By contrast, Scott Brown commanded broad enthusiasm throughout the Republican Party, from libertarians to vegetarians, to borrow an old joke of John McCain’s. Does the breadth of enthusiasm bespeak a broadening of accepted views? If so, Tuesday’s big victory offers more than hope for a better quality of health reform. It offers hope that the Republican Party has truly recovered its center – and its way not only to win, but to be deserving of it. ~David Frum

It seems that the breadth of enthusiasm for Brown is not really a sign of the “broadening of accepted views.” As Frum noted, Brown is likely to be to the left of Specter once he starts voting in the Senate, and movement activists and party regulars were glad to be rid of Specter last year, so it might appear as if something has changed in atittudes toward moderates. However, the enthusiasm for Brown was not an expression of newfound acceptance of moderate Northeastern Republicans. It is not as if movement conservatives recognized an error in pushing Specter to switch parties and wanted to remedy it by replacing him with an even more liberal Republican from Massachusetts. As I mentioned earlier, the selective outrage that targets the less liberal Specter and Crist with serious primary challenges but leaves the more liberal Brown unscathed depends entirely on the degree to which the moderate Republican opposes or embraces Obama’s agenda.

Specter and Crist crossed the line by respectively backing and embracing the stimulus bill. Brown won boundless sympathy and admiration for pledging to kill the health care bill. There is still an “ideological straitjacket” limiting what Republican candidates can do, but its dimensions may be a little different than they were in the past. The most important factor in determining whether or not movement and party will rally behind a Republican candidate is his readiness to thwart Obama. Everything else is secondary and will be overlooked, so long as the candidate doesn’t have presidential aspirations.

Just look at how quickly the Huntsman ’12 talk evaporated almost as soon as he began to become a national figure. Huntsman went to Beijing as ambassador in part because he surveyed the political landscape and realized that there was too much resistance even to a pro-life Utah Republican candidate who had supported the Western Climate Initiative, backed civil unions and acquired a reputation for reasonableness. Bob Bennett is currently discovering that his positions on the environment and health care are not really welcome in the Utah GOP. The primary challenge against Bennett and the broad conservative enthusiasm for Brown actually stem from the same desire to oppose health care legislation. In other words, at least as far as national Republican and conservative support for Brown are concerned, Brown has profited from the same political pressure that sent Huntsman to China and made Specter a Democrat. As soon as Brown reveals that he really is a moderate Northeastern Republican, conservative enthusiasm will disappear.

Looking ahead to the midterms, this Politico report and this summary from the pollster PPP provide some perspective on how far the GOP has to go. As Politico reports, one important Republican problem is the weakness of their fundraising:

Privately, top Republicans tell POLITICO that they are most concerned right now about their bank balance. They are doing well in recruiting candidates but worry they might not have the cash to sufficiently fund them.

Consider the House. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has $15 million in the bank right now — nearly four times more than the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Officials say that, while small and large donors are still chipping in, the recession has caused a dip in contributions from middle-level donors — often the small-business types who are feeling the economic pinch.

At the candidate level, if you tally up all the money for everyone running, Democrats have about $60 million more ($175 million to $114 million), according to numbers compiled by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Money is one of the many reasons top GOP officials wish the party had not elected Michael Steele as Republican National Committee chairman. Senior Republicans don’t like his loose lips or his wildly improvisational style. But they could live with that if the RNC were a cash cow. It is not, in part because of Steele’s unwillingness to personally stroke top donors.

Poor Republican fundraising and a Democratic advantage in fundraising have been the story for the last two cycles of House elections. As the report says, the RNC has less cash on hand than its Democratic counterpart, and Steele’s erratic and often ridiculous leadership style is hindering efforts to make up the difference. Things can change, Steele might be forced out on account of his incompetence, and fundraising could pick up if it seems that the GOP has a fighting chance, but at present the GOP is at a significant disadvantage. The recent Court decision on corporate and union contributions doesn’t seem likely to help Republicans that much. Not only are they deep in the minority, but to the extent that they have posed as populists arrayed against bailouts and crony capitalism they have not exactly been giving corporations a lot of reasons to provide funding. If they opt to become defenders of Wall Street and banks against Democratic expressions of economic populism, they may win contributions at the expense of losing many votes.

Meanwhile, the public is largely dissatisfied with “the direction of the GOP”:

Our national poll this week found that only 19% of voters in the country are happy with the direction of the Republican Party, compared to 56% who are unhappy with it. Even among independents, who have voted overwhelmingly for Scott Brown, Chris Christie, and Bob McDonnell 58% say they don’t like the direction the GOP is headed in.

