More Americans approve of polygamy than of Congress. A February CBS News/ New York Times poll found just 10 percent of respondents approved of Congress’s job performance. A recent poll from the same source found 11 percent of respondents thought polygamy “morally acceptable.” Other polls have found that the “U.S. going communist” has 11 percent support—meaning that concept has more fans than Congress has. But here’s the paradox: While the approval rating for Congress has hit an all-time low, well over 90 percent of incumbent House members routinely win re-election. Even in the Tea Party election of 2010, 86 percent of House incumbents were returned to office. How can this be? It’s because the game is rigged in favor of incumbents, with more than four out of five congressional districts a lock for one party or another. Incumbent gerrymandering and enormous campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists make it nearly impossible to dislodge members short of major scandal. The general elections in which they cruise to victory time and time again are really fake fights, like the ones in pro wrestling. A new group called the Campaign for Primary Accountability (CFPA) plans to shake up this stagnant system. Its key insight is that incumbents who are ethically challenged, lazy, or ideologically mismatched to their district can be beaten—but in party primaries. And it has already had some impact on this year’s elections. “The way to regain control of Washington is to regain control of Congress,” says Curtis Ellis, the group’s spokesman. “Only 10 percent of voters normally participate in primaries, so if you can increase turnout for a credible challenger, you can either beat them or send them a message they can’t take voters for granted. All we want is competitive elections.” The group—one of those independent “super PACS” inspired by the unshackling of campaign finance in Citizens United —is funded by a collection of wealthy backers and small donors who feel frozen out of politics now and say underdog challengers deserve a chance to compete. One target of the group—15-term incumbent Democrat Marcy Kaptur of Ohio—airily tried to dismiss CFPA’s donors as a bunch of “anarchists from Texas.” She was apparently referring to Leo Linbeck III, a 50-year-old Texas developer who is CFPA’s biggest donor. But the Houston Chronicle , a pillar of the Texas establishment, notes Linbeck’s father has been a mainstream player in areas such as the Fair Tax and opposition to Obamacare. It highlighted how donors like Linbeck III are “using their wealth to undermine, rather than support, a political system where gerrymandering and uncontested incumbency seem to matter more than actual votes.” So far the group is punching way above its weight. Its threatened entry into the GOP primary in Indiana’s 6th district (north of Indianapolis) prompted 30-year-incumbent Dan Burton to retire earlier this year. In Ohio, Republican Jean Schmidt saw her primary total fall to 43 percent from a towering 62 percent in 2010. She lost by six points to Brad Wenstrup, an Iraq War surgeon who had never held elected office but had a beef with the incumbent over her votes to bail out Wall Street and raise the debt ceiling. CFPA alerted voters to her record by spending $240,000 on mailers and radio ads. A week after its Ohio victory, CFPA fell short in its efforts to knock off House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus, the subject of a federal probe into alleged insider trading, and House Ethics Committee Chairman Jo Bonner. But both men won only 57 percent of the vote, and were forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to overwhelm their Tea Party challengers. In the Illinois primary a week later, the group failed to derail Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. from winning his Democratic primary, but played a role in the defeat of 20-year-incumbent Republican Don Manzullo. “Incumbents who have been resting on their laurels have a lot to worry about,” says the National Journal . “In 2010, an eye-popping 20 members finished with a very weak 60 percent or less in their primaries. Even though 16 prevailed, many could have lost their seats if an outside group had funded their opposition.” CFPA plans to be that outside force. In deciding what districts to play in, it looks at four factors: The district must be solidly Democratic or Republican (“We’re not looking to swing power from one party to the other,” Linbeck says). The challenger must be credible and capable of standing on his or her own. The current incumbent must be a long-time office-holder. CFPA’s own private polling has to show there’s actually a chance its candidate could win. The district surrounding El Paso, Texas, is a test case for the kind of race CFPA prefers. Democrat Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso city councilman, wants to knock off Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a former Border Patrol agent who has held the district for 16 years. The 39-year-old O’Rourke blasts Reyes for sloppy constituent service work and notes that two of the six bills Reyes has passed have been to rename buildings. O’Rourke also wants to rethink the Drug War and has written a book making the case for marijuana legalization. It’s possible that El Paso Democrats are comfortable with the status-quo representation given them by Reyes, but at least O’Rourke provides a real debate over alternatives. In 2010, Reyes had no primary opposition and rolled over his hapless GOP challenger by outspending him $1 million to $7,000. The approach taken by CFPA—and similar groups, such as the Club for Growth—is an intriguing one. For decades, the standard line of reformers when confronted with complaints about lack of political competition has been to tout limits on campaign spending—McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” is their idea of a solution. But it hasn’t worked. Incumbents are more entrenched than ever. Maybe more money in politics is the answer. More money means more competition, and in the races that CFPA has chosen to enter, it’s the only thing that has gotten the incumbents scared. Incumbency may never be the same again.
