SurveyUSA/Bluegrass Poll Shows Jack Conway Edging Mat Bevin In Kentucky's Gubernatorial Race. Watch Discussion.

You can read more, here.

U. S. SUPREME COURT POOH-POOHS ARIZONA "IMMIGRATION" LAWS, AND RE-AFFIRMS ITS RULING ALLOWING CORPORATIONS TO SPEND LIMITLESS AMOUNTS OF MONEY ON POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS. SO LET THE WEEPING AND WAILING COMMENCE FOR SOME FOLKS, BUT NOT ME!

YOU CAN READ THE ARIZONA OPINION HERE, AND THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE OPINION HERE.

EDITOR'S NOTE: IN THE CAMPAIGN FINANCE LAW CASE, THE COURT HAD THIS TO SAY:

"A Montana state law provides that a “corporation may not make . . . an expenditure in connection with a candidate or a political committee that supports or opposes a candidate or a political party.” Mont. Code Ann. §13–35–227(1) (2011). The Montana Supreme Court rejected petitioners’ claim that this statute violates the First Amendment. 2011 MT 328, 363 Mont. 220, 271 P. 3d 1. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, this Court struck down a similar federal law, holding that “political speech does not lose First Amendment protection simply because its source is a corporation.” 558 U. S. ___, ___ (2010) (slip op., at 26) (internal quotation marks omitted). The question presented in this case is whether the holding of Citizens United applies to the Montana state law. There can be no serious doubt that it does. See U. S. Const., Art. VI, cl. 2. Montana’s arguments in support of the judgment below either were already rejected in Citizens United, or fail to meaningfully distinguish that case."

IN THE ARIZONA "IMMIGRATION" CASE, HERE IS THE ESSENCE OF THE COURT'S RULING:

"An Arizona statute known as S. B. 1070 was enacted in 2010 to address pressing issues related to the large number of unlawful aliens in the State. The United States sought to enjoin the law as preempted. The District Court issued a preliminary injunction preventing four of its provisions from taking effect. Section 3 makes failure to comply with federal alien-registration requirements a state misdemeanor; §5(C)makes it a misdemeanor for an unauthorized alien to seek or engage in work in the State; §6 authorizes state and local officers to arrest without a warrant a person “the officer has probable cause to believe . . . has committed any public offense that makes the person removable from the United States”; and §2(B) requires officers conducting a stop, detention, or arrest to make efforts, in some circumstances, to verify the person’s immigration status with the Federal Government. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, agreeing that the United States had established a likelihood of success on its preemption claims.
Held:
1. The Federal Government’s broad, undoubted power over immigration and alien status rests, in part, on its constitutional power to“establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” Art. I, §8, cl. 4, and on its inherent sovereign power to control and conduct foreign relations, see Toll v. Moreno, 458 U. S. 1, 10. Federal governance is extensive and complex. Among other things, federal law specifies categories of aliens who are ineligible to be admitted to the United States, 8
U. S. C. §1182; requires aliens to register with the Federal Government and to carry proof of status, §§1304(e), 1306(a); imposes sanctions on employers who hire unauthorized workers, §1324a; and specifies which aliens may be removed and the procedures for doing so, see §1227. Removal is a civil matter, and one of its principal features
2 ARIZONA v. UNITED STATES
Syllabus
is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials, who must decide whether to pursue removal at all. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, is responsible for identifying, apprehending, and removing illegal aliens. It also operates the Law Enforcement Support Center,which provides immigration status information to federal, state, andlocal officials around the clock. Pp. 2–7.
2.
The Supremacy Clause gives Congress the power to preempt state law. A statute may contain an express preemption provision, see, e.g., Chamber of Commerce of United States of America v. Whiting, 563 U. S. ___, ___, but state law must also give way to federal law in at least two other circumstances. First, States are precluded from regulating conduct in a field that Congress has determined must be regulated by its exclusive governance. See Gade v. National Solid Wastes Management Assn., 505 U. S. 88, 115. Intent can be inferred from a framework of regulation “so pervasive . . . that Congress left no room for the States to supplement it” or where a “federal interest is so dominant that the federal system will be assumed to preclude enforcement of state laws on the same subject.” Rice v. Santa Fe Elevator Corp., 331 U. S. 218, 230. Second, state laws are preempted when they conflict with federal law, including when they stand “as an obstacle to the accomplishment and execution of the full purposes and objectives of Congress.” Hines v. Davidowitz, 312 U. S. 52, 67. Pp. 7–8.
3.
Sections 3, 5(C), and 6 of S. B. 1070 are preempted by federal law. Pp. 8–19.
(a)
Section 3 intrudes on the field of alien registration, a field in which Congress has left no room for States to regulate. In Hines, a state alien-registration program was struck down on the ground that Congress intended its “complete” federal registration plan to be a “single integrated and all-embracing system.” 312 U. S., at 74. That scheme did not allow the States to “curtail or complement” federal law or “enforce additional or auxiliary regulations.” Id., at 66–67. The federal registration framework remains comprehensive. Because Congress has occupied the field, even complementary state regulation is impermissible. Pp. 8–11.
(b)
Section 5(C)’s criminal penalty stands as an obstacle to the federal regulatory system. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), a comprehensive framework for “combating the employment of illegal aliens,” Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB, 535 U. S. 137, 147, makes it illegal for employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized workers, 8
U.
S. C. §§1324a(a)(1)(A), (a)(2), and requires employers to verify prospective employees’ employment authorization status,
Cite as: 567 U. S. ____ (2012) 3
Syllabus
§§1324a(a)(1)(B), (b). It imposes criminal and civil penalties on employers, §§1324a(e)(4), (f), but only civil penalties on aliens who seek, or engage in, unauthorized employment, e.g., §§1255(c)(2), (c)(8).IRCA’s express preemption provision, though silent about whether additional penalties may be imposed against employees, “does not bar the ordinary working of conflict pre-emption principles” or impose a “special burden” making it more difficult to establish the pre emption of laws falling outside the clause. Geier v. American Honda Motor Co., 529 U. S. 861, 869–872. The correct instruction to draw from the text, structure, and history of IRCA is that Congress decided it would be inappropriate to impose criminal penalties on unauthorized employees. It follows that a state law to the contrary is an obstacle to the regulatory system Congress chose. Pp. 12–15.
(c) By authorizing state and local officers to make warrantless arrests of certain aliens suspected of being removable, §6 too creates an obstacle to federal law. As a general rule, it is not a crime for are movable alien to remain in the United States. The federal scheme instructs when it is appropriate to arrest an alien during the removal process. The Attorney General in some circumstances will issue a warrant for trained federal immigration officers to execute. If no federal warrant has been issued, these officers have more limited authority. They may arrest an alien for being “in the United States in violation of any [immigration] law or regulation,” for example, but only where the alien “is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained.” §1357(a)(2). Section 6 attempts to provide state officers with even greater arrest authority, which they could exercise with no instruction from the Federal Government. This is not the system Congress created. Federal law specifies limited circumstances in which state officers may perform an immigration officer’s functions. This includes instances where the Attorney General has granted that authority in a formal agreement with a state or local government. See, e.g., §1357(g)(1). Although federal law permits state officers to “cooperate with the Attorney General in the identification, apprehension, detention, or removal of aliens not lawfully present in the United States,” §1357(g)(10)(B), this does not encompass the unilateral decision to detain authorized by §6. Pp. 15–19.
4. It was improper to enjoin §2(B) before the state courts had an opportunity to construe it and without some showing that §2(B)’s enforcement in fact conflicts with federal immigration law and its objectives. Pp. 19–24.
(a) The state provision has three limitations: A detainee is presumed not to be an illegal alien if he or she provides a valid Arizona driver’s license or similar identification; officers may not consider race, color, or national origin “except to the extent permitted by the
4 ARIZONA v. UNITED STATES
Syllabus
United States [and] Arizona Constitution[s]”; and §2(B) must be “implemented in a manner consistent with federal law regulating immigration, protecting the civil rights of all persons and respecting the privileges and immunities of United States citizens.” P. 20.
(b)
This Court finds unpersuasive the argument that, even with those limits, §2(B) must be held preempted at this stage. Pp. 20–24.
(1)
The mandatory nature of the status checks does not interfere with the federal immigration scheme. Consultation between federal and state officials is an important feature of the immigration system. In fact, Congress has encouraged the sharing of informationabout possible immigration violations. See §§1357(g)(10)(A), 1373(c). The federal scheme thus leaves room for a policy requiring state officials to contact ICE as a routine matter. Cf. Whiting, 563 U. S., at ___. Pp. 20–21.
(2)
It is not clear at this stage and on this record that §2(B), in practice, will require state officers to delay the release of detainees for no reason other than to verify their immigration status. This would raise constitutional concerns. And it would disrupt the federal framework to put state officers in the position of holding aliens in custody for possible unlawful presence without federal direction and supervision. But §2(B) could be read to avoid these concerns. If the law only requires state officers to conduct a status check during the course of an authorized, lawful detention or after a detainee has been released, the provision would likely survive preemption—at least absent some showing that it has other consequences that are adverse to federal law and its objectives. Without the benefit of a definitive interpretation from the state courts, it would be inappropriate to assume §2(B) will be construed in a way that conflicts with federal law. Cf. Fox v. Washington, 236 U. S. 273, 277. This opinion does not foreclose other preemption and constitutional challenges to the lawas interpreted and applied after it goes into effect. Pp. 22–24.
641 F. 3d 339, affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded."

