When Newt crashes and burns, will the GOP be sending out for a new batch of "front-runners"?

Newt or Paul -- pick your poison.

"Truly, it is amazing how our political landscape continues to be dominated by people who have been wrong about everything for years."

-- Paul Krugman, beating up on Rep. Paul Ryan in a
NYT blogpost this morning, "Debasing the Dollar, Not"

by Ken

For the record, what prompted this latest Krugman lament inspired by the antics of the idiot Paul Ryan is yet another demonstration of the gap between Bad Paul and, well, reality. There is on the one hand the Thomson Reuters/Jefferies commodity price index, which Good Paul notes "has been trending down since the spring" (and he includes the relevant graph), and then on the other hand there was "the hearing last February in which Paul Ryan accused Ben Bernanke of debasing the currency, using rising commodity prices to argue that dangerous inflation lurked just around the corner." Which leads him first to the question "So, will Ryan demand more expansionary policies from the Fed given the sharp fall in commodity prices this year?," and then to the observation I've extracted above.

PK'S LATEST ROUND OF RYAN-BASHING, BY
THE WAY, PROMPTED SOME LOVELY COMMENTS

From Mark, in Cheyboyagen, MI: "No one else in the media cares what Ryan said. They only care about what he is going to say. Therefore, he may say whatever he wants whether it makes sense or not."

From Charley James, in Minneapolis: "What's even more amazing than talking heads still being trotted out who have been so wrong about so many things is that Paul Ryan still has the nerve to show his face in public after his 'I Wanna Kill Medicare!' fisaco. So, no, he won't be demanding expansionary policies from the Fed or The White House because commodity prices trending lower doesn't fit his narrative. Well, not much in the real world fits Rep. Ryan's narrative but that's another story."

At the moment, as DWT readers are surely aware, the Newtster has found himself on what his rivals seem to think is the wrong side of the Ryan curve, having now-famously denounced Paulie's Randian hooha as "right wing social engineering." Willard Inc., the candidate who believes in nothing except what brings him closer to what he wants in that particular moment, thinks he can crucify Newt as a "leftist."

Huh? Any DWT reader can readily rattle off a list of purely policy-related reasons -- in other words, separating out his loathsome character and his blatant personal dishonesty (as if separating that stuff out were a good idea in a presidential wannabe) -- why Newt is ideologically way too zonked-out extreme to hold any public office, let alone the presidency. As Tim Dickinson notes in a current Rolling Stone piece, "The GOP's Crackpot Agenda," that I got to peek at in the physical-therapy waiting room:

The Republican Party -– dominated by hardliners still cocky after the electoral sweep of 2010 -– has backed its entire slate of candidates into far-right corners on everything from the environment and immigration to taxation and economic austerity. Whether the GOP opts for Mitt Romney or an "anti-Mitt" is almost entirely beside the point. On the major policy issues of the day, there's barely a ray of sunshine between any of the viable Republicans, not counting those who have committed the sin of libertarianism (Ron Paul) or moderation (Jon Huntsman).

Tim backs this up with testimony from a truly expert witness on crackpot agendas:

Take it from one of the most divisive figures in the history of GOP presidential politics: "Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off," the televangelist Pat Robertson warned recently. "They're forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election." Robertson knows fringe politics: In 1988, he ran for president on a platform that included abolishing the Department of Education and adopting a constitutional amendment to prohibit deficit spending. At the time, Robertson was dismissed as an unelectable candidate of the far right. Today, he would be somewhere to the left of Texas governor Rick Perry. And that way lies ruin: "You'll appeal to the narrow base, and they'll applaud the daylights out of what you're saying," Robertson cautioned. "And then you hit the general election and they say, 'No way!' They've got to stop this!"

But Republican candidates show no signs of moderating their positions. In fact, with the first primary contests rapidly approaching, all of the top contenders are tripping over themselves in a race to the far right.

Far be it from me to predict what's going to come out of a process with such heavy input from the Republican "base," but I would offer the observation that ol' Newt's front-runner status may be no more long-lasting than that of any of the front-runners who've preceded him in this campaign cycle. And the problem is that all these nightmarish debates, which the party and the candidates thought would be a great way to give their candidates widespread exposure, have, well, given their candidates widespread exposure. You or I might not be able to guess what constitutes "too much" for a Republican basenik, but one after another the juggernaut riders have crossed it.

Perhaps pundits think that Newt will be an exception because he is, after all, a familiar figure on the party's national scene. But I'm not so sure that party rank-and-filers really remember, and in any case the 2011-12 model Newt is so awash in craziness and corruption that it's hard to imagine him standing up to scrutiny. Ironically, though, as with poor "Brokeback Rick" Perry, whose campaign began to unravel over devastating evidence that he was insufficiently insane on the immigration issue, Newt's greatest vulnerability may be over one issue on which he is, or at least was, least crazy. And there's a real chance that there may be a price for the party to pay -- and I don't mean with us radical-left liberals.

Our expert witness here is Thomas Edsall, whom I tend to think of as a washed-up political-news hack. Wikipedia says more politely that he's "best known for his 25 years covering national politics for the Washington Post." He's since become political editor of HuffPost as well as a professor at Coumbia's School of Journalism, where I see "he holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professorship in Public Affairs Journalism." I shudder at the thought that he's teaching aspiring journalists to do what he's spent his career doing, but then, what did I think goes on in the big-time J-schools?

