Romney, Bain, and the End of the Reagan Coalition

Listening the last couple of days to the Republican crack-up over Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital has been fascinating. Conservatives have pounced on Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for their harsh criticisms of Romney. Perry, for example, has said: "We need more venture capitalism, and less vulture capitalism."

This is an attack from the "left," observers left and right have said. It is not conservative. Rush Limbaugh sputtered in exasperation: "My gosh, that's what the people who indict capitalism say ... this sounds like left-wing social engineering." Gingrich, Rush said, "sounds like Elizabeth Warren."

I couldn't disagree more. This isn't an attack from the left, it is an attack from within the unstable marriage that has been the Republican Party for at least the last thirty years. What's happening, I think, may be nothing less than the disintegration of the Reagan coalition.

The idea that the critique of Romney and Bain is "left-wing" is only true if you conceive of modern American conservatism in extremely narrow terms. By any reasonable definition of the word "conservative," the critique (especially as made by Newt Gingrich) is in fact deeply conservative.

What we are seeing here is the tension, if not outright contradiction, between two strands of modern American conservatism. On the one hand, conservatives value tradition. They talk about small-town values: family, work, religion. But the other strand is unrestrained free-market capitalism, the single most progressive force in history. The essence of capitalism is incessant change. Everywhere it has enjoyed free rein, it has undermined traditions and traditional values.

Ever since Herbert Hoover, the Republican Party has tried to maintain a coalition that includes both strands. Hoover was the epitome of both small town values and capitalist business success: born in the heartland (Iowa), he was orphaned at age 9, overcame being shuffled around for several years, attended Stanford, became a mining engineer, sought his fortune abroad, and became a self-made millionaire. As president during the depression, he warned against the moral degeneracy of dependence on the state.

But the Republican political leader who best combined these strands was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Like Hoover, he came from humble origins. But unlike Hoover, he became "the Great Communicator," a politician who never lost the common touch. The key to his political success was winning over the so-called Reagan Democrats: white, middle-class voters who had become disaffected with 1960s liberalism, and whose economic interests had suffered in the stagflation of the 1970s.

Modern American conservatives, however, have sometimes had trouble maintaining the coalition Reagan forged, and in Romney's Bain experience, we have a stark example of why it can be so hard.

When faced with the recent criticisms, Romney has relied on the power of the free market strand of conservatism. He claims that all of the attacks on him are meant to put "free enterprise on trial." In that, he has the support of Ron Paul, conservatism's purist defender of laissez-faire capitalism: “Bankruptcy and restructuring are very important principles in free markets.”

Free markets always create the correct, and moral, result according to this doctrinaire view. If people get fired in the pursuit of greater profits, so be it. The greater economic good counter-balances whatever harm may have been done by the invisible hand.

But we all know that unemployment is socially corrosive. When people lose their jobs, families suffer. It puts tremendous strain on them, sometimes they break up. When a company goes bankrupt, it can destroy an entire community.

That is the thrust of the devastatingly effective video put out by the pro-Gingrich Super Pac.

What  makes it so powerful is the testimony of real people put out of work by Bain. These are the Reagan Democrats. They come off, as Andrew Sullivan notes, not as "envious," as Romney condescendingly puts it. "They come off as bewildered, betrayed and sure that Romney's goal in all this was merely, solely to make money for himself - the kind of money that most Americans cannot even compute."

Newt's real apostasy here is that he is pointing out the contradiction that has always been there: the market is not inherently moral. The workings of free enterprise can be entirely legal and also immoral.

And, believe it or not, Gingrich is making the moral argument.  Here's how he put it on MSNBC Wednesday:

A company Bain had invested $30 million in, they took $180 million out -- that's 6 to 1-- and the company went bankrupt. And you have to ask yourself, if you're going to get a 6 to 1 return when the company's going bankrupt, gee, what if you'd only taken  3 to 1? ... Just because you have the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.

