Well, it had to start soon, given the general consensus among Democrats that even a sitting two-term vice president wouldn’t have a prayer of beating her in the primaries. So Mark Ambinder weighs in with the first serious post-election will-she-or-won’t-she piece about Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential aspirations. He begins with the most pertinent issue:

People who have spoken to Clinton about her future and, importantly, who have spoken with her husband, former President Bill Clinton, are not ready to bet on odds any greater than 50:50 that she decides to run. In fact, Clinton discourages speculation within her inner circle not by swearing them to omerta but by simply laughing off the possibility that she needs to make a decision anytime soon.

Since no one—say, Martin O’Malley or Andrew Cuomo—is about to start building a campaign until they have a clue about Clinton’s intentions, her “availability,” to use an archaic phrase, will likely freeze the field for longer than has been the case in quite a few years, says Ambinder.

If I had to bet, I’d bet that she decides to run, if only because she will feel that destiny and circumstance have put her in the right place at the right time. She may feel that she owes it to young women and those who supported her to finish the marathon of American politics.

This sort of speculation is interesting right now, but it will soon get very old. So work on your HillaryWatch BS filter, because real information is likely to be scarce for a good while.

As you may have heard by now, a group of naked people showed up in Speaker John Boehner’s office to protest the potential impact of automatic spending “sequestrations” on funding for anti-AIDS programs. Here’s some of Sahil Kapur’s report on the incident for TPM:

Seven naked protesters swarmed the office of Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) on Tuesday for some 20 minutes of loud chanting against cuts to AIDS funding.

Among their chants: “Boehner, Boehner, don’t be a dick, budget cuts will make us sick.” And: “Fight AIDS. Act up. Fight back.” And: “End AIDS with the Robin Hood tax, no more budget cuts on our back.” And: “Budget cuts are really rude, that’s why we have to be so lewd.”

The screaming, fully-nude protesters stood still in the center of the office, together in a line but facing in different directions. The room quickly filled up with members of the activist groups they belong to, observers taking photographs, a handful of reporters, and, eventually, police….

The protest was organized by AIDS activist organizations Health Global Access Group (GAP), Queerocracy, Act Up NY and Act Up Philadelphia. They say that if sequestration — automatic spending cuts set to take effect in January — goes into effect, funding to combat HIV/AIDS could drop substantially and cost lives.

The protest is notable because nearly all the noise about possible sequestrations has come from those fighting defense cuts. And while the nude protesters were specifically calling for “new revenues” to make the sequestration unnecessary, the more immediate injustice is that across-the-board cuts represent a very explicit abandonment of congressional responsibility to pick and choose among spending priorities. For good (with respect to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and several other key low-income programs) or ill, some priorities have been exempted from the cuts. Advocates of others have to find ways to draw attention to their causes, and those in Boehner’s office found an all-American way to do just that.

Perhaps it’s a testament to the size and breadth of Barack Obama’s victory on November 6, or maybe it’s because so many conservatives were stunned by MItt Romney’s failure to win by a landslide, but the acceptance of the president’s re-election by U.S. conservatives has been surprisingly widespread. So far almost no one has charged Obama “stole” the election through voter fraud, and conservatives are already looking forward to 2014.

Ah, but in some of the more exotic precincts of the Tea Folk, post-election resistance has been hardier, as evidenced by this report from Idaho by Betsy Russell:

A state senator from north-central Idaho is touting a scheme that’s been circulating on tea party blogs, calling for states that supported Mitt Romney to refuse to participate in the Electoral College in a move backers believe would change the election result.

Sen. Sheryl Nuxoll, R-Cottonwood, sent an article out on Twitter headed, “A ‘last chance’ to have Mitt Romney as President in January (it’s still not too late)….”

Turns out Nuxoll received her inspiration from an article by our old buddy Judson Phillips, who staged the wacky National Tea Party Convention in 2010 that gave Sarah Palin a nationally televised speech opportunity.

The article, by Judson Phillips, a former Shelby County, Tenn., assistant district attorney and founder of Tea Party Nation, posits that if 17 of the 24 states that Romney carried refuse to participate in the Electoral College, the college would have no quorum, throwing the presidential pick to the GOP-controlled House of Representatives.

