Here Comes Cruz . . . How Long Until the Rivals Strike?
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Morning Jolt March 23, 2015 Here Comes Cruz . . . How Long Until the Rivals Strike? Ted Cruz announces his presidential bid early this morning. I'm sure some of you are cheering and some of you are scoffing. Here's his English-language ad and his Spanish-language ad. For the scoffers, Cruz could go toe-to-toe with overt social conservatives like Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, he's obviously competing with Rick Perry for the Texas donor base, and he's competing with Walker and Jindal for the I'm-the-true-conservative-in-the-field slot. At some point he'll draw the contrast with Marco Rubio as the first-term Cuban-American senator who wasn't a part of the Gang of Eight. You get the feeling he's stylistically competing with Rand Paul, too -- both young, bold, not waiting in the back-benches for a few terms before attempting to shake up national policies. Both launched filibusters from the Senate floor. The big question will be whether the nascent campaigns of Cruz's rivals drop their opposition research today or later in the week. Kneecapping a guy on his big debut day may seem wildly premature and ludicrously hyper-competitive. But our current political and media environment rewards those who don't hold back. The Obama campaign and its allies defined Mitt Romney in the early summer of 2012 when the Romney campaign didn't have the money to fight back. Bill Clinton did the exact same thing in 1996. (It's not just campaigns that attempt to define candidates, of course. We're already seeing the "what was Jeb Bush like in high school?" pieces.) This is the strategy of our era: Define your opponent as quickly as possible, before he can define himself. A Nefarious but Brilliant Strategy for 2016 A crazy thought perhaps worth exploring: How much money would it take to reserve all of the commercial breaks on all of the television stations in every key market in the 2016 swing states, for the entire month of October . . . now or in the near future? It would cost a lot, sure. But some wealthy donors out there have it, if not individually then collectively. And if they pulled this off, you could imagine nothing but anti-Hillary ads, hitting her from every angle, every hour of every day for the entire final month of the election, throughout all of the early-voting periods. Democrats and their allies would have a ton of money, but no way to get access to viewers sitting on the couch during commercial breaks. If you're some outside group, why not reserve the October 2016 ad space now? Buying early makes running the ads a heck of a lot cheaper: Kantar Media's CMAG, counting every presidential ad aired from October 24 to October 30, found the Obama campaign aired TWICE as many spots as Romney - 35,731 to 17,277, with estimated spending of $24 million for Obama and $11 million for Romney. But, but, but . . . what about the outside groups? Even adding in the outside groups, the total Democratic message had 79,089 spots (Obama + outside groups), to 64,945 for Republicans. Spending, though, was at parity: $55 million for each side. (Also note that campaigns get reduced rates that outside groups don't.) Heck, reserve ad space for October 2020 while you're at it.
Why the Skepticism of 'Reformicons'? Are We Too Angry to Talk Policy? Yes, it's usually a mistake to read the comments under any article. But I'm struck by the amount of skepticism and animosity that greets a mention of the word "reformicon." Maybe Eric Cantor has become such a controversial figure that his status as a former employer of some of the reformicon-minded staffers at the Conservative Reform Network -- formerly known as the YG Network or Young Guns Network -- instantly creates distrust or wariness. The "reformicon" agenda -- to the extent it can be boiled down -- is to find conservative reforms of existing local, state, and federal laws to help the middle class. Start with the problem facing the middle class -- high tuition, high tuition, high health-care costs, high cost of living, slow wage growth -- and come up with ways to get government out of the way as a driver of costs, or figure out how to get the government to achieve the required goals more efficiently and with more choice for individuals. The reformicon crowd overlaps a lot with National Review, past and present -- Ramesh Ponnuru, James Pethokoukis, Yuval Levin, Reihan Salam, Ross Douthat, Pete Wehner, Kate O'Beirne, and so on. (Insert all standard caveats here: I know most of these people and CRN's policy director, April Ponnuru. Yes, she's Ramesh's wife, so just how likely is it I'm going to say nasty things about her?) What I don't get is this claim that "reformicon" is somehow a code term for a big-government conservatism . . . also known as not conservatism. One of the refrormicon crusades is rolling back or repealing licensing requirements in professions and jobs where they simply aren't needed and function as an obstacle to small-business creation and stifle competition for current license-holders. You've heard the insane tales of runaway bureaucratic regulation: "Iowa requires people who want to cut and style hair to receive 2,100 hours of education and training at a cosmetology school." You know how we know when a conservative idea is particularly popular? When