This is the traditional values argument: doing the right thing. In the video, we see families harmed, we see good people who want to work unable to support those families. We see them sincerely question whether what Bain did was morally right.

This is a conservative case, one that harkens back to an older, pre-capitalist, communitarian ethos, one that values the stability of the community, one that seeks a balance between the interests of the individual and those of the whole.

For advancing this line of attack, Republicans and other conservatives are roundly condemning Gingrich. The president of the right-wing Club For Growth has accused Newt of engaging in “economically ignorant class warfare” and making an "attack on a basic tenet of economic freedom."

Newt has rightly countered: "Criticizing one businessman for one set of practices is not an assault on capitalism." Of course that's true. But there's a good reason today's conservatives cannot agree to that. They're all in. They have fully committed to the free market strand of conservatism.

Note how John McCain put it to Fox News: "To go after [Romney], on really what is the essence of what we Republicans believe about economy, is a serious mistake.... There's an alternative to how Bain does business. It's called communism."

In other words, the distinction Newt makes -- between the ideal of capitalist competition and the predatory practices of Bain -- simply does not exist for today's Republican Party. It is either unrestrained free market, with all of its excesses and destruction (both "creative" and not), or it is communism. There is no middle ground.

Republicans and conservatives cannot acknowledge the conservative moral legitimacy of the Gingrich critique because they have been damning it for at least the last three years. To say that Gingrich has a point would invalidate their entire critique of Barack Obama: it would expose the "Obama is a socialist" line for the idiocy that it is.

It is Obama who has been making the conservative critique of capitalism. It is Obama who has been criticizing specific businessmen and specific business practices. It is Obama who has championed Wall Street reform and consumer protection -- not because he doesn't believe in capitalism (as Republican demagoguery would have it), but because, like Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt before him, he sees that capitalism is in crisis and needs to be saved from its greatest and most self-destructive excesses.

There is no room for such a view among the power elites of the Republican Party and conservative movement. They have forgotten that the moral component of conservatism was never merely lip-service opposition to abortion or gay marriage. At its best, it has been much more than that.

Reagan knew that. As Obama has adroitly noted, his so-called "Buffett Rule," far from being "class warfare," was Reagan's idea.  In 1985, Reagan said that tax loopholes "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying ten percent of his salary, and that’s crazy.... Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver or less?"

That same year, Reagan said the following:

I told some people ... of a letter that I just received ... from a man out here in the country, an executive who's earning in six figures -- well above $100,000 a year. He wrote me in support of the tax plan because he said, “I am legally able to take advantage of the present tax code -- nothing dishonest, doing what the law prescribes -- and wind up ... paying a smaller tax than my secretary pays.” And he wrote me the letter to tell me he'd like to come to Washington and testify before Congress as to how that's possible for him to do and why it is wrong [emphasis added].

Legal, nothing dishonest -- but wrong. Reagan knew the difference, and knew how important that difference was politically. Today, in his political desperation, Newt Gingrich also knows it matters politically.

In his segment on Romney's Bain problem Wednesday night, Lawrence O'Donnell put it beautifully:

The freedom to choose our occupations, the freedom to choose what we will do for money, requires us to check, not just if it's legal, but if it is the right thing to do.... What we do for money, and what harm we do while doing it, goes a long way to define who we are.

O'Donnell is a liberal, but that is a fundamentally conservative statement: freedom is not license, freedoms come with responsibilities, and we are responsible not just to ourselves, but to others and to our communities.

This debate over Romney and Bain is not about Republicans sounding like Democrats, or about both parties trying to be economic populists: it is about the moral dimension of our politics. It's something that a significant number of Republican voters value, but that the radical individualists among the Tea Partiers and libertarians either reject or flatly deny, and the corporate elite don't even understand.

Gingrich is, of course, primarily motivated to make these attacks by personal animus to Romney due to the negative ads that killed Newt's chances in Iowa. But one of Newt's (few) political virtues is that he does sometimes see a bigger picture. In this case, he knows that the Republicans, if they nominate Mitt Romney, are handing this potent political issue to President Obama, and with it, possibly, an essential component of Republican political success over the last 30 years.

