Reform Conservatism

At The New York Times Magazine, Sam Tanenhaus writes of Yuval Levin and other conservative reformers:

Levin and company, who do have the policy mentality, will happily fill in the blanks. In the wake of Cantor’s defeat, April Ponnuru said she was still hearing from legislators interested in connecting with the ideas of the YG Network, and she had more events scheduled to spread the word. Rubio volunteered to speak at one such event in late June. He, too, shrugged off Cantor’s defeat. “I don’t think Eric Cantor lost because he gave a few speeches advocating reforms,” said Rubio, who seems to understand that being elected as an insurgent — riding the crest of a movement — doesn’t mean he has to govern as one. American politics is the story, in large part, of outsiders who became skilled insiders, not by selling out but by growing into the demands of the office. It happened to Barry Goldwater and also to Reagan. It might happen again. When I spoke with him, Rubio also stood by his own antipoverty proposal, acknowledging it would not save any money but suggesting it might in the long run since it would lift many out of poverty. This is exactly the case Lyndon Johnson and Democrats made generations ago. “Our debt isn’t driven by discretionary spending on poverty programs,” Rubio said. “We’re not going to balance the budget by saving money on safety-net programs.”

It is hard to imagine the Republican candidate who will say this in a closely contested Red State primary in 2014 or during a presidential race in 2016. But some politicians say otherwise, including Levin’s own favorite senator, Mike Lee, the Tea Party firebrand from Utah, who stood by Ted Cruz’s side during the October shutdown but also has adopted the reformers’ middle-class agenda as well as its idioms

Rand Paul and Foreign Policy

At The Hill, Niall Stanage reports on Rand Paul's effort to transcend concerns that he is an isolationist.

But Paul has been trying to tamp down those concerns. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he sought to compare his foreign policy to that of President Reagan. 

“I opposed the Iraq War. I thought we needed to be more prudent about the weightiest decision a country can make,” Paul wrote. “Like Reagan, I thought we should never be eager to go to war.” 

Last week, Paul wrote another opinion column, this time for National Review, in which he reacted to the killing of three Israeli teenagers, allegedly by Hamas. 

In the article, he referred scathingly to calls from the Obama administration for Israel to show restraint.  

“How many times must Israel hear this call? Children are murdered — please show restraint. Cafes and buses are bombed — please show restraint. Towns are victimized by hundreds of rockets — please show restraint while you bury your dead once again,” Paul wrote. 

The tone of the piece attracted its fair share of criticism, including from those who suggested Paul was seeking to ingratiate himself with wealthy, pro-Israel Republican donors such as casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

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Others, however, praised Paul and said his foreign policy views are maturing.

Anomaly Tracker

From Open Secrets:

Attention, supersleuth readers: We have a brand new tool for you to play with, a new category on ouranomaly tracker. This one is focused on outlier expenditures of political committees, allowing you to find out when more than 50 percent of a committee’s money goes to a single vendor — and who those cash-guzzlers are.

One important note: These are anomalies in the statistical sense, the committees and recipients that stand out in the data. That doesn’t necessarily mean there is anything improper happening. All it means is that a particular committee devotes an unusually large percentage of its money to one campaign vendor or consultant. Maybe that consultant is really good at what they do, or maybe the committee has a very specific purpose for which a particular vendor is uniquely suited.

This won’t necessarily flag the House Speaker’s affinity for steakhouses, but it might indicate which companies are profiting the most from the business of politics. For instance, you’ll see that an Arizona-based call center and direct mailing service called Political Advertising is making millions every cycle from conservative groups, including the Life & Liberty PAC Republican Majority Campaign and RightMarch.com. Other usual suspects include InfoCision Management, a similar communications outfit out of Ohio, and the Gula Graham Group, a Republican fundraising firm based in Washington. InfoCision is so profitable that it has lent its name to a football stadium at the University of Akron, the alma matter of its founder, Gary Taylor. The former CEO also gave the school $3.5 million in 2004 to open the “Taylor Institute for Direct Marketing.”

Crossroads GPS v. Hagan and Obamacare

At The Hill, Cam Joseph, Abby Smith, and Alexandra Jaffe report:

NC-SEN (HAGAN): Crossroads GPS hit Sen. Kay Hagan (D-N.C.) with a new ad Wednesday, slamming Hagan for voting for ObamaCare despite the impacts the law is having on small North Carolina businesses. The ad, which is part of the group’s $3.5 million buy announced in May, will run statewide for a week.

Economic Statistics and Economic Perception

Jim Kuhnhenn writes at AP that politicians are hesitant to play up the declining unemployment rate.  For one thing, labor force participation is low.