EDITOR'S COMMENT:BUT NOTICE THE COURT SAID IT IS OK FOR POLICE TO QUESTION FOLKS ABOUT THEIR IMMIGRATION STATUS IF THEY HAVE BEEN LEGALLY STOPPED.

HOWEVER, I SUSPECT THIS EXCEPTION WILL BE SHOWN TO BE UNCONSTITUTIONALLY UNWORKABLE IN ACTUAL PRACTICE. IT IS FRAUGHT WITH CONSTITUTIONAL DANGERS REGARDING RACE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST PEOPLE OF HISPANIC DECENT.

Rick Santorum's Departure From GOP Presidential Race Prompts Newt Gingrich To Declare Himself "Last Remaining Conservative In The Race"; JC Watts Concurs. Read Their Emails To Me.

Dear Friend,

Conservative pundits and activists across this country are all buzzing about what Rick Santorum's exit from the Presidential race means. I'll tell you exactly what it means: that Newt Gingrich is the last conservative standing. Will you join our campaign by making a donation here: http://www.newt.org/donate.

Whether you're one of the 178,000 donors to the campaign thus far or you've never made a donation before, now is the time to make a donation. Now when everyone in the elite media is watching, waiting to see what Newt and his supporters will do.

We're in this race to win and defeat Barack Obama's radical agenda that will take America the way of Saul Alinsky socialism.

Donate here: http://www.newt.org/donate; and help us reach our goal of 12,000 contributors in 24 hours.

Thank you,

J. C. Watts
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Newt Gingrich
Date: Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 2:20 PM
Subject: Last Conservative Standing
To: J.C. Watts


Dear J.C.,
As you might have heard, Rick Santorum just suspended his presidential campaign.

Rick is a good friend and I commend him on the strong campaign he ran, standing up for the conservative values that we hold dear. Callista and I wish him, his wife Karen, and his entire family all the best.

This has been a campaign full of amazing ups and downs. And through it all, you’ve been standing with me fighting for bold, conservative breakthroughs to change Washington and rebuild the America we love.

As the last remaining conservative in this race, we urgently need your financial support today. We have set an ambitious goal of 12,000 donations by midnight tonight. Will you donate $25, $50, $100 or whatever you can afford to help us reach this goal?

Time after time we’ve defied the political odds during this campaign, proving that the American people are hungry for a candidate with bold ideas and the courage to take the fight to President Obama.

I believe this year's primary represents a big choice about the very soul of the Republican Party, and whether it will remain the party of smaller government, lower taxes, and conservative reform.

Over 178,000 people so far have donated to this vision, and I need your contribution today to help unite conservatives around this campaign of bold conservative breakthroughs.

Thank you,

Newt Gingrich
P.S. I am committed to being the voice for our shared conservative values all the way to the Convention in Tampa. Help us unite conservatives around a positive vision for a better America by making a donation to our campaign today.




Paid for by Newt 2012

PHONY Mitt Romney Wins CPAC Straw Poll. I Guess CPACers Can't Tell A REAL Conservative From A PHONY One!

YEP, I guess CPACers can't tell a REAL conservative from A PHONY one!

Read more here, and PUKE.

POLL: GOP Voters Not Happy With Choices. Well ... DUH! You Can Count Me Among The UNIMPRESSED With My AWFUL Choices!!

Poll: GOP voters still not happy with choices
By Tucker Reals
CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto.

Overwhelming dissatisfaction with the direction in which our country seems to be heading, and mediocre approval ratings for President Obama, should provide plenty of opportunity for Republican presidential candidates to find traction.

But a new CBS News/New York Times poll

suggests the current field have a long way to go to impress the nation's conservative-minded voters.

The narrowing GOP presidential field

While Republicans are more enthusiastic than Democrats about the presidential elections in 2012, Republican voters remain entirely un-enthused by their current options -- they're still waiting for one of the field to step up and shine, or for a new face to spring from the shadows.

Only 23 percent of Republican voters said they were satisfied with the candidates running for their party's nomination,

while a solid majority of 71 percent said they'd like to see a new face in the mix.

That's in spite of the fact that President Obama's overall approval rating remains at a fairly unimpressive 47 percent - down one percentage point from a poll conducted just three weeks ago - and a consistent majority say they're dissatisfied with his handling of the economy.

The lack of enthusiasm is so pervasive that 67 percent of Republicans who responded to the CBS News survey couldn't even pick one candidate from the current field who they'd be happy to support.

Seven percent of self-described Republicans said they were enthusiastic about Mitt Romney's candidacy, and Michele Bachmann, who has stolen the spotlight in recent days, got the same backing. Two percent threw their backing to Herman Cain. None of the other candidates managed to garner more than 1 percent of the Republican respondents' backing.

Read the complete poll (PDF)

Editor's note: This poll was conducted among a random sample of 979 adults nationwide, interviewed by telephone June 24-28, 2011. The error due to sampling for results based on the entire sample could be plus or minus three percentage points. The error for subgroups is higher. This poll release conforms to the Standards of Disclosure of the National Council on Public Polls.

GOP's Jon Huntsman Joins EXPANDING List Of Presidential Aspirants. Watch Video.

Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour Helps David Williams/Richie Farmer Ticket "Rake In" Over Half A Million Dollars At Lexington Fundraiser.

GOP candidates raise $700,000 in event at home of Don and Mira Ball
By Beth Musgrave

FRANKFORT — A Lexington fund-raiser Thursday night featuring Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour raised more than $700,000 for Republican candidates.

The fund-raiser — held at the home of Don and Mira Ball — was attended by more than 500 people, according to Republican organizers.

The Republican gubernatorial ticket of Senate President David Williams and Agriculture Commissioner Richie Farmer raised a little more than $500,000, said Scott Jennings, of the Williams-Farmer campaign. The remaining money went to the Republican Party.

Jennings said that pledges were still being counted on Friday and that the total amount of money is likely to increase.

Incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear and running mate Jerry Abramson have already built a substantial campaign war chest. The two had no opposition in the Democratic primary.