If Obama can take advantage of Romney's moral blindness and regain a significant number of Reagan Democrats, he will win re-election. If he can go further and recapture the mantle of the moral dimension of politics, he can realign American politics and fracture the Reagan coalition.

Paul & Huntsman: "Bring 'em Home" Republicans

Back in November, before the GOP debate here at Wofford, I noted that one of the interesting things to look for in the debate, whose ostensible topic was foreign policy, was how large a role the historical internationalist v. isolationist split in the GOP would play: "I’ll be looking for signs that this old debate within the Republican party may be re-emerging in the 21st century."

Last night, I could not help but note that the primary in New Hampshire produced a 40% vote for two candidates who explicitly call for the US to get out of Afghanistan: Ron Paul and Jon Huntsman. Granted, Mitt Romney, who called for "overwhelming military superiority," won the primary with 38%, and if one adds in the 20% that went to the combination of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, that means that about 60% of voters went for candidates whose foreign policy is much more aggressive and interventionist.

It is also worth noting that voters don't generally vote on foreign policy, and this year that is probably more true than it usually is. So one can't take that 40% as a necessarily isolationist vote.

Nonetheless, it does seem fair to say this: for that 40% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters, the foreign policy views of Paul and Huntsman were not disqualifying. That is significant. 

It is practically impossible to imagine that just four years ago. Then, there was only one candidate calling for such a foreign policy: Ron Paul.  And he got only 7.7% of the vote in 2008. He tripled that last night.  Something interesting is happening among Republican voters.

Several observers have noted the absence in this campaign of references to the last Republican president, George W. Bush. For some, that's due to the perception that he was a "big government" conservative who let spending get out of hand. But it may also be that some Republicans are recoiling from the aggressive, regime-change, nation-building foreign policy that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld pursued.

Listening to the jingoism of Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum (especially on the topic of Iran), it is clear that the animating spirit of the Bush foreign policy is far from dead. It is also not going unchallenged.

Those two things combined add up to a meaningful split in the foreign policy consensus in the Republican Party. That makes it all the more interesting that Romney's victory speech in New Hampshire focused as much as it did on foreign policy.

He accused Obama of an "appeasement strategy" and said the president  "doesn't see the need for overwhelming military superiority." If Obama is an "appeaser," then what do we call Paul and Huntsman and their supporters? Clearly, Romney is not interested in appealing to the Paul and Huntsman voters on foreign policy.

Certainly, no virulently anti-Obama voter is going to vote against Romney in the general election on foreign policy grounds. But those who find appealing the "bring 'em home" sentiment expressed by Paul and Huntsman will have no place call their own in a Republican Party led by Romney. In the long run, that could spell trouble for party unity.

Andrew Sullivan Gets Eisenhower Wrong

Andrew Sullivan has an innovative video feature on his blog, The Dish, now at the Daily Beast. In "Ask Andrew Anything," Sullivan gives video replies to reader questions. These replies are an interesting way of expanding blog content, but today's installment gets some history quite wrong.

The question was "Why do you think Eisenhower was the greatest president of the 20th century?" I agree with the general thrust of the reply, which echoes the revisionist case that Ike was far more effective than people at the time realized.

However, comparing Ike to JFK, Sullivan says: "You can certainly say this thing: that Eisenhower would never, ever, ever have done the Bay of Pigs in a million years.... and I doubt would have gotten us entangled in Vietnam either."

Both of those speculative statements are contradicted by the historical record.

The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, in which CIA-backed Cuban exiles tried to overthrow the Castro government, took place less than three months after Kennedy took office. The planning was not a Kennedy initiative, but had begun a year earlier during the Eisenhower administration, when the president approved a National Security Council paper calling for covert action to overthrow Castro. The specific Bay of Pigs plan was approved by Eisenhower after the election, in late November 1960. Kennedy inherited the operation from the Eisenhower administration. It is simply wrong to say "Eisenhower would never, ever, ever have done the Bay of Pigs in a million years." Ike approved it. It was Ike's plan.

