With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pressing for quick ratification of the New START treaty, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) reiterated again on Wednesday there wasn’t enough time left in this lame-duck session of Congress to consider it. ~The Politico

Last week, there seemed to be a slight chance that the continuing resolution and tax deal would set the stage for bringing the treaty up for debate and a vote. So much for that. At this point, I assume we can all agree that Kyl never had any intention of debating and voting on the treaty in the lame-duck session, and all of the frenetic lobbying of the last three weeks was not going to change that. Perhaps Kyl held out the prospect of bringing up the treaty this year to make sure that Lugar agreed to the Senate GOP’s filibuster threat ahead of the tax deal, and once the deal was made he could revert to his earlier stalling. Of course, when Kyl insists that the treaty needs as much as two weeks to debate an arms reduction treaty, it is easy for him to conclude that there is “not enough time,” as he has set the bar so high that there never could have been enough time.

As for the abortion issue, it’s true that Johnson is a pro-choice Republican who could run as operationally pro-life. But most of the conservatives who would be inclined to back him rejected this argument when it came from Rudy Giuliani in 2007-08. It will be hard to walk that back simply because Johnson’s foreign policy is more to our liking. Though Johnson does have the advantages of having an actual record of signing pro-life bills as governor and he has gone a step further than Giulaini by supporting the reversal of Roe v Wade [bold mine-DL]. ~Jim Antle

Those last two points make some difference, don’t they? As governor, Johnson signed parental consent and partial-birth abortion ban legislation. At least by the standards of most national Republicans, that makes him as “operationally pro-life” as anyone, and he managed to do those things without engaging in a lot of absurd pandering by telling phony conversion stories. It makes a difference that Johnson has signed pro-life legislation. That is as much as most of his likely competitors in 2012 have done on this issue, and in some cases it goes beyond what other probable candidates did while in office. Giuliani’s claims that he would satisfy pro-life voters once in office were based on nothing in his record, so there was no reason to accept what he was saying.

In any case, what made Giuliani such a ridiculous candidate was not his socially liberal views. That made it impossible for him to be nominated, but it seems to me that everyone sympathetic to Johnson already accepts that he isn’t going to get anywhere near the nomination. What made Giuliani’s candidacy so ridiculous was that he proposed to run as the national security candidate solely on the basis of having happened to be New York’s mayor during a major terrorist attack, and that he refused to bother campaigning actively anywhere except Florida. If Johnson campaigns in a similar way, he will deserve the same mockery.

Andrew:

The most powerul aspect of this entire deal is how it has delivered a body-blow to the FNC/Limbaugh/RNC notion that Obama is an enemy and an alien and a threat. Instead, he’s now the architect of a deal with that most rightwing of Republicans, Mitch McConnell [bold mine-DL], a deal that legitimizes Obama on the right with consequences McConnell probably hasn’t completely absorbed yet.

This description of McConnell doesn’t make sense. It was not very long ago that conservatives saw McConnell as the embodiment of establishment Republicanism, which is what he is. McConnell is a very dedicated partisan, and uses his parliamentary skills to serve partisan goals, but it is clear that he is “right-wing” only by comparison to the moderates in the Senate GOP. McConnell did his best to oppose Rand Paul’s nomination in Kentucky, which put him in direct opposition not just to Tea Partiers but also to the broader Republican right as well. McConnell has been a leading facilitator of virtually every Bush-era legislative disaster from the prescription drug benefit to TARP. If McConnell is “that most rightwing of Republicans,” the left-right political spectrum truly has no meaning. Indeed, the opposition to the deal from the Club for Growth and Jim DeMint underscores that McConnell does not represent the right wing of his party, and it suggests that McConnell may not be able to force the conservative members of his caucus to accept the deal he has hammered out.

While I can understand opposing the deal, DeMint and the Club are in error in their resistance to the deal when they insist that all of the tax cuts be made permanent. The absolutist rejection of the estate tax compromise is also foolish, since the 35%/$5 million exemption arrangement is probably the best that can be had. For the sake of adding hundreds of billions more in debt, DeMint appears to be prepared to try to kill the deal. It’s important to note here that if DeMint succeeds, it will be in the name of even greater fiscal irresponsibility.

