The question that defines the Republican presidential race in South Carolina is whether the party’s base will rally around a consensus alternative to Mitt Romney before Saturday’s primary — or if the former Massachusetts governor will benefit from divided opposition, post his third victory in as many contests, and all but clinch the nomination.
Heading into Monday night’s debate, luck seemed to be on Romney’s side. Polls last week showed Newt Gingrich posing the most serious threat to Romney’s first place position, but a high-profile weekend endorsement by evangelical leaders had infused Rick Santorum’s campaign with just enough new life to potentially keep Gingrich from catching Romney. The most recent poll underscores this, with Romney running at 32 percent, Gingrich at 21 and Santorum at 13.
But in the debate, Newt just may have attained the separation from Santorum that he so desperately needs. He did this not by attacking Romney’s Bain Capital record; loud condemnation from conservative opinion-shapers has caused him to ease up on the subject, and when debate panelists tried to engage him on it Monday night, he claimed only that he’d tried to raise reasonable questions about Romney’s business record and showed no interest in saying more. Instead, Newt struck gold by catering to racial and class resentments — with an assist (presumably unintended) from one of the panelists.
The key exchange took place in the debate’s second segment, when Fox News contributor Juan Williams brought up Gingrich’s statement that “the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps” and his claim that children in poor areas don’t understand the value of work and could learn it by doing the jobs of school janitors.
“Can’t you see,” Williams asked, “that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?”
In a general election debate, this might have been a challenging question for Gingrich to field. But this was a GOP primary debate in a state where the modern Republican Party was essentially created out of a white backlash against the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights. Some in the live audience in Myrtle Beach hissed at Williams, one of the few Democratic-friendly voices on Fox, and Gingrich milked their outrage for all it was worth.
“No,” he said matter of factly, ” I don’t see that.”
Neither did the crowd, of course, which responded with one of the night’s most thunderous bursts of applause, a scene that was repeated when Gingrich punctuated his explanation to Williams by saying, “Only elites despise earning money.”
This came just moments after Gingrich had brought the house down by claiming that Barack Obama doesn’t believe that work is good and by railing against “unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country.” It was all a reminder of Gingrich’s unparalleled ability to serve up pure red meat to a party base that has spent the past three years being sold a caricature of Obama as radical redistributionist.
But then Newt really got lucky: Williams decided to ask him a follow-up.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “my email account, my Twitter account has been inundated with people of all races asking if your comments were not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities. You saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina …”
Williams was referring to the grilling Gingrich faced from parishoners at the Jones Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church on Sunday, but by this point his words were being drowned out by jeers from the crowd. When they quieted, he finished: “You saw this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina, where a woman asked why you refer to President Obama as ‘the food stamp president.’ It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.”
More booing.
“Well,” Gingrich replied, “First of all, Juan …”
There were laughs at this.
“The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps under Barack Obama than any other president in American history.”
Cheers.
“Now, I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.”
More cheers.
“Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. The area that ought to be on I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years? No. They haven’t built a road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything.”
Louder cheers.
“So here’s my point: I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday how to own the job.”
By this point, the audience was practically chanting Gingrich’s name. When it comes to massaging the resentments of the party base, no Republican candidate has had a finer five-minute stretch than this during the entire campaign. It’s the kind of performance that fueled Gingrich’s unlikely polling surge this fall, and it’s very possible that it will do the same now in the South Carolina home stretch.
This is especially when you consider that Santorum pretty much bombed. Why? Because the closest he came to scoring points on Monday was when he picked a fight with Mitt Romney over voting rights for convicted felons. Santorum pointed out that it was Martin Luther King Day and that “this is a huge deal in the African-American community.” Romney responded that, “I don’t think people who commit violent crimes should be allowed to vote again.”
The crowd liked that reply, as you might expect, showing that Romney seemed to understand his audience better than Santorum — but not nearly as well as Gingrich.
It didn’t take long for Cory Booker to get the message. Just hours after undermining the Obama campaign’s main line of attack against Mitt Romney, the Newark mayor released a video late Sunday afternoon in an effort to repair some of the damage.
Booker had seemed to pronounce the Obama effort to highlight unflattering aspects of Romney’s private equity background “nauseating,” but in the video, he suggested he was making a broader statement about negative campaigning.
