the name of “security.” It means defending our people when attacked, not launching costly and unjust aggressive wars. Finally, it means having a government that, at all levels and in all branches, respects the bounds of its Constitutional authority and obligations, not a government that ignores and delegates them.

The most pressing issues facing our district and our nation are our government’s departure from its founding principles. This departure threatens our future with $53 trillion in unfunded liabilities, an unstable financial system that relentlessly increases the separation between rich and poor, and the increasing domination of corporate power and interests at the expense of individuals facing increasing pressure to make ends meet. This departure endangers our national security with a belligerent and unwise foreign policy. Finally, it threatens the right of the individual to live and act as one pleases without injuring others, and to be afforded protections and due process under the law.

This part was also quite good:

I’ll caucus with Dennis Kucinich to preserve civil liberties, Ron Paul to reform the monetary and banking system, Marcy Kaptur to fight exploitative corporatism, Walter Jones to bring the troops home, Barney Frank to reform unconstitutional drug policy, and Roscoe Bartlett to address peak oil and long-term sustainability.

Finally, Andrew should like this one:

I will also confront the deplorable use of torture in interrogations, which I believe is a blatant violation of both the Fifth and Eighth Amendments.

If TARP is a deal killer, then Romney is finished. ~David Frum

That might turn out to be right, but if Romney is finished because of his support for the TARP then so is Palin. For whatever reason, Palin’s supporters don’t care that during the only national campaign in her career she aligned herself with the party establishment on this and every other issue. One interpretation is that they don’t care because policy is simply irrelevant to her enthusiasts, and that may be partly true, but my guess is that they choose to suspend their outrage over the TARP arbitrarily because they like Palin. Instead of using it to attack her, they try to excuse it. Romney’s supporters can be similarly oblivious to his flaws and mistakes in judgment. They overlook these things not so much because they like him (who actually likes him?), but because they like what they believe Romney represents: success in the private sector and technocratic competence. They look at Romney and think, “This is what we’ve been missing!” It doesn’t bother them that he is exceptionally unprincipled, and for some of them that is almost a plus.

As I have said before, if the TARP becomes an important litmus test in the primaries Republican voters are going to be stuck with very few choices. Most national Republicans with presidential ambitions supported the bailout, and this included governors (Pawlenty) and ex-governors (Romney) who had no particular reason to take a position on it. I don’t know that Daniels took a public position on it, but I would be amazed if he had come out against the bill. In the primaries this year, incumbent Republicans have lost partly because of their support for the TARP because there was a challenger who could make it an issue without being a hypocrite. It would be very difficult for any of the probable contenders under discussion to attack others on support for the bailout.

Ross:

But with seemingly-unassailable incumbents dropping right and left in Republican primaries, and with once-safe Democratic seats in play from Washington and Wisconsin to Illinois and Connecticut, it seems pretty clear that she deserves to be remembered less for her own missteps and follies, and more as the first casualty of forces beyond any establishment candidate’s control.

I see what Ross is getting at, but part of what made Coakley’s campaign so lousy was that she embodied the worst traits of everything about politicians most people, including the non-ideological and/or confused Obama/Brown voters of Massachusetts, simply cannot abide. Coakley’s mistakes were numerous, but the worst of them were her sense of entitlement and her presumption of victory. Perhaps most important was her indifference to local interests and concerns. Not coincidentally, these are very much the things that undid Tedisco and Hoffman in New York. They are also the things that I am guessing will prove to be the undoing of the Republicans in November. These were not things outside of the candidates’ control. They were deliberately chosen strategies of identifying with a national party platform, pushing an ideological message that the candidates assumed would resonate in what was supposed to be friendly territory, and ignoring what mattered to the voters.

When it comes to talking about the midterms, there is a desire to find a unifying national theme to explain what is happening in the country. If there is any theme, it is that in pretty much every case the election has gone to the candidate that has paid the most attention to local issues and frames his positions on national policy questions according to how they affect his district or state. The most interesting thing about Scott Brown’s victory is that Republicans still don’t really understand why he won. Yes, he had a flawed opponent from western Massachusetts (which apparently almost never produces winning statewide candidates), but he also cast the major policy debate of the moment in terms of whether it was good for Massachusetts’ own unsustainable and extremely popular health care system. It was absolutely not an ideological appeal, but was based entirely on the basic political question, “What’s in it for us?” Brown also happened to have the good luck to be able to tap into voter frustration with the state Democratic establishment in Boston, which made the special election partly into a protest vote. For her part, Coakley was part of that establishment, essentially relied on the appeal of ideology as she emphasized her support for the President’s agenda, and she combined that with a call for partisan loyalty at the same time that Brown was pushing a message of independence from party politics. So it is Coakley’s missteps and follies that help illustrate what it is that voters have been rejecting, and most of these moves were not necessary and could have been avoided.