Now, some might quibble that JFK didn't actually implement Eisenhower's plan because he did not supply American air cover. Without delving into the morass of that particular controversy, let me simply say that Sullivan's argument is based on the premise that Ike was prudent and cautious, a president who "presided," while Kennedy was rash and "radical." Ike's approval of a more provocative step than JFK took is hardly evidence of that.

On Vietnam, Sullivan might seem to be on stronger ground--his claim is less absolute ("I doubt") and since Ike was not president, we'll never know with absolute certainty.

But we do know what Ike advised LBJ to do in 1965. Johnson knew that the prestige Eisenhower enjoyed could be a politically effective tool in garnering public support for escalation. When Ike was briefed on Gen. Westmoreland's recommendation for escalation in June 1965, Eisenhower reportedly said "We have got to win."

More conclusively, thanks to LBJ's telephone conversation recordings, we have direct, irrefutable evidence of Eisenhower's thoughts. Johnson spoke to the former president on the morning of July 2, 1965. Ike said: "You've got to go along with your military advisers ... My advice is, do what you have to do." He advised LBJ to say to the Vietcong and North Vietnamese: "Hell, we're going to end this thing and win this thing.... We don't intend to fail." His final word to LBJ? "I would go ahead and ... do it as quickly as I could."

We don't have to guess what Ike thought about escalation in 1965. Sullivan's view initially seems plausible, given Eisenhower's own decision in 1954 not to bail out the French at Dienbienphu. Less than a year after ending the Korean War, Ike had no interest in getting into another land war in Asia.

But (and this is what Eisenhower admirers overlook) he did commit the United States to maintaining an independent South Vietnamese government. That commitment, the one LBJ always said his policy was meant to keep, was Eisenhower's commitment. When it came down to it, Eisenhower supported troop escalation in 1965 to keep the commitment he himself had made.

There was much that was prudent about Eisenhower's presidency. He did end the Korean War, he did avoid direct American involvement in the French war in Vietnam. But he also endorsed what in retrospect were clearly counterproductive and even reckless covert operations in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, and those "successes" gave rise to the hubris of the Bay of Pigs. He made the ill-advised commitment to South Vietnam, leaving his successors to make good on it. In neither case do his actions fit Sullivan's admiring portrait.

Santorum and Mussolini

Rick Santorum wisely saw his post-Iowa speech as a chance to introduce himself to the majority of Americans who had not previously paid much attention to the presidential race. He told a quite effective story about announcing his run in the town where his immigrant grandfather lived. He related how his grandfather had fled Mussolini's Italy in 1925, and come to America for freedom and opportunity.

So far, so good.

But then he veered off course. He said that we face the same situation today:

[The Democrats want] to talk about raising taxes on people who have been successful and redistributing money, increasing dependency in this country, promoting more Medicaid and food stamps and all sorts of social welfare programs and passing Obamacare to provide even more government subsidies. More and more dependency, more and more government — exactly what my grandfather left in 1925.

That's right. He actually compared Obama to Mussolini.

Now, for the Republican primary electorate, this probably won't hurt him.  But for more rational people, it is hard to believe that most won't find such a comparison offensive.

By 1925, Mussolini, who had begun his career by working through the electoral process, had seized dictatorial powers and had come close to completely dismantling Italian democracy. Political parties (other than his Fascists) effectively had been stripped of power. They would be banned totally in 1928. His opponents were sometimes gunned down in the streets gangland style. Newspapers were censored.

It goes without saying that nothing about today's American resembles that. Comparing American today to Mussolini's Italy in 1925 is nothing short of delusional. But in the contemporary GOP, is is far from unusual. Today's conservatives, as I have noted before (here and here), seem to have a marked tendency (whether they mean to or not) to denigrate the actual tyranny suffered by other peoples. They claim they are the guardians of freedom and the enemies of tyranny. But they diminish the meaning of that term when they equate the passage of policies they don't like, such as the health care law, with real tyranny.

