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AP – Eastern Europe’s tradition of political revolt has met the digital age. This time it’s not communists or food shortages fueling fury, but an international copyright treaty that opponents say threatens freedom on the Internet.
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CONCORD, N.H. ? Just a year ago, tea party activists came roaring out of the congressional elections eager to shape the looming race for the White House.
Things have not gone as planned.
Turned off by Mitt Romney’s style and evolution on several important issues, they have bounced from one candidate to another in hopes of finding a formidable alternative to the former Massachusetts governor to focus their enthusiasm.
After a series of disappointments ? Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, and businessman Herman Cain among them ? the anti-establishment movement has settled, for now, on a favorite: former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, even though he has spent more than three decades in Washington politics.
With the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 3 and tea party support fractured at best, some activists worry that the passion that defined the movement 13 months ago may become lost in the selection of the next president.
Infighting among conservative groups, a growing sense of pragmatism, and glaring weaknesses among the candidates have forced some tea party leaders to acknowledge their limits and shift their attention to Congress.
“I wish that we had coalesced behind one candidate earlier on. It’s not because of the tea party movement, it’s because there hasn’t been that candidate out there so far that has stirred the passion ? the fire in the belly,” said Amy Kremer, president of the Tea Party Express. “Everybody wants to focus on presidential politics. I think we need to be focused on the Senate. That’s where we really, really need to be engaged.”
Lacking a presidential contender to rally behind, Kremer’s organization and others have begun eyeing congressional elections that could shift the balance of power on Capitol Hill next fall regardless of the presidential race winner.
Other tea party groups, despite a desire to play prominently in the White House contest, are left to focus on policy debates in Congress.
They’ve already helped shape the debate over federal spending, pushing the House to pass a balanced budget amendment while rejecting Democrats’ effort to raise new revenues to help close the federal deficit.
“We’ve changed the discussion on Capitol Hill and we’ve let the politicians know we get the game they’re playing,” said Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots. “We always said last year that after the November election that our work was just beginning.”
Despite fractures within the conservative movement, the presidential campaigns are courting tea party leaders, recognizing the potential political muscle of a grassroots movement that helped deliver the House to Republicans in November 2010.
Romney and Gingrich have met privately with Kremer, although the two men generally have followed different strategies in trying to capture the tea party vote.
Romney, Gingrich, Bachmann and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum answered questions from Martin about curbing federal spending and other tea party priorities, and gave their pitch to more than 100,000 supporters, during a national conference call conducted by the Tea Party Express Sunday.
Since his 2008 presidential bid, Romney has invested time and money in building relationships with Republican leaders inside and outside the tea party movement.
That investment helped produce endorsements from conservative favorites including South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and unsuccessful Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.
Romney had endorsed all three politicians in their most recent elections, donated thousands of dollars, and in the case of Haley and Christie, traveled to their states to campaign by their side.
Gingrich, after such a long Washington career, represents the kind of political insider that many tea party activists generally oppose. But Gingrich had used his now-defunct organization, American Solutions, to support the tea party movement for years. American Solutions was an original sponsor of the movement’s original tax day rallies, Kremer notes. Gingrich himself was one of their first speakers.
“A lot of people don’t realize this, but he has been involved from the beginning,” Kremer said.
Gingrich’s critics say he’s bought tea party support by hiring influential activists.
In New Hampshire and South Carolina in particular, several staffers hired in recent weeks come from the conservative movement. Andrew Hemmingway, who leads his New Hampshire operation, is a 29-year-old tea party activist with no campaign experience. Gingrich’s national Coalitions Director, Kellen Giuda, helped create New York City’s tea party movement.
But that’s not enough to win over many grassroots conservatives.
Some reluctantly have embraced Romney. Others have latched onto Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s fiery candidacy. Many more say they’re simply not sure where to go.
Martin says her organization is gearing up to boost turnout in early voting states. Just don’t ask which candidate she’d like to be the nominee.
“What I’ve heard from a lot of tea party people is that they wish they could interchange the parts, like a Mister Potato Head ? take parts they like from the candidates and put them together into a new candidate,” Martin said. “But we obviously can’t do that so we’re working with what we have.”
According to an AP-GfK poll from December, 55 percent of Republicans consider themselves supporters of the tea party, including 20 percent who say they are strong supporters of the movement. By comparison, 22 percent of political independents say they support the tea party, as do 10 percent of Democrats.
Tea party preferences contribute heavily to the prevailing sentiment in the GOP’s nomination contest. In the AP-GfK poll, for example, Republican tea party backers prefer Gingrich over Romney 42 percent to 26 percent. Among non-tea party Republicans, it’s Romney 29 percent to 23 percent for Gingrich.