Jonathan Chait makes sense when he says that O’Donnell’s Senate campaign is a dry run for Palin’s presidential bid. What I don’t understand is how he squares this with the argument that Palin is now the front-runner for 2012. It seems that Palin wants to run, and she seems to be positioning herself to start doing that, but it is a leap to get from there to concluding that she is the front-runner. There would need to be some evidence that she is at least one of the top two preferred candidates in the relevant caucus and primary states. We would need to see proof that some plurality of Republicans nationally would support her candidacy. As of now, according to every measure normally used in determining such things, Romney is the front-runner in terms of money, organization, and name recognition, and on top of all that it is now “his turn.” For the thousandth time, Republicans almost never nominate insurgents. Palin would insist on being seen as an anti-establishment insurgent, and in some crucial respects that is exactly what she would be, which is also why she couldn’t win the nomination.

If O’Donnell’s Senate campaign is a dry run, surely what that means is that a Republican Party that wants to defeat or at least seriously compete against Obama must under no circumstances nominate a presidential candidate similar to Christine O’Donnell. That means that Palin is a “front-runner” in the same way that Giuliani was considered a major presidential candidate throughout much of 2007: it is something that journalists and pundits say to one another and tell their audiences, and it has nothing to do with political reality. Assuming that O’Donnell is going to lose in a blowout to Coons, which is what virtually everyone assumes, the “dry run” in Delaware will be an example every Palin critic and opponent can point to from this November until the start of the Iowa caucuses.

The basic argument against O’Donnell can be made against Palin: outside the bubble of her devoted followers, very few people like her, and even fewer believe she is qualified for the office. The main difference is that Palin has a slightly larger bubble, but even this bubble doesn’t include most of the GOP. As Ross suggested yesterday, Delaware could be a reality check and a cautionary tale about “ideological purism,” and most attentive and savvy voters (which is what a lot of early primary voters are) will see it that way. Defeating an incumbent President is difficult. There’s a reason that it has only happened four times in the last century. If Republicans want to have a chance, they will nominate someone other than Palin, and if there is one thing that is obvious from the last two years it is that most Republicans are desperate to have a realistic chance of defeating Obama.

Andrew:

I know that the Tory leadership has been particularly worried about the influence of small groups of Christianists potentially hijacking local nominations. But their numbers are mercifully minuscule compared to the US – which is why the British Conservatives have been able to tackle public spending directly without the baggage of religious dogmatism [bold mine-DL].

Put another way, centralized national political leadership wants to be able to dictate and control the process by which candidates are selected. I can see why this is useful for Cameron, but I’m at a loss as to why anyone outside the Tory front bench should see this as a good thing. As for the “baggage of religious dogmatism,” I have a hard time believing that it is this baggage (if such baggage exists) that is to blame for an American inability to “tackle public spending.”

It seems to me that better explanations would include the utter cowardice of Republican leaders, a decades-long public embrace of entitlements, and a widely-shared cultural aversion to paying for government services ourselves instead of pushing off the responibility onto our descendants. The Tories also have the advantage of operating in a coalition government in which public backlash against austerity can be spread around, and they are faced with an even larger national debt as percentage of GDP than we are. There are some religious fundamentalists less zealous about their holy places than opportunistic Republicans are when it comes to defending the sanctity of Medicare these days. We would be better off spending more time worrying about the effects of the latter enthusiasts, since they are the ones partly responsible for exacerbating the federal government’s long-term liabilities.

No fan of the Tea Party, Glenn Greenwald attacks the class-based condescension being directed at O’Donnell and those like her:

Much of the patronizing derision and scorn heaped on people like Christine O’Donnell have very little to do with their substantive views — since when did right-wing extremism place one beyond the pale? — and much more to do with the fact they’re so . . . unruly and unwashed. To members of the establishment and the ruling class (like Rove), these are the kinds of people — who struggle with tuition bills and have their homes foreclosed — who belong in Walmarts, community colleges, low-paying jobs, and voting booths on command, not in the august United States Senate.