The latest campaign finance reports show that the total raised by the Beshear-Abramson campaign is $4.8 million. It reported having $3.3 million on hand in the campaign's quarterly finance update, filed with the Kentucky Registry of Election Finance.

Williams-Farmer banked more than $1.2 million in the Republican primary race for governor, according to a May campaign finance report.

Read more: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/06/17/1778990/gop-candidates-raise-700000-in.html#ixzz1Pa92AmwG

First Key GOP Debate Sounded Like An Echo Chamber.

First key GOP debate sounded like an echo chamber
By CARL LEUBSDORF

The organizers of Monday night’s Republican debate apparently knew what they were doing when they lined up presidential hopefuls across New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College stage in a way that reflected the contest’s pecking order and ideological shape.

In the center - politically, ideologically and physically - was former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, looking very much the early front-runner polls say he is. Placed on the ends by the main sponsor, CNN, were former Sen. Rick Santorum and businessman Herman Cain, probably the most ideologically extreme in the solidly conservative field.

In between, two who seem more like interesting curiosities than true contenders - Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich - and two Minnesotans who might have the best chances in this field of overtaking Romney.

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Rep. Michele Bachmann may have provided the first major debate’s lasting significance. Pawlenty, touted by many Republicans as potentially Romney’s top challenger, underscored his weak persona by refusing to repeat criticism of the latter’s Massachusetts health care plan.

By contrast, tea party favorite Bachmann, who combines a Sarah Palin-like personal appeal with a more traditional political approach, made a stronger impression by speaking directly and knowledgeably on the issues. The two Minnesotans loom as major rivals in next-door Iowa’s caucuses before New Hampshire’s primary.

The debate generally resembled an echo chamber, as participants repeatedly attacked President Barack Obama and avoided criticizing each another.

They showed some differences on social issues, including how the federal government should combat legalized gay marriage in states like New Hampshire, and whether to overturn Obama’s decision ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays.

Santorum said he would repeal Obama’s policy. Cain and Paul said they wouldn’t. Romney, Bachmann, Gingrich and Pawlenty said they would rely on the military’s evaluation of the changes.

On economic issues, all favored cutting taxes and repealing Obama’s health plan. But Romney got a pass - and Pawlenty missed a chance - when CNN moderator John King asked him to repeat his weekend criticism linking the two plans as “Obamneycare.”

“I just cited President Obama’s own words that he looked to Massachusetts as a blueprint,” Pawlenty said.

Romney defended his plan as a state solution to a problem. He said he can’t wait to debate Obama and ask, if he paid such attention to Massachusetts, “Why didn’t you give me a call and asked what worked and what didn’t?”

Pawlenty’s rivals refused to build on widespread criticism that his economic plan was unrealistic in assuming 5 percent annual GDP growth.

“I think we need a president who is optimistic,” Santorum said. Pawlenty insisted “this idea we can’t have 5 percent growth is hogwash,” even though reaching that level is rare.

Romney reflected his experience, showing he understands consistent message is a key to debate success, and repeatedly blasted Obama’s economic record.

But one answer could dog him in the crucial Midwestern industrial states, his defense of his 2008 comment that if the federal government bailed out U.S. automakers, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”

Paul, as in his 2008 bid, was often the odd man out, chiding rivals for not joining in criticizing the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and urging return of all U.S. troops abroad “as quickly as possible.”

Presidential debates often give the mistaken impression one person can single-handedly reverse U.S. policies. Gingrich, the closest thing to a truth-teller, essentially repeated his prior political assessment of the controversial GOP Medicare plan: “If you can’t convince the American people it’s a good idea, maybe it’s not a good idea.”

And he observed that to achieve its goals, the GOP needs to gain 12 Senate seats and 30 to 40 in the House - as well as win the presidency.

To My Republican Like Minded Conservative Friends, It Is Time To Start WEEPING And Wailing: Mitch Daniels Will NOT Run For President. Watch Video.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

TEA Party Ponders Loss Of Kentucky Governor's Primary Race That Pitt Their Man, Phil Moffett Against David Williams.

Tea party ponders loss in KY gubernatorial primary

By ROGER ALFORD
Associated Press

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) -- State-level tea party leaders who helped launch U.S. Sen. Rand Paul's meteoric rise from obscure small-town eye doctor to nationally known conservative leader thought they had a sure winner again in Kentucky's Republican gubernatorial primary.

Now, some are miffed that national tea party bigwigs didn't step up to help Louisville businessman Phil Moffett, an articulate political outsider with telegenic good looks and conservative philosophies. He lost Kentucky's GOP primary on Tuesday to state Senate President David Williams, a career politician with more than two decades in the legislature.

"You've got to question how committed they really are to the tea party movement if they're unwilling to come in and help," said Michael Maggard, a factory worker from Boonesborough who took time off to hand-paint signs for Moffett. "If they had focused on this race, we would have pulled it off."

A simple endorsement from the likes of Paul or former Alaska Gov. Sara Palin or any one of several other national tea party figures, Maggard believes, would have generated needed campaign cash for Moffett to pay for TV spots, political consultants, and many other necessities that the campaign went without.

Moffett, outspent 10 to 1, lost by 10 percentage points, a gap that campaign manager David Adams believes could have been bridged with assistance from the national tea party, especially in an election that drew only 10 percent voter turnout.

"I think that hesitation on the part of some national leaders had a devastating impact on the campaign," Adams said Wednesday.

At least two national tea party leaders did show up, winning the allegiance of Kentucky groups. Former Alaska tea party Senate candidate Joe Miller and former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack campaigned for Moffett in the state during brief visits.

Williams, who spent $1.2 million compared to Moffett's $120,000, navigated around potentially troublesome personal issues to win the primary and the right to challenge incumbent Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear in November. Williams was helped by a third candidate, Louisville political powerhouse Bobbie Holsclaw, who drew 14 percent of the vote, enough to turn the election for Williams.

Williams, the state's best known anti-gambling advocate, was dealt a particularly troubling setback late in the campaign when a judge unsealed financial documents in a decade-old divorce case that showed he had a history of casino gambling. In a Bible-belt state like Kentucky, the juxtaposition can turn off a key voting bloc, conservative Christians.

The GOP candidates differed little on key Republican issues, from cutting state spending to opposing abortion. In campaign appearances, Williams was able to avoid arguing with his Republican opponents and focus instead on attacking Beshear as ineffective. Moffett and Holsclaw didn't attack Williams on the gambling issue, nor on another touchy personal issue involving his running mate, former University of Kentucky basketball star Richie Farmer.

Farmer's wife, Rebecca, filed for divorce last month without giving a reason, triggering a whisper campaign of speculation about the cause of the split. Farmer, who was twice elected state agriculture commissioner, asked in a motion last month that the divorce petition be dismissed, but, if not, that he receive joint custody of their three children.

Lexington political blogger Mica Sims said tea party activists consider Tuesday's election a major win for the movement in Kentucky. Moffett came much closer than polls predicted, and three other tea party candidates won Republican nominations - John Kemper for auditor, James Comer for agriculture commissioner and Bill Johnson for secretary of state. None of those races required the kind of campaign spending needed for a competitive gubernatorial bid. Comer, a state lawmaker, was the leading fundraiser at about $200,000.

"I am proud of the Kentucky tea party," Sims said. "We came within 10 points of knocking of the Republican Party of Kentucky's golden boy. That is something to be totally proud of, and we did it on our own. We didn't have help from the national folks."

Adams called Moffett's finish a moral victory for the tea party in Kentucky.

"We're going to have fits and starts like this," he said. "I remain greatly encouraged for the movement, and I think that establishment politicians overlook or try to ignore the tea party at their own peril."

University of Kentucky political scientist Stephen Voss agreed.