Some say they’ve learned painful lessons from the 2010 elections, when the tea party helped nominate polarizing GOP Senate candidates who proved too conservative for voters in Nevada, Delaware and Colorado.
“The tea party in Colorado has become more pragmatic,” said former Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams. “There is such an urgency to defeat Obama, I think the vast majority of tea party members are going to look at this election the way any Republican would.”
But not everyone agrees.
The tea party ally FreedomWorks, in particular, has aggressively opposed a Romney bid from the beginning. But the group, established by the conservative Koch family, is also cool to a Gingrich candidacy.
Both Romney and Gingrich “have been on the wrong side of some major policy debates,” according to Brendan Steinhauser, Freedomworks’ director of federal and state campaigns. “We do worry about whether they would follow through on their promises to shrink government if they get to the White House.”
In Massachusetts, the president of the Greater Boston Tea Party president says groups like FreedomWorks need to avoid bashing any of the Republicans.
“It seems really irresponsible to me,” Christen Varley said. “We all have to get together and back whoever it is in the end. That’s what I think is ridiculous. If the nominee is Mitt Romney, is FreedomWorks really going to sit out the 2012 election? Of course not.”
No it won’t, says Steinhauser.
But like the Tea Party Express and the Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks may divert its energy elsewhere.
“FreedomWorks is going to focus mostly on taking back the U.S. Senate,” Steinhauser said. “FreedomWorks’ members are divided in their support of various candidates and they would like us to hold off on any endorsements until we get through some of these early states.”
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Associated Press writer Kasie Hunt in Washington contributed to this report.
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NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) ? Is Fox News going centrist for 2012?
Consider another media critic convinced.
Gabriel Sherman, a contributing editor at New York magazine who has spent many a word on Fox News, wrote a post for the magazine’s Daily Intel blog Monday suggesting Fox has adopted a “new strategy” for 2012.
“Fox is trying to credibly capture the center without alienating its loyal core of rabid viewers. To this end, the network is flexing its news-gathering muscles in high-profile ways that will capture media attention,” Sherman wrote.
Sherman is not the first media critic to make this claim. Howard Kurtz did so back in September after talking with network chairman Roger Ailes, and observing a Fox News debate in Orlando.
Kurtz wrote that Ailes has a series of anchors and correspondents — like Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly — who would fit in at any news network with their credentials and willingness to ask tough questions.
Sherman too sees the news side of Fox adopting a more pugnacious approach with the GOP candidates. While the prime time hosts continue to operate in their own universe, Baier conducted a widely praised interview with Mitt Romney, Wallace has peppered Michele Bachmann and the entire field was subject to a roaming New York Times reporter at Saturday’s “candidates forum.”
The New York Times? That bastion of liberalism and bias?
Like Kurtz, Sherman remains skeptical, particularly since he does not see this shift as a case of old-fashioned media objectivity. It’s just another way of benefiting
Fox.
“2012 is shaping up to be the year that Ailes decided Fox will benefit if the political world recognizes that his network is willing to make GOP candidates sweat in front of their base. Like any good candidate, the network plans to tack toward the center for the general election,” he wrote.
Sherman’s language suggests his opinion of the network has not changed since May, when he wrote about Fox as if it were a political organization as much as a media network – something MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has seized on in calling the GOP race the “Murdoch primary.”
Yet whatever Fox’s motives, this marks another prominent Fox critic noting a more moderate shift for the network.
“The GOP primary candidates may think Fox News studios are friendly territory. But while it will continue to function as home turf, especially in the prime time hours, they shouldn’t be surprised to see more curveballs,” Sherman wrote.
With another Fox debate less than two weeks away, we’ll all have another chance to scrutinize.
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/tv/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111205/tv_nm/us_foxnews
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WASHINGTON ? The Republican presidential candidates sound much alike in their zeal to shrink government, cut taxes and replace President Barack Obama’s big health care law with, well, something entirely different. It takes some digging to see the distinctions.
That’s when Mitt Romney, for example, emerges a few steps removed from the deeply conservative drift of the pack. Sure, he says constitutional abortion rights should be overturned. But unlike Michele Bachmann and some others, he’s not up for clashing with the current Supreme Court over it. Yes, he wants to sweep away regulations that interfere with business. But unlike the slashers and burners, he wants the rules to be “updated and modern,” not thrown as a heap in the trash.
Altogether, it’s a familiar pattern on the cusp of party primaries. The candidates play to their ideological base so hard that true differences among them are blurred. The presumed favorite caters to the same crowd without getting locked into positions that might prove a disadvantage with the broader and more moderate electorate next fall.
That pattern results in an array of positions that sound good to the true believers but have little or no chance of becoming law. And it can produce flat-out contradictions.