The problem with that, [Boise State University law professor] Adler said, is that it’s based on a misreading of the 12th Amendment, which notes when no candidate receives a majority in the Electoral College, the decision moves to the House, where each state would have one vote and a quorum of two-thirds of the states would be required. “The two-thirds reference in the 12th Amendment is a reference not to the Electoral College but rather to the establishment of a quorum in the House of Representatives,” he said.

Oh well. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And this effort is a reminder that accepting Obama’s election does not necessarily connote acceptance of the legitimacy of his administration, as Sen. Nuxoll indicated:

She said, “I think it is very, very sad that we elected our current president, because he is definitely not following (the) Constitution. He is depriving us of our freedoms by all the agencies, and so … what I’m thinking is the states are going to have to stand up for our individual rights and for our collective rights.”

I mentioned late yesterday a new Pew analysis of the under-30 vote in the 2012 elections, suggesting a generational trend to the political Left unlike anything we’ve seen since the early 1970s. Jonathan Chait takes a closer look, and is more confident than I am that he’s seen the future:

More than four decades ago, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril identified the core of Americans’ political thinking as a blend of symbolic conservatism and operational liberalism. Most Americans, that is, oppose big government in the abstract but favor it in the particular. They oppose “regulation” and “spending,” but favor, say, enforcement of clean-air laws and Social Security. The push and pull between these contradictory beliefs has defined most of the political conflicts over the last century. Public support for most of the particulars of government has stopped Republicans from rolling back the advances of the New Deal, but suspicion with “big government” has made Democratic attempts to advance the role of the state rare and politically painful.

This tension continues to define the beliefs of American voters. Among the 2012 electorate, more voters identified themselves as conservative (35 percent) than liberal (25 percent), and more said the government is already doing too much that should be left to the private sector (51 percent) than asserted that the government ought to be doing more to solve problems (44 percent). But this is not the case with younger voters. By a 59 percent to 37 percent margin, voters under 30 say the government should do more to solve problems. More remarkably, 33 percent of voters under 30 identified themselves as liberal, as against 26 percent who called themselves conservative.

The reason I’m not so confident of Our Liberal Future is that we’re only talking about one cohort of young voters (like those that tilted left in 1972), and their successors could be different—though certain cultural trends, most notably secularization, are unlikely to be reversed. But Chait is right: today’s under-30 voters are relatively unattached to the basic parameters of politics as they have existed since the Reagan Era. If nothing else, there should be a larger constituency for unapologetic liberalism moving forward, and additionally, the false equivalence the MSM so often attributes to the vehemence and political power of Left and Right could eventually come true.

It’s hardly news any more when conservatives oppose ratification of a treaty reflecting widely shared American values. Concern for U.S. “sovereignty,” often based on conspiracy theories about the United Nations and other multinational organizations the U.S. helped create, has become a reflexive excuse for a kind of rigid unilateralism once associated with the John Birch Society or even older, isolationist conservatives.

But the current conservative fight to kill ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is especially interesting because the most avid opponents are the cultural conservatives who often profess solidarity with the disabled as part of their fight against legalized abortion. Anti-choicers and home-schoolers, however, have declared war on the convention on the theory that it confirms the “reproductive rights” of people with disabilities, and/or might confer other rights upon them that intefere with the absolute power of the family (presumably a servant-leader male-directed family) to raise children as they wish.

Thus it’s not surprising that Rick Santorum is at the head of this particular parade in the Senate, which raises the ire of WaPo’s Dana Milbank:

The former presidential candidate pronounced his “grave concerns” about the treaty, which forbids discrimination against people with AIDS, who are blind, who use wheelchairs and the like. “This is a direct assault on us,” he declared at a news conference….

[Mike] Lee, a tea party favorite, said he, too, has “grave concerns” about the document’s threat to American sovereignty. “I will do everything I can to block its ratification, and I have secured the signatures of 36 Republican senators, all of whom have joined with me saying that we will oppose any ratification of any treaty during this lame-duck session.”

Lame or not, Santorum and Lee recognized that it looks bad to be disadvantaging the disabled in their quest for fair treatment. Santorum praised Lee for having “the courage to stand up on an issue that doesn’t look to be particularly popular to be opposed.”

