Patrick Ruffini's blog

That title is provocative, and deliberately so. I'd like to play Devil's Advocate and argue that blindly going along with the Dump Sanford crowd could seriously damage Republican elected officials' ability to weather future, hopefully less serious storms.

At the core of the Sanford and Ensign episodes is the cloud of "hypocrisy" that hangs over any Republican who strays from the bonds of their marriage. (Quickly forgetting that all who commit adultery are hypocrites, having taken a solemn vow of marriage.) Because Democrats are perceived as more socially libertine, they get off easier.

This is a structural disadvantage that, on the margins, hurts Republican officeholders, forcing them into resignation or disgrace more easily than their equally adulterous Democratic counterparts.

Simply put, it is a strategic error to sanctify the idea that it's worse when Republicans cheat. The hypocrisy charge exacts a double penalty on Republicans where none exists for Democrats -- first, in the accusation of hypocrisy itself, and second, in the media whipping social conservatives into a frenzy in a bid to belatedly "enforce" their moral code -- exactly the thing the secular media believes you shouldn't do 364 days out of the year -- to hound a Republican out of office. 

When the #AllBarackChannel realizes something is going wrong, it's probably time to pay attention:

Obama's spending proposals and a record-breaking national debt inherited from President Bush that is projected to grow could be Obama's political Achilles heels, and one reason he often underlines fiscal prudence as a top priority.

The percentage of people in a Pew Research Center poll out today who expressed approval for the way Obama is handling the economy slipped to 52 percent from 60 percent in April.

Recent NBC/Wall Street Journal and CBS/New York Times polls showed that nearly six in 10 people said the Obama administration is not doing enough to reduce the deficit, and the Pew poll showed about the same percentage disapprove of the government spending billions to keep General Motors and Chrysler in business.

"They worry that government is going to be too involved in the economy and the everyday lives of the American people," said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

Obama faces this conundrum: while the country voted resoundingly for a political change from George W. Bush, Obama continues to preside over a country that is fundamentally conservative not simply in the center-right political sense, but in its skepticism of big structural changes to the basic nature of the economy.

When hopeandchange is inextricably tied to disturbing and unsettling changes like auto nationalization and mountains of new debt, the whole "change" mantra tends to lose its luster.

The fear right now is not that the government will do too little, but that it will do too much. Popular resistance to any action to support the domestic auto industry runs counter to the natural political instinct to "do something" to help the little guy keep his job. The American people are way out ahead of Obama and the Republicans because of a basic sense that nationalizing industry is just not something we do here in America, not even temporarily. This is that basic don't-rock-the-boat mentality speaking, I think.

Furthermore, what if health care is effectively tied in to this? The proposition that the President is going to do for health care what he's doing for the auto industry seems pretty toxic, and has a kernel of plausibility, in that new government-owned entitites are springing up all over the place competing in the private market. It's not a huge narrative leap to suggest that neither the government standing behind your new muffler nor it competing in the health insurance market are particularly well-advised ideas.

It is here that I think the seeds of a Republican political recovery in 2010 are born. Republicans don't need to convince the electorate that Obama is the second coming of Karl Marx. They need merely to establish that if one has any doubt that the stimulus, or Government Motors, or health care will work out exactly as planned, the only prudent thing is to vote Republican as a hedge. There has been sweeping economic change these last few months, some of it created by the previous Administration, and little of it good. Sorting out the mess will require a huge national effort, not just one party. And times of sweeping change require accountability, not its complete absence.

In Virginia today, this lost: 

How many times do I have to say it? In the modern campaign, early money and establishment support matters far, far less than it used to, and could actually turn out to be a handicap -- particularly when money becomes the story. 

Campaigns like McAuliffe's that are focused above all else on money, and that put out self-congratulatory press releases about their "grassroots organization" and their Noah's Ark of big-name consultants, frequently forget that money can't buy two other M's: message and momentum. As a campaign manager, I'd much, much rather be running the guy with a message and no money versus the guy with money and no message. Why? Because the guy with a message will eventually find momentum, which will deliver all the money he needs when he needs it. 

Of course, political consultants (and, disclosure: I'm one), like early money and quarterly numbers stories because they determine whether and how much they will get paid. But the reality is that money rarely translates into votes, particularly when fundraising is a fig leaf covering up glaring flaws in a candidate's argument. Ask Terry McAuliffe, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani (who raised more than any other Republican from individuals, all for a single delegate) what having big, early bundler money gets you.  