It is therefore quite conceivable that Palin could win Iowa, Johnson New Hampshire, and the battle joined. ~Jack Ross

I appreciate Jack’s enthusiasm, but after the 2008 primary I stopped believing that New Hampshire is some sort of natural base of power for libertarian candidates on the Republican side. It’s not just that Ron Paul didn’t do very well there, but that John McCain won and Romney came second. What’s worse, McCain somehow managed to win the most antiwar votes of any Republican candidate, which confirmed that the war was not a priority for most primary voters on the Republican side in 2008. All of the reasons why New Hampshire should have been a place for Ron Paul to do very well proved to have little to do with the actual voting behavior of Republican primary voters. In the end, for all the talk of the more libertarian leanings of the state, libertarian candidates don’t fare that much better up there than they do elsewhere. Johnson might make a decent showing in New Hampshire, but it is hard to see how he wins there or anywhere else. Of course, winning primaries and delegates wouldn’t be the main purpose of a Johnson candidacy. The main purpose would have to be to present an alternative to the supporters of the warfare and national security state that dominate intra-party debates, and to challenge the other candidates to defend positions that they normally adopt without any resistance or criticism from within the party.

Given his connection to Massachusetts and the influence of the Boston media market on New Hampshire, Mitt Romney has to be considered the favorite in New Hampshire until someone takes it away from him. McCain performed as well as he did in 2008 largely based on the goodwill he had stored up with New Hampshire voters with his victory there in 2000. As the runner-up in 2008, Romney will be well-positioned to pick up McCain’s supporters and dominate the New Hampshire scene.

Jim Antle writes that Gary Johnson is “badly positioned to make a credible presidential run,” and Dan McCarthy adds that he is “setting himself up to play the libertarian stock villain in the GOP’s quadrennial opera buffa.” They’re both right, but I have to admit that this is part of what I find appealing about the prospect of a Johnson candidacy. He isn’t just badly positioned–he’s horribly positioned, but there’s a chance that he might run anyway and have a salutary effect on the primary contest. His candidacy would force debates on civil liberties, foreign policy, and the drug war, which are all subjects where most of the other likely candidates hold misguided and sometimes appalling views. The rest of the field will all be officially pro-life*, but perfectly content with the idea of starting wars, detaining suspects indefinitely, and perhaps even torturing detainees when “necessary.” The contrast would be useful and instructive, and it might even lead some pro-life voters to insist that their leaders show more consistent respect for human life. All right, that last part is pretty unlikely, but it couldn’t hurt to try.

On a more serious note, I admit that I am more puzzled than repelled right now by Johnson’s apparent endorsement of humanitarian interventions. My first impression is that he hasn’t fully thought through the implications of what he’s saying. Let’s look at what Johnson says:

If there’s a clear genocide somewhere, don’t we really want to positively impact that kind of a situation? Isn’t that what we’re all about? Isn’t that what we’ve always been about? But just this notion of nation building—I think the current policy is making us more enemies than more friends.

These are rhetorical questions for Johnson. Obviously, he believes the answers to all of these are yes. It’s hard to know why Johnson believes that this is “what we’re all about,” since there isn’t much in American history that would lead anyone to conclude that humanitarian interventions are at the core of who we are as a nation. It doesn’t make much sense to support humanitarian intervention and oppose nation-building. Whatever outside power chooses to intervene in the internal affairs of another nation will end up taking on responsibilities for security after the intervention is over, and typically this will be paired with civilian reconstruction efforts, diplomatic engagement with the various political factions in the country, and an attempt to sort out an enduring post-conflict political settlement. Based on Johnson’s opposition to nation-building, I conclude that he wouldn’t actually be very interested in launching humanitarian interventions, since these interventions would inevitably lead to the nation-building that he sees as unacceptable. Humanitarian intervention really makes no sense on its own terms if there is no effort to follow it up with political stabilization, and Johnson seems to see that follow-up effort as misguided.

One of the other problems with this position is that it is often not “clear” that a genocide is taking place. Even when it is “clear,” it is not always certain that outside intervention would halt the killing, but might instead lead to its intensification. There is a presumption that outside intervention can meaningfully resolve or end these conflicts, when in most cases it will merely interrupt them until the intervening forces depart. In order to engage in a successful preventive intervention, the U.S. would have to involve itself before the policy and intentions of the government or group in question became “clear,” which would make the case for intervention extremely difficult and vexed. For that matter, this reason for intervention has been horribly abused, leading to the entirely unjustified 1999 war against Yugoslavia, and it is difficult to separate the idea of humanitarian intervention from that grossly illegal war, especially when most of the champions of humanitarian intervention and the “obligation to protect” remain dedicated supporters of that war. The strangest thing of all is that Johnson is coming around to see the virtue of humanitarian interventions at a time when humanitarian interventionism is meeting with a lot more skepticism among some of the people who previously endorsed it. As Mark Mazower wrote in World Affairs Journal earlier this year:

