Andrew:

It [the tax deal] could also lead to a spectacular black eye for the GOP establishment. Does anyone believe that the Tea Party campaigned so hard in order to have the Congress pass a second stimulus – as pricey as the first, and borrowed entirely from the Chinese [bold mine-DL]? Think what happens after the deal is passed, and the truth of it sinks in with the base. The GOP civil war will begin in earnest – especially if Obama outflanks the GOP on long-term debt reduction in the SOTU.

One thing that Tea Partiers definitely did campaign for was tax cuts. Once you add up the extension of all the Bush-era rates, the temporary payroll tax cut, the AMT provision, the estate tax provision, and the various tax credits included in the deal, there isn’t much left that really qualifies as stimulus spending. What I have seen so far from members of Congress associated with the Tea Party movement is hostility to the deal because it does not make all of the tax cuts permanent and fails to abolish the estate tax. Assuming that the deal is passed, what will “sink in” with the Republican rank and file is that approximately 93% of the deal took the form of tax breaks, tax credits or tax holidays. Looked at this way, the deal was designed almost perfectly to avoid making any difficult, fiscally responsible decisions and to indulge the fantasy that there is no economic or fiscal problem that cannot be solved by reducing taxes.

Inasmuch as these Tea Party-aligned politicians primarily care about lowering taxes, the huge deficit expansion that the deal represents will not trouble them, because they are openly calling for expanded deficits for years to come. One reason that there is no strong resistance to the deal among House and Senate Republicans is that almost all of them see the deal as a significant win for their side and for their policy preferences. Even most of the parts of the deal that can be described as new stimulus do not seem to be objectionable to Tea Partiers in Congress.

Maybe the newly-elected Republican members take a different view, but I have a hard time seeing a Republican civil war erupting over the concession on unemployment benefits. Democratic supporters of the deal have been emphasizing what little spending there is to make the best of what they see as a lopsided deal whose stimulative effects will be very inefficient. This is an exercise in positive spin more than it is a fair description of the entire deal. As many others have pointed out already, the Democrats’ “almost epic attempt at political suicide” was before the election when the Democratic leadership chose to do nothing on taxes, which is part of what put them in their current predicament. Some of them are not yet resigned to oblivion and have started struggling against the inevitable, but it is probably too late for them.

P.S. Bearing all this in mind, things are not completely hopeless on the Republican side. As Ross points out in his column today, Sen. Tom Coburn has objected to the deal for the right reasons.

Mr Obama’s short-term deal makes it more likely that the long-term equilibration of income and outgoings will be done on Republican terms. ~Christopher Caldwell

This is certainly what many Democrats fear, but this seems to be a case of Democrats’ putting more faith in conservative “starve the beast” rhetoric than many conservatives actually do. I noticed that Jim Pinkerton was recently insisting that this was the real reason why Republicans support the tax deal, but I doubt that they really believe this. My impression is that this is the line Republicans always use to reconcile their refusal to control spending with their professed interest in keeping spending under control. In practice, the beast never starves. The beast simply starts devouring the wealth of future generations. This is the result of the very American and extremely un-conservative conviction that we can have it all, which means that we don’t need to make any serious trade-offs.

Caldwell argues that the deal will increase pressure for deficit reduction, and presumably we are supposed to believe that deficit reduction on “Republican terms” implies drastic spending cuts. If that were the case, liberal dissatisfaction with the deal would seem even more reasonable, and any conservative opposition to the deal would seem short-sighted, but this is not what will happen. As Caldwell outlines very well, the tax deal is an embodiment of “centrist” and bipartisan government at its worst:

The two parties have connived to kick every single difficult budget decision down the road. They have collaborated only to give away money. If this were part one of a larger plan to get the country’s fiscal house in order, it might be welcomed. But it is an exercise in wishful thinking. It damps hopes that America can reform before the markets bring it to heel.

