What with his attacks on the president for advancing “phony theology,” and on Mitt Romney for seeking government “bailouts” for the Olympics, Rick Santorum got less attention for his assault on federal and state involvement in public education during his speech to the Ohio Christian Alliance over the weekend.

Those who did notice generally accused Santorum of attacking the very idea of public schools. I have little doubt Santorum is blowing a dog-whistle to home-schoolers and those who think education should be privatized (with or without public subsidies). But he did not, for the record, say he opposed public education: he just said the federal government and the states should have minimal involvement in education generally.

There is however, a pretty substantial overlap between what Santorum said and meant and what he was inaccurately accused of saying. Federal and (especially) state involvement in public education is what makes it possible for public schools to operate in the low-income communities where public education matters most. Overall, federal and state governments provide over half the revenues of K-12 public schools in America. And in poorer areas of the country, inadequate local revenues are only partially offset by higher federal and state education funding.

Santorum did vote in the Senate for No Child Left Behind, which was aimed (inadequately) in part on equalizing educational opportunities through federal dollars. But he now seems to be hell-bent on restoring the maximum degree of educational inequality, and his heretical voting record may actually push him in a direction more reactionary than the one he has embraced in the past.

Rick hasn’t quite called for getting the government out of public schools, but he’s getting close. Public subsidies for sectarian schools strike him as making sense. So, too, does submitting to parents and “neighborhood” authorities for use of public education funds. He’s a solid symbol of the devolution of Republican “thinking” on education policy since George W. Bush took office in 2001.

As Sahil Kapur reports at TPM today, Republicans are repackaging their plans to radically transform Medicare to avoid the most obvious political pitfalls:

Republicans want to turn Medicare into a subsidized private insurance structure and cut costs on the beneficiary side. This concept — dubbed “premium support” by backers and “vouchers” by critics — would end the coverage guarantee and give seniors a fixed amount to shop for insurance on a private exchange. If the subsidy is too small, tough luck; they’re on their own.

The Ryan budget aimed to replace traditional Medicare with this concept. But after voting overwhelmingly for it last year, Republicans have grown conscious of the political reality that it’s too radical to pass, and are offering up gentler versions of its core components.

The new Coburn-Burr proposal is the latest example of this recalibration: it would “transition Medicare to a subsidized private insurance system while giving seniors the option to remain in the traditional government-run program — think ‘Obamacare’ exchanges with a public option.”

The Democratic response to such proposals has largely been to just say no to any significant change in Medicare’s structure. But, given the irrefutable cost spiral in Medicare (and in health care costs generally), Democrats have also been gradually driven to embrace a mix of less fundamental but still painful benefit reductions (e.g., raising the eligibility age for Medicare) and cuts in provider reimbursements (especially via the Independent Payment Advisory Board or IPAB).

The IPAB could potentially be the source of revolutionary changes in how medicine is practiced under Medicare—and what it costs—leading to prevention and disease-management innovations that would improve health outcomes as well as improving Medicare’s bottom line. But it’s already under attack from know-nothings in both parties who view it as the prototype for imaginary “death panels” and other “rationing” devices. It is almost certain to have its powers restricted, and is in general a rather slender reed for progressive health policy aspirations. With conservatives probing for better marketing devices and slower implementation of their privatization schemes, something more basic is in order that in no way compromises the commitment to publicly-financed Medicare services.

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A good deal of the excitement over the recent contraception coverage mandate has resulted from the hopes of Republicans, and the fears of some Catholic liberals, that the controversy could prove to be a “wedge issue” that would drive significant numbers of Catholic voters into the GOP column in November.

The assumption behind such scenarios, of course, is that there is a self-conscious “Catholic vote” that operates independently of the rest of the electorate, and that can be moved by the pronouncements of Catholic religious leaders.

