In a long election season, it’s never wise to get too high or too low over any one poll. Presidential elections are won at the state level, but statewide polling is fairly sporadic at this stage of the race, so we’re stuck reading national polls a lot. But the latest poll is bad news for President Obama.

We all know the major issues by now to look for with individual polls: some polls are adults, and are totally useless, because only registered voters can vote. Polls of likely voters, in turn, are vastly more accurate and less Democratic-biased than polls of registered voters, many of whom also don’t show up to vote. Most polls are also reported after weighting to achieve some guesstimate of the partisan breakdown of the general electorate among Democrats, Republicans and Independents. Even polls that don’t feature egregious hackery are an inexact science, because they rest on the pollster’s current assumptions about the D/R/I split and the ‘screen’ they use to decide who is a likely voter. If the shape of the electorate is not as projected, the poll will be wrong.

Polling averages tend to be steadier than individual polls conducted over a few hundred respondents, and they show a tight race – the RealClearPolitics average shows Obama up 46.5%-45.1%, while the left-leaning TPMPolltracker average shows Romney up 46.1-44.2. Those averages smooth out possible outliers like last Friday’s jaw-dropping Rasmussen poll showing Romney up 50-43 among likely voters. And the averages themselves get more reliable as more of the pollsters start polling likely voters – right now, Rasmussen is virtually the only pollster reporting regularly conducted polls that is polling likely rather than registered voters. Looking at RCP, Rasmussen’s mid-April poll is the last likely voter poll showing President Obama in the lead.

All that said, the Obama campaign cannot be happy with the results of the latest CBS/New York Times poll – a poll of registered voters done by two organizations notoriously unfriendly to Republicans* – showing Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 46-43. Some breakdowns below the fold.

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Indiana Republicans go to the polls tomorrow to decide whether to re-nominate 80-year-old 36-year Senate veteran Richard Lugar or to pick instead State Treasurer Richard Mourdock, running as the conservative alternative. In the usual course of events, my advice for activists and pundits alike in these races is to not forget that every race is unique, based on the individual candidates, the state or district, and the issue environment of the day. Not every state is Utah or Rhode Island; not every conservative is Marco Rubio or Christine O’Donnell; not every moderate is Chris Christie or Jim Jeffords. Often (but not always), the better candidate wins, whether or not that candidate is the most conservative, the most Establishment-backed, or considered the most ‘electable’ by pundits and political pros.

That being said, the conditions of 2012 – specifically, the now-certain nomination of Mitt Romney as the Republican candidate for president – call for conservatives to take a harder line than ever in supporting Operation Counterweight (William Jacobson’s term), in particular to seek in Senate races what David Freddoso has called “an un-bossable Senate.” Party insiders expect conservatives, Tea Party-style outsiders and single-issue social conservatives to show up to vote anyway for a party whose leader is a man many of us distrust on nearly every issue. Politics, they remind us, is compromise. And that’s precisely my point: it is exactly because one side of the party got Romney that the other can less afford to swallow Romney-like figures in the Senate. That doesn’t mean backing the most conservative candidate in every single race without considering any other factor – but it does mean giving more than usual preference to the more conservative and/or less establishment option in Senate races. It’s not about demanding absolute party purity – it’s about recognizing that Romney has sopped up most of our tolerance for impurity already. If you want a Senate that will hold Romney’s feet to the fire, you have to start by replacing men like Dick Lugar and, in Utah, 78-year old Orrin Hatch.

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One year ago today, a Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the culmination of many years of intelligence-gathering. The operation was personally authorized by President Obama, over the objections of Vice President Joe Biden. While national security leaders had, properly, publicly downplayed the importance of getting bin Laden – it was more important to focus on dismantling the operational network of Al Qaeda and similar groups, and overemphasis on one man hiding in isolation would give the fugitive bin Laden an unnecessary propaganda victory – it was nonetheless a significant longstanding priority of three Administrations to get him, and a great day for America when he was killed. The Obama campaign, recognizing that there is broad bipartisan agreement on this point among voters, has done everything possible to capitalize politically on the President’s role.