“I used the word ‘nauseating’ on ‘Meet the Press’ because that’s really how I feel when I see people in my city struggling with real issues and still feeling the challenges of this economy, and still looking for hope and opportunity and real specific plans,” Booker said. “I get very upset when I see such a level of dialogue and calls to our lowest common denominator.”
But he insisted that he sees Bain as a legitimate topic for Obama to raise: “Let me be clear. Mitt Romney has made his business record a centerpiece of his campaign. He’s talked about himself as a job creator. And therefore it is reasonable — and in fact I encourage it — for the Obama campaign to examine that record and discuss it. I have no problem with that.”
Booker’s new line is a bit hard to swallow, though, because his “Meet the Press” comments clearly went beyond simply decrying the tone of the campaign. At one point, he offered a pointed defense of Romney’s Bain past, saying: “I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, it — they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this to me — I’m very uncomfortable.”
An RNC spokesman told Politico that “it’s clear this video was orchestrated by the Obama campaign,” which certainly sounds plausible. Shortly after Booker posted his clarification, an Obama campaign press secretary tweeted out a link to a condensed version of it featuring only Booker’s statement about Bain being fair game.
As I noted yesterday, Booker has throughout his political career cultivated and maintained close ties to Wall Street and affluent, investor class donors – people who, in many cases, believe the administration has declared war on their world and see the Bain attacks as an extension of that effort. Booker’s statewide political aspirations are no secret in New Jersey, and the presumption is that he’s eyeing a Senate run in 2014 (others have mentioned him for governor next year, but that’s less likely for a number of reasons).
Booker’s actions on Sunday are best understood in that context. In sticking up for private equity, he was tending to a financial base that’s been there for him before and that he’ll need in the future. Running ads in the New York and Philadelphia markets is an expensive proposition, so Booker will need a ton of cash for a statewide run. And in rushing to clarify (but not exactly retract) what he said, Booker was trying to contain the damage with a Democratic Party base that likes Obama and has no problem with his attacks on Bain.
In a way, the episode is simply a high-profile illustration of the very real tension that exists, especially in the New York area, between elite Democratic donors and rank-and-file voters. Booker is hardly the only tri-state region Democrat who’s cultivated Wall Street, but in 2012 not many are as open about it as he is.
House Republican leaders put out the word on Wednesday night that they’ll be prepared to swing into action if the Supreme Court invalidates President Obama’s healthcare law next month.
The political necessity of this was obvious: “Obamacare” itself doesn’t tend to poll that well, but some of its individual components do, and when voters are asked which party they trust more on healthcare, Democrats enjoy a clear advantage. So if the court does away with the law, it will be hard for Republicans to hit the campaign trail this fall without having some sort of plan that they can point to for dealing with the issue.
Of course, calling what GOP leaders leaked a “plan” is really stretching the term. As stories in the New York Times and Politico made clear, the intent seemed more to shield the party from Democratic attacks that it helped kill off provisions of the law that are actually popular:
If the law is partially or fully overturned they’ll draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. Ripping these provisions from law is too politically risky, Republicans say.
The problem, as critics were quick to note, is that the popular components of Obamacare are only made feasible by the unpopular parts. Forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions only makes sense with the individual mandate that Republicans abhor, since it compels young and healthy people who would otherwise forgo coverage to enroll too. Beyond that, the Times reported, the House GOP was prepared to consider a variety of modest measures that might bring down insurance premium rates slightly:
Republicans are dusting off proposals that date back more than a decade: allowing individuals to buy health insurance across state lines, helping small businesses band together to buy insurance, offering generous tax deductions for the purchase of individual policies, expanding tax-favored health savings accounts and reining in medical malpractice suits.
But even this may be too much for the right. By late Thursday morning, just hours after the GOP leadership’s plans were leaked, Rep. Paul Ryan threw cold water on the idea that Republicans would offer any specific legislation before the November election, telling the Washington Examiner: “Now, we’ve got nine weeks of session left. Do we want to cram through our own 2,700 page vision? No, that’s what the country hated. But do we believe in patient-centered health care and market-based medicine? A lot of us have put time and effort into this, yeah.”