My latest column for The New Republic examines this assumption, and finds it uncompelling in several respects: Catholic voters are remarkably similar to all voters in their partisan inclinations; they do not have any overall inclination to follow the Church hierarchy on hot-button cultural issues; and in fact, they are not responding differently from other Americans to the contraception coverage mandate controversy. “The Catholic Vote” looks just like America.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal’s Craig Gilbert addressed the same issue recently and reached the same conclusion. Yes, the sizable “Catholic vote” in Wisconsin is slightly more Republican than the electorate at large, but that’s because it is overwhelmingly white (compared to the Catholic population nationally with its large and growing Latino minority). As Gilbert shows, white Catholic voters break down much as white voters generally do in the major battleground states.

Still another writer scoffing at the idea of some semi-monolithic “Catholic vote” recently was Stephen S. Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, in an article for CNN:

[T]he idea of a Catholic bloc is patently ridiculous. As voters, American Catholics mirror the electorate as a whole, divided into Democrats, independents, and Republicans at about the same percentages as all Americans. And it’s hard to trace such political complexity to religious allegiance.

Schneck notes, in fact, that Catholic voters’ willingness to take orders from religious leaders on moral issues is steadily declining:

88% of Catholics in the [CNN] poll said that it’s OK for Catholics to make up their own minds about these moral issues. That represents a growing trend. In 1992 only 70% supported the “make up their own minds” argument. In 1999 it was 80%.

Today’s Catholics are picky and even suspicious about political signals from the institutional church.

Schneck does observe there are subcultures of Catholic voters who are worth paying distinctive attention to: most obviously, Latino Catholics, but also “intentional Catholics” more likely to actively embrace Church teachings, and “cultural Catholics” who tend to be somewhat more culturally conservative than other voters, but also more “populist” on economic issues.

But the days when—to cite one leading example—there was a vast gulf in the political affiliations of German Catholics and Protestants of relatively similar circumstances are long gone. Voters who happen to be Catholic are affected by the same sorts of cross-currents affecting other voters—but not so much by their distinctive religious tradition.

If you happen to get Presidents Day off from work, perhaps you enjoyed a leisurely brunch this morning. But for everyone else, here are some morsels for just another mid-day break:

* Gallup reports that when Americans are asked to name the country’s top “enemy,” Iran ranks first at 32% with China second at 23%. But it’s not really close: Iran’s favorable/unfavorable ratio is 10/87, while China’s is 41/56.

* Ben Adler tells Republicans they need to accept their presidential field as the best they’re going to get.

* Ron Paul joins the ranks of candidates with a big fat Super-PAC sugar daddy.

* Club for Growth received $1 million check from a sugar mama, New Jersey investor Virginia James, which it will spend in continuing effort to purge “RINOs” in primaries.

* Steve Benen has good summary of two-front attack on Romney for Olympics “bailouts.”

* Local poll shows Santorum crushing field in Texas. Too bad for Rick the primary’s been delayed, maybe until late June.

Back in a bit.

As Adele Stan noted in this space yesterday, Rick Santorum reached a new summit Saturday in his efforts to paint the president and “liberals” generally as secularist enemies of Christianity. In a speech at a luncheon sponsored by the Ohio Christian Alliance (successor to the Ohio branch of the Christian Coalition), Santorum used an interesting phrase to describe Obama’s belief-system:

Obama’s agenda is “not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology,” Santorum told supporters of the conservative Tea Party movement at a Columbus hotel.

Some observers immediately connected these comments to the widespread myth among Obama-haters that the president is actually a Muslim.

Thus, when Santorum, under questioning about these remarks, said “If the president says he’s a Christian, he’s a Christian,” it probably looked to some as though he was backing down a bit from the thrust of his attacks.

I don’t think so.

As I noted in a post last week that has drawn some fire from conservative bloggers, Santorum is on record identifying with the fairly common fundamentalist belief (shared by some “traditionalist” Catholics and even by secular commentators) that mainline or “liberal” Protestants have largely abandoned Christianity for man-made idols. To use Santorum’s own phrase for Obama, many conservative Christians think mainliners maintain a theology that is “not a theology based on the Bible,” but on the nefarious beliefs of such neo-pagans as the “radical environmentalists” who don’t understand God gave dominion over nature to man for his enjoyment and exploitation.