As the leaders of both parties have made clear in the last few months, sacrificing anything significant for the sake of fiscal responsibility is out of the question right now. The new guardians of the sanctity of Medicare in the Republican leadership are not going to throw away the advantage among elderly voters they have acquired by hinting at anything that might appear to threaten Social Security or Medicare. Trusting in newly-elected members of Congress to change this will most likely lead to disappointment. To take one example, Marco Rubio is not going to start speaking truth to the power of retirees. If we put aside their campaign rhetoric, we can see that the party of insolvency has no interest in austerity budgets. As the tax deal has shown, no amount of establishment consensus or elite panic about debt will force political leaders to stop expanding the deficit at every opportunity. If it comes to a point where the fiscal imbalance absolutely cannot be ignored any longer, it will be relatively easier to raise taxes than it will be to reform entitlements. It won’t be very popular, but it will only be after this that entitlement reform becomes politically possible as the public begins to identify what the real cost of government services is. Starving the beast doesn’t work, and in all likelihood it creates all the wrong incentives if the goal is to reduce the size and scope of government.

Last week, Peggy Noonan wrote:

He should confound everyone, and give a headache to his foes, by bowing to the spirit of 2010 and accepting the Bush tax cuts, top to bottom. It would be electrifying. It would seem responsive, and impress the center. And it would help Mr. Obama seem credible, not ideological or partisan but reasonable and moderate, when he weighs in on taxing and spending in the future.

This is more or less what he did. It did not create a headache for his foes. On the whole, they have been celebrating his embrace of their position. All of this created a problem for Noonan. How could she find a new angle for mocking Obama when he did the “startling” thing she advised him to do? This is how:

The president must have thought that distancing himself from left and right would make him more attractive to the center. But you get credit for going to the center only if you say the centrist position you’ve just embraced is right [bold mine-DL]. If you suggest, as the president did, that the seemingly moderate plan you agreed to is awful and you’ll try to rescind it in two years, you won’t leave the center thinking, “He’s our guy!” You’ll leave them thinking, “Note to self: Remove Obama in two years.”

In other words, it is not enough that Obama capitulate and accept a position he has specifically, publicly rejected on many occasions. He must also pretend that his capitulation is the result of a genuine change of heart. I am reminded of one of the interrogators from an episode of Babylon-5 when he says, “We don’t just want a confession; we want conversion.” It isn’t enough to break Obama. He must also admit that he was wrong all along. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t receive any of the benefits of “startling” and “electrifying” the public by his abject surrender.

She had also said:

This would further damage his relationship with the more leftward part of his base, but that can hardly be made worse [bold mine-DL], and a compromise would leave them angry anyway.

Instantly, after doing what Noonan recommended Obama’s relationship with the left was made worse. Having insisted that capitulating on the tax cuts couldn’t do much to worsen his relationship with the left, Noonan now marvels at the unprecedented spectacle of Obama’s core supporters turning on him:

You’re not supposed to get a serious primary challenge from the people who loved you. But that’s the talk of what may happen with Mr. Obama.

Last week, Obama’s relations with the left were about as bad they could be. This week, they have worsened so much that Noonan has never seen anything like it. Last week, capitulating on tax cuts was Obama’s path to political revival. This week, after he did exactly what Noonan called for, he is in such sorry shape that she has no idea how his political future can be saved:

Some Democrats will try to bring him back. How? Who knows. But that will be a great Democratic drama of 2011: Saving Obama.

Of course, it is no surprise that Obama is in worse shape now by taking the “advice” of Noonan than he was before it.

Responding to my post, Dave Weigel offers an explanation for why conservatives remained solidly behind Bush until at least 2006:

1) War. There was no serious conservative opposition to Bush from September 11 2001 to some point in 2006. The Medicare Part D vote was held two months after the Iraq War began. When your base supports you on a war, you can get away with some disappointments on other issues. Barack Obama simply doesn’t exploit his commander-in-chief role the way Bush did. (If you think that’s unfair to Bush, I have video of a certain pilot landing on an aircraft carrier you should see.)

2) Winning/Losing. The Medicare Part D vote was sold to conservatives as a more market-friendly version of a Democratic idea, which would take their idea off the table for the 2004 election. The tax cut deal looks like sad president bowing to Republican obstruction in the Senate and giving in to “hostage takers.” Bush’s successful feints to the left were always sold as ways to grab voter-friendly Democratic ideas to benefit Republicans. Democrats don’t see what they’re getting with the tax deal — it affirms, as Jim DeMint says, what conservatives spent 10 years saying about tax cuts.