I didn't predict Creigh Deeds would be the nominee until last week, but I did have a strong sense that Terry McAuliffe would crater once this DC fixer met grassroots reality. Placing me squarely in the analytical minority inside the Beltway, I tweeted this on January 29th: 

The debate over whether and how much Senate Republicans should oppose Sonia Sotomayor is grinding along. I personally don't think it's the worst thing in the world if Republicans got more aggressive than they currently seem to be comfortable with, and for the following reasons. 

Not Blowing the Whistle on a Solid Liberal Like Sotomayor Creates a Bad Precedent for Decades to Come. The left is trying to spin the Sotomayor nomination as a pick in the mold of what moderate conservative John Roberts was to Bush -- a moderate liberal "slam dunk." In reality, she is more like the liberal Sam Alito, whose strongly conservative tendencies were seen as a suitable replacement upon Rehnquist's death (remembering that Roberts first had to clear a lower conservative bar to replace Sandra Day O'Connor). Is there any doubt that Sotomayor wouldn't at least tie Ginsburg and Stevens as the biggest liberal on the Court?

The calculus is this: if you let a leftist judge sail through where an Alito would get at least 40 no votes you create a precedent whereby it's considered okay for Obama or future Presidents to nominate far-leftists with impunity, while conservatives always have to jump through extra hoops. The President gets his judges most of the time, but differences are made at the margins.  Republican Presidents will always have an incentive to be more cautious or play games with Supreme Court picks, as Bush tried to do in nominating Harriet Miers, which was initially seen as a play to placate Harry Reid, who wanted a non-judge.

In past years, Senate Democrats have been far, far more aggressive in stalling Bush judicial picks than even Republicans were in the late Clinton years. Republicans played up their light treatment of liberals Ginsburg and Breyer during the 2005 court fights, even coining the term "The Ginsburg Precedent" to legitimize bipartisan support for an ideologue with judicial credentials, but where did this get us exactly? The media's playing up the danger of opposing a minority is cruelly ironic in light of the Democrats' shameful treartment of Miguel Estrada and Janice Rogers Brown, and their specific strategy of Borking minority conservatives to lower courts to head off a future Supreme Court pick. Schumer and Co. play for keeps, and Senate Republicans should not be afraid to do the same when we are talking about lifetime appointments. 

We Can't Be Afraid of Legitimate Criticism of the "First" Minority. Much hay has been made of how delicately Republicans will have to handle the first Latina nominee, as though the media assumes that the GOP's first instinct would be to race-bait.

Well, here's some news: Sotomayor is not the only "first" minority on the political scene today the media routinely shields with a protecting coating because of the genuine historicity of their rise. Another lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Many of the same reasons for treating Sotomayor "delicately" were brought up as reasons for treating Obama delicately last year, so much so that the heroic self-conception of the press as a check on the government has become disturbingly laughable.

Republicans cannot shy away from legitimate critcisms of Sotomayor's job performance and judicial philosophy, just as we will have to learn to more effectively criticize Obama. If you concede the point that criticism of an historic, "first" minority is out of bounds, that doesn't say much for GOP prospects for the next eight years.

At the same time, we will need to ostracize those who would bring ethnicity into the equation. If Republicans don't like the tenor of the opposition, we should not be afraid to nuke the bad actors on our side while amping up criticism of Sotomayor's legal record. The trick is not so much being delicate but being rough both with the left and certain people on the right to insulate against charges that our opposition is anything other than policy-based. The ideal messaging to my mind would be as follows:

1. Tom Tancredo is an idiot.
2. Sotomayor's decisions, her stated penchant for "making policy" from the bench, and her high reversal rate among those she aspires to join all render her nomination profoundly troubling.
3. Tom Tancredo is still an idiot.

Remember also: Supreme Court fights are inherently elite D.C. fights. Don't expect voters, even Latino voters, to passionately engage. Most people correctly perceive the Court as being far removed and even irrelevant to their daily life and whether they will keep their job -- and that's as it should be. Has there ever been a mass movement for or against a Court nominee, even a Thurgood Marshall, a Sandra Day O'Connor, or a Clarence Thomas?