In other words, Santorum’s dog-whistle is aimed not so much at people who ignorantly believe Obama is a secret Muslim, but at people who look at Episcopalians and Presbyterians and Methodists and Congregationalists (Obama’s own denominational background) and see infidels who don’t understand that “true” Christianity requires hard-core opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage, or for that matter, environmentalism, feminism, and other departures from nineteenth century American mores. Indeed, in the 2008 Ave Maria University speech I wrote about the other day, Santorum described mainline Protestants as people who had, sadly, gone over to the enemy camp in a “spiritual war” between God and Satan.

As a Roman Catholic, of course, Rick Santorum doesn’t follow a theology that is based strictly on the Bible, either, but on centuries of (selectively applied) Church teachings that happen to coincide with those of conservative evangelical Protestants. Catholic “traditionalists” are engaged in their own parallel war with “liberal Catholics” whom they accuse of “betraying” their Church by supporting legalized contraception and/or abortion or same-sex marriage or the ordination of women.

The political alliance of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholic “traditionalists” has become a familiar part of the landscape in this country, odd as it may seem to old-timers who remember the conservative Protestant hostility to JFK’s presidential candidacy on grounds that no Catholic could conscientiously support strict separation of church and state (a position conservative evangelicals have themselves now emphatically abandoned.) But it’s important to understand that all the thundering about “secularism” we hear from the religio-political Right these days represents in no small part an intra-Christian civil war by conservatives on those in every faith tradition who do not accept their elevation of “traditional” cultural values to the level of religious absolutes.

There has been an intense amount of interest in Public Policy Polling’s latest survey of the Republican presidential primary in Michigan. It shows Rick Santorum leading Mitt Romney by a 37- 33 margin. But the headline—“Romney Gaining On Santorum In Michigan”—is the real source of interest, because it confirms exactly what most “experts” had expected, thanks to Romney’s large spending advantage in Michigan, and the general feeling that Santorum was becoming a bit unhinged on the campaign trail.

Nate Silver, however, argues convincingly that PPI’s earlier Michigan poll, which showed Santorum racing out to a 15-point lead, was probably an outlier (with a sample showing a suspiciously huge evangelical vote, for one thing). Moreover, the new poll doesn’t seem to show Santorum exactly weakening: his approval-disapproval ratios remain very good, and he continues to beat Romney decisively among the most conservative elements of the MI electorate. Romney’s own favorability is improving, which probably reflects the fact that much of his early MI advertising has been “biographical” rather than “comparative” or negative.

So one popular idea—that Michigan is the new Florida, and Santorum’s eventual decline and fall in the former state is as inevitable as Newt Gingrich’s was in the latter—isn’t really based on empirical evidence, so far. Perhaps Mitt or his Super PAC will go savagely negative on Santorum in Michigan between now and February 28, and perhaps it won’t backfire. But that all remains to be seen.

The one thing that is clear is that Wednesday’s CNN-sponsored debate in AZ—which could be the last in the entire contest—could be a very big deal, not only in AZ but in MI, where voters are likely to be watching pretty closely. I’d say the crucial moments for MI, and maybe the whole GOP nomination contest, could be how Team Romney assesses the situation right after that debate, and whether it decides it has to go crazy negative on Santorum in order to avoid a potential two-state calamity on February 28.

Since this is a federal holiday, I will be following a relatively light posting schedule here today, which means it will only be slightly more intensive than most sites are on normal days.

As you probably know, Presidents Day (or as some spell it, Presidents’ Day) was originally (and still is, according to the federal government) Washington’s Birthday. The more generic term came into popular use in part because the holiday is no longer celebrated on GW’s actual birthday, as it once was, and in part because in some parts of the country it is utilized to honor other presidents along with the first one—usually Abraham Lincoln, whose own birthday was and remains a separate holiday in a number of states.