To the more ardent interventionists, such considerations represented pure legalism when set beside the chance to topple a dictatorship and prevent mass murder. But the more thoughtful of them have come to realize that the way leaders treat their people is not the only problem that counts in international affairs. On the contrary, if the history of the past century showed anything, it was that clear legal norms, and the securing of international stability more generally, also serve the cause of human welfare. Let alone the fact that it is much easier to destroy institutions than to build them.

One reason I’m not instantly put off by Johnson’s answer is that it doesn’t really fit with anything else he’s saying. If Johnson’s positions generally put him on the side of respecting international law and state sovereignty, which they seem to do, I am far less worried that Johnson would be willing to intervene militarily in another nation’s internal conflicts. Compared to everyone else in the likely GOP field, none of whom opposed invading Iraq and most of whom want to attack Iran, Johnson seems far less likely to support violating another country’s sovereignty for any reason. If Johnson wants to decrease military spending by half, or at least by some large amount, he is arguing for a significantly reduced ability to project power around the globe. A policy preference for humanitarian interventions requires the ability to project power quickly to many different places around the globe, and absent an extensive network of clients and bases that becomes much more difficult. Johnson’s interest in reducing military expenditures dramatically seems to be much greater. In the end, he doesn’t seem interested in willing the means to achieve the end he endorses, which suggests that his support for humanitarian intervention is not as deep or significant as it might seem at first.

* It is worth noting that Johnson’s position on abortion is actually the one that is basically consistent with the view of constitutionalists:

But as a matter of law, Johnson thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned. “It should be a states issue to begin with,” he says. “The criteria for a Supreme Court justice would be that those justices rule on the original intent of the constitution. Given that, it’s my understanding that that justice would overturn Roe v. Wade.”

On the main question of appointing justices to the Court and his view of the relevant case law, Johnson is no different from most conventionally pro-life Republicans.

It is fitting that the first significant legislative struggle since the midterms concerns the extension of the Bush tax cuts. One of the stories some conservatives told themselves in 2010 was that the Tea Party movement had succeeded in getting the Republican Party “out from under Bush.” This has become a recurringtheme in Peggy Noonan’s columns in the last few months. According to the new received wisdom on the right since 2006, it was principally Bush’s spending that harmed GOP fortunes, and the Tea Party was supposed to represent a reaction against this. “The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so,” Noonan wrote back in October. Granted, for many Tea Partiers, they became only too willing to say so beginning in 2009, but at least they said something.

Fresh off of a significant electoral victory aided in part by the Tea Party movement, what has been the first and most pressing priority of the Republican leadership? To make sure that the deficit-expanding tax cuts they failed to pay for in the Bush years continue to increase the deficit in the future, and to make sure that they don’t pay for them now. On the whole, the tax cuts were arguably the one Bush administration policy at home that satisfied most conservatives, and if this continues to be true we will have confirmation of just how little conservatives are concerned about adding to the debt even now.

It is certainly true that the Tea Party movement opposes tax increases, but it is also supposed to be interested in bringing public debt under control. The leadership has made clear that it is quite happy to add significantly to the debt through tax cut extensions, payroll tax cuts, and continued spending. Bush-era habits of spend-and-borrow have resumed within weeks of the midterms that supposedly represented the repudiation of these habits. Will the new members of the House and Senate rebel against this rapid return to the old ways? If Tea Partiers and conservatives are at all serious about reducing the debt, they need to make sure that they do.

Ross:

Given the parlous state of the economy, it makes sense to maintain the low Bush-era tax rates, it makes sense to extend unemployment benefits, and it makes sense to temporarily drop the payroll tax rate … if, that is, our leaders use the time between today and 2012, when this bargain comes up for renegotiation, to make real progress on a strategy for long-term deficit reduction, joined to a base-broadening, rate-lowering tax reform package that renders the debates over the Bush tax cuts obsolete.

In other words, the deal makes sense if Obama and the GOP will prove themselves to be fiscally responsible stewards working in the national interest. So the deal doesn’t really make sense. As Ross explains, the last administration and this one have been very good at pushing through big, expensive legislation. The Bush administration failed completely to pay for anything it did. There is no reason to expect anything better this time around.