And by the end of the day, Politico reported that a revolt had broken out on an influential conservative Google email group that GOP House leaders monitor, where the sentiment seemed to be that publicly supporting any components of Obamacare – even the popular ones – would amount to a sellout of conservative principles. The uprising, according to Politico, began almost as soon as the stories leaked Wednesday night, leading to this:
Cognizant of the conservative anger, Dave Schnittger, Boehner’s longtime deputy chief of staff, sent a separate email to a small group of fellow leadership aides Wednesday night, saying that, during his weekly media availability, the speaker would “knock … down” the plan that had leaked.
Boehner did not address health care once in his 12-minute news conference. Aides say he was prepared to talk about it — if the issue came up.
One of the first moves Republicans made when they reclaimed the House in 2011 was to pass legislation repealing the healthcare law. It was a symbolic move, since it had no chance of clearing the Senate, but it was also billed as the first step. Soon, Republicans insisted, they’d unveil a new, better plan to replace Obamacare. More than a year later, that plan still hasn’t seen the light of day, and if the events of the last 24 hours are any indication, there’s not going to be one before the election – or maybe ever.
There’s a persistent belief on the right that President Obama snuck into office in 2008 because an awestruck media refused to look into his background and personal associations, preventing voters from learning about all sorts of radical, anti-American connections that would have turned them against the Democratic nominee. In this narrative, John McCain also comes in for criticism because of his refusal to fully exploit Obama’s ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the general election.
This is the mind-set that, according to a New York Times story from Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg, has a billionaire super PAC overseer mulling a $10 million anti-Obama ad blitz that’s designed to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”
According to the Times, Joe Ricketts, the Ameritrade founder whose super PAC just played a crucial role in the upset victory of a Sarah Palin-backed candidate in Nebraska’s Republican Senate primary, has been presented with a 54-page blueprint drawn up by GOP media consultant Fred Davis, who produced the anti-Obama “Celebrity” ad that the McCain campaign ran four years ago:
“Our plan is to do exactly what John McCain would not let us do: Show the world how Barack Obama’s opinions of America and the world were formed,” the proposal says. “And why the influence of that misguided mentor and our president’s formative years among left-wing intellectuals has brought our country to its knees.”
The story includes all kinds of interesting tidbits about the proposal, including its suggestion that the super PAC hire an “extremely literate conservative African-American” as a flack in order to deflect charges of race-baiting.
The reality, though, is that even if Ricketts signs off on the plan – and the story makes it clear that it’s just one of several options he’s mulling – it won’t have the devastating impact its authors envision. It probably won’t have much, or any, impact at all.
For one thing, the notion that Obama wasn’t fully vetted by the press in 2008 and that voters are in the dark about all sorts of troubling biographic details and character traits just doesn’t compute. The Rev. Wright issue, for instance, was covered exhaustively by the press, enough to compel Obama to deliver a lengthy speech on race that, if anything, probably made him more appealing to the average swing voter. And while McCain may not have authorized ads about Wright, many of his allies on the right (not to mention his own vice presidential nominee) filled the air with warnings about Obama’s secret radicalism. None of this seemed to move voters back then.
And nothing that has happened in the intervening four years has given Americans any reason to believe that there was anything to the radicalism charges of ’08. Obama’s approval rating isn’t that great right now, but it’s because the economy is in rough shape and voters are questioning his policies. It’s not because he’s said or done anything that validates the charge of radicalism; the policies he’s pursued are entirely within the mainstream of the Democratic Party. So the idea that a bunch of ads that dredge up a four-year-old controversy will make voters suddenly conclude that the warnings were right seems entirely off-base.
More to the point, the airwaves will be awash in political ads this summer and fall, with the Obama and Romney campaigns and all sorts of party committees, independent groups and super PACs launching their own multimillion-dollar campaigns. The Wright ads probably wouldn’t stand out nearly as much as the Davis blueprint suggests. And, as Jonathan Bernstein has pointed out, “voters will pay less attention to information they hear through paid advertising when there is plenty of other information available, as is the case with high-profile presidential elections.”
What the news about Ricketts and his super PAC could do, however, is put Mitt Romney in a bit of an awkward spot. The law prohibits him from coordinating with super PACs, but that doesn’t mean the media won’t demand that he make a statement over whether he thinks the Wright stuff is fair game.
It’s clearly not a road that the Romney campaign and most Republican leaders want to go down. They (mostly) recognize that Obama is more personally popular with Americans than their party’s base realizes, and that there’s a real political risk in pushing too far on race/culture-based attacks on him. This is why, for instance, Haley Barbour has been arguing that the GOP’s general election effort should focus on Obama’s record, not on anything personal.