In anticipating Presidents Day over the weekend, I did something I hadn’t really done before and took a collective looks at the presidents who have served in my lifetime. I was shocked to realize there had been a dozen: Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, and Obama. Half were Democrats and half were Republicans. Half were either born in or were elected to office in one of the states of the former Confederacy. Half went either to Ivy League colleges or to military academies. All of them with the arguable exception of Carter prosecuted military actions. Four fought in World War II, five sent or maintained troops in Vietnam, two invaded Iraq. Their warlike gestures ranged in intensity from Reagan’s playhouse invasion of Granada to Truman’s order to drop nuclear weapons on Japan.

Five lost re-election bids (if you assume Truman wanted to run in 1952 but withdrew after losing the New Hampshire primary). Three (Ike, Nixon and Reagan) were re-elected by landslides; one (Clinton) by a comfortable margin; and a third (G.W. Bush) by an eyelash.

Several had difficult second terms. One resigned under the threat of impeachment and another survived an impeachment trial.

Only two (JFK and Reagan) were immediately succeeded by their vice presidents, although in four other cases (Nixon, Humphrey, Mondale and Gore) the last Veep won his party’s next presidential nomination.

While all these presidents have had their defenders among professional and amateur historians alike, and Truman and LBJ in particular have achieved relatively high rankings, only two of the twelve achieved what you might call hagiographical status after their presidencies: JFK and Reagan—the former because of his tragic death, and the potential, personal and national, he represented, and the latter as the increasingly dominant ideological lodestar of contemporary conservatism, despite his own heresies.

Most readers doubtless have their own memories and reflections on the presidents of their own lifetimes; feel free to share them in the comment thread.

When a big-time celebrity dies an untimely death, there’s an immediate rush in the media to apply lessons. This is especially true of those whose unravelling became the stuff of spectacle and speculation; consequently, this is especially true of Whitney Houston, whose funeral took place yesterday in Newark, N.J.

I don’t mean to set myself apart from this phenomenon; I did my share of writing about Michael Jackson’s death and what it said about matters of race and child abuse. And I suppose I’m about to hold forth a bit about Houston’s demise, if largely through the observations of others.

So far, the death of the sublimely talented and very beautiful Whitney Houston has an inspired a rash of “What really killed Whitney?” pieces. Was it the prescription drugs, the alcohol, the peculiar pressures of worldwide fame?

Was it being a black “cross-over” artist, and the self-denial demanded of those so destined? Was it her own purported denial of her sexual orientation, rumors about which dogged Houston for years? Or the tension of living in the profane world of pop music after being raised in the church, the daughter of a famous gospel singer?

Or maybe it was all of the above.

But, truth be told, these questions are less about Whitney Houston than those who pose them, and those who read the articles in which they’re posed, eager for a clue to who we Americans are as a people, and the cross-currents of our often maddening and self-contradictory society. This is true whether it’s the New York Times’ Frank Bruni today jumping off from the Houston story to write a column about alcohol abuse, or Out magazine resurrecting a year 2000 interview with Houston in which she addressed — rather graphically — the gay rumors.

Of the work I’ve read in the “Why did Whitney die?” genre, the most gripping I’ve seen — and one that speaks to all of these questions is a long essay by Max S. Gordon at The New Civil Rights Movement.

From the first, I always felt Houston was ill-served by those who chose her material for her. She possessed an amazing vocal instrument, and the pieces chosen for her to sing were pop anthems to which she applied astounding feats of vocal pyrotechnics. But more than that, Houston was a true artist: she could make you feel the most cliched lyrics as if they were somehow profound. Imagine what she could have done with material that actually was profound.

From Gordon’s essay:

This amazing black voice was consistently singing bullsh*t; and not just lovely trifles that became classics like her cousin Dionne [Warwick’s], but songs that felt willfully repressive; there was a story that was definitely not going to be told through her. I knew that Whitney wasn’t solely responsible for this, but it was her voice in the end on the record, so they had to have her consent. My question is, did she even know what was missing from her music, and did she care?