The deal does provide a useful contrast with the federal wage freeze theater we saw earlier in this session. Phony deficit hawks love this sort of theater, because it allows them to oppose spending without opposing enough of it to run real political risks. When it came down to it, and there was a decision to be made between deficit reduction and deficit expansion, both the White House and the GOP chose the latter. Certainly, it’s helpful to be reminded immediately that Republicans in Congress are incorrigible and fiscally irresponsible. That can save their supporters the trouble of going through the time-consuming and embarrassing phase of expecting something different from Bush-era behavior.

As for Obama, he has managed to adopt and then abandon a pretense of deficit hawkishness in a relatively short period of time, which has served to annoy his core supporters without having any redeeming value on policy substance. Thanks to this deal, he has added one more charge of embracing “centrist” governance in a country where most of the public actually loathes the products of “centrist” governance from the last decade.

The most tiresome response to this deal I have seen is the claim that it somehow helps Obama with “the center” because the left is unhappy about it. It seems clear to me that he has put himself in the position of being identified with the interests of the wealthy and powerful yet again, which has been one of the administration’s problems for two years. Something like two-thirds of the public favored letting the top rate go up, and that includes the precious voters of “the center,” and Obama has now effectively taken the very unpopular side of this debate.

Too-clever-by-half interpretations of this hold that Obama is playing a cunning long-term game. However, it is never cunning to abandon a core commitment, disillusion one’s most active supporters, and cede an opponent everything he wants from a relative position of strength in the hopes that the opponent will later be easier to outmaneuver after he has become even stronger. “Centrist” and conservative pundits who have been urging Obama to capitulate on this issue are rather like Gollum urging Frodo on into Shelob’s lair. “No, really, this is the right way to go!” Obama’s defenders on this are reduced to saying that the lair could have been a lot worse. Provided that he isn’t eaten by the spider, all will be well.

It’s worth noting that the argument for voting on START now contradicts the positive spin some Obama supporters are trying to put on the deal. The administration has correctly argued for voting on the treaty now. This is not just because it is important and should be ratified as soon as possible, but because they assume that five more Republican votes are more than enough to kill it outright. They take for granted that everything, including a treaty that has overwhelming consensus support, will be far more difficult to move through the Senate next year, and obviously the new Republican House will be even more combative. Everything gets much harder for Obama over the next years, and he is already giving in to the opposition before the new Congress has met.

People who insist that Obama is playing a long game haven’t taken account of the fact that, politically speaking, Obama has been steadily losing the long game for most of the last year. They are also overlooking the reality that Obama and the Democrats frittered away their advantages for much of the year, which hardly inspires confidence in anyone that they are going to become more effective once they are weaker.

This explanation [anti-American sentiment] is not on firm footing: the group of voters were from a set of countries that are ordinarily relatively friendly to the United States. Of the 22 nations represented, 7 are members of NATO, and 5 others — Argentina, Egypt, Japan, South Korea and Thailand — are designated as major allies by the Department of Defense. This list does not include other countries like Brazil and Switzerland that have also traditionally enjoyed strong relations with the United States.

Certainly, the 22 individuals representing these countries may not have held the United States in the same high regard as their governments officially do. But they were not from countries, by and large, that would seem to hold a grudge against the country. ~Nate Silver

Why Qatar’s bid for the 2022 World Cup beat the U.S. bid is not really very important, but when I came across this passage from Silver’s post on the subject I was a bit puzzled. There may have been much more straightforward reasons for Qatar’s success related to the internal politics of FIFA, but it makes sense that a U.S. bid would run into significant resistance from FIFA representatives from Europe and “Argentina, Egypt, Japan, South Korea and Thailand.” With the possible exception of Thailand (and arguably not even there), all of those nations have mixed or hostile attitudes about America and American influence, and those attitudes probably become more negative when it comes to soccer. Resentment towards the U.S. in Egypt, Japan, and South Korea is fairly easy to explain, and in Argentina many people associate the collapse of their economy ten years ago with the neoliberalism associated with America. Depending on the political leanings of the individual representatives, these resentments might be weaker or stronger, but what would be strange is if they were not present.