Up until that point, I really admired Santorum's speech.  But that jarring, ahistorical demagoguery reminded me who he really is. Despite his attempt to introduce himself to the American people as a mainstream figure, he slipped. Those who were paying attention saw behind the pretense to what lies beneath.

Gingrich: Courting the Apocalyptic

The last topic in my Western Civilization class this fall was Napoleon. I always use that as an occasion to introduce students to two basic views of history: the "great man" and the "great forces" theories. It is an admittedly simplistic dichotomy, but it comes down to this: does the individual make history, or does history make the individual?

Napoleon is an easy case for discussing those ideas. Historians sometimes write of the "Napoleonic Era" as if it were the product of one man, but without the "great forces" that made the French Revolution, there would have been no opportunity for there to be a "Napoleonic Era." A more sophisticated view is that certain individuals capture the spirit of the moment, and the combination of the individual and the times makes for great changes in history.

Newt Gingrich's recent rise as the latest "not-Mitt" in the Republican race has had me thinking lately about this idea, because, as Jonah Goldberg writes in the National Review: "It’s no secret [Gingrich] sees himself as a world historical figure, the last of the great statesmen." In other words, Gingrich believes he is one of those rare individuals, like Napoleon (or for Gingrich, Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan), who uniquely understands the historical moment, seizes the mantle of leadership, and leaves an indelible mark.

Frank Bruni's piece in Sunday's New York Times on New Gingrich's massive ego nicely catalogs Gingrich's most grandiloquent expressions of his own historical significance. My personal favorite is this self-description from 1992:

"Advocate of civilization

Definer of civilization

Teacher of the Rules of Civilization

Arouser of those who Fan Civilization

Organizer of the pro-civilization activists

Leader (Possibly) of the civilizing forces"

I love the "Possibly"--that's as close as Gingrich gets to humility. As Bruni rightly notes, an arrogant egotism is effectively a prerequisite for the presidency, but Gingrich's variety "would make him a dangerous president."

But Bruni fails to focus on precisely why Gingrich would be dangerous. The death of Kim Jong-Il Sunday brought it into focus for me: in a delicate moment in international affairs such as this, how many people really wish we had a President Gingrich in charge?

For a conservative like Goldberg, the danger is that Newt's desire to make history might lead him--God forbid!--to make a grand compromise with liberals. But I think his ambitions are grander. Newt seeks to bestride the world.

When Bill Clinton (who in some ways is Gingrich's liberal, generational twin) was leaving office, there were numerous articles about how the soon-to-be ex-president was privately bemoaning the fact that no single event gave him the opportunity to seize greatness. He presided over largely prosperous times domestically, and in the lull between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 internationally. His achievements, one observer noted, came "in increments."

Clinton, for all the recklessness of his private life, was largely sober and prudent in discharging his office (one of the reasons he almost always bested Gingrich politically). Gingrich, I fear, would not accept change by increment. I can see him courting the apocalyptic in his search for "greatness."

He is certainly given to apocalyptic rhetoric. For example, in the foreword to Michael Reagan's recent book, The New Reagan Revolution, Newt writes: "Our generation will decide if America remains free--or if freedom goes extinct."

Or think for a moment of this comment from last week's debate: “if we do survive,” he ominously intoned, while discussing the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.

As a New York Times article recently noted, "Mr. Gingrich is warning of a protracted ideological struggle — and perhaps military intervention in Iran — as part of a battle of ideas in the Muslim world."

Just as the Arab Spring is sweeping away dictatorial leaders, with Al Qaeda in disarray and decapitated by the killing of Osama bin Laden, Gingrich envisions not a potentially beneficial democratic awakening in the Muslim world, but a new Cold War with Islam.