During the election, the groups functionality on My.BarackObama.com was a remarkably efficient way to communicate to Democratic activists on the local level. Republicans wanting to volunteer for McCain-Palin signed a sheet at county victory headquarters, and might or might not get a call back. If you wanted to get plugged into the Obama campaign, all you had to do was sign up to your local group online, and a local organizer would send out regular e-mails with volunteer opportunities, which if printed out would be something like 10 pages long.

Ever since, the group listservs have served as an EKG of sorts for the movement. It's not so surprising that activity is way down from the election. In one Gmail inbox I used to track groups in swing states, MyBO group emails went from 4,200 messages in October to just under 300 in the last 30 days -- a decline of 93%. However, the content too is considerably less upbeat. Here's part of a message I got to my local group summing up recent election results and looking forward to the June Virginia primary:

Let's prove that 2008 wasn't a fluke because of the cult of Obama....the long term demographic trends are in our favor but WE CAN'T BRING CENSUS AND POLLING DATA TO THE BALLOT BOX and declare victory.

...

So far this year there have been several special elections in Virginia and the results haven't been good....WE RECENTLY LOST TWO CITY COUNCIL SEATS IN ALEXANDRIA (voted 72% for Obama) and came close to losing Brian Moran's Delegate seat and Rep. Gerry Connolly's Chairmanship of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors (home of 1 million people).  Because of EXTREMELY LOW TURNOUT these races came down to a handful of votes as the ELECTORATE OF THE "PAST" DECIDED THE WINNER.

On a similar note, PRESIDENT OBAMA NEEDS US to get involved in the upcoming HEALTH CARE REFORM BATTLE.  So, keep in mind that elections might require the most work for the "community organizer" in us, but WE NEED TO STAY ENGAGED IN OUR COMMUNITY TO GET THE RESULTS WE WANT after our candidates get elected.

The all-caps exhortations seem kind of.... forced, no? Like it isn't as easy anymore without Obama on the ballot. As the e-mail accurately notes, there is a partisan realignment of sorts going on in Northern Virginia local elections, with Republicans coming within one percent of capturing the chairmanship of the Fairfax Board of Supervisors, a Republican picking up the supervisor seat of the newly elected chair in a quite Democratic, close-in district, a pickup of two seats on the Alexandria City Council, and the almost inexplicable near-win of Brian Moran's old House of Delegates seat.

Looking forward, the e-mail sounds an ominous note. Northern Virginia was ground zero in the statewide shift to Obama last November, yet the implication is that Democrats have sat on their hands ever since, content in their victory. There is fear that this complacency might threaten the Obama push on health care and other issues.

Another data point is the DNC continuing to lag the RNC in monthly fundraising, despite the incumbent advantage. Remember that the Obama e-mail list has been brought in-house at the DNC, and fundraising returns from THE LIST (a.k.a. "the 13 million") count towards the DNC's bottom line. And yet, the same fearsome fundraising machine that utterly blew the doors off the GOP last year can't keep pace with the RNC's aging direct mail house file.

There is an inherent problem with "organizing" while in power and it's by no means unique to Obama. It's perhaps an early manifestation of the restlessness that gripped the conservative base in the latter Bush years (and the liberal base in the latter Clinton years). No matter what the organizational advantages were that were "banked" during the election, it's very, very difficult to transfer them into a "movement" to defend a power hegemony in Washington, D.C. The Bush people tried this in 2005-06 after building quite the machine during the 2004 re-election, and fell short of their lofty goals. Electoral machines don't transfer that well to non-electoral situations when people aren't in the mood for community organizing.

Nor does the Internet, which I've written quite a bit about, solve this problem. If anything, the same forces that make it easier for movements to form make it easier for them to de-mobilize after the fact, as the next big thing is always just around the corner. The yawning chasm between the burning passions of an election campaign and second-order movements (like Organizing for America is now) is especially apparent in the friction-free market for activism that it is the Internet.

Parting thought: Was Obama '08 simply the biggest flash mob ever assembled, rather than a "movement?"

Full Obama organizer e-mail after the jump.

Unless you've been living in a cave or something, you've heard that Charlie Crist is running for the U.S. Senate from Florida.

This is supposed to be great news. No credible Democrat will now run. And this will save the national party from investing lots of money in holding a seat in a swing state. The logic is impeccable. 

Except for the fact that with Crist out of state politics, it's open season on the Florida Governor's mansion. And holding on there is far from a sure thing, with old warhorse Bill McCullom the likely GOP nominee going up against much buzzed about Dem CFO Alex Sink. 

