Class and Immigration

Ross Douthat writes of the argument -- made recently by Rich Lowry and Bill Kristol -- that the Senate immigration bill will not advance the GOP's more pressing political interest, appealing to younger and downscale voters.

This is also the point suggested by the recent argument, marshaled by Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics and amplified by others, that it makes as much sense to see the G.O.P.’s 2012 defeat as a reflection of the party’s failure to woo Perot-ish, downscale, disaffected white voters as it does to just pin Romney’s defeat on demographic changes and anti-anti-immigration backlash. Liberals have portrayed this thesis as an argument that the Republicans should just double down on their existing, largely white base, but that’s not the sensible implication of what Trende is saying. Rather, it’s that many of his “missing white voters” are the lowest-hanging fruit for a party trying to rebuild itself, and that the kind of populist arguments that resonate with that constituency might actually offer the Republicans a better chance with minority voters in the longer run as well.

Now of course there are ways to mix and match these points. One could invoke the Trende thesis, as some talk radio figures have done, to justify basically standing pat ideologically on both immigration reform and economic policy writ large. It’s not a very plausible argument, but it’s one that some conservatives will obviously find appealing. Alternatively, and somewhat more plausibly, one could take the approach of many Bush administration veterans and argue for immigration reform as a necessary signal to Hispanics that requires follow-up on other fronts, and that makes sense as part of a larger, multi-issue shift intended to improve the G.O.P.’s standing with the pan-ethnic working class.

But much of the energy in the immigration fight comes from factions within the Republican tent that regard the Rubio-Schumer bill as a brilliant-and-easy way to avoid any kind of broader rethinking on economics, and that are pressing immigration reform on their co-partisans as the only conceivable alternative to swift political extinction. This is the argument Lowry and Kristol are mostly pushing back against: No, they’re saying, there are other paths the party could take. And they’re right.

Perry Redux?

Texas Governor Rick Perry announced that he will not seek reelection in 2014, leaving open the possibility of another presidential run in 2016.  Jay Root writes at The Texas Tribune:

Perry was at the top of his game as governor when he decided to throw himself into the 2012 presidential race. He entered the contest in August 2011, quickly raised millions and immediately shot to the top of the polls. But soon a series of missteps and gaffes began to drag down his once promising candidacy.

Then on Nov. 9, 2011, during a nationally televised debate in Michigan, Perry entered the political blooper hall of fame when he couldn’t remember the third of three federal departments he wanted to shut down if elected president.

“I would do away with the Education, the, uh, Commerce, and, let's see," Perry said toward the end of 53 seconds of campaign horror. “I can't. The third one I can't. Sorry. Oops.” (For the record, it was the Department of Energy.)

The embarrassment came as Perry’s campaign was struggling to revive a candidacy that had already become the stuff of late-night comedy routines. After the oops moment, he never recovered. Perry came in fifth in first-test Iowa, did not compete in New Hampshire and then withdrew before the South Carolina GOP primary — a southern state that had held promise for him — in January of last year.

Perry, who jumped into the race with almost no advance preparation, later pointed to his sudden entry in the contest and the health fallout from his July 2011 back surgery as major reasons why his candidacy faltered.

He’ll have a lot more time to prepare if he runs again as many expect, and analysts see a tough but not impossible road ahead for Perry should he get into the 2016 race.

Jim Henson, a Tribune pollster and head of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin, said Perry has already made a first impression, and what voters saw was a gaffe-prone, shoot-from-the-hip Texan. Now the first order of business is dialing that back.

“The first task is not to establish an image, it’s to reset one,” Henson said. “That presents difficult, if not insurmountable problems.”

Jindal Falling

At The New Republic, Marin Cogan writes of the relationship of David Vitter and Bobby Jindal:

What makes their rivalry particularly noteworthy is that Vitter—who has been the butt of many more and much better jokes than Jindal’s—may now be more popular and influential in the Louisiana Republican Party. This doesn’t just testify to Vitter’s underrated political skills; it also pulls back the curtain on Jindal’s overrated ones. While Jindal was traveling the country, giving speeches on fixing the Republican Party and stoking presidential and vice presidential speculation, Vitter, who once seemed so isolated and politically vulnerable, was quietly and carefully courting influence in the state GOP.

Now, it’s Jindal who is isolated and vulnerable. His approval rating has plummeted after voters revolted against his handling of the state’s budget crisis. Other Republicans in Louisiana describe a governor so cut off from his party that he and his team operate “like a cult.”

Making matters worse, Jindal is term-limited as governor in 2015—and Vitter could be the candidate to replace him. If Jindal’s off-putting style has driven Louisiana Republicans into the arms of a man more famous for his personal peccadilloes than his legislative record, then just imagine what he’ll do for Marco Rubio or Chris Christie as a presidential candidate in 2016.

Bipartisan Incompetence

In After Hope and Change, we explain that expectations for President Obama were very high when he took office in 2009.  In particular, many Americans in both parties hoped that he would mark a fundamental change from the administration of George W. Bush.  But in a number of ways (e.g., political insiderism, NSA surveillance), he has continued in the ways of the previous administration.  At The Daily Beast, Lloyd Green notes another unfortunate similarity:

Who says that the bipartisan spirit is dead? Just last week, Pew Research listed incompetent as the word most frequently associated with President George W. Bush, and President Barack Obama. A day later, the administration announced that it was putting Obamacare’s much-vaunted employer mandate on hold for a year, until January 1, 2015, even as television cameras steadily streamed pictures from Cairo of the lethal tumult once known as the Arab Spring.

