Exit Marx and Mussolini

It's outrageous that Rep. Allen West (R-FL) said he'd heard that as many as 80 of his Democratic colleagues were communists. The far right doesn't need any more hysterical and nonsensical incitements. Then I Googled "fascists in Congress." Sure enough, on April 5 David Seaman at Business Insider criticized "congressional fascists" for a raft of new national and cyber security measures, just the kind of reckless, ahistorical rhetoric that's bound to get the left all riled up.

How ironic and reassuring that the major party nominees will by election day have amassed roughly comparable four-year records as enlightened, pragmatic chief executives. While each is now in his 'Scuse me while I kiss my base period, in the general election it will become abundantly clear that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have so much in common that stale ideological appeals will lack all credibility. They can't evade their records, and they shouldn't try. We've heard more than enough about Marx and Mussolini, about all these imaginary communists, socialists, and fascists. This political year now belongs to the silent and heretofore overlooked majority as the epic battle for the great American center finally begins.

An American Classic Begins Today

Talk about burying the lead. Here's how Zach Beauchamp put it at The Dish: "So Santorum up and left, taking with him the last vestiges of interest in the GOP primary." The other way to describe today's events is that Mitt Romney has just won a dazzling victory and set the stage for an American classic.

After the tea party-driven GOP surge in the 2010 elections, it was a foregone conclusion that the far right would dominate the 2012 cycle. Yet all its champions left the arena or were defeated by the establishment choice, the so-called Massachusetts moderate: Palin, Huckabee, Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, and now Santorum. If the GOP has a "fundamental problem" with dominance by the right, as Beauchamp says and so many pundits have been insisting for months, why has the candidate conservatives liked the least been able to wrap up the nomination by early April?

Continuing to devalue Romney's achievement, Beauchamp writes:

The obvious conclusion is that, assuming Romney loses in 2012, the candidate best positioned to win the GOP nod next time around will be someone with Santorum-esque views with an extra dollop of political talent.

But lack of charisma was never the GOP's problem. It had many talented conservative candidates. Romney demolished them all. Assuming that Romney will lose is also premature, not only because it's April 10 but because Real Clear Politics' composite poll shows him running only 5.3% behind Barack Obama, another stunning achievement given how bruising the primaries have been.

But who's congratulating Romney tonight? Not Democrats, who know he's Obama's least desired opponent. Not conservatives, who never wanted a moderate standard bearer nor even, I suspect, a Romney presidency to the extent that he would reposition his party closer to the center by forging new center-right coalitions in the country and especially on Capitol Hill. While moderates who think he's just been pretending to be conservative are happy, we don't know for sure if their optimism is warranted.

So is Romney moderate or conservative? To me he seems relentlessly opportunistic (which helped him beat all those conservatives) and non-ideological, a throwback to the days of the country club Republican. His cool temperament and refusal to be pigeonholed remind me of the other pragmatic Republican in the race: Barack Obama.

In the fall election (which began today), party propagandists will spend millions calling Romney a wealthy, far-right wing nut and Obama a socialist. But little if any of that mud will stick, and not only because Romney can't very well run against Obama's big-government health care bill (which was patterned on Romney's) nor Obama against Romney's coziness with fat cats (which isn't that much cozier than Obama's). Voters are smart enough to know that both candidates are steely, smart pragmatists. Obama and Romney are primed to give us the hardest fought, most substantive, and possibly closest presidential race since 1960 -- and that's worth celebrating.

Two Weeks In The Sausage Factory

Last week, Susan G. Komen for the Cure tried to suspend breast screening grants to Planned Parenthood on account of its performing abortions. This week, the Obama administration tried to require Roman Catholic hospitals, universities, and charities to provide free contraception to women.

Last week, progressives rose up, defending PP's work and women's right to privacy. PP will get its money for the time being, permitting it to continue to offer breast screenings to patients who otherwise couldn't afford them. This week, conservatives rose up, defending the independence of religious institutions. Under a compromise announced today by the president, employees at Catholic institutions would still have access to free birth control, but on the insurance companies' nickel instead of the pope's lira, a distinction perhaps designed to satisfy discerning students of the complicated teaching embodied in Mark 12:17.

And that's how it's done in a free and diverse society. It's been a bloody, noisy, anxious mess, but there's a certain beauty to the symmetry of it (with women's only recently won right to self-determination at the heart of both narratives) as well as to the way violently differing viewpoints and the balance of personal vs. constitutional and secular vs. religious were all worked out. In both matters only the most inflexible absolutists have nothing to show for themselves, while those who feel most comfortable in the middle of the road are probably happiest of all.