We might say that the Governorship of Florida is not Washington's problem -- except this is the same sort of short-term DC-centered thinking that gives us establishment favorites inimical to the grassroots. The GOP's revival will not come from Washington or from the Senate. It will come from the states. From an overarching party balance sheet perspective, we need to evaluate the potential loss of the Florida statehouse before stating whether Crist's move is a good thing. 

Florida is one of the few places left with a thriving Republican state party and multiple plausible statewide officeholders waiting in the wings. I would not have minded a competitive Republican primary between Connie Mack and Marco Rubio -- because either could win the seat -- combined with a safe Crist re-elect. The conservative legislature in Tallahassee has largely restrained Crist from enacting Obamaism in Florida. 

On the one hand, I'm glad that candidate recruitment seems to be going pretty darn well in the Senate. However, my antennae stand on end when these recruits are plucked from useful and key positions in the states, because those officeholders are strategically more important to party revival. The class of 1994 was packed with Newt Gingrich/GOPAC recruits from the late '80s for mayors, county commissioners, and state legislatures. Ultimately, we'll be able to tell more stories about successful Republican governance if we can point to a few jurisdictions we actually control, rather than being a slightly more effective opposition on Capitol Hill. 

Republicans looking for a comeback have yet to come to terms with a basic fact in today's polling: Obama's strongly favorable personal ratings.

Too much of what passes for sea changes in public opinion on policy are in fact residual effects of a narrow partisan advantage magnified by the huge personal popularity of that party's leader. This is how JFK's political position was never seriously dented or in doubt. Or how Ronald Reagan always seemed to bounce back from serious political crises. In Reagan's case, the Gipper's personal magnetism created an opportunity to move the country to the right. Obama is now doing the same for the left.

The tale of the tape is indeed telling here. Obama's personal popularity stayed remarkably stable throughout the course of the campaign, and the average unfavorable rating barely ever cracked 35%. Obama the campaigner looks downright polarizing compared to Obama the President, who now sports a 65/25 fav/unfav in the Pollster.com average.

Why is this important? Republicans right now haven't the slightest idea of how to reduce the President's appeal because they've never actually done it before. It would be one thing if Obama had become a controversial figure during the campaign, like Bill Clinton did in 1992, providing fodder for a comeback once he did get into office, but that possibility scarcely exists today.

While personality may not be everything, and real-world policy outcomes provide opportunities for inflection points, it rarely ever works out that a President's policy agenda is unsuccessful while he remains personally popular. Yes, there are weird situations where a President might be personally loathed (Clinton post-Monica) but politically successful, but not (that I know of) the other way around.

While attempts to remake Republican policy may be all well and good, to pretend the American people will listen to new policy ideas in a vacuum, without reference to their satisfaction (or lack thereof) with Obama is silly.

This hopelessness with respect to Obama's popularity might be cause for more long-ball type thinking and for cultivating charismatic young leaders who too can put an attractive face on conservative ideas, not for seeking short-term tactical wins. Paradoxically, the more irrelevant Republicans become, the easier it is (or should be) to think outside the box. And it is in this intellectual ferment that a comeback will be born.

Arlen Specter's departure has triggered the predictable media outcry attacking the Republican Party as an increasingly insular conservative rump, a regional party at best with no foothold in the Northeast.

That is one narrative. But there's a different story being told by the likely Republican lineup of Senate candidates in 2010. It's a story of our best pickup opportunities coming in blue states from more moderate Republicans, not from easy layups in red states represented by Democrats (of which there are many). And by and large, these candidacies are being embraced by conservatives, chief among them Mike Castle (DE), Mark Kirk (IL), and Rob Simmons (CT) (disclosure, I work on the last race).

Arlen Specter's erratic behavior in the last week is proof he needed to go. But this doesn't change the fact that there needs to be a functional relationship between the conservative and moderate wings of the party, and that any situation where a blue state Republican is ipso facto disparaged as a RINO is a dysfunctional one not conducive to building a majority led by the right.

I wasn't happy with Collins and Snowe's votes on the stimulus, but it is useful to make this distinction between the Maine Senators and Specter. For them, one gets the sense that it's not about ego or entitlement. They are genuinely moderate-to-liberal Republicans (moreso Snowe) representing a deep blue state that just legalized gay marriage through the legislative process.