"Moffett's success, despite a lack of resources, should be a real warning message," Voss said. "That he didn't have the national fundraising to mount the kind of campaign Paul did, that should be a real message to the Kentucky Republican Party."

The Real Ronald Reagan.

The Real Reagan
When Reagan was (much) less popular than Carter
By Steve Kornacki

By 1992, three years after he left the White House, Ronald Reagan was anything but a beloved former president. As a painful recession gripped the country, the public came to see the Reagan years -- which featured a massive defense buildup, soaring deficits and even a stock market crash in 1987 -- as the source of their economic woes. Running for president that year, Bill Clinton promised to enact a clean break from the "failed policies of Reagan and Bush." As Reagan prepared to speak at the Republican National Convention in August, a Gallup poll found that just 46 percent of Americans had a favorable view of him. By contrast, Jimmy Carter, the man Reagan had defeated in a 44-state rout in 1980, was viewed favorably by 63 percent of the American public. The Reagan presidency stood in something approaching disrepute.

Today, though, you'd never know any of this happened. In the two decades since it bottomed out, Reagan's image has been resurrected, thanks largely to a relentless campaign from conservative activists. Will Bunch, who writes for the Philadelphia Daily News and is a senior fellow at Media Matters, chronicled Reagan's image makeover -- and the reality of his record as president -- in his 2008 book "Tear Down This Myth." We spoke with him recently about how the myth of Reagan has taken hold, and whether there's any truth to it.

I'm really struck by the poll that showed Carter much more popular than Reagan. It's not something that people would think is possible if you asked them now. Can you talk about how we reached that point, back in the early '90s?

By 1992, Reagan and Carter were kind of being compared as ex-presidents, and on a lot of levels, Jimmy Carter has had this very successful ex-presidency with the work he's done for Habitat for Humanity and from the other peace-oriented types of missions he's been on around the world. Reagan received an enormous amount of criticism a couple of years after he left office, particularly for an episode that's probably not going to get mentioned a lot this week, which is accepting, I believe it was $2 million, to give a speech in Japan. At the time, it was unusual and kind of jarring for Reagan to accept that much money to give a speech, plus the fact that a bunch of millionaires in California had all chipped in to buy Reagan a house, which a lot of people thought was kind of suspicious and didn't look too different from bribery.

Also, Nancy Reagan actually published her memoirs (1989's "My Turn"), and they were very poorly received as being kind of nasty and vindictive. And so there were a lot of negative feelings about Reagan. But the real reason Reagan had fairly high unpopularity in the early 1990s was that people were not happy with the aftermath of his policies as president. The American economy was doing very poorly in the early 1990s, there was a recession during the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Bush 41's presidency basically collapsed because he was forced to increase taxes to deal with the continuing deficits that were a legacy of Reagan. There was high anxiety among the American people starting in Reagan's second term about the loss of jobs in manufacturing, the growing clout of Asia -- so all of these things really caused Reagan to be viewed pretty negatively at the time. Bill Clinton campaigned very aggressively against Reaganomics. When Clinton was able to get some of his economic policies through Congress in the first two years of his presidency, Time ran a cover with a picture of Reagan upside down, and it was about the death of Reaganomics. That was the tone in the early '90s, before this conservative campaign to build what I call the Reagan myth got started.

Going back a step to his time in office, the popular version of Reagan's presidency is that he was elected kind of overwhelmingly, and then in 1984 reelected in a 49-state landslide, and then he just rides off into the sunset at the end of his term. But that second term was -- there were some serious problems in there, weren't there?

Oh, absolutely. A lot of people -- and I mean people in Congress who were in a position to do something about it -- felt that Reagan possibly committed impeachable offenses in the Iran-Contra scandal. There were several reasons he wasn't impeached. One, I think, was his age and some concern about his mental state, and the fact that he was in his second term. You have to remember that in the late 1980s, it really didn't feel like it was that long after Watergate -- and I think there's a tendency in politics to not want to relive something that's so traumatic. I mean, obviously, Congress had shed its qualms about impeachment by the late 1990s, but I think with Reagan there was a reluctance to do that.

Reagan's poll numbers really suffered a lot in the last two years of his presidency, partly because of Iran-Contra, but the other thing was the huge crash of the stock market in October 1987, which in the short run caused people to really start to reexamine Reagan's economic policies and whether the economic boom of the mid-1980s had maybe been a house of cards. I believe there was a poll that showed maybe a third of the American people wanted to see Reagan resign before his term was over, and certainly his approval ratings fell back under 50 percent.

The thing about Reagan and his approval ratings is they really went way up and way down. I mean, he was elected by a pretty big margin in 1980, probably because of Jimmy Carter's unpopularity. Then, when he came into office, he cut taxes and always gets so much credit for improving the economy -- except the economy got much worse over the next year, to where unemployment hit a high point, I think 10.8 percent. And Reagan's approval ratings dropped much lower than Obama's ever has, down to 35 percent. And then in '84 -- talk about good timing -- he really got the most benefits of the inevitable capitalist cycle of the reversal of the economy. It was really roaring back in '84, and the Democrats didn't really nominate the strongest opponent in [Walter] Mondale, and Reagan did win a big landslide. But then his popularity really plunged again because of Iran-Contra and nagging worries about aspects of the economy.

When he left office, his approval ratings were pretty high, and I think that after all the failed presidencies that came before him -- Nixon, Carter and Ford -- there was a sense of relief that he'd gotten through two terms and nothing disastrous had happened. There was goodwill toward Reagan because of his personality and his age. So he left office with a pretty high approval rating. And when he left office and people started to ponder the effects of his policies, his poll numbers dropped again only to be resurrected in the late 1990s.

But here we are just 15 or 20 years later and that whole story you just outlined is forgotten by so many people. What was the turning point from, say, that summer of '92, when Carter was actually more popular than Reagan, to where we are today?

There was always an effort on the right, starting from 1989 on, to try to give Reagan credit for winning the Cold War. The funny thing was, at first the public didn't really buy into that because the public was following the day in and day out of the news very carefully and felt what I think most scholars feel, which is that the credit for the Soviet Union collapsing largely belongs to Mikhail Gorbachev -- that it was Gorbachev pressing for these reforms and Reagan was an external force that wasn't quite as important. I quote in "Tear Down This Myth" a USA Today poll that was taken after the Berlin Wall collapsed (in October 1989) and a majority of Americans credited Gorbachev and only 14 percent credited Reagan.

How the myth gets started is that memories get softer and you have one group that gets very aggressive in pushing this notion that it was all Reagan's doing, that it was because of his defense buildup. The other thing is, during the 1990s, it was a great time economically -- probably better than it should have been because of the dot-com boom. At least among one class there was a lot of affluence in America -- and there were improvements that reached down to lower income. Black unemployment, for example, dropped during Clinton's presidency. It created this feeling that America had been on a roll and people forgot the recession of the early 1990s and how bad things had been and their anger with Reagan. They were more willing to say, "Well, this all started with Reagan," forgetting all those bad things that happened in the '80s and '90s.

It's no accident that the push to glorify Ronald Reagan started in 1997, because it was the year that Bill Clinton started his second term. He had just defeated Bob Dole overwhelmingly and things looked bleak for the broader conservative movement. They didn't seem to have anybody on the horizon to be a leader of the party, so there was this very conscious and calculated effort to look back. Something else that you can't overlook is that in 1997 Reagan was still alive and he announced with a lot of class and dignity in 1994 that he had Alzheimer's, so the public hadn't actually seen Reagan for three years. And the public impression of Nancy Reagan softened quite a bit, for good reasons -- she was out there pushing for stem cell research and other things. It would have been very difficult to criticize Reagan because of his health, a situation that engendered personal goodwill.