David Brooks' Ticket To Santorumville

In a nice way, David Brooks says Mitt Romney is stumbling because he appears too eager to please -- in other words, inauthentic. The solution:

He needs to show that he is willing to pursue at least a few unpopular policies, even policies that are unfashionable in his own party. Since many people fear that he is a suck-up, it would actually help him at this point if he violated party orthodoxy in some bold and independent way.

I don't think Republicans fear Romney's a suck-up. They fear he's a moderate. If he follows Brooks' advice, maybe Romney will feel more authentic and affirmed, but the nominee will be Rick Santorum.

Get To Work

Blogger-in-chief Andrew Sullivan has been criticizing Mitt Romney for lying about Barack Obama. Though he has no use for Newt Gingrich, last week he admitted to a perverse hope that Gingrich would be able to perpetuate the GOP's chaos by over-performing in Florida. But this morning, Sullivan dutifully surveys the conventional wisdom, which is that Gingrich has no way to the nomination.

Here's hoping the pundits are right. In an odd commentary implying that all politicians are just like the narcissistic demagogue Gingrich and put their emotional needs ahead of the country, Chris Matthews predicts that he will stay in the race until the end just to make Romney's life miserable. If that's really Gingrich's plan, I pray his fellow Republicans will dissuade him at last in caucuses and primaries to come.

As for Romney's campaign so far, yesterday I sent Sullivan this comment:

Imagine being a moderate Republican, fiscally prudent and leaning to the center on gay rights and abortion. Your one time in government, that's just how you behaved. But now you want to be president. You could switch parties, but you grew up in the GOP, you believe in its historic values, and you think that with the right leadership it could again be the broad-gauge, non-ideological party of Lincoln and your own father. But you realize that only a Republican president could lead in that direction, and to be nominated you have to navigate the fire swamp that the party's become. What would your campaign look like?

This explains rather than excuses Romney's rhetorical excesses. I'm not yet for him or Obama. In the fall campaign we need and deserve a serious conversation between serious people with records they can't evade. Health care, gay and women's rights, Palestine, and deterring Iran without war are vital issues. Most important is the harrowing fact of 12 million-20 million unemployed, men and women who deserve a government that enables them to thrive. With a Congress that obstructs Obama out of spite, electing Romney may at least enable collaboration on economic growth and jobs. Either that, or we could throw some of the bums out out of the House.

The GOP, Nixon, And "The Whole People"

Writing in the Jan. 23 New Yorker about the state of the GOP, Jeffrey Frank raises the ghost of the last winning Republican to endorse moderation for moderation's sake:

In 1959, Vice President Nixon, speaking to members of California’s Commonwealth Club, was asked if he’d like to see the parties undergo an ideological realignment—the sort that has since taken place—and he replied, “I think it would be a great tragedy . . . if we had our two major political parties divide on what we would call a conservative-liberal line.” He continued, “I think one of the attributes of our political system has been that we have avoided generally violent swings in Administrations from one extreme to the other. And the reason we have avoided that is that in both parties there has been room for a broad spectrum of opinion.” Therefore, “when your Administrations come to power, they will represent the whole people rather than just one segment of the people.” Ten months before the general election, the increasingly angry, suspicious, and divided party of Romney, Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry seems ever more immersed in its current orthodoxies. None of the candidates, though, seem the least bit interested in even addressing how they, or their party, might actually govern the “whole people” of a fractious nation.

America's Battle Of Realities

At the "National Interest," published by the Center Formerly Known As Nixon, Paul Saunders wonders why public policy pragmatism is popular but, in practice, increasingly difficult to achieve:

The underlying difficulty may lie in the changing nature of America’s public-policy debates. The dramatic multiplication of media in the United States—starting with cable television and continuing on the Internet—appears to have undermined our ability as a society to agree on the facts. Politicians, cable-TV talking heads and bloggers regularly state “facts” and “statistics” that are at best creatively engineered and at worst cynically manipulated. This is not new behavior; disingenuous political arguments are as old as politics. The transformative element is a volume of information that appears to have exceeded the capacity of our marketplace of ideas for self-correction, something that allows bad information to develop a self-sustaining life of its own. As a result, our debates sometimes seem to be between contending realities rather than contending policies.