Courageous? Or just contentious? The treaty requires virtually nothing of the United States. It essentially directs the other signatories to update their laws so that they more closely match the Americans with Disabilities Act. Even Lee thought it necessary to preface his opposition with the qualifier that “our concerns with this convention have nothing to do with any lack of concern for the rights of persons with disabilities.”

Their concerns, rather, came from the dark world of U.N. conspiracy theories. The opponents argue that the treaty, like most everything the United Nations does, undermines American sovereignty — in this case via a plot to keep Americans from home-schooling their children and making other decisions about their well-being.

And so, Santorum brought his famous daughter Bella, who suffers from a severe birth defect, to the hearing where he fought against acknowledgement of the rights of people like her.

This is where the pretzel logic of the Right can lead.

I’m en route to the Atlanta airport to head back to California, but to the extent allowed by the suspension of the car I am in, here are some mid-day bites of news and views:

* French conservative party splits in a real post-electioin “struggle for the soul.”

* ORC survey shows majority unhappy with administration handling of Benghazi, but not buying any conspiracy theories.

* “The Next Mitt Romney”—that’s one wingnut’s derisive comment about Jeb Bush.

* California’s Humboldt State University creating academic institute for study of issues related to marijuana.

* Nate Silver points out that proposal to create new non-marginal top tax rate will create dangerous “bubble” among taxpayers.

And in non-political news:

* Baseball union pioneer Marvin Miller dies at 95.

Back to blogging after I get through security.

If you needed any additional reason to read Jacob Heilbrunn’s review of Thomas Ricks’ latest book (The Generals: American Military Commanders from World War II to Today) in the November/December issue of the Monthly, consider Ricks’ new celebrity as the guest who called out Fox News—on Fox News—for its characteristic partisan bias, and got booted off the air for his pains.

Ricks was scoring the network for its huge role in inflating and perpetuating the “Benghazi scandal” into a “story” that happened to be an extraordinary obsession of Republican members of Congress before and after the elections. The truth hurts, and Ricks deserves a good audience for what he has to say about the present or the past.

Of all the conservative raps in circulation, the one I have the most trouble with personally is the anti-anti-racism meme: the idea that white people are being persecuted for the color of their skin by a dominant coalition of minorities and honky quislings. And invariably, the proof of that proposition is that those crying “racism” are themselves race-conscious, which makes them guilty of the original sin.

In his latest column, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto ups the ante a bit, warning “race-card” wielding Democrats that they are being so bigoted towards white people that they may soon encourage the rise of a White Power movement:

This seems likely to weaken the taboo against white identity politics. Whites who are not old enough to remember the pre-civil-rights era—Rep. Duncan, for instance, was born in 1966—have every reason to feel aggrieved by being targeted in this way.

The “Rep. Duncan” in question is Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, who authored a letter to the president denouncing Susan Rice, which was criticized by the Washington Post. The Post in passing noted that the letter was heavily subscribed to by white males from the former Confederacy, which is what sent Taranto off on his anti-anti-racism tangent.

So poor Jeff Duncan is a victim of bigotry because he’s too young to have personally stood in the door of a schoolhouse trying to block desegregation, and probably too young to have shouted racial epithets in public and gotten away with it. According to Taranto, this man who represents a South Carolina tradition of entrenched and militant white conservative power that is one of America’s most distinctive and universally understood and historically significant (it did, after all, touch off a bit of a war once upon a time) phenomena should feel “aggrieved” for being suspected of anything other than pure motives in singling out an African-American diplomat for a rare House letter to the president on a potential cabinet nomination.

I dunno. The same people who worry about southern white Members of Congress representing 100% white voting constituencies weeping quietly in their offices at the grave injustice of having their racial good faith questioned are often capable of viewing fortune 500 CEOs as cowering, helpless victims of all-powerful, vicious Bureaucrats and Regulators; of treating smug wealthy conservative evangelical Christians as Martyrs to Their Faith; and of regarding the vast political power of Big Poor as a threat to the mild-mannered lobbyists representing such small and civic-minded interests as tobacco and banks.

Taranto is warning that “aggrieved” white folks are justifiably on the very brink of just coming right out and reclaiming their right to race-consciousness. When that happens, presumably, black and brown folks and “liberals” will be to blame. I’m a bit older than Jeff Duncan, but this sort of logic sure sounds a lot like what I heard as a southern white child during the civil rights era: white bigotry was bad, of course, but it would never have exploded into violence if it weren’t for those pestiferous civil rights protestors and “outside agitators.” Anti-anti-racism has as long and nearly as discredited a pedigree as racism itself.