There are three real lessons to be drawn a year later:

1. In the big picture, we’re all national security hawks now.

2. As a matter of policy specifics, the hawks won and the anti-war movement lost every round.

3. As a matter of partisan politics, the side that loses the debate over the death of bin Laden will be the side that overplays its hand the worst.

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Multiple news sources confirming the news, with a 2pm press conference in Gettysburg to follow. The news comes on the heels of word that his chronically ill daughter Bella was hospitalized again over the weekend. Santorum has already called Mitt Romney to concede.

In my view, it’s the right time for Santorum to drop out. His family needs him now, the delegate math precluded him from doing anything but dragging the race to a fractious convention, and with Romney preparing a huge ad buy as Santorum fell in the Pennsylvania polls, withdrawing now avoids a potentially embarrassing home state loss on April 24.

CNN has live feed of the press conference.

POSTMORTEM: There were missteps along the way worth learning from, but at the end of the day, each of the four finalists in this race – Romney, Santorum, Gingrich and Paul – met or exceeded any reasonable expectation for what they could have accomplished in this primary, given where they all started in the spring of 2011. Santorum in particular began the campaign – and even entered the last week of 2011 – as a marginal figure discredited by a disastrous 2006 loss, but vaulted himself back into the national conversation as a major leader of the social-conservative wing of the party and won over 3 million votes and 11 states.

I’ve previously looked in detail at the breakdown of GOP primary votes here, here and here; for purposes of this series, I’ve broken out the votes in three groups – the five conservative candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain), the two moderate candidates (Romney and Hunstman) and the libertarian (Paul) – for reasons explained in the first post. In my second post, I detailed the signs to look for to see whether and when Romney would start putting the race away with the voters rather than simply plodding through the accumulation of delegates.

After the March 24 vote in Louisiana and Tuesday’s votes in Wisconsin, Maryland and DC, we can see the signs of that momentum shift, but only slightly, with stubborn resistance to Romney still continuing. Not-unrelatedly, we can see the collapse of Newt Gingrich’s campaign to levels even lower than he was getting in February, the last time he went a month without being on the ballot in any Southern state (recall that Newt was not on the Missouri ballot). Let’s start with the month-by-month running tally:

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Charles Fried has suddenly become a very popular fellow on the Left. The former Reagan Solicitor General and Bill Weld appointee to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is being touted by the Washington Post’s in-house left-wing activists Greg Sargent and Ezra Klein, as well as ThinkProgress and Media Matters and its frenetic professional tweeters Eric Boehlert and Oliver Willis over Professor Fried’s support for the constitutionality of Obamacare. Dahlia Lithwick went further, using Prof. Fried’s prediction of an 8-1 decision as evidence that “[t]he conservative legal elites don’t believe in the merits of this challenge”. It’s not surprising that these folks are in such a rush to get the cover of a former Reagan lawyer to restore their talking point – now in tatters after a week of serious, sober and probing questioning from the Supreme Court – that only an extremist would think there is any constitutional issue at all with Obamacare. But there are some things they’re not telling you about Charles Fried.

Now, let me preface this by saying that I have a lot of respect for Prof. Fried. He was my constitutional law professor and probably the best teacher I had in law school, a brilliant man who had taught just about every area of law under the sun and was especially talented at bringing together the strands of disparate areas of the law. I read his book about his days as the SG before I started law school, and I respected his willingness – as a guy who is not pro-life – to argue, twice, for overturning Roe v Wade. He was also the faculty adviser for the Law School Republicans, which I headed for a time. Prof. Fried has indeed been, in the past, a longstanding member of the GOP legal establishment; he testified in favor of John Roberts’ Supreme Court confirmation, and in 2006 wrote a NY Times op-ed defending his former deputy, Samuel Alito, as “not a lawless zealot but a careful lawyer with the professionalism to give legally sound but unwelcome advice” and “a person who can tell the difference between the law and his own political predilections.”