In this environment, the content of our public-policy debates and politics appear naturally to be gravitating away from concrete policy choices—which are increasingly difficult to discuss meaningfully in the absence of a shared set of facts—and toward competing ideals. This in turn forces our debates out of the realm of pragmatism, where discussion could focus on the best means to achieve our ends, and into the world of idealism, where even modest changes in policy can be assailed as threats to America’s core principles.

Michele, Nobel

The voice of sober Nixonian realism on Libya is Rep. Michele Bachmann, who said in an interview tonight with Fox News' Greta Van Susteren that the U.S. shouldn't have intervened because we're overextended internationally and don't know enough about the anti-Qaddafi rebels or the war's likely outcome.

The Heartbreak Of Realpolitik

The upshot of Nixon Center Dimitri Simes' cautionary post about U.S. policy in the Middle East is that the place where the tyrant and his actions are most appalling, namely Libya, is the one where the least is at stake for U.S. interests.

Doing The Public's Business? There's An Idea

Two views about the progress toward political and economic equality for gay and lesbian people. At the "American Spectator," George Neumayr (left), reflecting on the repeal of DADT, discerns a hidden, even malign agenda:

[T]he repeal is an elitist, not populist, victory, one which a future Edward Gibbon will mark down as yet another illustration of an insular political class's delusion and decadence at a time of terrorism. This elite has long wanted to tear down the military and turn it into a laboratory of political correctness, and Obama has smuggled this gift to his friends through the backdoor of a lame-duck session.

Whereas Rep. Barney Frank says the gay agenda is no secret:

It is to be protected against violent crimes driven by bigotry, it's to be able to get married, it's to be able to get a job, and it's to be able to fight for our country. For those who are worried about the radical homosexual agenda, let me put them on notice. Two down, two to go.

Neumayr's denunciation of the undemocratic, underhanded DADT repeal seems strange in view of a recent poll showing that 77% of the American people favored permitting homosexuals to serve openly in the military. Wouldn't ignoring the people have been the undemocratic and underhanded thing?

This seems too easy, so I must be missing something. Or maybe some conservatives have been stunned into incoherence after having been part of an historic GOP victory last month only to watch Barack Obama win a massive second stimulus bill (which is already helping spur economic recovery), DADT repeal, health care for Sept. 11 first responders, and the ratification of the U.S.-Russian arms control treaty.

Each measure required Republican leadership and votes. While the far right spent the month denouncing those out-of-touch Beltway Republicans, they're the ones who seem to have their finger on the people's pulse. Meanwhile, just as Obama made the mistake of thinking his 2008 victory amounted to a mandate for massive change, many conservative ideologues think the American people now want leaders who think like George Neumayr. But we've been clustered around the great American center all along, right where our polarized politics abandoned us.

In Need Of One Good Book

It's easy to understand people's revulsion at the racial and ethnic commentary on the newly opened Nixon White House tapes, especially the exchange between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger about a hypothetical Soviet holocaust against Jews. As his chief of staff, library director, and legal co-executor, I cringe myself.

That being said, during thousands of hours of conversations with me over a 15-year association, he rarely if ever talked this way. Even as a former president, he devoted most of his time and energy to substance -- articles, books, and speeches, as well as his voracious consumption of and commentary about political and policy news.

Having spent plenty of time with the Nixon tapes, my sense is that their 4,000 hours embody a comparable disproportion between substance and triviality. But today's snarling editorial in the New York Times goes out of its way not to take a balanced view. Again, anger about racism and anti-Semitism is understandable. But I'm sure the Times also realizes that Nixon was a serious person of considerable accomplishment whose legacy of foreign policy innovation and domestic pragmatism can still teach us a lot in our era of terrorist threats from abroad and ideological warfare at home.

But frankly, I really shouldn't be picking on the Times, which has been left a clear field. With the exception of the measured insider's perspective at Maarja Krusten's new NixoNARA, it's astonishing how few people have piped up for 37 since the new tapes were opened. Pleased finally to find some relatively friendly commentary about Nixon on another, unfamiliar blog the other day, I went to the home page and realized it was operated by white nationalists. The Nixon White House aides who have devoted so much effort to trying to block the Nixon library Watergate exhibit in which some of them play starring roles appear to have gone home for Christmas now that the tapes beg for friends and associates to stand up and say, "That's not the totality of the man I knew."

One Nixon family member who was especially prone to defeatism repeatedly expressed a fear to me that Nixon's reputation would never recover from the rancor of his times and racism on the tapes. With each new records opening, I can see why someone could feel that way. The Times notes the devastating irony of tapes Nixon thought would cement his reputation instead having the effect of cement wingtips, dragging his historical standing further down. Having helped negotiate a three-party settlement that envisioned all the tapes being opened by 2000, I regret that the National Archives has taken this long to open the whole collection. The library now says it will take until 2012. Scholars used to blame us Nixonites for holding up the tapes. But we waved the white flag in 1996. Why will historians have had to wait at least more 16 years?