[…]

Whitney’s voice was a revelation, but we never got her blues song, her protest. I argue that Whitney was an artist in the end, but I believe that she was an artist not because of the music industry, but despite it.

Here’s the state of our national politics: The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination says that that President Barack Obama embraces a “phony theology”; that large-scale public education is an outdated idea, and that contraception is “not okay.” And let’s not forget his statement last month that he didn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”*

Yes, you heard all that right. If current polls hold up, Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania could be the presidential nominee of one of the nation’s two major parties. The most recent Gallup national tracking poll shows Santorum with a 6-point lead over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.

At a campaign stop in Ohio yesterday, Santorum, an old-school, anti-contraception Catholic, asserted that Obama’s agenda sprang from a false theology. As quoted by the New York Times, Santorum said of Obama’s overall agenda:

“It’s about some phony ideal, some phony theology. Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology,” he said. “But no less a theology.”

Not a theology based on the Bible. Funny, I’ve been thumbing through my Bible, trying to find Jesus’ injunction against birth control (not there), abortion (yes, it existed in his day) and public education (bupkis).

Well, okay, I concede that Jesus was probably home-schooled.

And I haven’t heard Santorum bleating that great quip from Jesus about how much easier it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into Heaven.

But never mind. Because Santorum isn’t really advancing a theological argument. He’s fanning the flames of culture war, speaking in a code that is easily deciphered by those determined to paint Obama as something other than a real American, those who want to believe he is a crypto-Muslim, those for whom his birth certificate is less than valid proof of his citizenship.

From the Times report, by Richard A. Oppel, Jr.:

Assertions that Mr. Obama is not a Christian, or that he is not an American, were rampant in the 2008 campaign…

[…]

Last month, a woman at one of Mr. Santorum’s campaign stops in Florida declared during a question-and-answer session that Mr. Obama was Muslim. According to an account by CNN, Mr. Santorum did not correct the woman’s statement, and he later said it was not his job to correct such statements.

Santorum was Bob Schieffer’s guest this morning on CBS News’ “Face the Nation.” When the video posts, it will be here.

* Days after Santorum’s “black people” comment was reported, the candidate denied that he said the word “black”, contending that it was the word “blah” that he said. Mediaite has the video.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times’ conservative columnist, this morning brings us this startling revelation: In states where there are few restrictions on abortion, more abortions take place. Herewith:

[A]bortion rates are frequently higher in more liberal states, where access is often largely unrestricted, than in more conservative states, which are more likely to have parental consent laws, waiting periods, and so on. “Safe, legal and rare” is a nice slogan, but liberal policies don’t always seem to deliver the “rare” part.

To be fair to Douthat, the point he’s trying to make is that in states where contraception is easily available to women, abortion rates remain high. But the fact that women have to jump through fewer hoops in order to get abortions in liberal-leaning states likely also has something to do with the higher rates in those states.

What’s really at issue in Douthat’s column is the perils of accepting the right-wing frame when constructing liberal positions. By unilaterally presenting abortion as a very bad thing in the 1990s, the message mavens of the Clinton administration, with their construction of “safe, legal and rare,” gave abortion opponents a rhetorical rationale for piling on restrictions that, in many states, make abortion inaccessible to increasing numbers of women — despite the fact that the Supreme Court decided decades ago that their right to the procedure is protected by the Constitution.

A similar “moral hazard,” if you will, exists in the arguments of some LGBT rights advocates, who assert our rights via the idea that LGBT people are “born this way,” and should therefore not be penalized for sexual behavior, conducted in private between consenting adults, that falls outside the realm of heterosexuality. In rooting one’s rights in the “born this way” claim, one basically makes the case that if one weren’t “born this way,” the behavior would be wrong. How ‘bout the simple constitutional claim that, hey, it’s none of your business?