These account for some of the reasons why Bush did not face a rebellious conservative movement until the 2007 immigration debate. The degree of uniformity and lockstep support for the administration that the Iraq war created does help explain why Bush could run much more to the left than Obama has moved right without provoking a backlash. The war largely dominated the politics of 2004-2007, Bush and the movement were united on the same side, and outside Washington the movement and his party’s rank and file were the only ones who were still with him when he proposed the “surge.” It is possible that the sheer unpopularity of both Bush and the war forged a connection between Bush and conservative war supporters that would not have otherwise endured. As long as the war remained the defining issue, it bonded the movement to Bush to an extent that has never happened with liberals and Obama. Conservatives might reflect on that and consider whether waging an unnecessary, costly war that harmed U.S. interests was worth the massive expansion of the welfare state before and after 2006 that it enabled.

As the movement became convinced of the success of the “surge” and Iraq faded into the background, the movement became a bit more willing to challenge Bush when they found his policies unacceptable. Obviously, many of Obama’s core constituencies haven’t responded to Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan in anything like the same way because many of them are ambivalent or openly opposed to the decision. Where support for the “surge” became the single-most significant litmus test on the right, Obama’s decisions on foreign policy and national security have generated mixed reactions at best on the left because of significant continuity of many Bush and Obama policies.

The timing of the two episodes also makes a big difference. When Bush pushed through the prescription drug benefit, it wasn’t just that he was making it seem like a Republican win on a traditional Democratic issue, but he was also still relatively popular both within and outside his party. He was coming off the unusual post-9/11 “Khaki” election of 2002 in which his party gained seats, and there will still illusions among some activists on the right that an enduring Republican majority was there for the taking. Indeed, according to the fashionable ideas of some “big-government conservatives” and “compassionate conservatives,” it was supposed to be the prescription drug benefit and things like them that would make the GOP into the dominant party in the future. All of that proved to be false, but it wasn’t immediately clear that it was false. At the time, it was tempting for some on the right to see it as a major partisan victory. Obama’s capitulation comes on the heels of a major electoral defeat and resulted from Democratic avoidance of the tax issue until after the election. Despite the best efforts of David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer, it is difficult to spin this as success. Instead of theoretically poaching on the other party’s territory, it represents a policy setback coming in the wake of a significant political setback. It also serves as confirmation in the minds of liberal critics that Obama will not “fight” and will accommodate the opposition, whereas Bush’s gargantuan entitlement expansion was more or less in keeping with what conservatives had come to expect of Bush. Perhaps one of the most important differences is that many of Obama’s liberal allies see the deal as a failure of leadership, and Bush’s conservative allies saw the prescription drug benefit as evidence of successful leadership, albeit in the service of expanding the welfare state. This is probably why the reaction to the tax deal is as strong as it is despite the comparatively smaller concessions that Obama made.

“Every one of these people is either deeply flawed or irredeemably polarizing, and that’s why a guy like Santorum is going to get a look.” ~The Washington Post

It’s not so hard to believe that Santorum will “get a look” because of the flaws of the rest of the likely 2012 GOP field, but as soon as people look most of them will conclude that he, too, is “deeply flawed and irredeemably polarizing.” More precisely, he is virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the field on most issues, except that he is widely (and somewhat unfairly) perceived as an authoritarian fanatic on social issues and a dangerous jingoist on foreign policy. No doubt he will steal John Bolton’s thunder when he delivers ringing condemnations of the Venezuelan missile threat, but if his presidential bid is anything like his 2006 re-election campaign he will be quickly dismissed by most primary voters. I suspect they will dismiss him not because he is excessively hawkish, but because he has had a habit over the last few years of talking about nothing else. Especially when voters are going to be anxious about the economy, Santorum’s fixation on “America’s enemies,” which he has been focused on since his ’06 defeat, will become tiresome. In a 2012 field that is likely to include more than candidate interested in demagoguing foreign policy issues, Santorum will become an echo rather than a clear alternative.

Santorum’s natural constituency of religious and social conservatives is likely to be split so many different ways that he will not be able to take advantage of his deserved reputation as a dedicated opponent of abortion and proponent of Catholic social reform. Meanwhile, the things that might make Santorum stand out and could make him a more interesting and attractive candidate, such as his effort on debt relief or his reflections on our obligations to serve the common good, do not resonate with the rank and file or appear to be a threat to individualism.

If the good patriots keeping the world safe for democracy feel they need to keep certain things secret, then they need to keep certain things secret. To splash those secrets all over the internet is simply to interfere with America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy. What kind of person would do that?