And yet all is not lost. The Nixon Center in Washington continues to promote Nixon's living principles of enlightened national interest as the foundation of the U.S.'s role in a changing world. Not only the thousands of hours of opened tapes but all the records are finally housed or available at the Nixon library -- the richest presidential collection about one of the most momentous eras in modern history. Thanks to my elder daughter Valerie, last Monday I had dinner with a young scholar from Italy who's studying relations between the U.S. and Brazil during 1971-73. She said there were four other readers working at the library last week alone.

If Nixon were still here and I could call to buck him up, I'd actually be the first to mention the Jews. I'd remind him that they wandered in the wilderness for at least 40 years. I'd say, "Mr. President, you've still got a shot at the promised land. All you need is a few historians and biographers who are willing to take the sweet with the bitter. Just one good book from an independent voice: Manna from heaven."

If Compromise Is So Bad, Why Do We All Want It?

Barack Obama didn't receive a mandate for radical change in 2008, and Republicans didn't get one Tuesday. Andrew Sullivan:

The pre-election NYT poll found that 78 percent want the Republicans to compromise with Obama rather than stick to their positions in the next two years; 76 percent want the Dems to do the same; and a slightly lower percentage, but still overwhelming, wants Obama to compromise too: 69 percent.

For archival purposes (well, maybe my reader will enjoy it, too), I'm reproducing a post I wrote on the Nixon foundation's blog a week before the 2008 election. I'll admit that, as an intestinal moderate, I'm mandate-averse. When any leader begins to envision himself or herself as a singular visionary, watch out. But Tuesday's result looked like nothing more than a rebuke of President Obama's overreaching (not because we didn't need health care reform, which we did, but because it kept him from focusing on jobs one in order to demonstrate a relentless desire to get his people back to work). Anyway, back to October 2008:

It’s not over yet. But while almost everyone will blame either Sen. McCain or Gov. Palin for the expected GOP debacle on Nov. 4, it’s important to fix the blame for the party’s dire prospects where it belongs — the plummeting economy, whose authors are Republicans and Democrats, Congresses and Presidents, Fed chairmen and Americans who borrowed more than they could afford in the hope that real estate prices would balloon indefinitely.

Amid the dread that millions of Americans are feeling, no different VP nominee would have helped McCain more, and no different GOP nominee — Romney, Huckabee, Reagan — could probably beat Sen. Obama. By the same token, Obama’s considerable gifts notwithstanding, Sen. Clinton would have done just as well. It’s just like 1980, when any Republican — Connally, Bush, Reagan — could’ve beaten Jimmy Carter thanks to the abysmal mess his administration had made of the economy and foreign policy.

President Reagan’s hagiographers have turned the 1980 election into a mandate for Reagan-Goldwater Republicanism rather than for the doctrine of anybody-but-Carter. They’re wrong. Not his election but his first-term tax cuts and tough Cold War line earned him his legacy, along with his unfailingly sunny demeanor.

If Obama wins, he won’t have an ideological mandate. Reagan could blame his predecessor for most of the nation’s problems in 1981 far more legitimately than Obama will be able to in 2009, especially now that Iraq war has taken such a positive turn. Even more than Reagan, who talked right but often governed as a moderate, Obama is more likely to succeed by walking right down the middle of the road. Just like Reagan, his greatest resource will be his temperament.

Which Obaman temperament I had completely misread, incidentally. A general outlook that appeared sunny and nonanxious during the campaign now appears to be prone to being gloomy, inflexible, and restive.

Burning The Bridge From Both Ends

Two LA Times reporters say Tuesday's real loser is the political center:

The clearest indication of the growing partisan gap was Tuesday's rout of the Blue Dog caucus, a group of moderate and conservative Democrats who urged the party to adopt a more business-friendly and fiscally conservative agenda. Fewer than half of its 54 members will be returning next year after incumbents were ousted in Pennsylvania, Ohio and a few Democratic pockets of the Deep South. Their absence will likely push the 190 or so remaining House Democrats even further left.

On the Republican side, the victory of dozens of insurgents backed by the "tea party" movement means the emboldened GOP majority will be even more conservative and confrontational than the one that harried President Obama over the last two years.