"The United States is 'about where we were in 1946' up against the Soviet Union, he said recently." The date is not coincidental. That was the year of Winston Churchill's famous "Iron Curtain" speech, which many conservatives credit with stiffening the resolve of the Truman administration to prosecute the Cold War against the Soviets.

Like so many modern American conservatives, Gingrich belongs to the cult of Churchill (the Republican House scheduled a vote Monday on a resolution that would put a statue of Churchill in the Capitol).

Churchill certainly is due credit for the role he played in the defeat of Hitler. I always point out to my Western Civ students that it is not implausible that a different Prime Minister in the summer of 1940 might have decided that it was in Britain's interests to make a deal with Hitler. Churchill's resolute defiance mattered.

But there's a difference between admiring Churchill and wanting to become Churchill. Gingrich sees himself as an American Churchill. He longs so much for his own Churchillian moment that I can easily see him creating one if history doesn't it offer it up to him.

Referring to the Palestinians, Gingrich said last week: "Somebody ought to have the courage to tell the truth. These people are terrorists. It's fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, 'Enough lying about the Middle East.'"

This is Gingrich posing as Churchill, the prescient and bold truth-teller, warning about Hitler in the 1930s or Stalin in 1946. "I will tell the truth, even if it causes some confusion sometimes with the timid," he sneered in reply to Mitt Romney's criticism of him as a rhetorical bomb-thrower. I guess the only question is whether Newt thinks Romney or Obama is Neville Chamberlain.

The last thing this country needs is a president so intent on making his mark on the world that he is willing to precipitate a crisis just so that he has a chance to save civilization. As Sen. Carl Levin put it, in response to the comments on the Palestinians, "Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match."

The world today needs firemen. Gingrich is an arsonist.

Judging Newt

When Newt Gingrich starts a sentence with "As a historian ...," I brace myself. You never know what's coming, but, as a historian, I worry.

So it was the other night at the final pre-Iowa caucus debate. When Megyn Kelly challenged Gingrich on his proposals for judicial "reform," noting that two former Republican attorneys general called his ideas "dangerous, ridiculous, outrageous, totally irresponsible," Gingrich said: "As a historian, I may understand this better than lawyers."

As a historian, I doubt it.

Let's examine Newt's case. He has proposed that judges should be impeached, or entire courts abolished, for issuing unpopular decisions. He cites Thomas Jefferson as precedent: "I’d ask, first of all, have they studied Jefferson, who in 1802 abolished 18 out of 35 federal judges?"

He's referring to the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, which did in fact abolish recently created district and circuit courts, and thus the judges who sat on those courts were removed from office. But why was that done?

The Judiciary Act had been passed in February 1801 by a lame-duck Federalist Congress after its defeat at the hands of Jefferson's Republicans in the election of 1800. Maybe you remember hearing about the so-called "Midnight Judges" in your American history classes? They were a product of this act.

While the idea of expanding the federal judiciary had been percolating for years, the repudiation of Federalists at the polls gave added urgency to the issue. Congress passed the bill less then three weeks before Jefferson took office, allowing outgoing Federalist President John Adams to put Federalist judges in place before the Republicans took over the Congress and Presidency.  One Federalist reportedly said: “it is as good to the party as an election.”

The Republicans saw the act--with some justification--as a blatant, anti-democratic attempt by the Federalists to maintain power and influence in the third branch despite having been recently trounced in elections to the first two branches. The Republicans therefore repealed the act in 1802, and thus, as Gingrich notes, abolished courts and judges.

But what Gingrich proposes is different. He wants to abolish courts to get rid of specific judges who have issued decisions he does not like. He's quite up front about it. He has stated that the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in particular should be abolished because of its decisions. Jefferson's 1802 act abolished all of the recently created circuit courts because they had been created for partisan reasons. Gingrich wants to target specific courts for making specific rulings which he opposes for partisan reasons.