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Incumbency Shakers
We’re about a week out from the Indiana Primary. Richard Mourdock now leads Barack Obama’s favorite Republican, Dick Lugar. But it is close. Surprisingly for so many conservative activists who backed Eric Cantor for his leadership position, the House Republican Leader has decided to engage in this and other races for the more moderate and liberal candidates. Whodathunk Eric Cantor would become like Mitch McConnell, but he is. And not only that, Eric Cantor has decided to engage in the Indiana Senate race — a Senate race, not a House race. So the cool thing is if you open your checkbook and help Richard Mourdock , you aren’t just dealing a blow to Mitch McConnell, but to Eric Cantor and Barack Obama too. All three of them want Dick Lugar to stick around Washington. Seriously, Eric Cantor’s PAC is asking Democrats to go vote to save Dick Lugar. The House Republican Leader wants Democrats to save Dick Lugar. That’s messed up. Do what you can to make sure Indiana sends Dick Lugar home . Oh wait . . . Dick doesn’t live in Indiana anymore. That’s why his Board of Elections says he can’t vote in Indiana. Still, get him out of the Senate. But that’s not all. In Texas, Ted Cruz is going up in the polls , but David DewCrist is a millionaire. Ted Cruz needs volunteers, prayers, and money. If he can get into a runoff with DewCrist, he should be able to close the gap and be Texas’s next Senator. In Nebraska, Don Stenberg is closing in on Jon Bruning. Bruning, by the way, still won’t walk away from his love of Eric Holder. We need to help Don. He’s going up in the polls and is now coming under whitening assault from Bruning and Bruning’s friends in Washington. And then there is Utah. After 36 years in the Senate, Orrin Hatch just might be retired by the voters. He did not make it out of the Utah Republican Convention with enough votes. He’ll face my friend Dan Liljenquist. Dan’s a good guy. Thirty-six years in the Senate should be long enough. Senator Hatch has been a commendable Senator on judges and other issues. But he’s also been on the wrong side of many votes and Dan Liljenquist would be one more headache for Mitch McConnell that Senator Hatch is not.
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Conservatives Are Gaining, But Need Help Making Mitch McConnell’s Life Truly Miserable
It appears that Newt Gingrich will suspend his campaign today. Speaking to a Republican crowd in North Carolina this morning, Gingrich said , “It’s pretty clear Governor Romney is going to be the nominee.” Many words could be used to describe the Newt 2012 campaign. Dull is not amongst them. Last summer, it appeared his campaign was over before it started with key staff defecting once Rick Perry entered the race. But following a series of impressive debate performances in which he challenged President Obama to seven one on one Lincoln-Douglas debates, Republican voters began to give Newt a second look. After Herman Cain’s troubles began last November, Newt shot to the top of the polls. However, as the Iowa Caucuses approached, the remaining candidates turned their attention to Newt and he did not whether the scrutiny well. Most damaging were the ads put out by PACs supporting Mitt Romney. Discontent from the Republican establishment didn’t help his cause either. Gingrich finished a distant fourth in both Iowa as the anti-Romney vote began to coalesce around Rick Santorum. Gingrich fared no better in New Hampshire with another fourth place finish. Yet Newt found a new lease on life in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary with two impressive debate performances centering on exchanges with Juan Williams of Fox News and John King of CNN. Both exchanges earned Newt standing ovations. As it turned out, they were the only standing ovations any candidates received during the GOP debates. What also worked for Newt was releasing his tax returns while Romney hemmed and hawed. Palmetto voters awarded him with a double digit victory over Mitt Romney. But the Romney Super PACs replicated in Florida what they had done in Iowa. Romney also outperformed Gingrich in two debates in Tampa and Jacksonville and ended up besting him in the Florida Primary by 15 points neutralizing Gingrich’s triumph in South Carolina ten days earlier. Newt never recovered. The only other contest he won was in his political base of Georgia on Super Tuesday. If Newt could not withstand the scrutiny of the Romney Super PACs then how could he possibly withstand the scrutiny of the even better funded Obama Super PACs? Since then, with campaign money running dry, Gingrich has been going through the motions and visiting zoos around the country. I think Newt will eventually endorse Romney but like Santorum I don’t think he’ll be in any great hurry to do it. Alas, Newt is not the new Nixon . There will be no more Newt to kick around.