Our rights come from the Constitution, not from some set of “Judeo-Christian values” selectively defined by right-wing politicians. Leave it to the religious institutions to promote their values as they see fit. After all, that’s their constitutional prerogative.

Every time liberals cede the moral frame to the right wing, liberals lose. Or, at the very least, we have to answer to nonsense such as that promulgated by Douthat.

Mitt Romney, the once-“inevitable” nominee for the Republican presidential nod, can’t seem to catch a break. With Rick Santorum nipping at his heels in Romney’s native state of Michigan, where the state party will conduct its presidential primary on February 28, Romney was at least looking forward to winning the other contest that will take place that day in Arizona, where Romney still enjoys an 8-point lead, according to Rasmussen Reports. Then the politics of sexual orientation and immigration intersected in a rather embarrassing way for Romney, who has drawn a hard line against undocumented immigrants, and opposes marriage for same-sex couples.

Paul Babeu, the tough-talking, anti-immigration Arizona sheriff who served as a co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, yesterday made a hasty exit from that lofty post after allegations that he threatened to use his office to deport a man who claims to have been Babeu’s lover. Although Babeu denied the claim, first published by the Phoenix New Times on Thursday, that he threatened an undocumented Mexican immigrant with deportation if the man revealed what he says was a multi-year romantic relationship with Babeu, the sheriff, in a Saturday news conference, took the occasion to come out. And then, one might say, he self-deported from the Romney campaign. Babeu, did however, vow to continue in his quest for a congressional seat from Arizona’s 4th District, continuing his primary battle with freshman Rep. Paul Gosar.

From Politico’s David Cantanese:

Arizona GOP congressional candidate Paul Babeu acknowledged Saturday he is gay but forcefully denied charges he threatened an ex-lover with deportation after their relationship soured.

“All of the allegations are false except one, I am gay,” Babeu said.

The nationally renown Pinal County Sheriff called a news conference to address the explosive story by The Phoenix New Times that he pressured a man only identified as “Jose” into signing an agreement to conceal their relationship or face deportation. The piece, posted late Friday, also includes text messages Babeu exchanged with the man and pictures he posted on online gay websites.

Babeu repeatedly sidestepped questions about his personal life but acknowledged a relationship with the man in question.

“What I do in my personal life and private life is my business,” he said.

Temporarily taking over dysfunctional, yet critical industries (or even entire industrial sectors) and improving their efficiency and bottom lines.

The other day Mitt Romney repeated his opposition to the restructuring of GM and Chrysler using public money.. As many have remarked, including former Washington Monthly super blogger, Steve Benen, this would almost sound sensible except for the fact that—hello!—there was a monster financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. The entire international credit system was frozen—there was no private capital interested and available for such a massive project. If Bush and Obama had followed Romney’s advice, we might have had a bonfire of the liquidators and stuffed the 10 cents on the dollar cars with five cent on the dollar books from Borders. It’s almost painful to also observe, as Benen does, that Romney’s analysis is transparently given in bad faith, so as to somehow mete out the pathological criticism of Obama that the party base requires even when his policies have succeeded.

But it’s even worse than that (isn’t always with Romney?). If you actually know the history of similar interventions in American history (including the Chrysler bailout of just thirty years earlier) as spelled out in this great Phillip Longman essay in this magazine from 2009 it turns out that the federal government has regularly salvaged companies vital to the nation’s economic ecology—and done so with great success.

Indeed, progressive fascist Woodrow Wilson even nationalized the entire national rail system during World War I, at a time when rail was, arguably, even more significant to the American economy (because it controlled almost all interstate commercial transportation) then the automobile is today. And Secretary of the Treasury, Williams Gibbs McAdoo, was appointed Director General of the nation’s railroads, which was like having the power of the God of Thunder, Mighty Thor, compared to the mere “Czars” and their little fiefdoms that pollute the Obama administration.