Moreover, hiring has tended to be predominantly in low-wage jobs, leading to stagnant wage growth, and the number of hours worked per week has not changed. Gains in paychecks are small enough that they can be wiped out by inflation. "The headline number masks the lingering structural weakness in the U.S. labor market," said Lindsey Piegza, a chief economist at the Sterne Agee brokerage house.

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More important, beyond those statistics, are public perceptions of the economy.

An Associated Press-GfK poll in May, found that the share of those surveyed who called the economy "good" stood at 34 percent, while 65 percent described it as poor. That's about the same as it has been all year, though slightly above where it was during the partial government shutdown in October. Few expected improvement in the economy over the next 12 months, and more expected it to get.
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"In the voting booth, economic perception beats economic statistics every time," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.
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"It takes a long time for economic statistics to be felt in people's pocketbooks," Ayres said. "It may be too late at this point to affect the political environment of the midterm elections.

What's more, neither side has an incentive to tout much progress.

"For Republicans, the reality is that they are not going to want to give credit for anything that Obama should be credited for," said Ken Warren, a political scientist and pollster at St. Louis University. "As for Democrats, when the public feels some way in the polls and it's not going to play well, even the Democrats in this case would see a down side.

"To contradict what the people think can be perceived as liability."

Charles Munger and Political Money in California

Tony Quinn writes at Fox and Hounds:

Neel Kashkari is the Republican candidate for governor because of the efforts of a mild mannered, bow-tied Stanford University physicist named Charles Munger Jr. Munger is also responsible for the defeat and retirement of several powerful California members of Congress, and he is the major funding source keeping the California Republican Party afloat. Not bad for a guy almost no one has ever heard of.

Munger has become the major funding source for a moribund and nearly broke state GOP, investing some $2 million in favored candidates this spring alone. The obviously wealthy physicist did not make this money as a Stanford professor, but through the very good luck of the being the son of Charles Munger Sr., senior partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. The 90-year-old senior Munger ranks number 1,432 on the Forbes list of world billionaires.
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A month out from the June primary, Neel Kashkari was running at a dismal two percent in the polls, one poll even had him trailing a convicted sex offender. Republican voices around the country began warning that if Assemblyman Tim Donnelly with his harsh rhetoric on immigrants were the GOP candidate for governor he would drag down the ticket in November. But what to do? Most Republican voters knew nothing about Kashkari and Donnelly was leading in the polls.

To the rescue came Charles Munger. He paid for “An Urgent Warning from Gov. Pete Wilson about Candidate Tim Donnelly,” a tough attack on Donnelly for being on probation and his extreme statements that also boosted Kashkari as “the right choice to take on Jerry Brown.” The mailer did the trick and Kashkari topped Donnelly in the primary. Without Munger’s last minute funding of this piece, it is doubtful Kashkari would have won.

This June Munger began what is probably a long process to reshape the state GOP by supporting with major independent expenditures centrist candidates for the legislature in the top two primary.

Hispanic Evangelicals and the GOP

At the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Henry Olsen describes GOP challenges with Hispanic Evangelicals [links added]:

By all measures, Hispanic Evangelicals embrace a much more expansive view of government than do whites, especially white Evangelicals. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic Evangelicals said in a May 2014 Pew survey that they supported “a bigger government with more services”; only 25 percent said they wanted “smaller government with fewer services.” This preference for larger government in the abstract is longstanding: A 2007 Pew poll found that 66 percent of Hispanic Evangelicals would rather pay higher taxes for more government services. They were only slightly more conservative on this score than Hispanics overall in the 2014 poll, who supported bigger government by a 67–21 margin, and they were slightly more supportive of big government than Hispanics overall in the 2007 survey. According to the Pew survey, America as a whole in 2014 supports smaller government by a 51–40 margin, and white Evangelicals support smaller government by margins close to 2–1.

Hispanic Evangelicals’ disagreement with conservative domestic-policy orthodoxy extends to many important issues. Fifty percent of them believe that government should guarantee health care for all Americans, and 57 percent prefer life without parole to the death penalty for convicted murderers. But the starkest differences come on the very sort of core economic questions that animate many conservative activists.

Data from the 2013 Hispanic Values Survey, conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, bear this out. Eighty-two percent of Hispanic Evangelicals supported raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour, and 69 percent supported raising tax rates on Americans earning over $250,000 a year. Perhaps most disturbingly, 60 percent believed that the best way to promote economic growth was to raise taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses to pay for more government spending on education and infrastructure; only 37 percent believed that lowering taxes and cutting spending on government programs was the best way to go.