Missing from Silver’s discussion is the statement from FIFA’s President Sepp Blatter earlier this year that “The Arabic world deserves a World Cup. They have 22 countries and have not had any opportunity to organise the tournament.” Incidentally, Blatter also serves as Switzerland’s delegate, so that would explain Switzerland’s vote. Blatter also praised Qatar’s earlier hosting of the Asian Games, and the head of the Asian Football Confederation (who is Qatari) endorsed Qatar’s bid earlier in the year. It doesn’t seem so odd that other Asian countries would back Qatar’s bid, especially when other Asian competitors, South Korea and Japan, have both hosted the Cup in the recent past. If there was an understanding that Qatar was the favorite Asian bid, and Qatar’s bid also provided an opportunity to give the tournament to an Arab country, which the head of FIFA told everyone months ago, we needn’t assume that Qatar won the final round to spite us. Neither should we find it surprising that representatives from the countries in question were unenthusiastic about a U.S. bid.

Finally, we shouldn’t assume that Qatar’s bid is some travesty of the sport (for those who care about the sport) or proof that FIFA has shown itself to be a ridiculous organization (for most Americans who pay attention to the World Cup and soccer mostly for the sake of mocking them). As one soccer blogger for ESPN noted in April of this year:

The Qataris already have much hosting experience, of course. This coming January, just six months after the finals in South Africa, they will host the best Asian football nations in the Asian Cup 2011.

You could seriously argue that if Democrats approve extensions of all the Bush tax cuts, it would be as big a cave-in than George H.W. Bush’s cave-in on the 1990 budget. ~Dave Weigel

Yes, you could. Weigel is correct that it would be as big of a cave-in as that of George H.W. Bush in 1990, and it is already starting to be perceived as a cave-in on that scale. For conservatives who were already strongly inclined to see Bush as unacceptably moderate, the 1990 budget deal confirmed their fears, and more broadly it did enormous damage to Bush’s credibility. The “no new taxes” promise had not only been central to Bush’s effort to appropriate the mantle of Reagan, but when he broke that promise it also added to the general dissatisfaction with Bush’s domestic governance that many voters were starting to feel.

I would go beyond this to say that Obama’s cave-in on taxes will alienate more than vocal progressives. It could be far more politically damaging than that. This is not simply a matter of provoking the base with yet another compromise. This is a matter of abandoning a position that is widely and strongly held throughout his party. In some cases, Obama has angered progressives by doing exactly what he promised during the campaign, but in this case he would be openly repudiating one of the most prominent positions he took during the campaign.

We should understand that this has nothing to do with the policy merits or flaws of the decision to make such a deal. The 1990 budget deal was arguably an important and desirable one as far as fiscal responsibility was concerned, but it was (correctly!) perceived as a betrayal on a core promise. This deal happens to be both fiscally irresponsible and politically foolish, so it is difficult to see how Obama comes away from making such a deal without looking bad all around. What will make this deal seem even less palatable to his party is that it is one that Obama is agreeing to not because of an argument on the merits, since Obama clearly doesn’t believe that it is undesirable or unwise to raise taxes on higher earners, but purely as a concession to free up the rest of a limited lame-duck agenda. As a supporter of START ratification, I appreciate that Obama is doing what he can to try to have the treaty ratified, but there is every chance that the Senate GOP will extract the concession on tax cuts and then revert to additional delaying tactics on the treaty anyway. If Obama does somehow save the treaty in all of this, he will have the consolation that he achieved something valuable for the country, but politically he will have paid an enormous price.

Andrew responds to Weigel by saying:

He’s saying that he’d prefer to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year, but cannot in this political climate at this particular time. Nothing prevents Obama from sunsetting them in their entirety if he wins re-election on a sturdier economy. And nothing prevents him from campaigning on long-term debt reduction from now on, as a way to restore the confidence that can keep the recovery moving [bold mine-DL].

It is questionable whether running on “long-term debt reduction” is politically advantageous, but assuming for the moment that it is Obama would have destroyed any credibility he may have had on this by agreeing to the extension of the tax cuts. What does he say? That he firmly believes we need to rein in debt when he just agreed to extend unaffordable tax cuts that significantly added to it? What a deal on these cuts shows is that Obama won’t hold firm when he still has the advantage of superior numbers in Congress, which tells us that he will probably be even more accommodating when one of the chambers is dominated by the other party. How does he argue that he will let the cuts expire in a few years’ time if he won’t do so now? If the recovery improves after he has capitulated, the GOP will take credit for having forced Obama to abandon his “job-killing” policies, and if it doesn’t Obama will face the same dilemma he does today with less credibility and fewer supporters in the Congress.