And that was something else conservatives could use as they launched this campaign to build up the Reagan legacy. They call it the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, started in 1997 by Grover Norquist. It was this aggressive push to rename as many things as possible across the country for Reagan. It started with the airport in Washington, which they successfully renamed Reagan Airport. And it's funny to see news from that time, because a lot of Democrats were biting their tongues because they had no good memories of Reagan's presidency, but because of his health nobody was going to vote against renaming the airport for Reagan. Not all of the ideas have been enacted. We still don't have Reagan's picture on a $50 bill, or alternating on the dime with FDR, as some people proposed. But there are an increasing number of Ronald Reagan statues across the country, and you can almost drive across the Sun Belt continuously on some sort of Ronald Reagan boulevard or freeway or highway. Not surprisingly, the push to rename things for Reagan has been more successful where conservatism is the most popular.

It seems that a lot of people aren't even aware of what Reagan actually did as president, and you can point out areas where he clearly didn't do things that you would call conservative -- immigration comes to mind, with the amnesty in 1986. Do the Reagan deifiers even know what they're worshiping?

Especially now that Reagan's passed away, I think they're able to purport this idyllic, mythological version of Reagan who happens coincidentally to support all the pillars of the modern conservative movement. Political movements need a hero and Ronald Reagan -- the word "roles" is often associated with him because of his acting career, and his final role has been hero. But to do that, this movement had to do a rewrite, and things like the amnesty for undocumented immigrants had to go to the cutting room floor. He increased taxes on a number of occasions, either to undo the damage of his first tax cut, or because -- unlike modern conservatives -- he would actually engage in negotiations and try to compromise with Democrats on certain issues. All these things get lost because they don't fit the storyline that they're trying to push out there.

What goes through your head when you hear conservatives talk about Ronald Reagan now?

Well, I think they're misusing Reagan to push policies that in 2011 are destructive and could continue to be destructive to America. The whole tax thing is kind of insane -- that you can never raise taxes, which is not anything like what Reagan actually did. Even when he was governor of California, he actually signed the biggest tax increase that the governor of any state had ever signed at that time. So Reagan never subscribed to the idea that you can never raise taxes. The other thing that really rang true in the Bush years is using the great sound bites Reagan produced -- like "tear down this wall" or "evil empire" -- to justify things like the war in Iraq.

I don't know if you saw "The Social Network," but there's a line in it about how every good creation myth needs a devil. Does this help explain why, just as Reagan's popularity has gone up in the last two decades, Jimmy Carter's has taken a hit? Is he a casualty of the creation of the Reagan myth?

Yeah. The issue that was really the centerpiece of Carter's presidency was energy -- trying to promote useful alternative energy. And I don't see how you can look at what's happened over the last 25 years and not say that Carter was right: that we should have been researching alternative energy the whole time, and as a result we've fallen behind other countries; that we're addicted to oil and unable to shake that. But if you listen to talk radio, Jimmy Carter is reduced to wearing the sweater and turning the thermostat down at the White House. They've done such a good job creating Carter as kind of an anti-Reagan -- that part of Reagan's greatness was that he saved America from the malaise, which, by the way, is a word that Carter never actually uttered. This has become the modern equivalent of waving the bloody shirt was for the post-Civil War Republicans: waving the Jimmy Carter cardigan sweater.

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki


Editor's note: wanna read more? Go here.

Ten Reasons Ronald Reagan Isn't As Conservative As His Worshippers (NOT ME) Want You To Believe.

10 Things Conservatives Don’t Want You To Know About Ronald Reagan

[As many Republicans] mark the 100th anniversary of President Reagan’s birth, and all week, conservatives have been trying to outdo each others’ remembrances of the great conservative icon. Senate Republicans spent much of Thursday singing Reagan’s praise from the Senate floor, while conservative publications have been running non-stop commemorations. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich are hoping to make a few bucks off the Gipper’s centennial.

But Reagan was not the man conservatives claim he was. This image of Reagan as a conservative superhero is myth, created to unite the various factions of the right behind a common leader. In reality, Reagan was no conservative ideologue or flawless commander-in-chief. Reagan regularly strayed from conservative dogma — he raised taxes eleven times as president while tripling the deficit — and he often ended up on the wrong side of history, like when he vetoed an Anti-Apartheid bill.

ThinkProgress has compiled a list of the top 10 things conservatives rarely mention when talking about President Reagan:

1. Reagan was a serial tax raiser. As governor of California, Reagan “signed into law the largest tax increase in the history of any state up till then.” Meanwhile, state spending nearly doubled. As president, Reagan “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years. As former GOP Senator Alan Simpson, who called Reagan “a dear friend,” told NPR, “Ronald Reagan raised taxes 11 times in his administration — I was there.” “Reagan was never afraid to raise taxes,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Reagan’s memoir. Reagan the anti-tax zealot is “false mythology,” Brinkley said.

2. Reagan nearly tripled the federal budget deficit. During the Reagan years, the debt increased to nearly $3 trillion, “roughly three times as much as the first 80 years of the century had done altogether.” Reagan enacted a major tax cut his first year in office and government revenue dropped off precipitously. Despite the conservative myth that tax cuts somehow increase revenue, the government went deeper into debt and Reagan had to raise taxes just a year after he enacted his tax cut. Despite ten more tax hikes on everything from gasoline to corporate income, Reagan was never able to get the deficit under control.

3. Unemployment soared after Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts. Unemployment jumped to 10.8 percent after Reagan enacted his much-touted tax cut, and it took years for the rate to get back down to its previous level. Meanwhile, income inequality exploded. Despite the myth that Reagan presided over an era of unmatched economic boom for all Americans, Reagan disproportionately taxed the poor and middle class, but the economic growth of the 1980′s did little help them. “Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled,” the New York Times’ David Leonhardt noted.

4. Reagan grew the size of the federal government tremendously. Reagan promised “to move boldly, decisively, and quickly to control the runaway growth of federal spending,” but federal spending “ballooned” under Reagan. He bailed out Social Security in 1983 after attempting to privatize it, and set up a progressive taxation system to keep it funded into the future. He promised to cut government agencies like the Department of Energy and Education but ended up adding one of the largest — the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which today has a budget of nearly $90 billion and close to 300,000 employees. He also hiked defense spending by over $100 billion a year to a level not seen since the height of the Vietnam war.

5. Reagan did little to fight a woman’s right to choose. As governor of California in 1967, Reagan signed a bill to liberalize the state’s abortion laws that “resulted in more than a million abortions.” When Reagan ran for president, he advocated a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother, but once in office, he “never seriously pursued” curbing choice.

6. Reagan was a “bellicose peacenik.” He wrote in his memoirs that “[m]y dream…became a world free of nuclear weapons.” “This vision stemmed from the president’s belief that the biblical account of Armageddon prophesied nuclear war — and that apocalypse could be averted if everyone, especially the Soviets, eliminated nuclear weapons,” the Washington Monthly noted. And Reagan’s military buildup was meant to crush the Soviet Union, but “also to put the United States in a stronger position from which to establish effective arms control” for the the entire world — a vision acted out by Regean’s vice president, George H.W. Bush, when he became president.

7. Reagan gave amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Reagan signed into law a bill that made any immigrant who had entered the country before 1982 eligible for amnesty. The bill was sold as a crackdown, but its tough sanctions on employers who hired undocumented immigrants were removed before final passage. The bill helped 3 million people and millions more family members gain American residency. It has since become a source of major embarrassment for conservatives.

8. Reagan illegally funneled weapons to Iran. Reagan and other senior U.S. officials secretly sold arms to officials in Iran, which was subject to a an arms embargo at the time, in exchange for American hostages. Some funds from the illegal arms sales also went to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua — something Congress had already prohibited the administration from doing. When the deals went public, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it came to be know, was an enormous political scandal that forced several senior administration officials to resign.

