Business leaders plan to challenge the Tea Party

This will be fun to watch:

A slice of corporate America thinks tea partyers have overstayed their welcome in Washington and should be shown the door in next year's congressional elections.

In what could be a sign of challenges to come across the country, two U.S. House races in Michigan mark a turnabout from several years of widely heralded contests in which right-flank candidates have tried — sometimes successfully — to unseat Republican incumbents they perceive as not being conservative enough.

In the Michigan races, longtime Republican businessmen are taking on two House incumbents — hardline conservative Reps. Justin Amash and Kerry Bentivolio — in GOP primaries. The 16-day partial government shutdown and the threatened national default are bringing to a head a lot of pent-up frustration over GOP insurgents roughing up the business community's agenda.

. . . Call it the wrath of establishment Republicans and corporate America, always considered the best of friends. Since the Republican takeover of the House in 2010, they've watched the GOP insurgents slow a transportation bill and reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, block a treaty governing the high seas and stand in the way of comprehensive immigration legislation.

The final straw was the bitter budget standoff that partly shuttered the government, precipitated by Republicans like Amash and Bentivolio who enlisted early in the campaign demanding that President Barack Obama dismantle his health care law in exchange for keeping the government operating.

Even after 16 days of a shutdown, falling poll numbers for the GOP and a threatened economy-jarring default, the two broke with their House Republican leaders and voted against the final deal to reopen the government.

Long before the shutdown, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has spent tens of millions boosting mainly Republicans in congressional races, urged the GOP to fund the government and prevent a default, then double back and try and work out changes to the health care law later.

A significant number of House Republicans have given a cold-shoulder to the Chamber's agenda.

The article mentions a new political action committee - Defending Main Street - that looks to back center right candidates against the more conservative candidates backed by Heritage Action, Club for Growth and Freedom Works.

A Time for Radical Centrists

Edward Glaeser wonders if the current political environment might lead to a break out of centrist politics. He points out an unfortunate reality of politics: Rational, common sense, centrist politics are unexciting:

Our best hope is that the collision between the Tea Party and the Obama administration will explode into some serious centrism. Just as the strange cocktail of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich produced welfare reform in 1996 and a significant decline in the gross debt, to 57 percent of G.D.P. from 67 percent, the political conflict between President Obama and the Republican-controlled House seems to have created some fiscal seriousness from both parties.

Political energy rarely comes from middle. It’s easy to understand why millions of Americans could get passionate about the more generous, more just country offered by progressives from Theodore Roosevelt onward. It’s also easy to understand the passionate desire for freedom that inspired the original Tea Party and its current incarnation.

But currently, our nation needs something that doesn’t conjure a crowd so readily: common sense. We need the spirit of nation-building centrists, like Washington and Eisenhower. We need the middle way described in the Bowles-Simpson budget plan, but that middle way needs to tear off the green-eyeshade approach to budgeting and wrap itself in red, white and blue, for it is America’s best hope.

The Drift to the Right

In our discussions of elections and parties I keep drawing the bell curve which shows the mid-point of the aggregate policy preferences in the general public, but probably haven't done enough to illustrate how the mid-point can move over time. Sometimes it drifts to the left (as it did in the New Deal Era) and sometimes to the right (as it did following election of Reagan -- actually Carter).

Here's an example. This story describes the rightward drift of environmental policy. Democrats have been proposing cap and trade policies to reduce greenhouse gas emission while Republican find them extreme, but 20 years ago Republicans were pushing cap and trade over strict regulations because it was the market solution to the problem. What was one a right wing proposal is not mainstream, and unacceptable to the right.

The cap and trade bill that died in the U.S. Congress in 2010 was based on market-oriented principles that were the centerpiece of George Bush Sr.’s cap and trade policy for sulfur dioxide, enacted in 1990. It permitted maximum flexibility in achieving its goals of greenhouse gas reductions over a long time horizon, giving businesses plenty of time to adjust and adapt. The bill’s intellectual foundations were so strongly rooted in conservative economics that then-presidential candidate John McCain was a huge supporter of the measure and included it in his presidential platform.

And yet today, the Republican-led House of Representatives has voted to deny the science of climate change and strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which was granted to the agency by a 5-4 decision in the very conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The GOP-led House has proposed gutting the EPA’s budget as well. And it gets worse.

Will the Electorate Continue to Swing After 2010?

We've discussed the volatility of the electorate and how the constitutional design is meant to minimize its impact on public policy. The last several electoral cycles have shifted drastically from favoring one party to the other. Here's an argument that this shift might continue after November's elections:

One of the more remarkable things about the likely big win Republicans are headed for next month is that they're doing it without having improved their appeal to the center at all since the 2008 election.

Barack Obama defeated John McCain 60-39 with self described moderates, according to the national exit poll. Our last national generic ballot poll found Democrats ahead 58-28, showing no improvement whatsoever


It's a similar story in some of the closest Senate races. Obama only won moderates 51-46 in West Virginia. Joe Manchin has a 29 point advantage over John Raese with them. In Colorado Obama won them 63-35...Michael Bennet leads Ken Buck by a pretty identical 56-32. In Nevada his advantage was 64-33...and Harry Reid led Sharron Angle 64-28 with them on our last poll.


The fact that Republicans are winning this election without showing much appeal to moderates is another reminder that the main reason for the pending GOP onslaught is the disengagement of Democratic voters. Conservatives will make up a much larger portion of the electorate this year than they did in 2008 and that's put Republicans in a position to make big gains without even having to develop a message that's appealing to the center.

That's the reason why this year's Republican resurgence may prove to be short lived and why much of what the party gains this year could be lost again in 2012. The formula they're using for victory this year- fire up the base, forget the moderates- may work for a midterm election but it's not likely to be particularly sustainable in a Presidential year. If Republicans want the 2012 election cycle to be as enjoyable for them as the 2010 cycle has been they have a lot of work to do to broaden their base.
I've also suggested that if Republicans win Congress, and the economy continues to be sluggish (as most economists suggest) they will bear part of the blame for it and their messages will likely not resonate as much as they are now. Plus, Republican success now will mobilize Democrats in 2012. Thsi story makes the point that moderates (the center) serves as balast in the American political system and tends to shift away from whichever party is in power, especially when that party starts implementing policies that stray too far to either ideological extreme.

Liberals Unhappy With Obama

Democrats are also dealing with disaffected ideologues within their ranks. Obama has been too centrist for their taste. (These two links require subscriptions -- check in the ACC library for them.)

California's Top Two Primary

Proposition 14 passed in California and could radically change party competition in the state.

- Overview.
- Comments.

The Center Wins

Here's empirical proof that moving to the right hurt Republican Senate candidates since 2000. Efforts by movement conservatives to force the party's candidates to the right may, if not hurt the party, lower the number of seats they could otherwise win in 2010.

The Median Voter Theorem argues that elections are won in the middle of the ideological spectrum.

To Scozzafava

A new verb has been created. From the Urban Dictionary.

Scozzafava

verb -- 1) to incite internal opposition against and undermine a moderate member of a political party, usually by right wing forces. 2) to ideologically purify an organization by eliminating members who don't adhere to orthodoxy.

Story in the WaPo.

Republican Primary Battle for SBOE #9

The contest between conservatives and moderates within the Texas Republican Party will play out in a primary battle for the State Board of Education's Ninth District.

Internal Divisions within the Democrats

The Democrats have their own issues attempting to restrain activists. Democrats who want to aggressively push abortion rights and civil rights for gays and lesbians are growing impatient with centrists and party leaders concerned with the electoral implications of those positions for their party in 2010.