The Notion

The most disturbing and telling moment in last night’s GOP presidential debate, as my colleague Jamelle Bouie has noted, came when the audience heartily applauded Brian Williams’s mention of the 234 executions Gov. Rick Perry presided over in Texas.

Here’s the full transcript of the exchange. (Huff Po has the video).

WILLIAMS: Governor Perry, a question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. [Applause] Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?

The most striking part of the first full-blown debate in the Republican primary was the total rejection of science.

In a surreal scene near the night's end, Gov. Rick Perry likened the people denying global warming science to Galileo. To observe that he has that history exactly backwards -- it was the Church that accused Galileo of heresy in 1633 for scientific theories which were on the right track -- is merely to observe that Perry's substantive errors come with their own stylistic snafus. Perhaps that is fitting. More consequential, however, was the answer that Perry failed to provide.

The original question asked him to name a single scientist that supported his views. None of his opponents seized on the gaffe, since apart from the exception-of-the-night, Gov. Huntsman, every other candidate was aiming for the same conservative turf on which Perry stood. And unlike Gov. Palin's famous inability to name her sources, the media is likely to put Perry's problems aside, in order to focus on the "fireworks" that finally broke out between top tier candidates.

There was a lot of agreement in Wednesday evening’s Republican debate hosted by MSNBC and Politico at the Reagan Presidential Library: Ronald Reagan is awesome and would have agreed with everything Republicans say today, there is something wrong with Barack Obama’s foreign policy even if we’re not sure what it is, the Affordable Care Act is a massive imposition by government on the will of the people who elected it well aware that they were running on a promise to enact healthcare reform.

The only major back and forth occurred around a curiously meaningless debate: which governor on stage presided over the most job growth and who would create the most jobs as president. For a party that claims government does nothing as well as the private sector and that efforts to improve society are a fools errand, it’s an odd obsession. If you believe, as Mitt Romney has repeatedly asserted, that it is business rather than government that creates jobs then how can you argue that you will do so as president?

In fact, Romney went so far as to say, “If I’d spent my career in government I wouldn’t be running for president,” because then he wouldn’t know how to create jobs. It was an apparent jab at Texas Governor Rick Perry, who has been in politics for nearly three decades and has no major private sector experience. Romney walked the claim back when moderator Brian Wiliams asked if he was saying a career politician is unqualified for the White House. Thankfully pundits seem disinclined to claim Romney showed weakness, as they bizarrely insisted Tim Pawlenty did in his confrontation with Romney at the first Republican debate.

Tuesday contained two strangely contradictory economic policy pronouncements from Mitt Romney. In the morning he announced the formation of an economic advisory team that included some encouraging choices. The two economists on board are Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia University’s business school, and Greg Mankiw, a professor at Harvard. Both served as chairs of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. So, granted, they are hardly models of fiscal discipline. Hubbard pushed the irresponsible budget-busting Bush tax cuts over Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil’s objections.

But Bushonomics looks quite sane compared to today’s GOP. These are relatively honest, albeit conservative, brokers. They are not the sort of people who demanded that Congress refuse to raise the debt ceiling, as Romney himself did. That’s not their only difference with their candidate. Romney recently said at the last Republican debate that he would not accept a deal to balance the budget that contained $10 in spending cuts for $1 in increased revenue. Both Mankiw and Hubbard endorses raising revenues through reducing expenditures in the tax code. Mankiw also supports taxing carbon emissions or raising the tax on gasoline.

Romney also appointed two politicians, former Representative Vin Weber (R-MN) and former Senator Jim Talent (R-MO). Webber is an establishmentarian who supports the Bowles-Simpson deficit reduction plan. That would raise $2 billion in revenues through eliminating expenditures in the tax code. No one knows what Talent thinks about revenues, but then again no one knows why Talent is on the committee either.

There’s no doubt that Rick Perry would be a president from every Democrat’s worst nightmare. Perry holds fringe views on matters of the economy and law: that Social Security is unconstitutional, Texas has the right to secede from the Union and direct election of senators is a mistake. His policy solutions consist mainly of serving his donors’ interests and asking citizens to pray.

But would he be a scary candidate for Democrats? After all, if he cannot win, his views are moot. When it comes to his political skill, Perry’s record in Texas offers a somewhat confusing and contradictory data set. Perry, unlike Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, has never in his career lost a race. Nate Silver of the New York Times points out that in Texas the Republican nominee for any statewide office typically wins in a landslide and Perry has actually underperformed the average Republican.