If it's a choice between Lindsey Graham, a headline-grabbing conservative-hating conservative, or an honest, workmanlike moderate like Collins who will not go out of their way to rip the party to pieces in the press, sign me up for the moderate. Both parties will have their moderates. And if we keep ours in line and grab some of theirs, that's the surest sign we're winning (see: card check). If we ever find ourselves in the position where moderates can't vouch for a center-right governing agenda, we are in trouble.

There is a categorical difference between egomaniacs or iconoclasts like Specter, Chafee, and frankly Lieberman who fancy themselves Senators-for-life and think of themselves as entirely above party, and those who understand that parties and ideological blocs are vital to shifting the political center of gravity. Yes, they won't be with us on stuff like earmarks, and yes, we'll razz them about that. But you know what? No intellectually honest person could ever call them a Specter. We need to take back seats in places like North Dakota and Arkansas to allow the natural Republican small state majority in the Senate to reassert itself. But I wouldn't mind planting a flag in the blue states either. And that is going to take a certain type of candidate.

For those of us who came of age politically after Reagan was President, Jack Kemp was, if not Reagan, then the next best thing. He was arguably the most consequential and electric conservative between Reagan and Newt. Had Kemp run for President in 1996, I would have been his first volunteer (I missed '88). Of course, Kemp's contributions to the cause of freedom long predated that time, having helped Reagan break the grip of an oppressive marginal tax regime.

What made Kemp different is that he had an original idea of what conservatism could be. The post-Reagan period leading up to the Contract with America was a period of intellectual ferment for the movement. Kemp led the way in advancing a conservative idea that could appeal to non-traditional Republicans, with enterprise zones and school choice lifting more of the poor into the middle class. It was compassionate conservatism -- but actually conservative. 

The Republican Party in the '90s then faced many of the demographic problems it does now. Perhaps in contrast to today, there was an actual good-faith attempt made to solve those problems, led by Kemp. Building a GOP that could appeal to urban areas may not have been the most logical next step politically, but it created an ambitiousness in the realm of ideas that we lack today. In the '90s, we were electing Republican mayors in big cities like Rudy Giuliani, Steve Goldsmith, and Bret Schundler who created a model for how conservatives could govern deep in Democratic terrain. 

With the battle in the GOP today being between no change and cosmetic change, we would do well to look to Jack Kemp, who was a big part of the sea-change that transformed the party in the late '70s and was never afraid to advance unorthodox ideas in the years that followed. 

RIP. 

With the Specter defection, there has understandably been a lot of handwringing within the party about where we go next. The "modernizers" are latching onto this as a rejection of the so-called "party of no" and calling for a more forward lean on positive alternatives to the Democrats.

The Republican Party will only fully come back as a party of ideas and solutions. But let's not kid ourselves: this will not happen in 2010. This is not so much because it isn't possible for the GOP to be the party of ideas before then, or because victory or significant gains aren't likely, but because the public granted the Democrats a sweeping mandate in 2008 and the public's judgment on 2010 and likely 2012 will by definition be a referendum on that seminal fact. 

Today the mandate was cemented. The Democrats now have full control over Washington, D.C. They can now break the filibuster. And any failure to do so is not the result of GOP "obstruction" but of self-beclowning Democratic overreach of the sort they couldn't possibly hope to get away with if any semblance of a balance of power existed.

The Democrats are now fully responsible for what happens in Washington. And though it is necessary that the GOP go above and beyond to demonstrate their eventual fitness to govern, their first responsibility right now as the loyal opposition is to hold the majority in check. And that will entail a lot of "no" votes -- and persistent explanation of why the "no" votes will lead to better outcomes for ordinary Americans.

I've written before that before the GOP can be an acceptable alternative, Democrats must first be discredited. Before they vote us in, people need to have a reason to kick them out. Democrats did not have a policy agenda in 2006, but won on the weight of GOP failures. And though the Contract with America was a model of proactively setting an agenda from the opposition, it would not have succeeded absent the context of forty years of Democratic failure.

Do not read this post as pushback against the idea that the GOP needs to be more solutions oriented, but shiny happy solutionsfests will not be enough given the position we are in now. If the GOP offers solutions, but does not offer a systematic critque of why Democratic "solutions" are wrong and will fail, the electorate will simply vote for the "solutions" they know over the ones they don't. Modeling ideal governance before doing the job of an effective opposition is putting the cart before the horse.