But if you think brilliant people can’t be horribly wrong, you have not spent much time studying lawyers and the law. And if you’ve been reading the left-wing activists, you might not have learned that the 76-year-old Prof. Fried has not only been a vigorous defender of Obamacare who famously testified that the federal government could mandate that you buy vegetables and join a gym, he also voted for President Obama and wrote him what amounted to a political love letter last summer, wrote a book in 2010 with his son which he characterized as showing that the Bush Administration’s anti-terrorism policies “broke the law” and were “disgusting and terrible and degrading,” and has been a vociferous critic of the Tea Party.

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The GOP’s national leadership – including the presidential candidates stumping today in Louisiana – may be uninspiring, but the GOP governors continue to roll. Bobby Jindal last night just scored another victory with the passage through the Louisiana House of a landmark school choice bill (the bill still awaits action from the LA Senate), before proceeding to debate a second bill that tightens teacher tenure standards:

In a victory for Gov. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana House of Representatives approved a bill Thursday night that would expand state aid for some students to switch from struggling public schools to private and parochial classrooms.

The vote was 61-42 after nearly 12 hours of debate.

Jindal still faces a tough fight – some of the legislators who voted for the bill also voted for an amendment limiting the use of local (as opposed to state) tax dollars for vouchers that could cross local district lines, and opponents are vowing a constitutional challenge. But then, reform is never easy.

For more on why Jindal is one of the nation’s very best governors, this long wide-ranging interview discusses not just his education reform proposals but also his pension reform fight. Excerpt:

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How has the popular vote differed in the 2012 GOP primary if you break out the states by their track record in recent presidential elections? It turns out that there are some distinct patterns, patterns that provide both good and bad news for a GOP contemplating a general election behind Mitt Romney.

Let’s start with the 13 “Red” states (i.e., the states won by the GOP in the last 3 presidential elections) to vote so far: SC, MO, AZ, WY, AK, GA, ID, ND, OK, TN, KS, AL & MS. Here’s how the vote breaks down, out of 4,052,212 votes cast:

Newt 30.4% (2 wins)
Romney 30.2% (4 wins)
Santorum 29.1% (7 wins)
Paul 8.5%

If we combine the votes for the 5 conservative and two moderate candidates as explained here*, we get the following:

Conservative bloc: 60.3%
Moderate bloc: 30.4%

Unsurprisingly, Romney has struggled in solidly Republican states, where the conservative vote has outpolled him 2-to-1, but the division in that vote means that he, Newt and Santorum have run almost in a 3-way heat, with Newt actually narrrowly in the lead (Santorum will probably close the gap on Saturday). The good news is, unless the Romney campaign really collapses, he’s likely to win most of these states against Obama anyway. The bad news is, there are a lot of down-ticket GOP officeholders who could suffer if Romney isn’t able to energize voters in these states.

Then we have the 8 Blue states (states won by the Democrats the past 3 elections) to vote so far: MN, ME, MI, WA, MA, VT, HI, & IL, in which 2,460,097 votes have been cast. Unsurprisingly, these states present a diametrically opposite picture:

Romney 47.3% (7 wins)
Santorum 32.4% (1 win)
Paul 11.5%
Newt 7.0%

Moderate bloc: 47.5%
Conservative bloc: 39.9%

Romney’s run much closer to a majority with voters in blue territory, who are accustomed to making a lot of compromises in search of electable candidates; Ron Paul has also run a lot stronger in these states, while Newt has been a complete non-factor with GOP electorates that tend to be mistrustful of the role of Southerners in the party’s leadership. That doesn’t mean there’s no market for conservatives, as the Pennsylvanian Santorum has actually done better in blue states than red ones.