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on under the hood of this Hill poll showing that more voters believe that Romney & the GOP respect working women than voters believe that Obama & the Democrats respect stay at home parents. Especially since the same poll is giving the edge to Romney on who understands women’s issues better, and a tie on which party is better for women. But what I’d like to point out is another poll that was only touched upon in passing; because the information found there will be even more distressing to the Democrats. Yes, this is a burying-the-lede post. We have to do a lot of those. The poll in question was a CBS/NYT one of registered voters that have Romney and Obama tied at 46% each. The Hill didn’t link, but I will – it’s here – and there’s one crosstab in particular that needs to be looked at: among women voters, Obama leads Romney 49/43. That further breaks down to Obama beating Romney 62/34 among unmarried women, Romney beating Obama 49/42 among married women, and … why am I pointing this out? Because all of these numbers represent a serious degradation of Barack Obama’s 2008 numbers among women. Exit polls indicated that Obama beat McCain 56/43 among women generally; 70/29 among unmarried women; and McCain only beat Obama 50/47 among married women. Hopefully this chart will help clarify matters: Category BO MR Diff BO JM Diff Shift Women 49 43 6 56 43 13 -7 Unmarried 62 34 28 70 29 41 -13 Married 42 49 -7 47 50 -3 -4 As you can see, Mitt Romney (MR) is currently doing much better in 2012 than John McCain (JM) did in 20o8 against Barack Obama (BO); or, more accurately, Barack Obama is doing much worse . I note this because it does not seem to be indicative of any sort of ‘unity bounce’ on Romney’s part; the Republican candidate seems to be more or less holding his own. But President Obama is in free fall. Now, of course it should be noted that this is one poll, and it may not be a representative poll, and that it is certainly not any sort of predictor of what the polls will look like in November. But there is still a technical term to describe a candidate who is suffering from significant erosion in his support from a key demographic, to the extent that Barack Obama is currently suffering among female voters. That technical term is ‘losing.’ Moe Lane ( crosspost )
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Barack Obama: coming up short among female voters.
Eyebrows up in feigned sincerity, shoulders hunched against the damp cold, Nicolas Sarkozy glanced at a mutilated statuette of a medieval girl warrior missing one arm and ducked through the low door of a rundown little house in the remote village of Domrémy-la-Pucelle, population 155. After a quick look around the dwelling said to be Joan of Arc’s birthplace in 1412 (no matter that it was actually built much later) the French president unveiled a commemorative plaque, met a handful of local dignitaries, and greeted a sparse crowd of shivering citizens. It was the first time a sitting president had visited the village since 1920, when the Catholic Church canonized Joan and she became France’s patron saint. If Sarkozy was on the hustings in this remote, little-visited corner of Lorraine some 200 miles east of Paris, it was because he is running for his political life as the first round of France’s presidential election looms April 22. Lagging in the polls for months as the most unpopular president since the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958, he is beating the bushes all over the country and working every angle. In Domrémy he was exploiting Joan of Arc to work the patriotism angle, a ploy to help counter the growing appeal of the populist National Front’s Marine Le Pen. (Le Pen early on identified with Joan by symbolically naming one of her daughters Jehanne, the medieval version of her name.) He also hoped to recuperate the right wing of his own UMP party, many of whose disappointed members are absconding to the Front. “There was a feeling in the last election in 2007 that Sarkozy was a new Bonaparte, a De Gaulle or even Joan of Arc who would save France from its problems,” says Jean Garrigues, a historian at the University of Orleans. “That’s why the disappointment among his followers is so great.” Thus Sarkozy’s hurried January pilgrimage to launch the official commemoration of the 600th anniversary of the mystical peasant girl who symbolizes French nationalism and resistance to foreign interference—oblivious to the fact that this is the very opposite of the soulless European Union that he defends so ardently. In a frigid local gymnasium he pointedly invoked France’s Christian roots, calling her the symbol of its unity and insisting that “Joan belongs to no party, to no faction, to no clan.” She was, he said, “the incarnation of patriotism, which is the love of one’s country without the hatred of others.” It was a nice try by Sarkozy at tarring the Front with xenophobia and putting Joan on his side. But as a political symbol she is already taken by the National Front. She’s been its icon since the 1980s, when it began celebrating her every May Day as an antidote to the left’s Labor Day braying. A life-size statue of Joan in full body armor stands guard at the entrance to the Front’s headquarters. Its May Day rally is invariably at the foot of the splendid gilded equestrian statue of Joan near the Louvre—my favorite in this city of monuments—with her right arm thrusting high her