I know what you’re going to say. How can the public be unhappy with the GOP’s direction? Wouldn’t the party need to have a direction with which to make them unhappy? What this does confirm is that the party is still politically toxic, and according to a WSJ/NBC poll it has a favorability rating of just 30%. The Politico article also related another piece of information that makes the chances of a significant Republican resurgence seem pretty poor:

A recent Washington Post poll found 24 percent trusted congressional Republicans to make the right decisions for the country — 8 points fewer than Democrats and 23 points fewer than Obama.

Three out of four Americans don’t trust them to make the right decisions, and yet we’re supposed to believe that they’re on the verge of being rewarded with massive gains in both houses later this year? Of course, these are midterm elections, and under normal conditions likely Republican voters tend to turn out for these at a higher rate than Democratic voters, so the distrust that the overwhelming majority feels for the Congressional GOP could be blunted. However, if the problem the administration and Congress have is that the public does not trust them, doesn’t distrust of Republicans in Congress make it very unlikely that the public is going to put them anywhere near regaining power in Washington?

The story Republicans have told themselves since they were thrown out in 2006 is that spending and earmarks did them in. Despite having no evidence that this was the case, they have repeated this for years. Having misunderstood the real reasons for their political collapse, they are poor interpreters of voters’ intentions, which makes it unlikely that they understand why they prevailed in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts. If they don’t understand this, it is improbable that they are going to be able to replicate that success in the fall.

That brings us to trying to understand the public’s views on the health care bill. Everyone is citing the new Gallup poll showing a majority wants Congress to suspend efforts on the current health care bill and consider alternatives “that can receive more Republican support.” The topline result seems straightforward enough. Just like Brown voters, a majority wants to stop the current bill. What the Gallup poll does not ask is why respondents want to do this. Naturally, GOP partisans take the topline result at face value and conclude that it must mean that any and all “health care reform” is wildly unpopular. We have already seen that this is not what Obama/Brown voters meant in Massachusetts, and it seems reasonable to suppose that some nontrivial number of Gallup’s 55% are also saying something else.

One of the other questions yields a somewhat vague result, but it does cast some doubt on interpretations that independent voters are recoiling from Obama’s agenda. Asked whether they are pleased with Obama’s progress, disappointed that he did not achieve more, or upset that he is taking the country in the wrong direction, 39% of respondents said they are pleased and 20% are disappointed. 37% is upset with the wrong direction. Among independents, the numbers were 35/25/35. I say that the result is vague because it is not completely clear what the disappointed respondents mean exactly by “more progress,” but regardless of what they meant exactly the result suggests that they seem to be sympathetic to Obama’s agenda, but they find his execution and his product lacking.

If the prevailing interpretation were correct, we should see a much higher “upset” result among all respondents and among independents in particular. This poll does not show that the majority is outraged by Democratic overreach. Apparently, the majority does not think that Obama is moving in the wrong direction. Most independents are evidently not fleeing from the Democrats because they believe their agenda to be misguided, but approximately a quarter of them are disillusioned because they expected more results, more “progress.” To express their disappointment, some of them seem willing to defeat poor Democratic candidates to try to get the administration’s attention. Paradoxically, their disappointment may help ensure that he will produce even fewer results.

This Hardball segment is a prime example of why cable talk shows and cable news generally are such useless venues for discussing politics. In the segment, Howard Dean refers to data from the Research 2000 Massachusetts post-election survey and makes an argument that a huge proportion of Obama voters who also voted for Brown were hostile to the current health care bill because they wanted a more progressive version of health care legislation. Matthews is left sputtering in disbelief, because the survey data would seem to show that Matthews and practically every other talking head and pundit in the land has missed what a significant number of independent Obama voters in Massachusetts were actually trying to accomplish by voting for Brown. Tom Bevan thinks this is one of Matthews’ great moments on televison. In fact, it is a display of how insipid and shallow so much political commentary can be, especially when it is reduced to the format of cable talk shows.

At one point, Matthews asked, “Are voters crazy?” The right answer is that voters know what they want, but sometimes have an odd way of expressing this when they vote. An overwhelming majority of Obama/Brown voters and Obama voters who did not vote on Tuesday favor a public option, a large plurality of both groups opposes the current bill, and most also oppose the mandate. Brown vowed to kill the current bill, and this is something that almost half of Obama/Brown voters wanted. These voters apparently wanted to kill it because they believed it was too compromised. Another 32% of them support the bill Brown has vowed to kill, which tells us that their votes were probably cast primarily as protests against Democratic establishments in Boston and Washington, but they were also among the 82% of Obama/Brown voters who favor a public option. Of Obama/Brown voters, just 14% oppose a public option. If the first priority of many of these voters is to scrap the current bill, and if voters are angry with the majority party because it crafted a compromised bill, there is an odd way in which a vote for Brown makes sense. It will certainly not get them what they ultimately want (i.e., the public option), but it may achieve the immediate goal of killing a bill they oppose or only support grudgingly.