Writing the progressive version of a disastrous Caddell/Schoen “advice” op-ed, Michael Lerner proposes that the key to making Obama adhere to progressive positions is to launch a primary challenge against him from the left. As far as Lerner’s goals are concerned, this is madness, but his op-ed is useful as a corrective for the bizarre notion put forward by Noonan that Obama should capitulate completely on taxes because his relations with the left couldn’t possibly get any worse. As Noonan wrote:

This would further damage his relationship with the more leftward part of his base, but that can hardly be made worse, and a compromise would leave them angry anyway. In time they may become so horrified by the Republican House that they come to see the president more sympathetically.

Lerner’s op-ed is one piece of evidence that this is quite wrong. Obama has alienated progressives on a number of issues, but some of them are making it clear that extending all tax cuts will be one concession too many. Conservatives should understand the frustration progressives are feeling. Noonan is arguing that Obama should do what George H.W. Bush did in the 1990 budget deal: betray a core campaign pledge as part of a deal with the other party. Extending all of the tax cuts may be the right economic policy, but politically it is as perilous for Obama to extend all the tax cuts as it was for George “Read My Lips” Bush to agree to a tax hike.

Lerner’s argument fails in several ways. Its central flaw is the conceit that a primary challenge will “save” Obama rather than weaken him. Lerner writes:

But there is a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration’s policies. Such a candidacy would be pooh-poohed by the media, but if it gathered enough popular support – as is likely given the level of alienation among many who were the backbone of Obama’s 2008 success – this campaign would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate. Far from weakening his chances for reelection, this kind of progressive primary challenge could save Obama if he moves in the desired direction. And if he holds firm to his current track, he’s a goner anyway.

It was an appropriate expression of conservative discontent with the incumbent, but Pat Buchanan’s ’92 primary challenge against Bush did not significantly change how Bush campaigned or governed. Any sitting President that has faced a serious primary challenge has gone on to lose the general election. Bush in ’92, Carter in ’80, and Ford in ’76 were all defeated after heading off significant primary challenges. It is very hard to argue that any of these challenges made the incumbents stronger in the general election than they would have otherwise been.

It is possible that they were all “goners” anyway, and it could be that the primary challenges were just symptoms of existing weakness rather than causes of greater weakness, but what Lerner calls for has never worked and it is difficult to see how it could work. One can reasonably argue for backing a third party as a protest designed to move political debate in a certain direction, or at least as a statement of how unsatisfactory the major parties are, but in doing so one already accepts that this is usually going to harm rather than help the ideologically-closer major party candidate. Primary challenges usually don’t make general election candidates more viable than they already were, and Lerner cannot cite examples of presidential primary challenges that have done this because none of them has.

The second chief problem in Lerner’s argument is that he assumes that Obama would continue to hold and defend progressive positions once the pressure of the primary challenge is over. Based on what happened in 2008 and since, there is not much reason to believe that. If Obama continued his habit of accommodating his opponents, he would attempt to placate progressives with new promises, and then revert back to “centrist” campaigning and governing once re-nomination was secure. Even if Lerner were right that Obama needed to tack left and shore up progressive support to win, a primary challenge might force him to pay lip service to some of the things Lerner mentions, but Obama would then busy himself with appealing to independents and moderates by moving away from the things that he pledged to do during the primaries. The same pattern of unreasonable expectations, disillusionment, and bitterness that we have seen over the last three years would follow.

The most significant practical problem with Lerner’s proposal is that there seems to be no Democratic politician with any ambition of higher office who would run against Obama in 2012. Lerner rattles off a list of names, including a number of recently defeated House and Senate candidates, but it is hard to see why any of them would want the notoriety of being the one to try to impede Obama’s re-election. Anyone who did would face the constant criticism from his colleagues that he was facilitating Republican victory, and the critics would have a point. None of them wants to be responsible for undermining Obama and putting a Republican in the White House. Some progressive politicians dissatisfied with Obama might very well want to let Obama fall on his own, since they could explain his eventual failure as a result of too much compromise and accommodation with Republicans.

There’s only one credible reason to launch a primary challenge against Obama from the left, and that is because progressives have decided that there are not enough significant differences between Obama and his Republican opponents to justify supporting him for another term. Indeed, the only reason for progressives to launch a challenge against Obama is to try to take the nomination and the party from him. No sitting President who has sought re-nomination has been denied it by his party, so the real goal of a primary challenge would be to wound Obama enough to make him less viable and less competitive to express the degree of dissatisfaction with the party’s direction.