So Perry’s greatest asset is also his greatest liability. According to Texas political experts, Perry has learned well—perhaps too well— the lesson that in Texas all he needs to do is to win the Republican primary. And in such a conservative state that means running hard to the right. Perry has mastered the art of appealing to the right-wing base and getting the GOP nomination, but he doesn’t play to the middle because he doesn’t have to, hence his unbeaten streak with underwhelming performances in the general election.

In addition to showing Texas Governor Rick Perry’s commanding lead over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in the Republican presidential primary, the latest Washington Post/ABC News poll also contains what must be disheartening news for the White House. Despite the debt ceiling fight—where President Obama demonstrated his political maturity in the face of complete Republican recklessness—only 39 percent of Americans trust the president to do a “better job” on the federal budget deficit, compared to the 42 percent who trust Republicans. Likewise, Americans are tied at 40-40 on who they trust to successfully create jobs, and only slightly prefer Obama when it comes to who they trust to handle the economy—Obama gets 42 percent support to 39 support for Republicans.

If anything, this is a sign that the White House’s preferred strategy—let’s make Obama the “adult in the room”—isn’t working. Instead, we have a more familiar dynamic: now that the choice is between a Republican message on deficit reduction from Republicans and a Republican-lite message on deficit reduction from Democrats, voters have opted for the genuine article.

That said, the situation isn’t hopeless; with tomorrow’s jobs speech, President Obama has the chance to move away from his usual rhetoric of compromise, and confront the Republican Party on its relentless attacks on Democratic attempts to improve the economy. As it stands, the public wants President Obama to stand up for himself and his party. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, 37 percent of Americans say that Obama should challenge the GOP more often, a ten point increase from earlier in the year. As a whole, Democrats are desperate for the president to stand up to the GOP—57 percent want him to be more forceful.

In what was surely one of the stranger Senate confirmation hearings in recent history, President Obama’s nominee to head the Consumer Financial Protection bureau, Richard Cordray, testified Tuesday before the Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs.

Unlike most nomination hearings, which focus on the merits of the nominee, the committee could not agree on whether the position itself should exist. Forty-four Senate Republicans sent a letter to President Obama in May that demanded a five-person board with appointees from both parties run the CFPB, instead of a single director.

Tuesday, only two of the committee’s Republicans showed up to the hearing—Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking member, and Senator Bob Corker. Shelby declined to even question Cordray, blasted the hearing in his opening statement as “premature” and said “we do not believe that the committee should consider any nominee to be the director of the CFPB until reforms are adopted to make the bureau accountable to the American people.”

Ten years ago, on the first Sunday after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the NFL did something truly heroic and generous: nothing. The league willingly ate millions of dollars and cancelled the games out of respect for the unfolding tragedy. As 9/11 morphed into a decade-long “Global War on Terror,” the league has, to put it mildly, failed to show similar restraint. From the now ubiquitous presence of military flyovers and honor guards at every game, to the armed forces recruitment stations set up outside preseason contests, to having war-gourmands like General David Petraeus toss the coin before the Super Bowl, to staging Fox’s NFL pregame show from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan (with Terry, Howie and the gang dressed in fatigues), the league has treated our era of endless war as an odious exercise in corporate branding.

This Sunday, the NFL season opens in earnest on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks and the league, like John Boehner finding an abandoned pack of unfiltered smokes, just can’t control itself. Teams will be going all out to commemorate that horrific day ten years ago when nearly 3,000 people were killed in DC, Pennsylvania and New York City. If you think this anniversary should be remembered with somber soft voices and an air of dignity, you are going to want to keep your distance from NFL Sunday or you will lose your lunch.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, on ESPN’s Mike and Mike in the Morning, said without a hint of humility, that the NFL will aim this Sunday to “help the country heal.” How will this healing take place? As the Associated Press reported, “Pregame tributes will be synchronized on CBS and Fox telecasts and shown on video boards in each stadium hosting games. Coaches, players and local first responders will hold field-length American flags for the playing of the national anthem.” The AP also reported that players, coaches and the sideline rabble will be compelled to wear a specially customized NFL 9/11 ribbon. The official “NFL 9/11 logo” will also be on the field of every game.

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