But there’s a problem for Pawlenty and the activists who cheered him: Rank-and-file conservatives actually like big government.

In 2008, the American National Election Study asked a national sample whether federal spending on 12 different programs should be increased, decreased or kept about the same.

As the graph above illustrates, the respondents who identified themselves as “conservative” or “extremely conservative” had little appetite for specific spending cuts.

Very few conservatives said they favored reducing (or cutting out altogether) spending on any program. The least popular program proved to be childcare — with a grand total of 20 percent of conservatives saying they’d slash it. The most popular is highways; only 6 percent want to cut spending there. Even bugaboos like welfare and foreign aid fare well, attracting the ire of only 15 percent of conservatives. Amazingly, the survey found that, on average, 54 percent of them actually wanted to increase spending.

Political scientist James Stimson has suggested that a fifth of the country consists of what he calls “conflicted conservatives,” those who might respond positively to a broad appeal like Pawlenty’s, but not once specific windows start getting smashed.

At CPAC, Glenn Beck turned to 12-step lingo: “Hello, my name is the Republican Party and I have a problem! I’m addicted to spending and big government.” But why blame the GOP? After all, the party is being enabled by its own base.

John Sides is a professor in the Department of Political Science at George Washington University. He blogs at the Monkey Cage (http://www.themonkeycage.org/).

Correction : The data in the above graph is based on a report from the American National Election Study that was later corrected. The percentages for each category are not accurate. ANES subsequently published an erratum, which can be viewed here.

A corrected graph can be found here. Foreign aid and welfare are more unpopular among conservatives than the original graph suggested. About 50% of conservatives want to cut or eliminate foreign aid and 35% feel similarly about welfare.

From Sides : The broader point does not change: for most programs, the percentage of conservatives who want to cut spending is small. In fact, it’s striking that even foreign aid and welfare attract as much support as they do, especially given the long history of conservative opposition to these programs. The fraction of conservatives who want to increase spending — an average of 54% — is unchanged. The disjuncture between the views of activists and rank-and-file conservatives remains.

Every politician’s memoir, especially if written while the author is still in office, is a series of self-serving half-truths. There’s really not much benefit to total and complete honesty, and most politicians are convinced enough of their own righteousness that they probably don’t even think of their omissions and distortions as dishonest. So, everyone Haley trashes in her book says she is lying. That is not that surprising!

Among the points of contention:

• Haley omits examples of her own hypocrisy. She attacks lawmakers who don’t disclose their sources of income, then dismisses a controversy over her old “consulting” job with a firm seeking legislative favors as “character assassination.”
• She attacks S.C. House Speaker Bobby Harrell (GOP) for opposing a reform bill she championed, including a supposed conversation in which he said something haughty and corrupt-sounding. (“We’ll decide what they need to see and what they don’t.”) Harrell says the conversation never happened (and that Haley cynically positioned herself as an “outsider” after spending time in the House leadership).
• She writes that two of her opponents actually high-fived each other at a debate the day a second man accused Haley of carrying on an extramarital affair: “Then, just as the lights came down and the cameras started to roll, I looked over and saw the two men high-five under the table.” The men say that didn’t happen. Furthermore, you cannot “high-five” under a table.
• She claims that a consultant took down her campaign website as part of a “dirty trick.” The “trick” was that the guy who built her site was working for a different gubernatorial candidate, and when she announced her candidacy for governor, he told her she’d have to move her site to a different server.
• She accuses her Democratic opponent of running a campaign based on “character assassination and guilt by association.” Her opponent says his campaign was based on issues and her campaign engaged in character assassination. (This is the dumbest/most subjective example of a mistruth, obviously.)
• Haley says the Legislative Black Caucus complained about a lack of diversity in her cabinet, but didn’t offer any qualified minority or female candidates for posts. The Legislative Black Caucus says they offered her a list of a dozen qualified people whom she did not appoint.

Haley is constantly playing the victim card — everyone who ever opposed her engaged in character assassination or worse — and highlighting her independence from the S.C. political establishment. Because she’s a politician. Even though she clearly made up some of the details and conversations in her memoir (under the table high-five!) none of it will kill her career. (It’s probably a bad idea to put quotation marks around words you’re putting in other people’s mouths, but every other S.C. pol is less famous than her, so their objections won’t matter.)

What may hurt her career, though, is trashing everyone else in her state. In attacking, often viciously, nearly everyone in the South Carolina legislative leadership in both parties and even her own lieutenant governor, Haley is not making it easy for herself to actually work with these people. Which suggests that maybe she has … grander ambitions than remaining governor of South Carolina.

Progressives, out of a mixture of political correctness and embarrassment, carefully avoid the subject. The Republicans are delighted at the silence, because it masks what should be fatal weaknesses in their own position.

It may not be pleasant to hear, but a massive Democratic voter cop-out in last year’s elections is what put the reactionary right in the driver’s seat, creating the disastrous logjam in Congress, and bringing to a dead halt the hyperactive first two years of the Obama administration.