Witness Herman Cain’s assertions that no abortions should be allowed ? and that the government has no business telling a woman she can’t have one. Or the position of several candidates that gay marriage should be outlawed in the Constitution ? and that states should be allowed to legalize or prohibit it individually, a right they would not have if the Constitution were so amended.
For all the me-too-isms of the campaign, some ideas stand well apart.
Cain is alone in bringing a national sales tax to the table with his catchy 9-9-9 plan to replace existing federal taxes with a 9 percent charge on personal income, businesses and purchases. Jon Huntsman wants federal authorities ? yes, the ones empowered by all those regulations ? to become even more aggressive on one aspect of the energy industry, breaking what he sees as an oil-company monopoly in the nation’s fuel-distribution network to let natural gas compete more favorably.
And Ron Paul, ever the libertarian, proposes an evisceration of government and a disengagement from military obligations abroad that no others approach.
A look at a sampling of issues, what the candidates share and where they differ:
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Health Care:
They all want to try to repeal Obama’s overhaul and most propose long-held GOP ideas to make insurance and care more affordable. Expansion of tax-advantaged medical savings accounts, limits on medical lawsuits and deregulation in the insurance industry to let policies be sold across state lines are common threads. None would require people to obtain health insurance, although Romney did just that as Massachusetts governor and Newt Gingrich once supported the idea.
Romney and Gingrich would, though, prohibit insurers from dropping or denying coverage to sick people, a key protection under Obama’s law, and they are among several candidates who would subsidize premiums through tax breaks or other means. No one lays out a fully developed plan marching the nation toward universal coverage; the priority is to get rid of “Obamacare.” Paul proposes an unfettered free-market system that he hopes would see doctors treating the needy for free.
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Immigration:
Texas Gov. Rick Perry says the popular Republican campaign proposal to stretch a fence all along the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border is “idiocy.” He joins others in wanting more border agents. Most of the candidates say they support the fence, although some sound half-hearted about it. Huntsman, for one, says a fence might be needed but it “to some extent repulses me.” The Republican field mostly opposes giving education benefits or other social services to the children of illegal immigrants; Perry defends Texas’s record of doing so.
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Education:
Bachmann and Paul want to eliminate the Education Department; Gingrich and Rick Santorum would shrink it. Romney once supported closing the department but says he came to see the value of the federal government in “holding down the interests of the teachers’ unions.” The education overhaul of Republican President George W. Bush has no defenders in the field even though some supported it at the time.
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Regulations:
Cutting regulations is a core economic plank of the candidates, especially environmental and energy rules that might constrain development. Some would go further than others. Paul would get rid of most of them ? along with nearly half the federal government. Like his rivals, Romney would seek the repeal of the law toughening financial-industry regulations after the meltdown in that sector. But: “We don’t want to tell the world that Republicans are against all regulation. No, regulation is necessary to make a free market work. But it has to be updated and modern.”
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Global warming:
Huntsman might be alone among the candidates in accepting the scientific evidence that humans contribute to global warming. Or, he might not be alone.
Romney declared earlier this year that “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.” But he since said, “My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet.”
Paul, too, has equivocated. In 2008, he said “human activity probably does play a role” in global warming and part of the solution should be to stop subsidizing the oil industry and let prices rise until the free market turns to alternate energy sources. Now he calls the science on manmade global warming a “hoax.” That puts him in line with Cain (“poppycock”), Santorum (“junk science”) and Perry (“scientific theory that has not been proven”), among others.
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Taxes:
Two optional flat taxes are in the mix: Perry proposes 20 percent on income for those who want an alternative to the current system; Gingrich proposes 15 percent. Both would preserve mortgage-interest and charitable deductions. Romney works within the existing tax code in proposing that no one with adjusted gross income under $200,000 should be taxed on interest, dividends or capital gains. Apart from Paul, who wants to eliminate the income tax and much of the government, no one has stepped further from the tax code than Cain with his 9 percent rates. Contenders agree that Bush-era tax cuts should continue to be extended, corporate taxes should be substantially lowered and the estate tax eliminated.
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Abortion:
Romney says: “I would live within the law, within the Constitution as I understand it, without creating a constitutional crisis. But I do believe Roe v. Wade should be reversed to allow states to make that decision.” His bottom line appears to be that states should decide on the legality of abortion. That means the Supreme Court decision affirming abortion rights would have to be overturned by a future court made up of however many justices he could nominate and get confirmed as president. That position is a considerable step short of seeking a constitutional abortion ban, which would allow for no such leeway by the states. But his position on abortion has changed over the years and still does not seem set in stone.
Bachmann, in contrast, has strongly backed state “personhood” initiatives that, if made law, would almost certainly be confronted with a constitutional challenge and she has spoken of using other means, including federal legislation, to try to take on the status quo on abortion.
Perry, too, has modified his position. He now supports a constitutional abortion ban after saying states should decide their own laws on such issues.
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