The more plausible that line of thought sounds to you, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as something akin to a terrorist enterprise. But the more you see a hegemonic America as a problem and not a solution, the more WikiLeaks will strike you as a welcome check on a dangerous, out-of-control hyperpower drunk on its own good intentions [bold mine-DL]. In that case, it may seem that the American political establishment and the collaborating media has grown blind to the hypocrisy so clearly apparent to others in its approach to WikiLeaks because it has forgotten that freedom and democracy have meaning apart from their role in justifying the operations of the far-flung secret-shrouded state. ~Will Wilkinson

I have seen different forms of this argument in the last few weeks. This is the second of them from Wilkinson. Each time I see it, I find it more annoying than the last. For one thing, it assumes that American critics of U.S. hegemony should welcome active subversion of their government’s legitimate functioning as a means of holding it accountable for its abuses and illegalities. This is as politically tone-deaf as can be, and it will almost certainly backfire to make the government less accountable and less transparent. I find the idea that all good anti-imperialists have to stand up for an organization that seems dedicated to harming American interests to be perverse, and it just the sort of argument that militarists here in the U.S. are only too happy to see libertarians, antiwar conservatives, and progressives take up. American opposition to U.S. hegemony as I understand it is rooted in the conviction that hegemony is unsustainable and damaging to real American interests in the meantime. It takes for granted that there are legitimate American interests that can and should be pursued, and that U.S. hegemony badly distorts our understanding of what our real interests are, conflates them with the interests of other nations, and wastes national resources on a project of global power projection that America can’t afford and doesn’t need. Enthusiasm for Assange distracts from all of this and substitutes the cheap thrill of airing some dirty laundry for the difficult task of changing the foreign policy consensus.

Wikileaks doesn’t interfere with “America’s attempt to carry its noble burden, to perform its urgent and necessary task, to make the world a little less safe for democracy.” All of that is risible nonsense. So is much of the anti-Wikileaks hysteria. If it is true that the information provided by Wikileaks hasn’t caused all that much damage, which its defenders argue by way of exonerating it from more serious charges, it is even more of an ineffectual bit of posturing than it seemed at first. It seems to me that would-be defenders of Wikileaks have made the easy mistake of imputing virtues to Wikileaks that it doesn’t have out of frustration with government abuses and disastrous policies. This comes from the tempting, mistaken belief that if these people oppose government abuses, it must make what they’re doing all right. All of this is an exercise in cheering on someone who has poked the hegemon in the eye without considering the counterproductive nature of such a protest.

I find myself agreeing with Michael Cohen in his exasperated reply to David Rieff:

The first an most obvious rejoinder to this is that even non-exceptional countries require diplomatic secrecy! So if you embrace the notion that confidentiality is a sine qua non for the ability to conduct effective diplomacy then you would certainly believe that Wikileaks’ modus operandi is dangerous and counter-productive.

Anyone who thinks we can disentangle the U.S. from our many commitments around the world without substantial international goodwill, cooperation, and trust is kidding himself. Undermining the confidence that other nations’ diplomats have in dealing with our diplomats reduces the options available to U.S. policymakers, and it makes it harder for Washington to employ tools other than the blunt instruments of force and coercion that Wikileaks admirers find so objectionable.

John McCormack follows up on the discussion about Gary Johnson and humanitarian intervention with another quote from his interview:

TWS: So, you think that the United States, even if it weren’t in its own narrow national interest, even if we weren’t threatened by the [other] country, but there was a genocide going on—a clear genocide—it would be the right thing to do to go in and stop that?

GARY JOHNSON: Yes. Yes, I do.

Other than Jack, I’m not sure that anyone doubted that this is exactly what he meant when he talked about intervening in the case of a “clear genocide.” As I said in the previous post, Johnson’s view is straightforward enough. What still doesn’t make much sense is how he reconciles his belief that the U.S. should wage war to prevent genocide with his opposition to nation-building, his obvious aversion to interfering in the affairs of other nations, and his apparent interest in dramatically cutting military spending. His support for intervention in the case of a “clear genocide” doesn’t match up very well with his other views. My puzzlement about Johnson’s answer remains unchanged, but I don’t doubt that he meant what he said.