9. Reagan vetoed a comprehensive anti-Apartheid act. which placed sanctions on South Africa and cut off all American trade with the country. Reagan’s veto was overridden by the Republican-controlled Senate. Reagan responded by saying “I deeply regret that Congress has seen fit to override my veto,” saying that the law “will not solve the serious problems that plague that country.”

10. Reagan helped create the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden. Reagan fought a proxy war with the Soviet Union by training, arming, equipping, and funding Islamist mujahidin fighters in Afghanistan. Reagan funneled billions of dollars, along with top-secret intelligence and sophisticated weaponry to these fighters through the Pakistani intelligence service. The Talbian and Osama Bin Laden — a prominent mujahidin commander — emerged from these mujahidin groups Reagan helped create, and U.S. policy towards Pakistan remains strained because of the intelligence services’ close relations to these fighters. In fact, Reagan’s decision to continue the proxy war after the Soviets were willing to retreat played a direct role in Bin Laden’s ascendancy.

Conservatives seem to be in such denial about the less flattering aspects of Reagan; it sometimes appears as if they genuinely don’t know the truth of his legacy. Yesterday, when liberal activist Mike Stark challenged hate radio host Rush Limbaugh on why Reagan remains a conservative hero despite raising taxes so many times, Limbaugh flew into a tirade and demanded, “Where did you get this silly notion that Reagan raised taxes?“

Editor's comment: I'm sure many of you are aware that I do not consider Ronald Reagan to be a great Conservative or Republican. He just managed to have the good fortune of appearing on the political scene after the economic disaster that was Jimmy "the teeth" Carter, and hence looked great in comparison.

Meanwhile, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels May Jump In The Presidential Race. Like "Mr. Burns" Would Say: "EXCELLENT"! Watch Video.

Talking About The Senate, Kentucky's Own Jim Bunning Bids Farewell To His Colleagues. We Thank Him For His Conservatism And Service. Watch Video.

The Death Of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated. YEP.

The Death of Conservatism Was Greatly Exaggerated
In 2008 liberals proclaimed the collapse of Reaganism. Two years later the idea of limited government is back in vogue.
By PETER BERKOWITZ

Last August left little doubt that a conservative revival was underway. Constituents packed town-hall meetings across the country to confront Democratic House members and senators ill-prepared to explain why, in the teeth of a historic economic downturn and nearly 10% employment, President Obama and his party were pressing ahead with costly health-care legislation instead of reining in spending, cutting the deficit and spurring economic growth.

Still, whether that revival would have staying power was very much open to question. A year later—and notwithstanding the Democrats' steadily declining poll numbers and the mounting electoral momentum that could well produce a Republican majority in the House and a substantial swing in the Senate—it still is.

Sustaining the revival depends on the ability of GOP leaders, office-holders and candidates to harness the extraordinary upsurge of popular opposition to Mr. Obama's aggressive progressivism. Our constitutional tradition provides enduring principles that should guide them.

In late 2008 and early 2009, in the wake of Mr. Obama's meteoric ascent, the idea that conservatism would enjoy any sort of revival in the summer of 2009 would have seemed to demoralized conservatives too much to hope for. To leading lights on the left, it would have appeared absolutely outlandish.

In late October 2008, New Yorker staff writer George Packer reported "the complete collapse of the four-decade project that brought conservatism to power in America." Two weeks later, the day after Mr. Obama's election, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne proclaimed "the end of a conservative era" that had begun with the rise of Ronald Reagan.

And in February 2009, New York Times Book Review and Week in Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, writing in The New Republic, declared that "movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead." Mr. Tanenhaus even purported to discern in the new president "the emergence of a president who seems more thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism than any significant thinker or political figure on the right."

Messrs. Packer, Dionne and Tanenhaus underestimated what the conservative tradition rightly emphasizes, which is the high degree of unpredictability in human affairs. They also conflated the flagging fortunes of George W. Bush's Republican Party with conservatism's popular appeal. Most importantly, they failed to grasp the imperatives that flow from conservative principles in America, and the full range of tasks connected to preserving freedom.

Progressives like to believe that conservatism's task is exclusively negative—resisting the centralizing and expansionist tendency of democratic government. And that is a large part of the conservative mission. Progressives see nothing in this but hard-hearted indifference to inequality and misfortune, but that is a misreading.

What conservatism does is ask the question avoided by progressive promises: at what expense? In the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008, Western liberal democracies have been increasingly forced to come to grips with their propensity to live beyond their means.

It is always the task for conservatives to insist that money does not grow on trees, that government programs must be paid for, and that promising unaffordable benefits is reckless, unjust and a long-term threat to maintaining free institutions.

But conservatives also combat government expansion and centralization because it can undermine the virtues upon which a free society depends. Big government tends to crowd out self-government—producing sluggish, selfish and small-minded citizens, depriving individuals of opportunities to manage their private lives and discouraging them from cooperating with fellow citizens to govern their neighborhoods, towns, cities and states.

Progressives are not the only ones to misunderstand the multiple dimensions of the conservative mission. Conservatives have demonstrated blind spots, too.

In 2010—in an America in which the New Deal long ago was woven into the fabric of our lives—conservatives can not reasonably devote themselves exclusively to limiting the growth of government. Government must effectively discharge the responsibilities it has had since the founding of the republic, but also those it has acquired over more than two centuries of social, political and technological change.

Those responsibilities include putting people to work and reigniting the economy—and devising alternatives to ObamaCare that will enable the federal government to cooperate with state governments and the private sector to provide affordable and decent health care.

A thoughtful conservatism in America—a prerequisite of a sustainable conservatism—must also recognize that the liberty, democracy and free markets that it seeks to conserve have destabilizing effects. For all their blessings, they breed distrust of order, virtue and tradition, all of which must be cultivated if liberty is to be well-used.

To observe this is not, as some clever progressives think, to have discovered a fatal contradiction at the heart of modern conservatism. It is, rather, to begin to recognize the complexity of the conservative task in a free society.

To be sure, the current conservative revival was not in the first instance inspired by reflection on conservative principles.

The credit for galvanizing ordinary people and placing individual freedom and limited government back on the national agenda principally belongs to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Their heedless pursuit of progressive transformation reinvigorated a moribund conservative spirit, just as in 1993 and 1994 the Clintons' overreaching on health care sparked a popular uprising resulting in a Republican takeover of Congress.

The Gingrich revolution fizzled, in part because congressional Republicans mistook a popular mandate for moderation as a license to undertake radical change, and in part because they grew complacent and corrupt in the corridors of power.

Perhaps this time will be different. Our holiday from history is over. The country faces threats—crippling government expansion at home and transnational Islamic extremism—that arouse conservative instincts and concentrate the conservative mind.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

If Republicans Insist On Recycling The Old, They Are In For ANOTHER RUDE Awakening In 2012.

Beyond Palin: Assessing the Rest of the GOP Presidential Field

Sarah Palin's recent Web video making a pitch to conservative women may have again shifted the political spotlight to the former governor of Alaska, but more than a half-dozen other GOP hopefuls are toying seriously this summer with a presidential run.

Unlike four years ago, when presidential hopefuls from both parties were already halfway out of the gate, with conspicuous trips to New Hampshire and Iowa, competitive staffing and heavy courting of donors and party chiefs, Republicans are mostly staying true to their public pledges to focus on the midterms. Given the unusually late start, therefore, Palin isn't falling meaningfully behind the organizational efforts of her potential rivals. And after Election Day, when the male candidates begin to seriously consider their options and announce their intentions, they will once again be reminded of Palin's capacity to dominate the stage with her Internet communiqués, book-promotional efforts and TV appearances. (See photos of Sarah Palin's life since the 2008 election.)