To be fair to Newt, there also were attempts to similarly politicize the courts during Jefferson's presidency. A federal district court judge in New Hampshire, John Pickering, was impeached by the House and convicted and removed from office by the Senate in 1804. Gordon Wood writes that Pickering was "an alcoholic and probably insane," but his real sin was that he "had been violently partisan" on the bench.

In this instance, impeachment had been used "in effect as a mode of removal, and not as a charge and conviction of high crimes and misdemeanors." (Rather like the Clinton impeachment, I would argue, in which of course Gingrich had a big hand.) That success emboldened the Republicans to up the ante and impeach Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. 

That attempt alarmed John Marshall, who feared what he called the "modern doctrine ... that a Judge giving a legal opinion contrary to the legislature is liable to impeachment." But even the overwhelmingly Republican Senate (they held 25 of 34 seats) failed to produce the two-thirds vote needed to convict Chase, avoiding the result Marshall feared.

The Chase trial precedent was the important one. He had committed no crime. His impeachment was transparently partisan. According to Wood, John Quincy Adams "thought that the failure to convict Chase established that only actual crimes were impeachable offenses." Jefferson himself said: "Impeachment was a farce which will not be tried again."

But Thomas Jefferson never met Newt Gingrich. As an experienced practitioner of political farce, Gingrich certainly has something to teach us. As a historian, not so much.

Rick Perry's Theocratic Vision

Rick Perry's new "I'm a Christian" ad is evidence that the people he's targeting do not understand something fundamental about the American system that they proclaim is so "exceptional." The mindset expressed in the ad is nothing short of theocratic.

Perry says: “there’s something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can’t openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Discussing that passage, Andrew Sullivan writes:

we get a classic non-sequitur: the notion that allowing openly gay servicemembers to serve without fear of prosecution is somehow connected to the constitutional prohibition of prayer in schools. There is zero connection between the two issues - except both are objected to by Christianist fundamentalists.

I think there is a connection between the two, beyond what Sullivan says, and that the way Perry connects the two is instructive.

Perry is really saying that government, by allowing open service by gays in the military, is thereby endorsing who they are. Defending the ad today, Perry said: "President Obama has again mistaken America's tolerance for different lifestyles with an endorsement of those lifestyles."

In Perry's mind, treating people whose conduct you personally find to be contrary to your own morality as equals in the public sphere is an endorsement--it is saying that who they are and how they act is right and good. In his mind, there is no room for saying "that's none of my (or the government's) business."

In effect, he is saying that there is a moral standard (one that is set by his own view of Christianity) to qualify for equal citizenship. It is hard to imagine anything more contrary to a foundational principle of American government, expressed in the words engraved in the Supreme Court building: "equal justice under law."

Perry then makes a comparison between open service and not allowing schools to endorse Christianity via prayers and Christmas celebrations. That's why they are connected in his mind, and in the minds of those to whom he is appealing. Government, he says, is endorsing homosexuality (which it should not do), and is not endorsing Christianity, which it should do.

The common element is the idea that government has a role to play in endorsing some moral principles and condemning others. Government should not, Perry is suggesting, treat all people equally: it should endorse some and condemn others. That is a theocratic mindset.

Perry looks at the inclusiveness that a pluralistic society demands (everyone is treated equally under the law) and the refusal to endorse one religious vision (which a pluralistic society also demands) and wants us to see a contradiction. In fact, the two things are perfectly consistent with each other--if one believes (as the Founders did) that there should be no religious test for citizenship.

Perry's problem is that he either does not understand that, or does not believe in it. He thinks government should discriminate against those whose private behavior he abhors and should publicly advance his particular religious beliefs even though they are not universally held. He is saying that failing to give Christians a superior position in American society is effectively discrimination against Christians.

In this worldview, there is no room for equal protection under the law. This is truly 1984 territory: failing to discriminate against minorities is discriminating against the majority.

It is disturbing enough that an allegedly serious candidate for the presidency in 2012 could espouse such views. It is even more disturbing that he seems to think it will appeal large number of Republican primary voters. It would be most disturbing were it to turn out that he's right.