There is a lot of truth to this. There is a visceral dislike among at least some conservative and Republican elites who have little more than disdain for the rank-and-file supporters who make their careers possible. While they are willing to tolerate the rank-and-file so long as they remain in a supporting role, they will absolutely refuse to accept them as equals, much less as leaders. We saw this in spades during Huckabee’s presidential campaign. There were honest Huckabee critics who genuinely objected to his fiscal record, and there were libertarians who truly found his social conservatism off-putting, but there was also significant hostility towards Huckabee as a person because of where he came from, his education and his vocation before politics. Huckabee’s biggest error from the elite Republican perspective was that he was not only proud of his working-class background as a part of his biography, but he openly scorned corporate executives and indulged in more economic populist rhetoric than any Republican presidential candidate in modern times. Huckabee received a lot of vocal criticism from conservative pundits for this, but more important for the failure of his campaign was his inability to get substantial funding that would allow him to compete seriously with Romney and McCain.

In Huckabee’s case, he erred by saying just a little of what his socially conservative constituency actually thought about economic issues. Much of the scorn being poured on O’Donnell comes from conventional horror at her social conservatism, which has been largely irrelevant to her campaign. What has been remarkable is how unimportant policy is in all of this. Huckabee supported the Fair Tax idea, but received nothing but grief from “economic conservatives” on the grounds that he was some crypto-liberal because he kept Arkansas’ budget balanced and rebuilt the state’s crumbling highways. Because of the hostility he encountered, Huckabee became very outspoken against libertarianism on the right, but he was also one of the only prominent national Republicans to oppose the bailout. As it turned out, his populist instincts were right, but he won’t get any credit from the anti-TARP activists, and he has simply confirmed the Republican elites in their fear and loathing of him. For her part, O’Donnell can dwell on fiscal and economic matters all day, and that doesn’t really matter to a lot of people in the political class and the media, because many of them are much more interested in treating her Catholicism or her pro-life convictions as some sort of joke. TARP was unnecessary and indefensible, so when an anti-TARP candidate wins the only recourse is to talk about something else.

There is something important about Tea Party activists that seems to elude a lot of observers, and I’m not sure why. It’s true that a lot of these activists are regular church-goers, and many of them are social conservatives, but rather crucially they don’t emphasize social conservative issues and these issues aren’t the ones that are energizing the activists and voters this year. Had O’Donnell run her campaign as an Alan Keyes-esque exercise in moral hectoring and Declaration-quoting, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere. Castle was more vulnerable because of his TARP and cap-and-trade votes, and whatever else you want to say about them these are fiscal and economic questions where Castle came down on the opposite side from a significant percentage of his own party. So, no, “the tea party” in general isn’t interested in social issues, doesn’t back candidates because of them, and has no great desire to advance social conservative causes. On the whole, the panic about O’Donnell’s social conservatism and the undue attention paid to it are just another way of expressing disdain for her because of her social and cultural background.

Though the amendments passed by 58 percent, 42 percent of Turks, over thirty-two million people [bold mine-DL], said no to the AKP. ~Soner Cagaptay

Suffice it to say that there is nothing that the AKP could do that would not horrify Cagaptay, who has been faithfully fanning Western fears about the dangers of Erdogan and his party for the last several years. It’s also worth noting that Cagaptay has made a significant error in describing the extent of opposition to the constitutional referendum. If you took the total population of Turkey (approx. 74 million) and multiplied it by .42, you would get a figure closer to 31 million, but of course it doesn’t work this way in elections. 159 million people didn’t “say yes” to Obama when he won 52% of the vote. In the actual voting in Turkey, just 15.8 million Turks voted no, which means that 30% of registered voters voted against the amendments, another 41% supported them, and the remaining 29% couldn’t be bothered to show up. Put another way, just 21% of the total Turkish population opposed these measures, which doesn’t sound nearly as impressive as Cagaptay’s false and misleading “thirty-two million people.”

If I were voting in the Delware primary today, as I say, I would vote for Mike Castle. He’s a moderate, but his election might—just might—enable the GOP to capture the U.S. Senate, a prize worth having. But when the tea party argues instead on behalf of Christine O’Donnell—when conservatives insist that, over the longer term, the only way for the GOP to become viable in the Northeast is to present conservative candidates, offering voters a true choice—well, you know what?

They have an argument. ~Peter Robinson

Via Andrew

No, not really. Republicans in the Northeast are free to nominate candidates of whatever stripe they like, but “offering a true choice” by running thoroughly conservative candidates and becoming politically viable in one of the least politically conservative parts of the country are clearly different things. Obviously, I am not a Republican partisan, so I don’t care that much about whether or not the party is viable there or anywhere else. I also don’t identify with movement conservatism because so much of what they believe conservatism to be is nothing of the kind. Despite all that, I find I am bothered by the extent to which conservative thinking about the practical politics of elections relies on certain fantasies.