The damning thing about this segment for Matthews is that he did not even attempt to consider the evidence being presented. All that he needed to know was that Brown won, Brown opposes this particular health care bill, and therefore it is obviously an endorsement of policy views on the national level that even Scott Brown doesn’t hold. The conventional wisdom has already become entrenched that Massachusetts independent voters recoiled from “statism” or “big government,” when the survey data indicate that the independent voters who backed both Obama and Brown expected much more from Obama than the shabby corporatist compromise in the Senate, and they were angry enough about his underwhelming performance to go so far as to elect a Republican to demonstrate the depth of their dissatisfaction. As Matthews’ and Bevan’s reactions show, their protest message is one that virtually no one is going to hear or understand.

Greenwald’s frustration with the prevailing wisdom that “the left” has been dominating the Democratic agenda is understandable. The opposition always seems eager to attack every administration by saying that it is in hock to its most ideological supporters, and it is usually nonsense. A party’s most ideological supporters almost always want to claim that an administration’s policy failures are tied to its compromises and betrayals of principle, and sometimes this is correct. Certainly as a matter of garnering enthusiastic support, generating turnout and mobilizing activists, an administration can hurt itself and its party by making too many concessions to the “center” or to the other side. What can often save an administration that violates principles or breaks with many of its loyal constituencies is the other party’s supporters and their accusations that the President is “too liberal” or “too conservative.” Progressives and conservatives tend to respond to these violations and accusations very differently.

Since at least 1981, conservatives have usually made the mistake of responding to this kind of attack on Republican administrations by identifying themselves very closely with Presidents who do not actually govern as conservatives would govern. For whatever reason, most conservatives have a strange need to be validated by Republican occupants of the White House, and so they engage in every sort of contortion to defend and justify whatever Republican administrations do. They have been keen to claim Republican presidential victories as vindications of their ideas, and they do this regardless of how the candidate campaigned and regardless of administration policies.

Except for very early on in 1999, when Bush was seen correctly as a moderate or, more accurately, as a “centrist,” conservatives flocked to Bush despite the latter’s lack of connections to the conservative movement, his record as governor and his “compassionate conservative” campaign theme. The fight with McCain in the primaries was a crucial moment when most conservatives decided that Bush was somehow “one of them” because he was under attack from McCain, who was running a campaign based on open hostility to the movement and an assiduous courting of the mainstream media. It was an instinctive, tribal response that made their much later complaints about Bush’s insufficient conservatism appear to have no credibility. This made Democratic charges that Bush was the “most conservative” or an “extremely conservative” President stick more easily, and it is unlikely that mainstream conservatism will ever recover from its corrupt bargain with a Bush administration that governed as corporatist, militarist “centrists.”

From the start, Republicans had been labeling Clinton a radical leftist, when he was on the whole the most “centrist” Democrat in the White House since Grover Cleveland. The 1994 result itself was the product of a number of factors, including a huge number of retirements in the House, but these included the demoralization of union members and party activists in the wake of NAFTA and the failure of health care legislation. I very much doubt that the midterm elections are going to be anything like ’94, but one similarity that exists is the disillusionment and loss of enthusiasm among party activists and rank-and-file voters. On the whole, aside from a few badly-handled, largely symbolic culture war controversies, Clinton governed as a “centrist” more or less from the beginning, and he moved even farther away from liberals after 1994, which did not stop the charges that he was a huge leftist.

Many progressives always remained cool to Obama throughout the primaries and the general election, and many netroots and other activists on the left never really embraced him as one of their own. They discerned correctly that Obama was running a primary campaign that put him to the right of his other two main rivals, and the best observers on the left realized that Obama did not have a record of challenging entrenched interests. As Election Day approached, Obama pursued the safe course of becoming ever more conventional and comfortable with the ideas of the Washington establishment, and his most prominent economic advisors and Cabinet members were mostly drawn from the friends and disciples of Rubin. As the health care debate continued, progressives kept losing ground, and the rank corporatism of the Senate version finally precipitated serious protests and discontent on the left. This was not a case of ideological activists and voters making even greater demands on an administration that was already doing what they wanted. It was instead a sign that some progressives were losing patience with the substance of the bill and the nature of the reform being proposed. Whatever else the last year has shown us, it has not shown us that the administration and the Democratic Party is currently in thrall to the left.

