The question of whether America is in decline cannot be answered yes or no. There is no yes or no. Both answers are wrong, because the assumption that somehow there exists some predetermined inevitable trajectory, the result of uncontrollable external forces, is wrong. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is written. For America today, decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice. Two decades into the unipolar world that came about with the fall of the Soviet Union, America is in the position of deciding whether to abdicate or retain its dominance. Decline--or continued ascendancy--is in our hands.
This view of Obama -- and liberalism -- is now so widespread among conservatives that I've heard more than one Republican politician attribute lines from Krauthammer to Obama himself.
Maggie Haberman and Alex Burns are bearing the liveblogging weight tonight; I'll wander in occasionally but check out their new blog here if you haven't already.
The White House and its allies have experimented with a range of attacks on Republicans, from women's rights to Medicare, but the DNC's memo before the debate seems to acknowledge that the election will be fought on core economic issues, and hits Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney (and only them) on jobs.
Says the memo from Communications Director Brad Woodhouse, set to be released shortly:
The fact is Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty are in no position to talk about economic growth, budgets or job creation.
In Romney’s four years as governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of all 50 states in job growth. There's a bumper sticker for you - "Elect Me: I finished fourth from dead last in jobs."
Tim Pawlenty’s record is no better. He left Minnesota with a $6.2 billion projected deficit, making him the first Minnesota governor in history to pass on such a massive shortfall. And he shifted tax burdens to localities by cutting local funding. The result was that, under Tim Pawlenty, 90% of Minnesotans saw an increase in property taxes. And during his entire tenure in Minnesota - eight full years - he created a mere 6,200 jobs while seeing a large spike in the jobless rate.
GREENVILLE, S.C. — Tim Pawlenty battled to a draw in a debate that was, in the end, between him and his main, absent rival, Mitt Romney.
Pawlenty, standing in the middle of stage here at Greenville’s Peace Center in a Clemson orange tie, is widely viewed as the only candidate in Thursday night’s Fox News debate with any real chance of becoming the nominee of his party or President of the United States.
He took the first question and more subsequent questions than any of his rivals, and while the low-key Minnesotan failed to dominate the arena amid a motley but presentable crew of second- and third-tier candidates, he proved well prepared both for tough, substantive questions and for the priorities of his South Carolina audience.
But if Pawlenty ground out a solid performance, it's Romney who was rewarded for his decision to skip the Greenville event.
The former Massachusetts governor’s supporters feared that a spurned Fox News would punish him in his absence, but instead Pawlenty and other Republicans passed repeatedly on opportunities to attack the field’s best-known figure and leading fundraiser.
“Governor Romney’s not here to defend himself, so I’m not going to pick on him or the positions he took in Massachusetts,” Pawlenty said at one point when asked about the state health care overhaul Romney enacted.
Tim Pawlenty, in his Clemson orange tie, has made sure to play to the issues of interest to South Carolina Republicans, notably the battle between Boeing and the NLRB over Boeing's move to shift jobs here.
Fox just now teed up a question for Pawlenty about Mitt Romney's health care plan -- and Pawlenty took a pass, mostly.
"Governor Romney’s not here to defend himself so I’m not going to pick on him or the position he took in Massachusetts," he said.
There's a strategic choice here, and one that has to do with Romney, the nominal frontrunner, not being so prohibitive a frontrunner that the pack is really gunning for him yet.
Asked if there are circumstances under which they'd support water-boarding terror suspects, three candidates raised their hands: Tim Pawlenty, Rick Santorum, and Herman Cain. Only the libertarians Gary Johnson and Ron Paul demurred.
The question, and answer, signaled that "enhanced interrogation" -- widely regarded as torture -- have turned into something of a Republican Party litmus test. Pawlenty introduced the subject unasked:
"If it turns out that...the techniques that [Obama] criticized during the campaign led to bin Laden's being identified and killed, he should be asked to explain whether he does or doesn't support those techniques," he said at the beginning of the debate.
Hume noted that Pawlenty, two years ago, refused to endorse waterboarding specifically, citing the "damage it causes not only to the individual but to our values more broadly."
Pawlenty said he stood by that sentiment -- but that he support[s] enhanced interrogation techniques under limited circumstances."
Nobody looks to minor candidate for caution, and Herman Cain's answer to a question about Afghanistan seems sort of disqualifying, in the minor-candidate stakes: He would, he says, rely on "the experts and their advice and their input."
"I’m not privy to a lot of confidential information," he said. "At this point, I don’t know all the facts."