At the very least, the Republican Party base’s revolt against its own establishment cost the GOP a 50-50 Senate tie in 2010, with primary voters forcing unelectable nominees on the party in three races that it had otherwise been on course to win. A decent case can be made that the uprising actually cost Republicans outright Senate control.
And now the same thing may be happening all over again, with Nebraska joining a growing list of unexpected 2012 Senate battlegrounds – at least for the moment.
The impetus is the surprise victory of Deb Fischer, a little-known state legislator, over two seasoned opponents in Tuesday’s Nebraska Republican Senate primary. Fischer’s candidacy seemed dead in the water until about a week ago, when she was endorsed by Sarah Palin. A last-second ad blitz from a super PAC controlled by the founder of Ameritrade added to her momentum, and Fischer ended up beating out state Attorney General Jon Bruning, who had been the favorite, by 5 points.
The outcome was greeted with immediate joy by Democrats, with the DSCC putting out a statement calling Fischer an “untested” and “accidental” nominee for the seat being vacated by Democrat Ben Nelson. The hope for Democrats is that the 61-year-old Fischer, who has represented a rural western Nebraska district in the state Senate since 2005, will melt under the spotlight of a high-stakes general election contest – much the way Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck and Joe Miller did in 2010.
This may prove to be wishful thinking. Fischer could end up being a perfectly competent candidate, one who isn’t prone to erratic behavior and pointlessly inflammatory rhetoric and who doesn’t have any serious skeletons in her closet. Certainly, she showed strong communication skills in her acceptance speech Tuesday night. And because of Nebraska’s deep red shading and its particular antipathy toward Democrats in the Obama era, Fischer’s margin for error is probably substantial. The same mistakes that derailed Angle in Nevada may only be the difference between, say, a 20- and 10-point win in Nebraska.
That said, Fischer absolutely is an untested candidate. Bruning and the race’s other major candidate, state Treasurer Don Stenberg, spent months firing shots at each other and gobbling up all of the attention. The intensity of their battle probably helped create the opening that Fischer seized, but the late timing of her surge also spared her from facing much in the way of media scrutiny or attacks from her rivals. She raised and spent very little money, and not much is known about her.
For Democrats, that’s reason to cheer. Had Bruning (or even Stenberg, a veteran of eight previous statewide campaigns) won the primary, the general election race would have been a snore. Polls showed both men comfortably ahead of the Democratic candidate, former Sen. Bob Kerrey, who won elections in the state in 1982 (for governor), 1988 and 1994, back when he was something of a local hero. But Kerrey spent the last decade running the New School in New York and hasn’t been on a Nebraska ballot in 18 years. Partisan divisions have hardened since then, and Kerrey now faces cries of carpetbagging.
There are no meaningful Fischer/Kerrey poll numbers out yet. Presumably, the GOP nominee will begin with a solid lead, just because this is Nebraska (and because right now she embodies a neat underdog story). The question is how she’ll hold up, and on that score there’s some real doubt, which means that Nebraska is in play, at least provisionally.
Add in Indiana, where the Tea Party-aligned Richard Mourdock knocked off Dick Lugar last week, and two GOP primaries in one week have resulted in a surprise general election opportunities for Democrats. And primary season isn’t over yet. As Josh Kraushaar notes, the GOP’s grass roots seem poised to rise up against former Gov. Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin; that race is already considered a tossup, but a weak GOP nominee could tip the scales.
Other developments over the last year have also bolstered Democrats’ chances of holding the Senate, including the emergence of Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts (her recent troubles notwithstanding), Olympia Snowe’s unexpected retirement in Maine, and encouraging news from Arizona and maybe even North Dakota. What looked like an awful Senate map for Democrats at the start of this cycle has come to seem more manageable – even more so after Tuesday night’s shocker in Nebraska.
Let’s be clear: No matter what, Republicans in the state of Nebraska will be nominating a very conservative candidate for the U.S. Senate today. But the sudden prospect of a surprise victory by an underfunded state legislator best known for the endorsement she received from Sarah Palin lends potential national significance to tonight’s outcome.