The impulse to label an opponent as an extremist is a common and tempting one. It is a very easy thing to do, provided that you are not concerned with accuracy or persuading undecided and unaffiliated people that you are right. These labels are not descriptive. They are a way to express the extent of one’s discontent and disaffection with the other side in a debate. When some Republican says that Obama and his party have been governing from “the left,” he might even believe it inasmuch as Obama and his party are to his left politically, but what he really means is that he strongly disapproves of how Obama and his party have been governing. He may or may not have a coherent reason for this disapproval, but declaring it to be leftist or radical leftist conveys the depth of his displeasure. That is, it is not analysis of political reality. It is therapy for the person making the statement.

The same thing goes for progressives who were trying to find words to express how outraged they were by Bush. Inevitably, many resorted to using labels such as theocrat, extreme right, radical right and the like. These did not correctly describe the content of Bush’s politics, but they did express the critics’ feelings of disgust and loathing for Bush’s politics. That doesn’t mean they weren’t right to be disgusted and outraged, but the words they used to express these sentiments typically had no relationship to the substance of what Bush was actually doing. Likewise, there could be merit in objecting to Obama’s agenda, but if critics begin by using the wrong definitions and descriptions they will not be critiquing an agenda that really exists, but it will instead be a fantastical one that they have imagined. Where this creates problems in understanding political reality is when partisans begin believing their own inaccurate descriptions of their opponents and then when they draw conclusions about the political landscape based on their misinterpretations of their opponents’ beliefs.

But I’m more interested in what happens after America attacks Iran. What if the government collapses? Do we occupy the country? Do we allow a power vacuum? Do we let a Revolutionary Guard commander assume control? A cleric? Could we exercise any control in Iran following an attack? And if the current regime hangs on and then redoubles their nuclear efforts, do we subject them to another pounding five years hence? As a famous general once observed, “tell me how this ends?”

We know from our rueful experience in Iraq that conservative defense intellectuals don’t pay much attention to the immediate aftermath of a conflict (with the exception of Max Boot). It’s apparently sufficient to start a war and then let the chips fall where they may. Not that we should have too much confidence in their predictive abilities on that front either, but it would be nice if those clamoring for a war with Iran could provide us with just a scintilla of analysis regarding U.S. policy in the aftermath. ~Greg Scoblete

In his critique of James Phillips’ call for war with Iran, Scoblete is picking up on something I was discussing in my last column. Describing the flaws of conservative internationalism, I focused on George Will’s Afghanistan arguments of the last few months:

Will’s view is often mistaken for that of a war skeptic, or even of a war opponent. It is in fact the opposite. He simply represents the conservative internationalist preference for air power (and the unavoidable civilian casualties that go with it), along with a lack of patience for the long grind of stabilizing and securing a country once the initial combat phase is completed.

Conservative defense intellectuals tend not to pay much attention to the post-combat phase because they don’t believe the military should remain for very long after concluding “major combat operations” (as Mr. Bush described them six and a half years ago). There was little or no Phase IV planning in Iraq, as Ricks documented in Fiasco and Zelizer has noted in Arsenal of Democracy, because many of the top officials responsible for that planning had no desire and no real intention of remaining in Iraq long enough to need such planning.

Scoblete credits Boot with paying attention to post-combat planning, but we should remember that the reason Boot does this is that he is a neo-imperialist who openly advocates for pursuing an imperial role in the world. While Boot’s so-called “hard Wilsonians” are very willing to think about U.S. post-conflict policies, in that they have no trouble supporting prolonged or even permanent deployments all over the world, their policies are mostly informed by arrogant presumption, naive universalism and cultural ignorance. This usually dovetails with the conservative desire to do as little nation-building as possible, because most of Boot’s neoconservative colleagues assumed that Iraqi democratic government would spring up and flourish almost immediately on its own with a ready-made exile leadership. Other conservative internationalists may or may not have believed this, but it provided them with the reassurance that the war would not “devolve” into a nation-building exercise. As the mission largely became more focused on nation-building, most conservative internationalists did not abandon support for the war, but this was a function of undue conservative loyalty to the executive, especially when the President was from their own party.

A quick war to topple a dictatorial regime and install a friendly replacement appealed to a broad cross-section of conservatives, but the badly flawed predictions of what would happen after the invasion revealed the error of both the “light footprint” approach and the democratist political fantasy that made that approach seem workable. We heard all about how modernized, secular and educated Iraqis were, which made nation-building seem unnecessary and it made post-conflict policies seem redundant. More often than not, the “stabilization” the “hard Wilsonians” propose to bring to the country was not necessary before the war, and their willingness to stay does not reflect an interest in repairing the damage to the country devastated by their war. It is instead an opportunity to project U.S. power and to create new responsibilities for the military and national security state, which make it that much harder to reduce and/or reform both.