President Obama's budget mentions it . . . and naturally, calls for spending more money studying the problem: The Budget seeks to reduce occupational licensing barriers that keep people from doing the jobs they have the skills to do by putting in place unnecessary training and high fees. The Budget proposes a $15 million increase for grants to states and partnerships of states for the purpose of identifying, exploring, and addressing areas where occupational licensing requirements create an unnecessary barrier to labor market entry or labor mobility and where interstate portability of licenses can support economic growth and improve economic opportunity, particularly for dislocated workers, transitioning service members, veterans, and military spouses. Cue the nanny-state liberal shrieking, "Sure, you start with an anarchic, Wild West world of unlicensed hair-braiders, and then next you'll dramatically lowering the amount of training and licensing requirements to handle legal matters!" The reformicons say . . . in fact, that's precisely the kind of idea we want to explore: One possible solution is underway in Washington state, which, the Post reports, is embarking on an "ambitious experiment to revolutionize access to legal services, particularly among the poor" via "a new class of legal professionals called 'limited license legal technicians.' They are the nurse practitioners of the legal world. Rather than earning a pricey law degree, candidates take about a year of classes at a community college, then a licensing exam. Once they do, they can help clients prepare court documents and perform legal research, just as lawyers do. 'It will save time and heartache,' says Paula Littlewood, executive director of the Washington State Bar Association. 'It's groundbreaking.' California, Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico say they may follow Washington's lead. The program, if it spreads, could transform how middle- and lower-class Americans use the law." And there's good news for folks searching for a middle-class career, the barriers to which don't leave them drowning in debt: getting trained and certified through "the program costs about $10,000 — far less than the average public-school law degree, which is $50,000." Reformers should keep tabs on this example of occupational licensing reform, which could prove a win-win for both those seeking affordable legal services and those seeking a stable, rewarding middle-class career. The reform-conservative agenda covers a lot of policy areas and has a lot to offer. But I suspect it lacks two elements that some grassroots conservatives still hungrily desire. The Room to Grow book from the YG Network last year begins simply, "policy is problem solving." (A sequel is coming, one chapter at a time, starting this summer.) To a lot of conservatives, these are the biggest problems facing the country: The reformicon agenda offers problem-solving . . . at a moment that a big chunk of the conservative base wants vengeance for the progressive stinkbombs laid upon this country by a runaway administration: Obamacare and its sales pitch full of lies; a partisan IRS; de facto amnesty by executive order; an enormously wasteful un-stimulative stimulus full of Solyndra-style pork and payoffs; a Dodd-Frank "reform" that turned "too big to fail" into "even bigger and more risky"; shipping guns to Mexican drug cartels in "Fast and Furious"; destructive race-baiting; a retreat from war against radical Islam; a reset button to an ambitious, duplicitous Putin; lying about the cause of the Benghazi attack; skipping Paris rallies for free expression to watch football; and giving away the store to Iranian mullahs. The reformicon agenda is important, meat-and-potatoes governing issues, but that's not what gets conservatives' blood pumping at the moment – and there's a sense that somebody really focused on the former is giving a pass to the latter. I think that sense is erroneous, but it's out there. The other element in there is those who suspect that "reform conservatism" seeks to reform conservatism itself, something that every reformicon insists isn't true. But while conservatism doesn't need updating, maybe the particular policy goals do. There are, in some circles, this insistence that "if we Republicans want to win again, we just need to do what Ronald Reagan did" as if 30 years hadn't passed since Reagan's last electoral victory. (If you plug Reagan's winning percentages among various demographics into the 2012 electorate, Reagan loses.) It's not 1979 anymore**; we don't have a 1979-style economy, tax rate, education system, health-care system, workforce, and so on; why would it be controversial to take the concepts of limited government, free enterprise, and individual liberty and apply them to the concerns of today's middle-class Americans? * Points in favor of contending it really is 1979 again: Europe is worried about Russian aggression, the Iranian Mullahs are nuts, Afghanistan is full of bloodshed, and there's a new Star Wars movie coming. ADDENDA: Goodbye, #Racetogether. Freedom Partners unveils a new effort to get Congress to let the Export-Import Bank expire, with a new video . . . A heads-up that the Morning Jolt will be on hiatus next week, March 30 to April 3. Pre-Easter week. Call it "Preaster Week."
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