Occasionally I’ll write something like the last post, raging at the right-wing boilerplate that passes for “moderation” in Washington today, and wonder if I’m more or less credible for having been associated with a famously “moderate” political group, the Democratic Leadership Council, back in the day. And I’m sure Tim Noah of The New Republic, another iconic segment of the moderate wing of the center-left coalition, must pinch himself after writing stuff like this:

The predominant ideology in Washington isn’t liberalism or conservatism. It’s Chicken Little-ism.

The Washington Post daily hammers us with panic-stricken dispatches by Lori Montgomery, a wholly owned subsidiary of Erskine Bowles, warning that if America falls off the “fiscal cliff” our civilization will be reduced to rubble. Never mind that Montgomery was preaching the same nonsense one year ago when the congressional “supercommittee” failed to reach budgetary consensus. Miraculously, we’re all still here. (Post readers seeking coverage more reliable and less alarmist than Montgomery’s are advised to go online for Suzy Khimm’s excellent Wonkblog dispatches on the topic.)

Now Politico has its knickers in a similar twist about the terrifying prospect of filibuster reform (“GOP Warns Of Shutdown Over Filibuster”). Manu Raju’s story, illustrated with a photograph of the Capitol dome set against a sky black with storm clouds—I kid you not—says the Democrats’ proposed filibuster reforms “will surely prompt a furious GOP revolt that could make those rare moments of bipartisan consensus even harder to come by during the next Congress.”

More and more, when reading Politico, I feel as though each article should come with a Surgeon General-style warning that whatever you’re about to read is hype-distorted by a factor of at least 20 percent. I recommend discounting by at least 50 percent for this one.

I won’t try to speak for Tim, but my own ever-increasing exasperation with the political analysis of the MSM is most definitely exacerbated by its writers’ implicit and explicit claims that whatever stands half-way between the present posturing of Left and Right is what defines not only “moderation” but everything that is reasonable. That’s not my idea of “moderation;” it is very nearly its opposite in terms of brainless and gutless accommodation to whatever way the wind blows. You get the sense that if the political Right in this country ever went openly fascist, with its activists wearing uniforms with lighting bolt insignia on the arms and marching around singing songs about the physical elimination of their enemies—the MSM would find some Lindsay Graham figure who only wore his uniform part of the time and sought only to circumscribe the liberty, not the life, of his enemies. (Yes, yes, I could construct a parallel image of the Left going totalitarian, too, with similar results).

I understand this sort of “moderation” based on false equivalencies is the MSM’s coping mechanism for looking objective in a polarized political world without referees. But I don’t have to like it or even accept it, and it’s a grievance many “moderates” are beginning to hold in an immoderate way.

The way the whole “fiscal cliff” thing (itself a contrivance based on the Republican view that expiration of the Bush tax cuts and imposition of defense spending cuts would be an apocalyptic development) is being discussed in the MSM is a depressing vindication of the huge strategic advantages of partisan extremism. If you are crazy enough for a while, then agreeing to be slightly less crazy looks statesmanlike.

Mike Tomasky notes this dynamic in the Grand Revolt Against Grover Norquist:

Norquist’s anti-tax position all these years has been so totalizing that he has counted lots of things as tax increases that aren’t explicitly tax increases. You may remember the tiff he got into with Oklahoma GOP Senator Tom Coburn over oil-and-gas subsidies. Coburn, who is retiring, was willing to end those subsidies, which amount to a few billion dollars a year. To Norquist, this was a tax increase on oil companies. I can see the logic in a way, but if you’re going to go down that road, then you are taking loads of policy options off the table.

It’s an extreme definition, and it’s the very fact that it’s an extreme definition that allows Republicans breaking from it to appear to be taking a bold position while they are in fact doing nothing of the sort. Because under the big headlines about Breaking From Grover, the actual news content is that they will consider increased revenue but not increased rates.

More generally, the “compromise” position of bold, brave GOP “moderates” on the overall shape of a “fiscal solution” is, as Greg Sargent has pointed out, almost identical to that of the Republican presidential candidate who just lost the election.