Conservatives such as Will are no less hawkish and no less willing to enter and start wars than they were six or seven years ago, but they don’t like tying down so many of our forces in ongoing military campaigns, and they don’t like the political opposition to aggressive foreign policy that long campaigns generate. Prolonged campaigns with large ground forces potentially hamstring U.S. power projection and limit how and where Washington can intervene. For neoconservatives, the solution is simply to expand the size of the military, while many conservative internationalists prefer to withdraw in order to be able to intervene elsewhere. Both are trying to perpetuate U.S. hegemony, but they sometimes disagree about how this should be done.

Neoconservatives are more willing to support long campaigns and risk public backlash, because they tend to be more contemptuous of public opinion when it does not support their policies and because they have an even greater fondness for executive power and an ideal of “strong leadership” that requires a President to ignore public opposition to a war. Conservative internationalists are more concerned about losing public support inasmuch as they don’t want any one military deployment to undermine long-term support for activist foreign policy. The “surge” became sacrosanct and beyond criticism for most conservatives partly because it satisfied the needs of these groups. It combined a refusal to end the war with the sending of additional forces, which pleased neoconservatives, and it also held out the promise of reducing American casualties and making public opposition to the war less urgent and therefore less politically dangerous.

That brings us back to Iran. “Preventive” war against Iran unfortunately has considerable support, especially on the right, and one reason for this is the perceived low cost such a war would have. The cost is perceived to be low because it would initially be largely waged as an air war, and the memory of past U.S. air wars in the last twenty years is one of total dominance, success and very few American casualties. Of course, a war against Iran would not be an easy, short or cheap one, but I think the majority that supports such a war assumes that the costs would be few and the fighting would be over quickly. My guess is that James Phillips does not discuss what might or might not happen after the strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites because he does not think there is anything to discuss. This is another shared flaw that many conservatives who write on foreign policy and national security share, which is simple indifference to the consequences of our military actions.

As I suggested yesterday, Brown’s opposition to the current Senate health care bill is a product of “I’ve got mine” sentiment: Massachusetts has its own health care plan, so there’s no need to tamper with it at the federal level. Chait poses a reasonable question when he asks, “So why should the rest of the country feel bound to heed this decision?” The answer many Republicans prefer to give is that the voters have spoken and it has been “proven” that health care legislation is unpopular and politically toxic, but this claim doesn’t actually hold up very well. If Massachusetts voters’ disapproval of federal health care legislation is driven in large part by satisfaction with MassCare, which is what Brown’s win would suggest, this is obviously an argument in favor of passing a health care bill in order to win the kind of popularity that MassCare already has. The very “parochial” defense Brown has mounted drives home that most Massachusetts voters apparently like universal or near-universal health insurance coverage mandated by government, which is not really a “wake-up call” telling Democrats that the public will destroy them if they pass a health care bill. The experience of at least the last forty-five years tells us that the public tends to like specific government programs and never wants to reduce or eliminate them, and it doesn’t make much difference if the programs create huge, unaffordable liabilities.

Whether this federal health care legislation or MassCare is good public policy is a different question. Obviously, I think they aren’t because they are unsustainable and unaffordable, but that isn’t my point here. The core of the Republican argument right now is that most people don’t like the health care bill, Brown’s election shows this, and therefore Democrats should give up. This is pretty close to a pure appeal to the crowd. It is understandable why they would say this, because we all know that the measures instituted by federal health care legislation will rapidly become popular and politically untouchable.

Once the legislation passes, it will probably become the Democrats’ ace in the hole in every domestic policy debate hereafter. Democrats routinely have an edge on almost every domestic issue anyway, and this is likely to increase that edge. Brown can make opposition to federal health care the centerpiece of his campaign because he is operating in a state liberal enough to already have near-universal coverage. That means that the problem the federal bill is attempting to address has become something of an abstraction for Massachusetts voters, and the bill itself appears to threaten the system they already have. This is true in very few other states.

After all, how has Brown been able to rally opposition to the health care bill? By complaining that it would lead to Medicare cuts and interfere with Massachusetts’ system. In other words, he has based his candidacy around defending old entitlements against new ones. This is effective as a short-term tactic, as Brown has shown, but it should also tell the Democrats that establishing a new entitlement will be to their benefit as a matter of winning elections and popularity. In other words, Brown’s win actually proves that voters reward a candidate who voted for (statewide) universal health care and who is willing to defend it, which means that the electoral consequences of passing the federal bill should also be positive for the supporters of the bill.