...
Obama barely talks to the Democrats and is incapable of communicating with congressional Republicans (for his part, House Speaker John Boehner can’t corral his caucus). But beyond the mechanics of legislation, Obama appears to be over his head. Winning the hearts of the Democratic donor base is one thing, but imposing America’s will on foreign governments, gaining Vladimir Putin’s respect, or mastering the implementation of signature legislation are different challenges, and right now Obama seems lacking.

Also note errors in political stagecraft, where the president has often been more effective. As the Egyptian crisis began, the news media reported that Secretary of State John Kerry was boating in Nantucket.  The State Department denied the report but had to backtrack in the face of photographic evidence.  Organizing for Action compounded the error by cheerily tweeting an old photo of the president in a kayak -- not the image that a president wants to convey as a key nation verges on civil war. George W. Bush suffered great political damage from a photo showing him strumming a guitar during Hurricane Katrina.

Inevitability?

Sean Trende pushes back against the notion that long-term demographic trends favor Democrats:

At the end of the day, I remember the aftermath of the 2004 elections, when almost everyone was convinced that Democrats had to reach out to white “values voters” to win elections. God, guns, and gays were killing the Democrats, so the argument went, as was opposition to the Iraq War. Howard Dean was urging the party to send staffers to Mississippi and to learn to talk with voters who had Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks. Demographic analysts were trumpeting the fact that Republicans had won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties, and claimed that Democrats were in danger of becoming a regional party, concentrated on the coasts, if they didn’t quickly moderate their appeal.

How quickly things change. Democrats did focus on improving their vote share with working-class whites to some extent in 2006, with positive results. But the approach was largely abandoned in 2008 in favor of targeting the “coalition of the ascendant” we hear so much about today. The conventional wisdom about what Democrats had to do was completely, utterly wrong.

The thing is, it was wrong not because of its particulars. It was wrong in a more general sense: Parties always have an almost infinite number of coalitions they can target their pitch to and emerge successfully from elections if the overall environment is favorable to them. That hasn’t changed in the past 100 years, much less since 2004. Put differently, if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee in 2008, she probably would have done somewhat worse with young voters and African-Americans, but probably would have done better in Appalachia. Gordon Smith of Oregon might still be a senator, but Mitch McConnell might not be. As I’ve said here since 2009, there are no permanent majorities, because every action in politics tends to create an opposite one.

I suspect the current conventional wisdom will last only until the Republicans next encounter a favorable national environment, and win an election. (There actually hasn’t been an unambiguously favorable environment for them in a presidential year since 1988, so they’re due.) At that point, the conventional wisdom will likely shift, reflecting a belief that Democrats must undertake some major changes in their coalition if they are going to ever win another election. But that conventional wisdom will be badly flawed, just as the present conventional wisdom is badly flawed.

Even the Good News Is Bad

At the end of a lousy week for the White House, Politico reports:

Welcome to the good-news-could-be-bad-news economy.

Friday’s Labor Department report showing a better-than-expected gain of 195,000 jobs in June was a heartening sign for many that the economic recovery continues to move ahead at a modest pace. But it could ultimately turn out to be bad news, especially for Democrats, because it means that the Federal Reserve might start winding down its extraordinary efforts to boost the economy later this year.

And if the Fed takes the juice away too soon it could tank the stock market, crush housing prices, snuff out the four-year-old economic recovery, and make life exceedingly difficult for any Democrat who hopes to run in 2016 for what will essentially be President Barack Obama’s third-term.

“This jobs report is a data-point that will get people wondering if the Fed will really start pulling back as soon as September, as many people are expecting,” said Nigel Gault co-chief economist at the Parthenon Group. “And it certainly raises the stakes for the next for the next three jobs reports.”

"A Crisis of Competence"

After Hope and Change continues to sound like a prescient title. At National Journal, Josh Kraushaar writes:

.The administration is facing a crisis of competence. At a time when trust in government is already at an all-time low, the events of this past week illustrate the limits of this president's power. The White House seems more comfortable stage-managing the news than dealing with the uncomfortable crises that inevitably crop up. (If there's anything to learn from the Benghazi crisis, it was the administration's attentiveness to detail in how to avoid blame in the aftermath of the crisis but a lack of focus in how to react as the crisis was occurring.)

The other worrying sign, is that politics is getting in the way of smart policymaking. Wary of the last war in the Middle East, Americans don't want the United States to intervene in Syria. The White House, heeding the polls, gladly obliged, even figuring out ways to forestall proof that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its people—the red line that the president famously set. Obama doesn't want to say anything to take sides between the Egyptian president he backed and the growing throngs of protesters, and then take ownership in a crisis that's showing no signs of abating. Politically speaking, it's a lose-lose situation.

On health care, with the 2014 midterms approaching and control of the Senate in play, the administration decided to buy time by delaying the employer mandate until after the elections. Former HHS spokesman Nick Papas said the delay was "about minimizing paperwork, not politics." But it's awfully politically convenient to delay implementation of a law that's been growing more unpopular and whose implementation is shaping up to be a "train wreck," in the words of Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Democrat.

Obama's second-term legacy is shaping up to be more about avoiding crises than accomplishing big things. Salvage the core of a health care law, avoid worst-case scenarios in Egypt and Syria, and don't get in the way of his party's efforts to win Republican support for a landmark immigration reform plan. It's a far cry from the idealism of his second inaugural. But at this point, the president needs to simply show that he's paying attention to the fires burning around him.