The remarkable ability of conservatives to drag American politics to the Right by taking extremist positions and then offering to “compromise” by accepting policies deemed conservative the week before last is hardly a new thing; it was the subject of a fine book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson six years ago. But the MSM keeps taking the bait, which is why we now have Lindsay Graham and Saxbe Chambliss being lionized for making fake concessions to stop America from plunging over a fake “fiscal cliff,” asking only the small concession that the Bush tax cuts, the principal cause of current long-term public debt, be extended forever, and oh, by the way, could we also cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits? I mean, you have to hand it to them: who else but American conservatives would have the audacity after losing an election to ask for bipartisan cover for their two most important long-term fiscal objectives?

If they have any sense at all, the “extremists” who are being “repudiated” by these brave Republican moderates ought to be cackling with glee.

Ran across this video last night, and just had to post it as a fine travel song for a travel day back to California: Golden Earring performing “Radar Love” in 1977.

Since I wrote the last several posts sitting in a mall, I’m certainly aware of the transition from the Thanksgiving to the Xmas season. Few of the folks passing me by are paying a bit of attention, I am sure, to political news. But it does go on, in dribs and drabs:

* Santorum “open” to 2016 run. It’s his turn!

* Cantor echoes earlier Boehner argument that Obamacare is “on the table” during fiscal talks. The White House needs to put a quick end to this angle.

* At TAP, Paul Waldman notes Republican vagueness over their position in fiscal talks matches pre-election vagueness, which is quite an accomplishment.

* At Ten Miles Square, Joshua Tucker suggests post-Citizens-United world palpably affecting GOP attitudes on tax policy.

* At College Guide, Daniel Luzer reports a Pennsylvania College emulating some businesses by cutting faculty hours to avoid Obamacare coverage requirement.

And in non-political news:

* Gene Chizik fired as Auburn football coach two years after national title.

Time to move back onto the jammed highways of metro Atlanta yet again. See you all tomorrow.

Selah.

Pew has a big analysis out on the under-30 vote in 2012, and while the basic numbers are well-known by now, there are some fascinating nuggets, including this one:

The last two presidential elections have had the widest gaps in voting between young and old of any election since 1972. This year, 60% of those under 30 backed Obama, compared with just 48% of those 30 and older; in 2008, the gap was 16 points (66% of under 30 supported Obama vs. 50% of those 30 and older).

This year’s 12-point difference between old and young this year was identical to the gap in 1972, when 46% of voters 18-29 supported George McGovern compared with just 34% of those 30 and older.

Wow. For those of us who remember 1972 as the year when “the youth vote” failed spectacularly to change U.S. politics, the comparison represents both a tonic and a cautionary tale. But of all the moving parts in the 2012 election, it’s clear the remarkable turnout among younger voters, which almost no one expected earlier in the cycle, was the biggest surprise and the real clincher for Obama.

Those of you who are familiar with the formerly-conservative economics writer Bruce Bartlett—who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, and held very visible posts at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute—should definitely check out his succinct apologia at The American Conservative detailing his long road from GOP orthodoxy to becoming perhaps the country’s most acerbic critic of supply-side economics. He writes it as a series of encounters with empirical reality, reinforced by banning from polite conservative society. And he considers the two closely connected, because he is convinced the closed world of conservative political discourse cannot tolerate serious questions, even when it is obvious the conflict between theory and reality has become acute. His conclusion is well worth pondering:

I am disinclined to think that Republicans are yet ready for a serious questioning of their philosophy or strategy. They comfort themselves with the fact that they held the House (due to gerrymandering) and think that just improving their get-out-the-vote system and throwing a few bones to the Latino community will fix their problem. There appears to be no recognition that their defects are far, far deeper and will require serious introspection and rethinking of how Republicans can win going forward. The alternative is permanent loss of the White House and probably the Senate as well, which means they can only temporarily block Democratic initiatives and never advance their own.

I’ve paid a heavy price, both personal and financial, for my evolution from comfortably within the Republican Party and conservative movement to a less than comfortable position somewhere on the center-left. Honest to God, I am not a liberal or a Democrat. But these days, they are the only people who will listen to me. When Republicans and conservatives once again start asking my opinion, I will know they are on the road to recovery.

I get the impression Bartlett is not holding his breath.