Some of the other would-be candidates and their senior advisers have known Palin over the years, primarily from her days as governor, but most have never met her or had a substantive talk with her. That is a strange situation, to say the least; it forces them to evaluate her without any direct insight into her strengths and weaknesses. But from afar, they increasingly believe she will either become a candidate for President or play a major role in the nominating process. (See photos of the fashion looks of Sarah Palin.)

Still, few express much regard for Palin's ultimate chances. An adviser to Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and, by traditional standards, the putative 2012 front runner, says of Palin, "She's not a serious human being." Another Romney intimate warns, "If she's standing up there in a debate and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she's in trouble."

One of the most experienced Republican national political operatives in the country suggests that while Palin might be envied and sleek, she lacks the endurance required for a protracted nomination fight. "She's like a cheetah. She can run really fast but not really long." In the end, according to this school of thought about Palin, she is too polarizing to be seen as likely to beat Barack Obama, and Republicans will be too hungry in 2012 to risk nominating someone who could cost the party the White House — maybe even losing in a landslide. (See the top 10 postelection Sarah Palin quips.)

If the traditional path to the nomination is still valid in 2012, despite the advent of Facebook, the Tea Party and Twitter, then Romney has as good a chance as anyone else to be the Republican standard bearer; no one is more likely to make the race and show up with the required table stakes. Although he launched a splashy book tour for his own New York Times best-selling tome and has written the occasional newspaper essay assailing Obama, Romney has purposely lain low most of the year. He has stayed off network television and campaigned below the radar for midterm candidates in 20 states, dispensing money to Republicans from his PAC funds, while engaging in intense private courtship of party donors and quiet recruitment of potential backing for his campaign-in-waiting. (Comment on this story.)

Still, there remain serious doubts within the party about Romney's numerous policy flip-flops, remote personal style and support for Obama-style health care reform in Massachusetts during his governorship, as well as concern over potential prejudice against his Mormon faith. Romney advisers claim to be confident that all of those vulnerabilities can be addressed. Most of the candidate's 2008 team plans to sign up for another go-round, and all say they see in their man a more relaxed figure who has well learned the lessons of his second-place finish to McCain. Most important: rather than shape his campaign in an effort to dominate the social-conservative vote in the nomination fight, as he did in 2008, Romney will present himself as an experienced manager of state government with private-sector experience and a rhetorical emphasis on fiscal restraint. That is the background that establishment figures in both parties believe would match up best against the incumbent.

Romney might be following the old-school candidate handbook, but it is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels who has attracted the backing of many party elders, including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Daniels, like Romney, fits the profile that Obama White House advisers and experienced Republicans believe would give the GOP the best chance to beat Obama in 2012. If voters think Washington is broken and spending is out of control, Daniels, like Romney, could effectively run as a Mr. Fix-It, ready to make the hard choices that conservatives believe Obama has dodged.

Bush frequently talks up Daniels' prospects to his associates. And Cheney recently praised Daniels' record and political promise when both men attended one of the Republican Party's most secretive regular gatherings: a dinner called Off the Record, held that particular night in the bunker-like subterranean private dining room of the Wolfgang Puck restaurant the Source in Washington. Some in the room, top GOP strategists among them, said they believed the former Vice President was sending a clear signal about whom his party should support in 2012 when he pointedly said Daniels had more to offer the nation beyond his public service in the Hoosier State. Many of the conservative movement's leading intellectuals and fiscal hawks who worked with Daniels as far back as the Reagan Administration also favor him. But there is substantial doubt that Daniels has the passion, charisma or fundraising mojo to enter the fray.

Other party power players, including many fundraisers, are hoping that Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, a former Republican National Committee chairman and Beltway superlobbyist, gets into the race. Barbour, who is heading the party's efforts to elect GOP governors in November, has put off serious consideration of a run until after the midterms. But a Barbour candidacy would cause a virtual earthquake, given his prodigious money-raising abilities (one upper-echelon party buckraker believes he could bring in more than $100 million in a few months), his uncommonly amicable relationship with the national press corps and his mastery of many of the political and communications skills necessary for a strong presidential candidate. If things go as planned, look for Barbour (who sources say has been conferring regularly with Daniels) to hold a press conference the day after the midterms to crow about his role in electing a lot of big- and battleground-state governors. At the same time, plenty of Barbour admirers at senior levels of the party fear a serious probe of his days as an influence peddler at a firm that represented corporations and foreign governments and wonder if his family will be willing to commit to the rigors of a national campaign. (See 10 potential Republican surprises.)

Outgoing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty was runner-up to Palin in McCain's 2008 veepstakes and will have logged more time in Iowa and New Hampshire than any other would-be candidate by the end of 2010. He is expected to make a decision about a run in early 2011. Smart and personable, he is well liked within the party and has a blue-collar background, a solid record as governor, ties to religious conservatives and an impressive wife ready to support a run. But Pawlenty lacks pizzazz and an obvious ability to raise the tens of millions of dollars necessary to keep up with the front runners.

Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee are, like Palin, virtual one-person corporations, with Fox News Channel gigs, book contracts and robust income from paid speeches. Both have clear aspirations and significant strengths. Arguing in favor of a Gingrich run: he's almost 70, making 2012 his last real chance to go for it. Arguing in favor of a Huckabee run: he's the reigning champion of the Iowa caucuses. But both have incentives to stay out, including critical perceived flaws. For Gingrich, this means his bombast, divisiveness and personal history; for Huckabee, his fundraising limitations and controversies from his time as Arkansas's governor. (See photos of Gingrich's career.)

Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, Indiana Congressman Mike Pence, former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson and South Dakota Senator John Thune are all mentioned as prospective candidates, but none are currently positioned to be in the thick of the hunt. Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, son and brother of Presidents, has given many national Republican figures the strong impression that he won't be a candidate in 2012, even if some believe his political and professional credentials might be enough to overcome a double dose of Bush fatigue. (See a photographic farewell to George W. Bush.)

Such a disjointed field can provide only more encouragement for Palin. And nothing would make the White House happier. The President's political advisers, troubled by the weak economy and Obama's image as a big spender, are more worried than he is about re-election and more worried than they let on publicly. Obama has told people that he believes the Tea Party movement will still be going strong in 2012, leaving the GOP to go into battle against an incumbent with a candidate too far right to win. In fact, the President's advisers believe that if Palin is the nominee, New York City's billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, could enter the race as an independent, scrambling all the conventional rules yet again.

The potential first-tier Republican candidates besides Palin — Romney, Barbour, Daniels, Gingrich, Huckabee and Pawlenty — are all more or less Establishment figures who would run traditional campaigns. Three (Barbour, Gingrich and Huckabee) bring a little sizzle to the table but nothing like what Palin packs. In the end, if Palin decides to run and fails, it will be because she couldn't pull it off, not because any of her competitors were uncatchable front runners.

Could the Tea Party movement and fervent anti-Washington feeling sustain themselves for two more years and make 2012 an election in which the grass roots overruns the Establishment and picks both the Republican nominee and the next President? Republican and Democratic elites might scoff at that notion as much as they scoff at Palin's qualifications to be President. But Mark McKinnon, an adviser to George W. Bush and McCain, taps the former Alaska governor as the real front runner in the race, saying, "The conventional wisdom would say that this is Romney's election. But we are in such different times politically that anything could happen." Palin, with her calling from a higher power, millions of locked and loaded hard-core supporters and a slew of mama grizzlies, could prove that in unconventional times, the most unconventional candidate just might have the last laugh.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,2003956-2,00.html#ixzz0txEGQiuq

Politico.Com Reveals Why Rand Paul's Opthamology "Issue" Makes Him "The Kind Of Guy You Want Working [For] You In Washington, D. C. ."