Once the legislation has passed and the GOP makes repeal their slogan, the party advocating repeal will lose ground and will perform worse at the polls than they otherwise would. I don’t think this is a good or salutary outcome, and I see it as a disaster for the country’s long-term fiscal health, but it is what has happened every time one party has successfully expanded the size and scope of government and the other party proposes to overturn or repeal the programs in question. Republicans will not and perhaps cannot admit this, as they have become so wedded to the falsehood that the public rejected them because of spending, when this had little or nothing to do with their losses in ’06 and ’08.

After the off-year elections, Democrats could cling to Bill Owens’s victory in NY-23 as a shred of evidence that the Tea Party message could hurt Republicans. Scott Brown’s victory exposes NY-23 as a fluke. ~Matt Continetti

I had already been thinking about the three special elections for Congress we have seen in the last year before Continetti wrote this, but this reminded me of an important point that needs to be made. It is a simple observation, and so obvious that it might be considered unnecessary: candidates and campaigns matter. Hoffman showed no interest in the concerns of the district he wanted to represent, his allies belittled local interests as “parochial” and he served as little more than a mouthpiece of national party and movement activist slogans. NY-23 was lost in much the same way that Coakley lost in Massachusetts: a candidate who seemed indifferent to the people he wanted to represent proved to be a horrible fit with the electorate. Similarly, Jim Tedisco in NY-20 ran an atrocious campaign that was marred by poor messaging, confusion over his positions and the interference of the national party. Tedisco, Hoffman and Coakley have something important in common: all of them had every advantage in terms of party registration, funding and and voting patterns, and they squandered all of these. As a result, two solidly Republican districts are now represented by Democrats (Owens and Murphy) and one of the most politically liberal states in the country will have a Republican Senator. There is a pattern, but it is not one that fits self-congratulatory narratives from either party. Parties and candidates that exhibit feelings of entitlement and/or disdain for the voters, the places they live and the issues that actually matter to them will be voted down regardless of how those electorates voted in the past.

In NY-23 the problem was not so much that the “Tea Party message” hurt Republicans. It was that the message was simply not relevant to a majority of voters in the district, because it could not address concerns that were specific to the district. Does Brown’s victory demonstrate that “the Tea Party message” has caught on in the state of the original Tea Party? Let’s think about this a bit more. Yes, Brown has courted Tea Partiers, and Tea Partiers were important in raising funds and working on behalf of his campaign. He has come out against a health care bill they also oppose, and no doubt they favor the tax cut he has proposed, but it is hard to see how electing a moderate-to-liberal Republican, who is reportedly on the center-left of the Massachusetts GOP, proves the electoral viability of the full-on “Tea Party message” anywhere, much less in the Northeast. Tea Partiers’ support for Brown showed a willingness to back candidates and make alliances with politicians who would never pass rigorous ideological purity tests. That seems to be evidence of their ability to be flexible and compromise to build a political coalition.

We should be careful to distinguish the message that prevailed tonight from the message that pro-Brown activists have been advancing in the past. Having just spent the last several months insisting that Obama overreached and has badly misread the public mood, Republicans seem to be in an awful hurry to attach far too much significance to a remarkable, but so far unique, special election. There are important differences between this election and the special election two years ago in MA-05, but I would note that the response from mainstream conservatives is much the same as it was then. Jim Ogonowski’s surprisingly competitive, failed bid to win an open seat against Paul Tsongas’ widow had at least a couple things in common with Brown’s run against Coakley. Like Tsongas, Coakley was preferred by party establishment forces, and Brown was able to tap into populist discontent even more effectively than Ogonowski by running as the insurgent outsider. Despite the obvious differences between those races, the mainstream conservative readiness to declare unusual elections in Massachusetts to be bellwethers for the general elections in the fall remains the same. After the MA-05 result, we heard a lot of arguments similar to those we’ve heard in the last couple of weeks. Usually, conservatives emphasized how much better than expected Ogonowski had done and how this portended a shift back to the GOP in November. That shift never materialized. This year the GOP has the advantage that it is the out-party and is bound to make some gains, but my guess is that they continue to read too much into the outcomes of special elections in Massachusetts and will end up gaining far fewer seats than they expect.

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday.

That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. ~David Brooks

Brooks may be right that liberals are consoling themselves with convenient, false narratives about what is happening, but if so they are certainly not alone in being caught up in “insular information loops.” It is very convenient for Republicans to believe that a Democratic push for health care legislation at this stage amounts to political suicide. Republicans tell themselves this because it tells them that their opposition will be vindicated in November, and they tell other people this because they very much want to goad the Democrats into doing just what they warn will be disastrous for their opponents.