Coming back to speculation about his presidential bid, it’s worth adding that Johnson’s answer on this puts him on the same side as a broad majority of the public. According to the survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs earlier this year, Americans are generally turning against hegemonism, but significant majorities apparently support just the sort of military interventions Johnson is endorsing here. As the survey report states:

In terms of humanitarian crises, Americans support many measures, including using U.S. troops
in other parts of the world to stop a government from committing genocide and killing large numbers of its own people (72%), creating an international marshals service through the United Nations that could arrest leaders responsible for genocide (73%), and providing food and medical assistance to people in needy countries (74%).

This comes from the same survey in which a majority wants a hands-off approach to conflict in Korea and wouldn’t want to intervene in a war between Iran and Israel, so Johnson’s combination of positions might be very representative of most Americans. One of Johnson’s political problems is that the Americans who share his views tend not to be members of his party and they are least concentrated among Republican primary voters. One of the other problems is that the public may theoretically support humanitarian interventions, but they sour on them just as quickly if anything goes wrong and Americans begin getting killed. Of course, they should sour on them under those circumstances, but that suggests that their support for these interventions is superficial. This may represent a case where people give the answer they think they are expected to give rather than the one they really hold.

I’m not going to assume that Johnson was taking the easy way out and providing the less controversial answer. After all, if Johnson had tried to make an argument for non-intervention in this case, the headline would not have been about his relatively recent marijuana use, but probably would have focused instead on his “isolationist” indifference to the suffering of innocents, etc. Evidently, he believes that humanitarian interventions are not only justifiable, but also desirable, but I would want to press him on specific cases. Is he really articulating a blanket principle in favor of intervention, or would he support intervention on a case-by-case basis? Was intervening in Kosovo prudent? How does Johnson distinguish between a “clear genocide” and a civil war in which all parties are guilty of atrocities? Are allied governments fair game, or are these interventions going to be aimed at the clients of rival powers as they mostly have been in the past? What are the implications for international stability if separatist groups assume that they will receive foreign backing against their governments by provoking massacres of their civilian population? These are the questions I would be interested in hearing Johnson answer.

Leave aside whether this characterization is accurate and focus instead on why a realist – of all people – should care. The United States supports states with far more egregious human rights records than anything sketched above. A realist is supposed to give less weight to a state’s internal flaws and focus instead on its geopolitical orientation, right? ~Greg Scoblete

Prof. Walt can provide his own answer, but I would say that a realist wouldn’t worry as much about Israel’s “internal flaws” if they were simply internal. We have other allies that still occupy territory seized during wartime decades ago, but the rest of them are not client states to the same degree that Israel is and the rest of them do not receive such generous aid. It is because of the extent of the relationship and the complications it creates for the U.S. with most other countries in the region that the realist cares about the implications for U.S. interests if the two-state solution is indeed beyond saving.

It is also the realist’s concern that much of the rest of the world claims to see the resolution of this conflict as a high priority, and it is the realist’s concern that much of the rest of the world focuses, fairly or not, on Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories more than it does on the worse internal repressions of numerous dictatorships. My preference would be to acknowledge that both the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the U.S.-Israel relationship are vastly less strategically important than most people claim that they are, but a realist has to work with the world as it is rather than how one would like it to be. In the world as it is, the conflict is seen as very significant for the entire region. In this world, an Israel that engages in mass expulsions or continues the domination of a subject people becomes an even greater political liability for the U.S. than it has been. The realist’s question would then become: is the relationship with Israel strategically important enough to balance the costs incurred from maintaining it? In at least two of the three scenarios Walt sketches out, it seems to me that the answer will be no.

Yesterday, I was criticizing the tax deal and some of its more imaginative defenders. Jonathan Bernstein picked up on the second part and responds:

The problem is that Obama either had to abandon the core commitment to end the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich, or the core commitment to continue Bush-era tax rates for everyone else. He didn’t have the votes to keep both core commitments. End of story.

I mostly agree with that. Once Obama insisted on a certain agenda during this final session of the year and the Senate GOP remained united behind their no-action-before-tax-cuts line, he was stuck with accepting bad options. My main objection to the deal itself is that it is fiscally irresponsible, and my concern about it is that the deal shows that there is no significant interest in deficit reduction on either side. I suppose we have all known that there was no significant interest in this, but the deal confirmed it. Quite a few defenders of the deal have also been making implausible claims that striking a deal that everyone agrees was forced upon him by necessity means that Obama has somehow cleverly set the stage for eventual triumph down the road. What I was trying to say in the section Bernstein quoted was that these claims of eventual triumph make no sense. Krugman has a persuasive explanation of why they don’t:

Look at the Zandi estimates: they show a boost to the economy in 2011, which is then given back in 2012. So growth is actually slower in 2012 than it would be without the deal.