Rand Paul's ophthalmological crusade

In 1997, the monopolist power prepared a new set of regulations to burden ordinary, hardworking citizens, and one man stood up against them. It was “the kind of hypocritical power play that I despise and have always fought against,” recalled the leader of the dissidents.

And so he led what his enemies saw as a “rump group of malcontents” out of the stodgy old institution, to form his own, rebel organization of … ophthalmologists.

The Death Star, in this parable, was the American Board of Ophthalmology, ABO for short. Luke Skywalker was Bowling Green, Ky. opthamologist Rand Paul, who cut his political teeth working for the Libertarian Party presidential campaign of his father, Ron Paul, and is now the Republican nominee for Senate in Kentucky.

The issue was recertification, the requirement – introduced for most medical professions in the last two decades – that physicians take classes and past tests every ten years to retain their medical licenses. Paul’s campaign against the way the ABO board wanted to institute it for ophthalmologists extended beyond his harsh letters: He put his own medical career on the line, allowing his professionally valuable certification to lapse in 2005 in favor of the unrecognized certification of a small new organization he started.

Sunday’s Louisville Courier-Journal led with the news that Paul – contrary to an earlier assertion – is a not a “board-certified” physician. But while his opponent played gotcha, and while Paul worried, his spokesman said, of the damage to his medical practice, the episode revealed more about Paul’s non-conformist character and his appetite for quixotic conflicts than it did about his competence in removing cataracts.

At the heart of his long, largely failed war against ABO was its decision to grandfather in older physicians while forcing younger ones to face recertification every decade.

“Is it fair that the ophthalmologist down the street can claim board certification, without renewing it, but that a younger ophthalmologist, who passed the same boards, is disallowed?” Paul asked in a statement to reporters Monday, calling the ABO’s decade-old decision “hypocritical and unjust.”

The ophthalmological civil war began in the early 1990s, when the American Board of Medical Specialties – a non-governmental group of which ABO, founded in 1916, is the oldest member – began pushing its member organizations representing the various medical specialties to change the way they certified doctors. In the past, most specialists passed a single certification examination after medical school and received a certificate that was good for life. Under the new “maintenance of certification” process, doctors would have to retake their tests each decade.

“This was upsetting to the younger ophthalmologists who had to participate when older ophthalmologists did not have to,” said ABO’s current executive director, Dr. John Clarkson of Miami’s Bascom Palmer Eye Institute.

Particularly infuriating to Paul was ABO’s decision to allow physicians who had been certified in 1992 and before to keep their certifications for life. Many other specialties follow the same practice.

The board’s leaders said they had no choice, however, and no leeway to change the rules on doctors who had already been certified. “It’s strictly a legal situation,” said Dr. Charles Wilkinson, the Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center and former chairman of the ABO board. “You couldn’t force them -- you’d be a dead duck and you’d end up spending all that money and getting nowhere.”

Paul didn’t buy it.

The group “claims it is illegal to call for recertification of all ophthalmologists. This is untrue,” he said in his statement.

The certification fight had no obvious ideological charge – the board is not a government organization, and state medical licenses don’t currently depend on board certification. But other opthamologists saw at work some of the same impulses that would later motivate Paul's political career.

"Randy" Paul had been a "friendly pleasant good resident - nothing special, but nothing negative," recalled Dr. Bruce Shields, who had been a professor and mentor of Paul's at Duke University, and then served on the ABO board. Suddenly he was writing "militant" letters to the board, threatening secession, and "challenging the establishment of medicine."

Paul invoked the same deep belief in the freedom of private organizations that nearly derailed his campaign when, soon after winning the nomination, he briefly defended the rights of private businesses to discriminate by race.

“ABO is a private group and creates any rules they wish (even discriminatory policies based on age),” he said. “Having all its members recertify is not illegal -- just impractical, because the older ophthalmologists will vote against it.”

Paul wasn’t the only one to object.

ABO “is besieging ophthalmology” and “should be stopped before it sows such terrible disunity that our profession never recovers!” wrote a Florida opthamologist, Stanley Braverman, wrote in 2004.

Braverman, Paul, and others also attacked the organization’s motives. It was more interested, they said, in self-preservation than the quality of medical care.

Paul’s hostility to the change, his uncompromising tone, and his public campaign against his profession’s leaders took them by surprise, and won him abiding enmity at the top of his profession.

Dr. Wilkinson recalled “nasty letters to the board” and a “very very negative tone” from Paul. (ABO accepted a written request for Paul’s letters, but didn’t respond immediately.”

“He attempted to organize a rump group of malcontents to oppose the whole thing and to stick their heads in the sand,” said Wilkinson.

“He was trying to paint the board in a pretty dark light,” recalled Dr. Denis O’Day, an ophthalmologist at the Vanderbilt Eye Institute in Nashville who was its executive director through the recertification battle and recalled being “under attack” from Paul.

“He felt that the position I was taking was wrong and he had no hesitancy in saying that,” O’Day said.

When the young doctor failed to persuade his elders to end the inequality, he took the conflict a step further: In 1997, he organized what he now says were 200 ophthalmologists into the National Board of Ophthalmology, a rival to ABO founded, a Paul aide said Monday, to do essentially the same sort of recertification – but without making distinctions between older and younger doctors. This distinction was academic: The group’s members appear entirely to have been the younger doctors who would be recertified anyway. It was a matter of principle.

To join the rival organization could have real consequences, and Paul’s was a principled stand with real risks: Some hospitals only extend privileges to doctors with board certification, and patients look to ABOP as a stamp of approval. But in 2005, Paul let his ABO certification lapse, recertifying – he says – through his own organization’s process.

Paul’s side in the ophthalmology wars was, in the end, much like his father's presidential campaigns: A near- hopeless battle for what he saw as principle. "It was kind of like fighting City Hall – he was fighting a very well established, well respected agency within our medical profession," said Dr. Shields.

For one lone crusader to hcallenge city hall – it didn’t have much chance of succeeding."

And in the end, Paul lost.

For all Paul’s passion, his National Board remains something like the Libertarian Party of ophthalmology. Registered in Kentucky and governed by Paul and two family members, it continues – Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said – to run a formal, confidential recertification process for ABOP dissidents that is much like that of ABO itself. The group has no website and no public presence, but it most recently recertified a doctor just two weeks ago, Benton said. Paul, in his statement, suggested that the American Board of Medical Specialties had refused to embrace his rival group to protect ABOP, one of it charter members, though there’s no evidence Paul ever seriously sought formal recognition.

The National Board of Ophthalmology “never quite caught fire like Rand and the 200 other ophthalmologists had hoped, but it continues to offer quality, trustworthy certifications for ophthalmologists,” said Benton. (A spokesman for the Bowling Green hospital where Paul practices suggested to the Courier-Journal that his certification isn’t a concern.)

As for the shift to what’s called maintenance of certification, “the debate’s over – we’re in the implementation phase,” said O’Day, Paul’s old antagonist.

Paul's admirers and his critics alike see the war with the ABO as a window into the candidate's deeply anti-Establishment politics.

"It speaks to the kind of person that Rand is," said Benton, the spokesman. "He doesn’t like the arbitrary and unfair use of power. He likes fairness, he likes equality under the law, and when these older opthamologists used their power to turn things in their favor, Rand stood up."

Wilkinson, the former ABOP chairman, said the episode should serve as a warning about Paul.

“He’s going to dig himself a little hole here if he’s not real careful,” he said of Paul’s continued criticism of the board’s certification process. Wilkinson compared opthamologists, who conduct eye surgery, to pilots, who also undergo regular testing.

“All you have to do is think of that pilot metaphor and say, ‘Is this the kind of guy you want working on you?’” he said.

Gabriel Beltrone contributed to this report.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38530_Page3.html#ixzz0r2mXDPQa

Editor's comment: wasn't it Albert Einstein who said that "a foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth"?

Go Rand.

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