There are three main fantasies. The first fantasy is that Americans are a naturally conservative people, and by “naturally conservative” activists and pundits on the right mean that they should favor a self-identified conservative policy agenda. Even if most Americans have certain instincts or attitudes that could be described in some way as conservative, when it comes to politics most Americans identify as something else. Moderates and liberals are more heavily concentrated in some parts of the country, and in those parts of the country if the GOP offered a “true choice” between a standard-issue conservative candidate and a liberal Democrat the latter would win most of the time. The reverse is true in areas with higher concentrations of conservatives, and in many cases the Democrats have re-adjusted to this and run candidates who are well to the right of the national party on some issues. For some reason, many conservatives are allergic to tailoring candidates to suit different regions and states, and they keep wanting to insist on a degree of ideological uniformity among all of their candidates. This uniformity probably wouldn’t be desirable even if it weren’t a political liability in many places.

Another important fantasy is the idea that political conservatives are “normal people” who don’t spend their time preoccupied with politics. The reality is that most political conservatives, which for the most part means likely Republican voters, are far more consistently engaged with politics and political news than their counterparts. This is one reason why Republicans typically enjoy significant turnout advantages in midterm and off-year elections. They remain consistently engaged in the political process, and the interest of Democratic voters tends to wax and wane depending on whether or not there is a presidential election. This allows Republican voters to create the illusion that “the country” is rejecting the other party’s agenda, and it leads them to believe that they represent a genuine majority view. In fact, these electorates are far less representative of the nation as a whole than the electorate in a presidential year, and Republicans are counting on this factor to exaggerate the level of support they have in the country.

The third fantasy is the one Robinson was indulging at the end of his post. This is the fantasy that Republican political failure can usually be explained as the product of insufficient or lacking conservatism. I understand why some conservatives like to make this argument: it gives Republican politicians an immediate incentive to move closer to conservative positions, and it puts down a marker to provide a ready-made explanation if an insufficiently conservative candidate loses. As a means of pressuring politicians or spinning election results, it may be an understandable move. However, as a matter of analysis, most of the time this claim is just not true, and in the Northeast or Pacific Northwest or in most of New Mexico it is obviously not true. Steve Pearce didn’t lose in a landslide to Tom Udall two years ago because he wasn’t conservative enough. New Mexicans had a “true choice” for Senate, and two-thirds of them chose Udall.

I have no problem if conservatives want to promote principled candidates and get them nominated for major offices, but I do object when they pretend that they can “have it all”–principle and political success–and base all of their calculations on that profoundly unrealistic and not very conservative understanding.

The essence of the establishment’s criticism O’Donnell is that she is a “flawed” candidate who can’t win in November. Unfortunately for the establishment, their credibility was shattered when O’Donnell won the primary. ~R.S. McCain

Well, as far as this Senate race is concerned their credibility is going to be pieced together again in a couple months. Sean Trende writes this morning:

O’Donnell really can’t win….O’Donnell is weaker than Paul or Angle, and she’s running in a state that gave Obama 62 percent of the vote. She’ll do better than her 2008 showing, but it won’t be enough.

If anything, Trende has been overstating the strength of Republicans in this election cycle, so if he thinks a candidate isn’t competitive she really isn’t. In 2008, O’Donnell received 140,595 votes and lost by over 116,000. Now that she had defeated Castle, many of Castle’s supporters are probably going to back Coons. PPP’s new polling suggests that this is what will happen: Coons is already pulling away 25% of Republicans in Delaware. Conservatives can cry about this if they want, but this was what was going to happen if O’Donnell became the nominee. Contrary to the spin her campaign was offering McCain, O’Donnell trails Coons among independents:

He also has a narrow 42-36 advantage with independents, a group Democrats are losing with most everywhere else.

Reportedly, her favorability in Delaware is 29-50, and her unfavorable number shot up 17 points in a month thanks to the barrage of attacks against her. Right now, she is polling at 34%, which is right around the 35% she received in her run against Biden in a much more Democratic year, so it is possible that she may end up winning less support than she did in 2008. For one thing, she didn’t win the nomination last time after an extremely bitter primary fight, and the fight has clearly taken a toll on how many voters perceive her.

O’Donnell’s nomination gives us all a chance to see a general election test of how someone as widely disliked as Palin and endorsed by Palin will fare with a broader moderate-to-liberal electorate.