And McAdoo improved the efficiency of the railroad industry. Then, after the Armistice, Wilson turned around and gave to Congress the task of reconverting the railroads to private ownership, which was completed in just 18 months.

And years later, Mitt Romney was still permitted to pay under 14% of his income in federal taxes—and, thus, the natural order was restored.

Michelle Goldberg and Michael Tomasky have excellent columns up at the Daily Beast, which catalog the comprehensive push by conservatives around the country to demean, control, and otherwise subordinate women who don’t conform to traditional gender roles. In Oklahoma, a bill passed by the State Senate would outlaw in vitro fertilization, since it depends upon frozen embryos. In Virginia, a woman seeking an abortion will be subject to invasive ultrasounds of her fetus. And, of course, we have seen how the fight over “religious freedom” done in the name of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church has quickly shifted to a fight over birth control, more broadly.

As with the continued rear-guard fight against same-sex marriage (activists in both Washington state and Maryland plan to challenge via referendum same sex marriage legislation passed or about to be passed in those respective states), we are seeing an old story replayed yet again: conservatives are entirely reactive to long standing efforts by women and gay people to obtain greater autonomy and equity in civil society and their personal lives. Fifty years after Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and forty three years after the Stonewall Riots, conservatives are still, in the famous phrase of William F. Buckley, standing on the railroad tracks of history and yelling “stop.” It is a restorationist credo to which we could also include efforts to bring back the gold standard and weaken the social insurance state. Yet this is a future obsessed nation, always fascinated by the next new thing, be it the iPad three or Jeremy Lin. And thus conservatism always has to set up a new bulwark in defense of freedom several miles back from it’s earlier bulwark—even Oklahoma can’t bring itself to prohibit birth control altogether. It will never be 1962 again, or 1920, or even 1870, the train of history keeps hurtling forward. The greater the current offense to the way things were—and now it’s a bi-racial/cosmopolitan/intellectual president raised in a Muslim country—the more rabid is the effort of conservatives to retain something of the old world, the more feverish is the desire to sail their boats against the current.

Modern conservatism and its political vehicle, the Republican party, is fittingly represented in 2012 by a movement of people who first came to public attention by dressing in clothing worn in the 18th century.

Correction: I’m embarrassed enough by this sloppy error to call special attention to it. The exact and, in context, William F. Buckley quote—one of the most evocative in the history of American conservatism—is as follows: “….if NATIONAL REVIEW is superfluous, it is so for very different reasons: It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” This is taken from the mission statement of the National Review in 1955.

No railroad metaphor—that was entirely of my own creation and should not have sullied Buckley’s lovely, if all too revealing, prose. Guess I must have been thinking about how great it was that Wilson nationalized the railroads (Irony alert!).

He is, by political instincts as a Florida politician, and by the example of his own family, a immigration moderate. Yet there is no issue which galvanizes the Republican base as much as its anti-immigration resentment. As Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson argue in their brilliant and definitive analysis of the Tea Party, immigration animus combines all of the cultural and economic anxieties of tea party types. Immigrants—and we are talking here about Latino immigrants—are seen as “freeloaders” who defy the cultural norms of hard working, white America even as they sponge benefits from it. In their many interviews with Tea Party supporters around the country, the authors were themselves surprised to find that immigration was the issue that touched a nerve, whether in border states like Arizona or seemingly anomalous places like Massachusetts.

It remains insufficiently acknowledged that Rick Perry’s decline in the polls began not as a result of his inept debate performances, per se, but when he told a debate audience that “it did not have a heart” for opposing his bill to give the children of illegal immigrants a tuition break at Texas state universities. According to a Washington Post/ABC poll soon after this remark, his support among tea party supporters declined from 45% to 10%!

Recall that Jeb’s big brother, W, saw his GOP base support collapse after his failed attempt to pass immigration reform. Only then did his polls decline into the 20s. In short, Jeb Bush is no guarantee to appease the howling Republican base. Quite the contrary.