Now, what we know from lots of political economy research — Larry Bartels is my guru on this — is that presidential elections depend, not on the state of the economy, but on whether things are getting better or worse in the year or so before the election. The unemployment rate in October 1984 was almost the same as the rate in October 1980 — but Carter was thrown out by voters who saw things getting worse, while for Reagan it was morning in America.

Put these two observations together — and what you get is that the tax-cut deal makes Obama’s reelection less likely. Let me repeat: the tax cut deal makes Obama less likely to win in 2012.

If Obama’s supporters want to say that he harmed his political interests to strike the best deal he could manage under the circumstances, that’s one thing. It’s something else to say that the Republicans have just fallen into Obama’s roadrunner jujitsu trap, as Andrew seems to think. What has happened is that Obama has given us an advance preview of the nature of hostage budget negotiations for the next two years, and he did so before his party’s majorities ended. I stand by my assessment that this is not what a cunning plan looks like.

At his press conference, Obama justified the deal by saying that he didn’t have the votes in the Senate for his preferred option, but he and everyone else understand that he and his party will have many fewer votes for his preferred option in the next Congress. Indeed, in the House his preferred option won’t receive a hearing. So it isn’t as if Obama is temporarily retreating in order to re-take the ground later–he’s just retreating. The best that one can say about it is that at least it was a more or less orderly retreat. His bargaining position a year from now will not be as strong as it is today, and in terms of Democratic numbers in the Senate it could very well be weaker in two years’ time than it will be before the next election.

The modern conservative movement did not waste time pitching primary challenges against George W. Bush in 2004. It spent that time trying to take down liberal Republicans in local, winnable races. In doing so, groups like the Club for Growth made it harder and harder for Republicans to break from anti-tax, small government orthodoxy, even when George W. Bush did so.

“There’s no point in just spending money for the sake of feeling good about attacking someone if no chance of winning,” says Club for Growth executive director David Keating. “You pick races you can win.” ~Dave Weigel

Weigel was making a lot of sense in this post until this part. It’s true that the conservative movement didn’t expend any energy or resources challenging Bush in 2004. It occurred to me earlier this week that I couldn’t recall anything like the outrage over the tax deal after Bush and his allies forced the prescription drug benefit through Congress. In terms of the damage it did to the long-term fiscal health of the country, Medicare Part D was infinitely worse than anything that has happened in the last few years, and it still represents the largest expansion of the welfare state since LBJ. By and large, conservatives have swallowed this, they generally never talk about it now, and they certainly don’t talk about repealing it. I suppose the one thing that Bush could say for himself is that he never specifically pledged not to do it.

There were conservative activists and pundits who disliked Medicare Part D, and many of them publicly opposed it, but there was never much mainstream conservative desire to penalize party leaders who pushed it through. Indeed, many of the people who voted for it have been promoted into the leadership since then. Aside from the immigration debate in 2007 and the much less important fight over Harriet Miers, the Bush years were a time when the conservative movement rolled over and tolerated one rejection of their views after another. Conservatives under Bush are a case study of how ideological core supporters are taken for granted. They also provide a good example of how these supporters reconciled themselves to their own policy irrelevance by engaging in constant intellectual contortions to justify their continuing support for an administration that regularly ignored their priorities.

It’s also true that many of the high-profile primary challenges launched by the Club for Growth against moderate and liberal Republicans in the last six years failed or led to a Democratic win in the general election. I found the Club executive director’s remark fascinating. It’s as if he doesn’t know that the Club has acquired quite a reputation for picking races that it cannot win, and for winning races that helped the GOP to lose seats in Congress. I suppose these challenges made it a little harder to break from anti-tax orthodoxy, but the GOP leadership happily ignored any “small government” principles until it was tossed out of power. Progressives are undoubtedly on the wrong track with talk of primarying Obama, but I can’t think of many worse examples of how a political movement can get its way than the conservative movement under Bush and the electoral strategy of the Club for Growth.