Democrats have convinced themselves for years that the public overwhelmingly favors “health care reform,” which they pretty readily identify with their own ideas on what that reform should be, and now Republicans have convinced themselves that the public will not stand for passage of a health care bill. My guess is that both have been wrong in different ways, but the GOP is probably misreading the situation even worse than the Democrats. Republicans are betting heavily that a bill that is passed this year but which will not take effect for several more years is going to precipitate a massive public backlash in their favor. Democrats are assuming that the voters who handed them 14 Senate and 50+ House seats over the last two elections are not going to throw them out of power for doing more or less what they said they would do. Whose bet seems smarter?

It is strange to see Brooks advocating on behalf of popular wisdom and the public’s sense of equilibrium. When we have seen opposition from across the spectrum unite against the immigration bill in 2007 or the bank bailout in September 2008, Brooks has been on the side of the arrogant, elitist and contemptuous. As I mentioned a little earlier today, when the House heeded some of that popular wisdom and correctly voted down the TARP Brooks dubbed them nihilists. Somehow the nihilists of sixteen months ago have become the spokesmen of American common sense today.

Now it could be that enough constituencies oppose health care legislation as much as they opposed those other establishment-backed bills, and a good case could be made that opposition to health care legislation is being driven by the same distrust of concentrated power and wealth and the same dissatisfaction with an arrogant government that ignores the wishes of the people, and this could lead to the same kind of backlash. Of course, the TARP was rammed through later, which is one of the reasons why there is so much frustration and anger with that measure in particular. Even if we leave aside the flaws of the plan, the way in which it was imposed on the country and our representatives with no meaningful debate and no deliberation has generated tremendous resentment. In every other case involving major legislation that pitted entrenched economic interests and the political class against the public interest Brooks has dismissed the latter and aligned himself with the former, but suddenly he sees the virtue in heeding the voice of popular wisdom. Perhaps the majority should heed his warning, but Brooks is probably the worst conceivable messenger to make the case for trusting popular wisdom over elite consensus.

P.S. On an unrelated subject, this post is the 6,800th I have written and published since I began blogging over five years ago.

Andrew wrote yesterday that it was the “eve of the crippling of Obama’s presidency,” and today he complains of the victory of nihilism. It will annoy Obama’s foes to no end, but he is not going to be crippled by this. No President in the last thirty years has enjoyed Senate majorities as large as the one the Democrats will still have after tonight. After the anti-GOP cycles of ’74 and ’76 the Democrats had a majority of 61 under Carter, and this was reduced to 58 after the midterms. It still seems to me that those elections are the best parallels to what we have seen since 2006.

Neither has “nihilism” triumphed. It is a strange thing to say that Obama’s presidency has been crippled by a “nihilist” victory, since it is clear from Andrew’s own choice of words that he thinks the “nihilists” have nothing of value to contribute to political debate. If they are “nihilists,” how could they possibly cripple Obama? Nihilist is a word that has been thrown around a lot in the last couple of years, and it seems that people use this word whenever voters or their representatives do something that displeases or opposes political establishments. Populist was the preferred word for demonizing anti-establishment leaders in the 1990s, but now the populist label has acquired a little bit of respectability and greater currency after the last few elections. Nihilist seems to have become one of the replacements to serve the same function. When the House correctly rejected the TARP the first time as the egregious power grab by the executive branch and incredible swindle of the public that it was, David Brooks railed against the “nihilists” who had voted with the majority. Brooks trotted out the label again in early 2009, and I wrote this in response:

It can’t always be “nihilism” to oppose government power-grabs and enormous amounts of spending and borrowing, but then the charge of nihilism is an odd one to make in any case. If the problems Republicans have are inflexibility and reflexive adherence to an ideological tenet, the problem is not that they believe in nothing or wish to lay waste to things, which is what nihilism would actually mean, but that they have invested far, far too much in one position. They believe in something (getting rid of earmarks!), and the only thing they want to destroy is earmarks, but this is not nihilism. It is not nihilistic to be obsessed with earmarks and “wasteful spending,” just incredibly stupid and futile.

One could substitute preoccupation with tax cuts in this paragraph, and the point would remain valid. Nihilists wish to tear down existing structures. Turgenev’s literary archetype of a nihilist, Bazarov, had no political vision of any kind. The goal of a nihilist is destruction. Far from trying to tear down existing structures, the GOP has pursed stand-patism and a defense of whatever the status quo happened to be a year ago. There are many things to criticize here, not least of which is the party’s complete inability and unwillingness to acknowledge and recognize their grave errors when they were in power, but the GOP’s “nihilism” is not one of them.

