Nate Silver analyzes the Republican debate and sees Michele Bachmann as a breakthrough candidate, one who effectively edges Sarah Palin right off the political map.
The candidate to break news in this debate was Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who announced that she was running for president. And then she performed strongly throughout, exuding confidence, and turning her service in the House of Representatives from a potential liability (in a field that also includes governors and senators) into a strength (by emphasizing her active role in formulating policy on the major issues of the day).
The comparison between Ms. Bachmann and Sarah Palin is perhaps made too easily. But as I remarked on Twitter during the debate, if there is a constituency of voters trying to decide between the two, Ms. Bachmann has a lot to offer. She’s considerably sharper on her feet than Ms. Palin, and has more discipline. She does not have the baggage of “blood libel,” a reality show, or having prematurely quit her term as governor. Her family story — a mother to 23 foster children, as she frequently reminded us — is every bit as compelling. She has considerably better favorability ratings — Americans who are familiar with her split about evenly on whether they like her or not, which is not true for Ms. Palin. She has a geographic advantage in Iowa, has devoted more time to her presidential campaign and has a reputation as a strong fundraiser.
Of course Palin may not see it that way, Silver reminds us. Whether or not, another candidate to emerge wasn't even there: Texas governor Rick Perry, who "could potentially fulfill William F. Buckley’s commandment to Republicans: nominate the most conservative candidate who is electable." Throw Romney and Pawlenty into the mix and we have the four candidates most likely to be influential. It'll be interesting to see if this is, indeed, the twilight of the Palins.
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David Brooks who leans right the way the Pisa tower does -- thanks to faulty fundamentals -- thinks this election is about saving America from decline. But then he goes on to demonstrate that the decline began decades ago, "Republican decades ago," one might add. I keep waiting for him to declare as a centrist Democrat, aka Republican moderate.
...The core issue is the accumulation of deeper structural problems that this recession has exposed — unsustainable levels of debt, an inability to generate middle-class incomes, a dysfunctional political system, the steady growth of special-interest sinecures and the gradual loss of national vitality. ...
... Workers’ share of national income has been declining since 1983. Male wages have been stagnant for about 40 years. The American working class — those without a college degree — is being decimated, economically and socially. In 1960, for example, 83 percent of those in the working class were married. Now only 48 percent are. ...
... Voters are in the market for new movements and new combinations, yet the two parties have grown more rigid. ...
... The Republican growth agenda — tax cuts and nothing else — is stupefyingly boring, fiscally irresponsible and politically impossible. ...
And, by god, Brooks falls just short of denouncing neo-bircher and celluloid whore, Ronald Reagan.
Republican politicians don’t design policies to meet specific needs, or even to help their own working-class voters. They use policies as signaling devices — as ways to reassure the base that they are 100 percent orthodox and rigidly loyal. Republicans have taken a pragmatic policy proposal from 1980 and sanctified it as their core purity test for 2012.
As a former "lifelong Democrat," whose party decided it wouldn't survive unless it accepted the corrupt compromises that have kept the Republican party afloat since Nixon, this writer agrees with Brooks that the Dems are no better. But we part company on money. Brooks claims we're out of money. I'd say the wealth is still there and visible but not available to working America, thanks to Republican policies. Brooks wants the theories of the stiff and autocratic Hamilton. I just want to return the money to the people who have been working for it all their lives.
In neither Brooks' world nor my world is there any room for Bachmann, Romney, Pawlenty ... And who was that other guy, the one from Texas?
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Washington Post opinionator, EJ Dionne, not a fan of Michele Bachmann, nonetheless thinks she was a winner.
I didn’t expect to think that Michele Bachmann would be the big winner of tonight’s Republican debate in New Hampshire, but that seemed the obvious conclusion. She was at ease and forceful without looking at all crazy or out-of-control. It’s a sign of how far to the right the Republican Party has moved that she didn’t stand out for her extreme views. On this stage, suggesting we should just rid ourselves of the Environmental Protection Agency seemed par for the course. ...
... If President Obama was watching, nothing that happened tonight made him quake in his boots. On the contrary, it was striking that the ideas on offer were largely conservative boilerplate: There is no problem, it seems, that can’t be solved by cutting taxes, slashing government and eviscerating regulations. Not much here for the political center. And that could be a problem for the GOP in the long-run: These candidates seem to think they have to be quite right-wing to appeal to the Republican primary electorate. And that, to return to the beginning, is why Bachmann did so well. She seemed a lot like all the others, but with a little more verve. Republicans might want to contemplate what that means for them in the long run.
I certainly hope that, given their flat earth beliefs and policies, it means they're about to drop off the edge.