Washington Rules

It helps to be a post-modern guy sometimes. Speaking to Peter Baker, 44 skillfully self-diagnoses:

[Barack Obama] has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

That presumes that what he did was the right thing, a matter of considerable debate. The left thinks he did too little; the right too much. But what is striking about Obama’s self-diagnosis is that by his own rendering, the figure of inspiration from 2008 neglected the inspiration after his election. He didn’t stay connected to the people who put him in office in the first place. Instead, he simultaneously disappointed those who considered him the embodiment of a new progressive movement and those who expected him to reach across the aisle to usher in a postpartisan age.

Perhaps A Fad Premature

America's last -- or, at least, richest -- moderate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, stakes his reputation on good sense:

Mr. Bloomberg described the Tea Party movement as a fad, comparing it to the short-lived burst of support for Ross Perot in 1992. The mayor suggested that the fury it had unleashed was not a foundation for leadership.

“Look, people are angry,” he said. “Their anger is understandable. Washington isn’t working. Government seems to be paralyzed and unable to solve all of our problems.”

“Anger, however, is not a government strategy,” he said. “It’s not a way to govern.”

Mr. Bloomberg said he wanted to see more of the cooperation once displayed by Senators Orrin G. Hatch and Edward M. Kennedy.

He said that he would not have voted for either of them (“one because he’s too liberal for me, one because he’s too conservative for me”), but added, “These two guys who went into the Senate together and were the closest of personal friends for 40 years, they were everything that democracy says a senator should be.”

The Stake For Conservatives, Till It Hurts

Dan Gerstein on the significance of Barack Obama's abandonment of bipartisanship in health care policy:

For Democrats, this means the official end of Bill Clinton's popular "third way" approach to progressive policymaking, which aimed to synthesize the best ideas of both sides. Obama seemed to go both ways on the third way during the campaign, repudiating it at times to win over the left and embracing it at times to win over the middle. But now it's clear there will be little if any synthesizing or triangulating. The president and his allies on Capitol Hill are betting that the suspicion of government that Reagan cultivated for a generation has ebbed enough to buy their activist policies time to work. If they succeed, the left will have driven a stake into the philosophical heart of conservatism.

The Larger Group In Between

More inconvenient truths from Al Gore's running mate:

"I probably will support some Republican candidates for Congress or Senate in the election in 2010. I'm going to call them as I see them," Lieberman told ABC News. "There's a hard core of partisan, passionate, hardcore Republicans. There's a hard core of partisan Democrats on the other side. And in between is the larger group, which is people who really want to see the right thing done, or want something good done for this country and them -- and that means, sometimes, the better choice is somebody who's not a Democrat."

Hat tip to Mike Cheever

A "Bold New Role For Faith"

President Obama is evidently angling for the theological as well as the political center:

In his first 100 days in office, President Obama has sought a bold new role for faith in the White House, which aides say is aimed largely at dialing down the decades-old culture wars. Without changing his party's liberal stances on social issues like abortion, for example, Obama is nonetheless attempting to reach out to religious conservatives by pledging to work toward reducing demand for abortion. And while acknowledging his party's own secular base—he went out of his way to mention nonbelievers in his inaugural address—Obama has sought to showcase religion's expanded role in his White House, opening his rallies with public prayer.

Hat tip to Cory Trenda

Old New Democrat

Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber say that while President Obama isn't out to alter the fundamental structures of American capitalism, he's not a Bill Clinton-style moderate, either:

Obama has set out to synthesize the New Democratic faith in the utility of markets with the Old Democratic emphasis on reducing inequality. In Obama's state, government never supplants the market or stifles its inner workings--the old forms of statism that didn't wash economically, and certainly not politically. But government does aggressively prod markets--by planting incentives, by stirring new competition--to achieve the results he prefers.

The Silent Majority Always Endures

From "The League of Ordinary Gentlemen":

After decades of gripping tightly to a self-conception founded on Richard Nixon’s idea of the “Silent Majority“–and to be fair, that self-concept was not without objective justification–the grass roots conservatives, after a period of cognitive dissonance in which they tried to convince themselves we were still a “center right nation,” is recognizing that the Silent Majority has become the Silent Minority.

Ah, but for President Nixon the silent majority was never a grassroots conservative coalition but a center-dwelling one, people appalled by the far left's Vietnam-era shenanigans but also unmoved by purist Goldwater-Reagan conservatism. RN envisioned the U.S. not as a center-right but a moderate nation. The silent majority is always there for the picking, as President Obama may have discovered.