Former Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer, one of several longshot candidates, paid the $25,000 fee but was still rejected by Fox News and the South Carolina GOP because he had not registered 1 percent approval in recent polls.
Roemer spokesman Aaron Walker told The Huffington Post his boss "would like to try and get [the $25,000] back."
Registering 1% is equivalent to being mentioned in a poll. It's hard to see a standard that includes Herman Cain and Gary Johnson but not Roemer, perhaps the most entertaining of the many former governors in the race and, as no-hope minor candidates go, a standout.
A libertarian memo is circulating that progressives ought to thank the Kochs for their support of organizations that fight for gay marriage, drug decriminalization and lower defense spending. But Chait disagrees:
[The] implication is that, if you're horrified by the Bush administration's civil rights record and supportive of gay marriage, the Koch brothers are for you. In fact, they're not. They work very hard to elect Bush and members of Congress who will support his agenda. They support think-tanks that oppose right-wing defense and civil liberties as long as they also support right-wing economic policies.
Another way to put this is that the Kochs will happily put their money behind candidates and intellectuals who agree with their economic agenda but disagree with their social agenda. They will never put their money behind candidates or intellectuals of whom the reverse is true.
Now, there is a coherent view here. The view is that libertarianism ought to be organized around economics, and especially opposition to progressive taxation and any attempt to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions. The Kochs have helped make this the dominant strain of American libertarianism. You can defend that if you want. But to pretend that people on the left should feel half-gratitude toward the Kochs because the Kochs support them on a bunch of issues is disingenuous. The Kochs are overwhelmingly in the business of supporting the Republican agenda.
Minor-party candidates often grumble about being excluded from debates by gatekeepers, and in the Memphis mayor's race, they seem to have run an experiment in including everyone.
Candidate X, who is either a better debater or the underdog, challenges Candidate Y, almost always a weak debater and/or frontrunner. Candidate Y declines or dodges (frequently citing the ample chances voters have already in the primary or soon will in the general to see the candidates).
Then Candidate X (or approved surrogate) counters the counter with some varation of accusing Candidate Y of being chicken.
To wit, today's statement from the Republican Party of Virginia after GOP gubernatorial nominee Bob McDonnell challenged Dem gubernatorial nominee to doing a series of 10 debates and Deeds declined.
“I don’t know what the guy is afraid of,” said Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins.
Joe Wurzelbacher doesn't immediately turn up in the Ohio voter registration database, leading to some speculation last night that he's not registered to vote.
Linda Howe, executive director of the Lucas County Board of Elections, said a Samuel Joseph Worzelbacher, whose address and age match Joe the Plumber’s, registered in Lucas County on Sept. 10, 1992. He voted in his first primary on March 4, 2008, registering as a Republican.
Ms. Howe said that the name may be misspelled in the database.
(This is, incidentally, the reason people worry about purging the voter rolls. They're such a mess to begin with.)
The debates are over, but the debate debate isn't.
The bi-partisan group of online activists pushing to liberate debate footage from copyright restriction, and more broadly to remold presidential debates for a new age, says it will involve itself in other debates in the off-years, and gear up for 2012.
The conservative activist Grover Norquist is also joining the group, he said last night.
"I'm happy to join the Open Debate Coalition in calling for dismantling the Commission or fundamentally reforming it so it is accountable to one constituency only: the public," he said in an email. "And, if the Commission wants to show any bit of responsiveness this year, they'll make sure that debate footage is put in the public domain so people can put clips on YouTube and otherwise share key moments without being deemed copyright lawbreakers."
The group's organizer, Larry Lessig, laid out the group's plans in a memo that one member passed on, after the jump.
"2008 should be the last year that the Commission on Presidential Debates exists as we know it," he wrote. "All of us can help make clear that, in the future, voters must 'own' the debates--and we demand debates that are democratic, transparent, and accountable to the public."
Two readers with access to the Ohio voter file say that Joe Wurzelbacher's inluence on this cycle will be limited in one way: He doesn't appear to be registered to vote.
(And yes, the freelance opposition research on Joe began before the debate ended.)
CORRECTION: The Ohio press reports that he is registered to vote, under a slighlty misspelling of his name.
Katie gets the first interview with Joe Wurzelbacher and, like everyone else in America, he talks like a pundit.
"McCain was solid in his performance," he says. "I still don't know where he stands," he says of Obama. "I'm middle class. I can't have my taxes raised any more."
He also says he actually isn't in the bracket where Obama would raise his taxes -- but he's worried that Obama will shift the bracket down.
He also said that, in his encounter with Obama, the Illinois Senator "a tap dance...almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr."