Reihan:

There are many, many ironies in the Brownthusiam, but the most notable is the fact that this suburban father with a rather blandly centrist voting record has become the target of apocalyptic rhetoric from both sides. Really, the question is whether or not he has decent judgment. His record suggests that he’s good at making fine distinctions and voting in a pragmatic, constituency-focused manner [bold mine-DL]. I’d prefer a more cost-conscious legislator myself, but he certainly doesn’t come across as a nihilist bent on the destruction of government.

It seems to me that if Brown votes in a “pragmatic, constituency-focused manner,” that helps to explain the apparent contradiction in his position on health care. Brown’s resistance to a federal health care bill seems to come from his defense of the system Massachusetts already has. Ignoring the flaws in MassCare while railing against the same flaws in federal legislation appears cynical and opportunistic, and maybe it is, but it is opportunism that defends a state government measure that already exists against possible federal changes to it. I don’t think this counts as belief in “competitive federalism,” especially when Brown calls on other states to imitate Massachusetts’ example, but I do think it is a classic expression of an “I’ve got mine” sentiment. Were someone like Brown in a poorer state that did not already have some form of universal coverage, his positions would be reversed: he would want the wealthier states to pay for his state’s coverage, and he would eagerly support a federal bill. One could claim that this makes him a good representative of his state. One could just as easily say that it proves that he is a cipher and goes along with whatever happens to popular back home.

Brown’s opposition is also a little bit like the reflexive hostility to any health care legislation among elderly voters on Medicare. For those who already have coverage provided in one way or another through government mandates or subsidies, new federal health care legislation appears to be more of threat than a benefit. This leads me to conclude that Brown espouses conservatism that is simply a defense of the status quo. It is not a conservatism particularly concerned about federalism or decentralization of power, and for those who would like to keep things as they are federalism and decentralization might seem to be dangerous, frightening things. I suppose Brown does exhibit something of an attachment to the interests of his state, which people call narrow-minded provincialism when it gets in their way and which they call localism when it does not affect them.

Like Reihan, I find the rhetoric surrounding this election to be wildly out of proportion. It occurred to me this morning that all these articles prophesying possible doom for Obama and his agenda are probably Coakley’s last, best chance of salvaging a win from the ruins of her pathetic campaign. Massachusetts voters like Obama overwhelmingly, and at least a large plurality of them support his agenda. Obviously, many voters are also discontented with Boston and Washington establishments and looking to make a statement against both, but if enough voters believe that this special election is a do-or-die moment for Obama and his agenda that could generate a late surge of support for Coakley that the polls would never have been able to detect. Obama foes are eager to treat this election as tremendously significant, but by emphasizing how meaningful it is they may have woken up and provoked the other party’s voters in a state where the other party has a huge advantage in registration.

This election has made me think more about political mandates. It is commonplace to say that the victorious party always overreaches and that it is usually mistaken if it believes that it received a mandate for its entire agenda. This is true as far as it goes, but if there is hardly ever a mandate for any party’s agenda it is also difficult to see how there could be meaningful electoral repudiations of any party’s agenda. If voters were doing little more than responding to the financial crisis and recession in 2008, they are doing little more than reacting to high unemployment now.

If 2008 did not represent some meaningful approval and affirmation of what the Democrats proposed to do by a majority of voters, what substance do protest votes in 2010 elections have? It is a cliche to say that elections have consequences, but they do. Something that must be more than a little frustrating for Democrats right now is that Obama and the leadership in Congress are doing pretty much exactly what they said they would do. We are now being told in effect that the majority is about to be punished for keeping their election promises, and the punishment is supposed to be coming from one of their most reliable core areas. It is as if voters in Alabama or Wyoming turned against Bush’s marginal tax cuts after having elected him because he promised to cut taxes.

The easy analysis of what is happening is to say that “even in deep-blue Massachusetts people are rejecting Obama’s agenda,” but none of this makes any sense. I don’t say this because I have any sympathy for Obama’s domestic agenda, but because I don’t think there is any way to understand this response by voters in a heavily Democratic state except as an expression of pure anti-incumbency sentiment and a desire simply to shake things up. After years of mocking Obama’s signature campaign slogans, Republicans have found that their best path back to power is exploiting the desire to change for change’s sake.

Assuming that Brown will win today, the lesson has to be that no winning party should ever attempt to deliver on its promises, and under no circumstances should it follow through and actually deliver promised legislation. I say this as someone who would be happy to see the current health care legislation fail.