Cop-out at the Polls

In 2008, more than 65 million Americans cast Democratic votes in congressional races, a 13 million-vote edge over the Republicans. In 2010, the Democratic vote plummeted to an abysmal 35 million, 6 million less than the GOP, which took decisive power in the House and paralyzed the Senate.

We think we know this story. But the truth is, we haven’t begun to absorb its full details and implications yet:

• The number of voters under 24 who bothered to go to the polls in 2010 dropped by a stupefying 60 percent, and those between 24 and 29 by almost 50 percent. Altogether, the participation of young people – who had been overwhelmingly pro-Obama in 2008 – declined by 11 million votes.
• Among over-65-year-olds, the core of the Tea Party movement, the voting numbers barely changed, from 17.6 million in 2008 to 17.5 million in 2010.
• The African-American vote fell by 40 percent, and the Hispanic vote by almost 30 percent.
• Among the mostly white voters who earn more than $200,000 per year, the turnout fell by a scant 5 percent, from 7 million to 6.5 million.
• Voting by those with annual incomes under $30,000 dropped by 33 percent, more than six times the figure for the affluent.

In effect, the abstainers turned a potential Democratic landslide into a full-scale collapse – with nightmarish consequences for civil rights, for the U.S. and world economies, and for social programs that range across the board from healthcare and educational funding to employment programs, pension benefits and the sagging national infrastructure.

It was a dream come true for the radical right, the sworn enemies of all public services. Their vote, measured at exit polls asking whether government was too intrusive, scarcely changed between the two elections, dropping from 50 million to 47 million.

At the same time, the number of voters believing that government should do more for its citizens – the central plank of the progressive platform – sunk from 60 million to 32 million, a staggering 47 percent slide.

These are astronomical, game-changing numbers. It makes no sense to argue that the Democratic voting collapse was a matter of demoralization. Decisions on whether to go to the polls were made by the early autumn of 2010, just 20 months into an Obama administration that had pushed through what many analysts regard as the most ambitious legislative agenda in modern U.S. history.

Half a century ago, Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez understood that genuine change could only be achieved through long-term, patient struggle – and that the prize, in King’s famous words, was full access to the nation’s key institutions, notably the ballot box and the governing seats it fills.

The leaders and foot soldiers of the civil rights era fought with unflagging commitment, and King himself was martyred, in a two-decade campaign for the voting privileges that 2010 abstainers dismissed as unworthy of an hour’s time on a single Tuesday in November. The Wall Street demonstrators are now debating an even broader boycott of the 2012 presidential election.

Yet if two-thirds of the 28 million progressive stay-at-homes had gone to the polls last year, the U.S. Congress today would be in the hands of a solid Democratic majority beholden to liberal votes.

The Republicans’ Best Hope

The nation’s key institutions stand at a momentous crossroads, ripe for fresh ideas and energy.

But in response, the anthem so far is nebulous anti-institutionalism, a “leaderless resistance movement,” as the Occupy Wall Street website proudly boasts, without defined structure or goals. “It’s not any more about parties, organizations or unions,” declares the manifesto of its Spanish counterpart, the International Commission of Sol, which also calls for mass abstention from voting.

Visceral impatience is endemic today, especially where the young are concerned. The Internet Age, with its virtual substitutes for the real thing — for tangible community, for productive struggle – promises to deliver on every desire, easily and instantly. Just twitter a crowd into the streets, and the rest will fall into place. But the hard truth is that it takes far more than that. Ask the Iranians, the Tunisians and Egyptians, who are invariably cited as models by the Spanish and American protesters.

Neither easy nor instant solutions are possible when a society faces the challenges that greeted the incoming Obama administration in January of 2009. The nation’s first African-American president took office amid two unwinnable and unfunded wars and a global economic crash unparalleled since the Great Depression. He was confronted by a rabid political opposition that challenged the new president’s very right to govern on trumped-up charges that he is not certifiably “American,” when their transparent subtext was that he is not white.

As much as anything else, Barack Obama’s ascent to the presidency was about the slow work of acquiring power and responsibility in the machinery of representative government. So too were the many milestones that preceded his victory: the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that dismantled segregated schools; the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion or national origin; its elaboration in 1965 with a Voting Rights Act that removed the last obstacles to the polls, and a presidential executive order enforcing affirmative action guidelines.

Each of those institutional steps flowed from the pressure exerted by election results, and each of them helped rewrite the terms of national life. Only someone who was not alive in the 1950s, when the struggle began in earnest, could maintain that nothing important has changed in the United States since then.

It is far more accurate to say that almost everything has changed – which is what terrifies the conservative right. They recognize that the institutions of representative democracy are expressions of collective interest, and that the crucial vectors of population and age are aligned against them.

Their sole hope for turning back the clock lies in a new majority that doesn’t bother to vote.

Rove has no great love for Rick Perry or Mitt Romney, but his raison d’etre is getting Republicans elected and viciously smearing Democrats, so he’s charging ahead without waiting for the party to settle on one of those jokers. American Crossroads, Rove’s shadow-RNC is launching ad campaigns targeted at President Obama’s campaign stops, accusing him of wanting to raise everyone’s taxes. (“The message is somewhat misleading,” ABC News says, but because “Karl Rove lies” is a “dog bites man” story, they don’t devote much ink to it.)