To set the stage, the front-runner in the race is (and has been the entire way) Jon Bruning, Nebraska’s third-term attorney general. The 43-year-old Bruning has made some gestures to his party’s restive base, suing the Obama administration over its healthcare reform law and contraception mandate and likening welfare recipients to raccoons. But his polished demeanor and political resume – elected to the state Senate at age 27, a seamless rise to the AG’s office six years later, and now a Senate bid – make him seem more like an establishment man on the rise.
Which can be a problem in the Tea Party era. Conservative leaders and voters today aren’t as easily satisfied as they once were by candidates who are with them on paper. They want proof of absolute commitment to the cause – reason to believe that a would-be senator won’t ever compromise away a single conservative principle, no matter how much pressure is coming from party leaders, polling and the press. And Bruning, who has had to contend with revelations about his personal investments in state-regulated businesses and his purchase of a summer home with two executives from a company that the AG’s office had previously sought to help, doesn’t really have the image of a true believer.
Until very recently, Bruning’s main challenger for the GOP nomination was supposed to be Don Stenberg, the current state treasurer and a former attorney general. Backed by some serious money from the Club for Growth, Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund and FreedomWorks, Stenberg has been portraying himself as the candidate of purity and pounding away at Bruning. But Stenberg, a veteran of three failed Senate bids and two other statewide offices, is something of a perennial candidate, and he lacks the freshness and outsider credentials that Tea Party conservatives tend to respond to. Thus did Bruning still seem poised to win the primary … until last week.
That’s when Palin came through with a surprise endorsement of the third candidate in the race, Deb Fischer, whose personal story is the most naturally appealing to the Tea Party crowd. The 61-year-old didn’t enter politics until 2004, when she won a seat in the state Senate, and on the campaign trail plays up her work as a rancher. She doesn’t ooze the same ambition as her opponents, and of the three candidates she’s the most likely to be immune to Potomac Fever.
The Palin announcement offered a huge jolt of momentum to Fischer’s effort, and was followed a day later by an endorsement from 1st District Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. Then, over the weekend, came one more surprise: a last-minute $200,000 ad buy from a super PAC that has decided to promote Fischer, and savage Bruning. (The super PAC is run by Ameritrade founder Pete Rickets, whose son, Pete, defeated Stenberg in the 2006 GOP Senate primary.)
Where, exactly, the race stands in hard to say. Fischer’s campaign has been promoting internal polls that show her leapfrogging Stenberg and threatening Bruning for the lead. There hasn’t been a reputable public poll since earlier in the race, when Bruning was still the runaway favorite.
The national implications are twofold. If Fischer does manage to win, Nebraska could actually emerge as a Senate battleground this fall. With Democrat Ben Nelson declining to seek reelection, the seat has long been assumed to be an automatic Republican pickup, even after Bob Kerrey, a one-time governor and senator, decided to return to the state and launch a comeback bid. Polls have shown Kerrey getting trounced by Bruning – and with Barack Obama on course to lose the state by at least 20 points, it’s not as if Kerrey is going to get any help from the top of the ticket.
Fischer, though, would be a wild card. She’s largely untested, and there’s a lot that isn’t known about her background and her skills as a candidate. If she wins the nomination, she might do fine in the general election, but there’s also the chance she’d prove to be another Sharron Angle. And, of course, it could be that she does turn out to be the next Angle, and that it still doesn’t matter, given Nebraska’s partisan bent. (It’s doubtful that a Stenberg win would do much to help Kerrey, since he’s a more established figure and has been able to win before.)
The bigger consequence of a Fischer win, though, would be to reinforce the message that was sent to Republican senators by last week’s Indiana Senate primary, when Dick Lugar was trounced by his Tea Party-aligned challenger. As I wrote yesterday, the Tea Party movement really isn’t about making the GOP a more conservative party; it’s about making what is already a conservative party more obstinate, unyielding and hostile to Democrats. A surprise victory by Sarah Palin’s candidate today would help that cause.
Republican presidential candidates Texas Governor Rick Perry (L) and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich speak to the moderators during a break in the Republican presidential candidates debate in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, January 16, 2012. (Credit: Jason Reed / Reuters) 
House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio speaks at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation's 2012 Fiscal Summit, Tuesday, May 15, 2012, in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) (Credit: AP) 
In this March 25, 2010 file photo, Rev. Jeremiah Wright speaks at Jackson State University in Jackson, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File) (Credit: AP) 
Sarah Palin (Credit: AP) 