Naturally the NYT glommed onto such a journalistic treasure, signing Tom on to bolster their election coverage. (That's right, girls and boys, he's going to make it even better!) And today he's got a blogpost that's more interesting than you might guess from the unfortunate title, "Let's Not Talk About Inequality." If you saw a title like that on, say, a news index, you would think that Tom is expressing the viewpoint that we should stop talking about inequality, and I for one, given my inherently uncharitable disposition toward him, would have had no trouble believing this was the case. In fact, I assumed it was.

But no, the title is meant to characterize the view of the Republican candidates, and I doubt that many of them would consider themselves unfairly characterized. And Tom is here, bringing the full weight of his journalistic and professorial experience to bear on the proposition that this is, from an electoral standpoint in the year 2012, nuts.

Tom, you see, places great stock in the insight -- which I suppose is probably true -- that the professional Democratic Party has essentially written off the white working-class vote, and has taken to plotting electoral strategies whereby a sufficient coalition of other groups can be put together to offset the drubbing Democrats can be expected to take among this onetime Democratic core group -- "Reagan Democrats," we might call them -- as long as the drubbing doesn't exceed that taken by John Kerry, voters who he says have been won over over the last four decades by "the right’s claim that liberalism creates a deterrent to personal initiative and generates an ethos of dependency."

Of course some of us might argue that the solution for Democrats would have been to develop credible, progressive policies and programs that would actually work to improve those people's lives and then figure out how to sell those policies and programs. But the professional Democratic Party would never be caught attempting anything as subversive, not to mention difficult, as that.

Nevertheless, Tom argues, things may be different in 2012, "as the aftereffects of the financial collapse of 2008 continue to batter the nation with high unemployment and low growth."

How does the laid-off 55-year-old factory employee “who worked hard and played by the rules,” looking for a job in a market where there are 4.2 applicants for every opening, find comfort when he turns on the TV to see Newt Gingrich declare that “you’ve got to become more employable” or Mitt Romney arguing that

the American people, edified by American principles, will rise to the occasion again, securing our safety, our prosperity and our peace.

One of these principles is a merit-based society. In a merit-based society, people achieve success and rewards through hard work, education, risk taking and even a little luck.

The conservative response to crisis offered by Gingrich and Romney fails to address the anxiety and anger of those millions of Americans who suddenly find themselves with no job, no health insurance and no money to pay the mortgage.

This question will set the terms of the debate for the 2012 election.

Tom describes the mysterious appearance of "a competing narrative originating on the left, a narrative that describes an American economy sharply skewed towards the affluent, with rising inequality, a dwindling middle class and the persistence of long-term unemployment." And just as Tim Dickinson went to the source when he brought in the Rev. Pat Robertson to testify about right-wing crackpottery, Tom Edsall turns to the heaviest hitter among heavy-hitting right-wing messagers.

Describing the influence of the Occupy Wall Street movement on the electorate, Frank Luntz, a conservative consultant who specializes in framing political messages, told the Republican Governors Association meeting in Orlando on Nov. 30, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”

Luntz contended that shifting voter attitudes require Republican officials to carefully monitor and change their language. The public is now favorable to raising taxes on the rich, he said, but “if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no.”

Tom Toles, in today's Washington Post (click to enlarge)

Nevertheless (yes, once again "nevertheless"), the GOP candidates are racing to trap themselves with a cutthroat competition for primacy in right-wing doctrinal purity, "even when such orthodoxy is a liability in the general election."

Romney, desperate to discredit Gingrich’s surging bid, is setting the trap by attempting to create a new conservative litmus test that Gingrich cannot pass. Romney wants to make support for the radical Ryan budget -- passed earlier this year by the House but rejected by the Senate -- a must for every Republican candidate.

And so the immediate challenge for the Newtster, assuming he chooses to play by the rules in force, is to prove that he's even more committed than Willard Inc. to the Ryan plan, which Tom points out the non partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorites has reported "would result in a massive transfer of resources from the broad majority of Americans to the nation's wealthiest individuals" and would "eliminate traditional Medicare, most of Medicaid, and all of the Children's Health Insurance Program," replacing them with vouchers to be used with private-sector insurers.

Democrats are delighted to see Romney put the Ryan budget once again into the headlines. “When you go through what’s in the Ryan budget to voters in focus groups, they are horrified by it,” Democratic pollster [Geoff] Garin said. “The inequities of the Ryan budget are not just striking, they are shocking to people. To make Medicare much less affordable while continuing to add on new tax breaks for people at the very top is mind-blowing.”

It would be difficult to imagine the Republican establishment allowing the presidential nomination contest -- in a climate of stark economic adversity for millions of unemployed Americans -- to be defined by a fight between Romney and Gingrich over the Ryan budget. But already that vaunted establishment has arguably damaged the party’s prospects by failing to persuade a credible, compelling and charismatic competitor to enter the nomination fight, leaving the field to candidates widely viewed by party loyalists as vulnerable.

Of course it's hard to imagine anyone better equipped to squander the opportunity being handed to them than those "centrist" Democratic strategists who have worked so hard to make voters think that Democrats are just like Republicans except maybe just a little different -- mostly in that they don't seem to really believe in much of anything.

I don't know that Frank Luntz has that much pull with the crackpot GOP candidates. But I think the people who bankroll Republican campaigns know better, and when it comes to the general election, whichever of these stiffs winds up the nominee, the Money People are likely to have more influence, even if, ironically, it means formulating messages that cast them in a less than flattering light. You do what you have to do to win, and then when you win, you do what it was you meant to do in the first place.

#