American Crossroads has “a fundraising goal of $240 million for the election season,” according to Politico, and anyone who doesn’t care for the management of the RNC or who doesn’t want a donation to a candidate publicly disclosed can chip in without fear of exposure.

American Crossroads will, of course, also be spending tremendous sums of money on Congressional elections. Democrats will struggle to keep up, especially with a demoralized liberal base and all of American big business basically united against them.

Anonymously funded outside groups will dominate the campaign no matter which guy the GOP primary voters land on. To them, it doesn’t matter which guy gets the nod — the Republican party will take care of its donors, as it always does.

NFIB and Lincoln have teamed up to launch a campaign urging the EPA not to do anything about greenhouse gases, and she details her fight in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing’s E&E TV. It’s not a very coherent interview, as Lincoln just repeats an endless flood of talking points (uninspired ones, too) and verbally treads water. She’s a politician, not an expert on policy, or anything else. The basic idea is that there are too many regulations, and regulations are bad.

Monica Trauzzi: EPA hasn’t yet sent its proposed rule of greenhouse gas emissions for utilities to OMB. The deadline is September 30. Do you take that as a sign that maybe there are some other regulations that they’re thinking of rolling back on?

Sen. Blanche Lincoln: I certainly hope so. I mean, that is definitely what we’ve been aiming for is to make sure — and you can go to our Website, www.sensiblereg.org, and that is where you can see these small businesses talking about what they face on a day-to-day basis, the cost of it, the time, how it is, you know, prohibitive towards them being able to reinvest their resources into their businesses to create new jobs. And it’s not just the new regs that come out, it is the uncertainty of what happens. You know, you’re exactly right, delaying that greenhouse gas emission rule is something that should be done if we don’t have all the facts, if we don’t have the appropriate cost-benefit analysis, if we don’t have the appropriate analysis of what, you know, is going to actually happen with that. OMB has got to have — I mean, sometimes it can take them two or three or four months, you know, to get that information out. And that is absolutely appropriate and it should not go forward until we have all that information. But when there are over 4200 new pending regulations out there, it just creates this unbelievable arena of uncertainty in businesses large and small, but particularly small, because they get hit harder. They’re not going to take their own money and spend $10,000 or $10 million, because they don’t know what those types of regs are going to cost them.

Uncertainty is bad, so the EPA must delay its new regulations as long as possible. 4,200 new regulations!

This is all fairly standard-issue Republican cant. Which isn’t surprising: The oil and gas industry were another of Lincoln’s major funders. (Lincoln also received more money than any other Democrat from ALEC, the organization that helps major industries write their own right-wing legislation in statehouses across the country.)

Blanche Lincoln’s loss proved that out-Republicaning the Republicans is an insane way to try to win an election, but Democrats never bother to learn that lesson.

That’s what she told the crowd assembled at Women’s National Republican Club in New York, where she was apparently booked to speak at the same time that she was booked to be interviewed on cable news by that guy from “The Apprentice.” The New York Observer was there:

“I want to apologize for being so late, I know that’s not respectful of your time, so please accept my apology,” Ms. O’Donnell began. “We started out at about five o’clock in the morning at Fox and Friends and we’ve gone nonstop until the final stop at CNN a few minutes ago.” No mention was made of the walk-out that Mr. Morgan was hyping on Twitter.

O’Donnell was even asked about the unfairness of the liberal media, and she declined to bring up any sort of ill treatment she may have suffered at the hands of Larry King’s replacement.

I think O’Donnell was probably just nervous about being late for this other thing, and so she came up with an excuse to bolt early. As someone who is chronically late and frequently anxious, I can relate! Speaking to an Observer reporter after her talk, O’Donnell made her abrupt departure sound like a scheduling issue.

“We were late for this, and he wasn’t ending, and we were going, ‘Wrap up, wrap up!’ He was late and he wasn’t ending. He’s looking for ratings. He’s looking for ratings. He was being rude, and I said, ‘Piers, I gotta go!’ You know, I’m late already! He’s looking for ratings, and trying to stir up a controversy.”

Of course, then O’Donnell said other, weirder things:

There is a double standard at work for women candidates, Ms. O’Donnell told The Observer: “In the 2008 campaign, no one would have dared ask Barack Obama, ‘How are you going to control your libido. You’re a strapping young man. What are you going to do around all those interns?’ But people can ask Michele Bachmann about her migraines.”

Yes, right, of course. It is a double standard that the press would be interested in Michele Bachmann’s chronic migraines but not in Barack Obama’s strappingness and heretofore unnoticed out-of-control libido.

I understand that O’Donnell meant to call the media’s prurient-seeming interest in her past romantic escapades hypocritical, without drawing attention to That One Thing With the Ladybug Costume, but perhaps she should have come up with an actual example of a double standard, instead of just saying things that make no sense and that also could be … taken the wrong way. (“Strapping!” Is that the word you think of when you think of Barack Obama?)