GOP Presidential Contenders Compete To Win Over “The Political Army Of The Lord”
Workers remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building after Superior Court Justice Roy Moore refused to take it down in 2003
So you can add another car to the crazy train that is the 2012 Republican presidential nominating contest. No, I’m not talking about last week’s sensation, Donald Trump. He’s a pretty conventional figure compared to the latest would-be president, former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who is currently barnstorming through Iowa after announcing an exploratory committee.
You may remember Judge Moore as the man who was forced from his judicial post after refusing to remove a gigantic monument to the Ten Commandments from his courthouse. He was also known for abrasive comments from the bench about homosexuality as contrary to God’s will, which in Moore’s opinion was dispositive. A martyr for theocrats everywhere, Moore spent some time hauling his monument around Alabama before launching two notably unsuccessful gubernatorial races — coming in a bad second in 2006’s Republican primary and a bad fourth in 2010 — and becoming a minor fixture at tea party events.
Moore was undoubtedly drawn to Iowa by that state’s furor over same-sex marriage, decreed legal by a 2009 state Supreme Court ruling. Iowa’s powerful Christian Right movement has made overturning that decision Job One, beginning with a successful effort in 2010 to remove three of the seven jurists responsible for it. It’s one of the few places left where Republicans don’t try to ignore the whole issue of gay rights as a divisive loser of an issue (which is why presidential wannabees like Tim Pawlenty have anachronistically come out against the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell). For Moore, it must have felt more like “home” than home.
Before writing off Moore as a kook trying to horn in on the spotlight of a presidential race, consider the company he’s keeping on his tour of the first-in-the-nation-caucuses state: former state legislator Danny Carroll. Carroll was co-chairman (with three-time gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats) of Mike Huckabee’s successful 2008 Caucus campaign, and more recently, signed on as a lobbyist for Vander Plaats’ new Christian Right umbrella group, The Family Leader. He’s a reasonably big deal in Iowa GOP circles, and by no means someone who howls at the moon.
For all I know, Carroll sees something in the crusty Alabama judge that others haven’t seen. Or maybe Judge Moore is a convenient stalking horse for Huckabee, designed to keep The Faithful loose and out of anyone else’s camp, in case Huck ultimately decides to run.
Regardless of Carroll’s (or Moore’s) personal motives, it’s likely the national Republican chattering class will dismiss the Judge’s campaign as a joke even worse than Trump’s. Or, it may be said, there is now such a crowd on the far right that opportunities are opening up for more moderate possibilities like Romney, T-Paw or an establishment-backed candidate-yet-to-be-named.
But I’d like to suggest another theory: the Christian/tea party right in Iowa is big enough, powerful enough, and politically sophisticated enough to hold its own caucus-within-a-caucus (well, caucuses, to be technical about it), an intramural contest to determine which candidate will actually represent the cause when Iowa Republicans make their final commitments before Caucus Night. Proven zealots like Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and now Moore, will joust with more suspect supplicants like T-Paw, Newt Gingrich — and maybe even Donald Trump! — over the next few months, with someone emerging as the designated favorite of the political army of the Lord. That is arguably what happened in Iowa in 2008, when Huckabee and Sen. Sam Brownback fought to become the Christian Right alternative to Mitt Romney, with Huckabee becoming The Man only after he out-organized Brownback at the State Party Straw Poll in Ames during the summer.
Moore’s candidacy may not ultimately have any direct influence on what happens next winter in Iowa, when conservative evangelicals and conservative Catholics get together to shape the 2012 Republican nominating process.
But he could indeed intensify the competition for Christian Right voters. And just as importantly, he could definitely serve as a symbol of the ideological and psychological gap between rigorous conservative activists and the mainstream political commentariat. Most of the latter think Moore is a crazy person. But most of the Iowa audiences before which Moore speaks will consider him an authentic if polarizing voice expressing the Word of God. That’s a pretty big gulf in perception, but also a pretty good reflection of the real differences Americans experience in how they view their leaders.
By: Ed Kilgore, Managing Editor of The Democratic Strategist and Senior Editor, Progressive Policy Institute. Article published in The Atlantic, April 20, 2011: Photo by Tami Chappell (Reuters)
What Does The Tea Party Want?….The New Litmus Test
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen argue that the Tea Party redefined the purpose of the GOP as opposition to spending:
The Republican Party is undergoing a messy but unmistakable 20-month transformation from fanatically anti-Obama to fanatically anti-spending, providing top party officials a new and intriguing playbook for recapturing the White House in 2012.
To understand the current evolution, flash back to late spring of 2009. The GOP was disoriented and adrift, its leadership void filled by the bombastic voices of Palin, Beck and Rush Limbaugh. There was no common conservative cause, beyond fear and loathing of Obama. No wonder swing voters were so down on them.
But the tea party, treated at first by the media as exotics, forced Republicans to focus almost exclusively on the size of government. By the time the 2010 elections rolled around, tea party activists and most independent voters were completely aligned on the need to cut, cut, cut.
Midterm election results showed that this approach offers the GOP its best – and maybe only – hope of keeping the interests of independents and tea party activists aligned enough to beat Obama.
The new litmus tests for GOP presidential hopefuls are support for repealing “Obamacare” and taking a cleaver to government spending. If a presidential candidate could harness the smaller-government conservatism, temper it enough to avoid a blatant overreach and articulate a vision for a prosperous future for the country, it’s not hard to imagine swing voters finding such a person appealing.
There’s a superficial appeal to this story. But the evidence that Tea Party activists want to cut spending — at least actual spending programs — is sparse. Polls show that Tea Party supports overwhelmingly oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The main thrust of Tea Party opinion is not the belief that Obama has spent too much money, but the belief that Obama has spent too much money on people unlike them:
More than half say the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration favors blacks over whites — compared with 11 percent of the general public.
They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.
Here’s another cut, showing the Tea Party’s greater comfort with inequality of opportunity and stronger belief that the government devotes too many resources to minorities:
It’s a revolt against the composition of government much more than the level.
Now, it’s true that Republicans aren’t exactly translating this blueprint into action, but they’re not exactly flouting it, either. There is always a generalized antipathy toward spending amongst Republican and swing voters, but it disappears when the subject turns to actual government programs. Usually Republicans decide to just cut taxes for the rich instead. Here’s is the one part of the article proposing a defined policy change:
Even Ralph Reed, the Republican operative most tapped in to evangelicals, reflected the new GOP mindset when he gave this surprising wish list for the next presidential race: “In a perfect world, I’d like to hear the Republican nominee run on a platform that takes the capital gains tax to zero over five years.” Reed, who summoned several of the presidential candidates to Iowa for his Faith & Freedom Coalition this week, made it clear that Christian conservatives will still need to be catered to, but added that his side will understand the nominee’s need to focus on swing voters.
So an article putatively about the GOP redefining itself as an anti-spending party has one actual programmatic detail, and it’s: a zeroing out of the capital gains tax. In the name of appealing to swing voters — who, in fact, oppose tax cuts for the rich. Meet the new boss…
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 14, 2011
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