banner and her determined face the picture of fierce resolve. And it was there the next day that the Front’s founder and Marine’s father, Jean-Marie, shot back at Sarkozy that Joan certainly did not belong to politicians that only spoke of her at election time, or “parties that gave over France to globalization, that want to dissolve it in a federal Europe, or that have permitted massive foreign immigration.” Touché ! It’s hardly surprising that Joan of Arc is a touchstone in a French election marked by voters’ disoriented malaise due to unemployment, deindustrialization, undigested immigration, rising criminal violence, and a pervasive, confounding sense of lost identity. It’s still another measure of the power of Joan’s universal symbolism of gutsy valor and moral certitude. She has long been recruited for all manner of causes, and not only in France. At one time or another, seemingly everybody has wanted a piece of her for their own reasons. After the French themselves neglected her for nearly half a millennium—the naughty Voltaire mocked her as an “unfortunate idiot”—19th century monarchist Catholics resuscitated Joan as a bulwark against godless republicanism. As her image gained momentum, the U.S. put Joan, garishly painted, on a World War I fund-raising poster. In the 1920s flappers adopted her bobbed hair as an early symbol of women’s liberation. Later feminists in the U.S. and Canada—not France—claimed her, ignoring that historians note she had a girly side, requesting cloth for dresses in towns she campaigned through. During France’s World War II occupation both the collaborationist Vichy regime and the anti-Nazi resistance co-opted her. Post-war, Latin American revolutionaries idolized Joan as one of the first to resist the powers that be, a sort of female, medieval Che. Writers and filmmakers latched on to her and retold her story endlessly. Her unyielding dignity in standing up to her malicious inquisitors inspired writers from George Bernard Shaw to Bertolt Brecht and Jean Anouilh. Mark Twain thought his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his best work, Huckleberry Finn notwithstanding. Jean Seberg and Ingrid Berman tried to incarnate her, with varying success, but of the 15 films about her, Carl Dreyer’s silent 1928 movie, The Passion of Joan of Arc is still the gold standard. Today anyone can try his hand at being Joan; the Jeanne d’Arc PlayStation game has her fending off both attacking demons and the English army. WILL SUMMONING THE INDOMITABLE spirit of the illiterate girl who changed the course of the Hundred Years War suffice to win Nicolas Sarkozy a second term? His record is actually not all that bad, even if not comparable to lifting the siege of Orleans or booting the Goddons (Joan’s charming pronunciation of the common English oath) out of France. He did launch major reforms of pensions and higher education. He reacted energetically to the financial crisis that nearly destroyed the euro. He managed to look valorous in supporting the Libyan uprising with military force. If voters were policy wonks, he could squeak through. Especially since his chief rival and frontrunner in the polls, the Socialist Party’s François Hollande, could never be confused with Joan of Arc. A bland party apparatchik, he has never run a company, held a national government post, or done anything else anyone can remember. Billing himself as Monsieur Normal in contrast to the twitchy, impetuous, unpredictable Sarkozy, Hollande looks and sounds on the podium like a facsimile François Mitterrand, whose intonations and mannerisms he imitates. His Marxist-style declaration that the world of finance is his “main foe,” and his promise to raise the tax rate to 75 percent on incomes of more than $1.3 million a year has many wealthy French—and most of the country’s overpaid professional soccer players—ready to pack their bags and join others already in Switzerland and Belgium. Sarkozy’s problem is that most don’t vote on policy, but gut feeling. And the French find him pushy, transparently ambitious and calculating, and, worst in this style-conscious land, vulgar. This is compounded by a hyperactive, media-grabbing manner that has left him over-exposed, a complaint known as Sarko fatigue. “A majority of the French simply cannot stand the idea of having him on their TV screens for another five years,” says Dominique Moisi, a senior advisor at the French Institute for International Relations. “It will be extremely difficult for him to prevent the upcoming election from becoming an emotional and negative referendum on his persona.” To be sure, a minority will favor Marine Le Pen. But she is unlikely to overcome the third-party handicap of limited resources and the two mutually supportive mainline parties that collude to crowd her out. Once again, a flawed political system has produced flawed, unappealing candidates. As this petty, unsatisfying election campaign grinds to a close, many French, longing for a charismatic leader they can believe in, likely feel the best candidate would be a spunky peasant girl speaking to them with resolute conviction.
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Where’s Joan When We Need Her?