Then there’s the 7 Purple or Swing states, each won by each party at least once in the last 3 elections. Excluding Virginia, which skews the sample because the conservatives were not even on the ballot, that leaves IA, NH, FL, NV, CO, & OH, in which 3,345,072 votes have been cast:

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On February 26 in a suburb of Orlando, a Hispanic man, George Zimmerman, shot to death an unarmed African-American teenager, Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman was on neighborhood watch, carrying a pistol. “Zimmerman spotted Martin as he was patrolling his neighborhood on a rainy evening and called 911 to report a suspicious person. Against the advice of the 911 dispatcher, Zimmerman then followed Martin, who was walking home from a convenience store with a bag of Skittles in his pocket.” To date, Zimmerman has not been arrested, but after a media outcry, local and federal grand jury investigations have been opened. Zimmerman contends that he shot Martin in self-defense; there are no eyewitnesses and the details are murky, but at least one witness overheard a confrontation. Presumably, further investigation will be needed before prosecutors can build a case that does not leave the claim of self-defense surrounded by a cloud of reasonable doubt, ending with a Casey Anthony type verdict. There’s been some discussion about Florida’s particularly strong self-defense law, but in any state in the Union, if a jury believes there is a real possibility that Zimmerman acted in self-defense, he’d be acquitted, and if the jury doesn’t, he’d be convicted.

The Martin case is a legitimate local news story, of the type that crops up now and then – in major cities like New York, where I live, we have multiple crime stories a year that involve sensational or particularly tragic facts and – at least at the outset – a significant possibility that injustice will be done either to the victim, the defendant, or both. Such cases test public confidence in the competence and fairness of local law enforcement, and sometimes find both to be wanting.

But the media feeding frenzy over this particular story – one out of the thousands of homicides in this country – in apparent response to a left-wing campaign to keep it in the national news, reflects at best a loss of perspective and at worst a cynical effort to inflame racial division in an election year.

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After last night’s contests, it’s time to update my running tallies of the popular vote in the GOP presidential primary and see what further conclusions can be drawn. I continue to break out the votes in three groups – the five conservative candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain), the two moderate candidates (Romney and Hunstman) and the libertarian (Paul) – for reasons explained in my last post. Also, the numbers through Super Tuesday have changed slightly from the last post, as more complete tallies in some states have become available. This time I’m including the Wyoming results in the totals, but not the tiny vote totals from the territories (the Northern Mariana Islands and U.S. Virgin Islands; no popular vote totals are available from Guam or American Samoa).

I. Popular Vote Totals To Date

Let’s look at how the week of contests since Super Tuesday stacks up against the popular vote count up to then:

Let’s take a different angle and break that out by month:

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Fred Barnes, who is nothing if not plugged in to the thinking of leading Beltway Republicans, looks at how the Congressional GOP plans to work with the presidential nominee:

Republicans would like to revive party unity and repeat the Reagan-Kemp success story. House speaker John Boehner and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell are planning to confer with the Republican nominee, once one emerges. Their aim: agreement on a joint agenda.

McConnell has specific ideas about what the presidential candidate and Republicans in both houses of Congress should promote. “Obamacare should be the number one issue in the campaign,” he says. “I think it’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

Next are the deficit and national debt. These, in turn, would make entitlement and tax reform important issues against Obama. “We’re not interested in small ball,” McConnell says.

And there’s another Republican initiative on Capitol Hill aimed at thwarting President Obama and Democrats. Republicans plan to keep up a steady stream of bills and proposals, mostly coming from the House, to foil the charge that Obama’s policies have been undercut by a “do-nothing Congress” – that is, a Republican Congress.

Even considering the fact that McConnell has to play coy due to the fact that there’s as yet no nominee, you will notice what is missing in this picture: the idea that the nominee himself, now most likely Mitt Romney, will have any ideas of his own to which Congressional Republicans will have to accommodate themselves. This is part of a broader pattern: outside of the party’s most moderate precincts – where Romney is seen as a bulwark against conservatives – Republicans who have resigned themselves to Romney have done so, more or less, on the theory that he can be brought around to do things the party’s various constituencies want him to do. This is the opposite of the thing we normally look for in a president: leadership in setting the agenda of the party and the country. As such, it represents an experiment, or at least a throwback to the late-19th century model of how the presidency operates. Can the GOP beat Barack Obama and run the country the next four years without presidential leadership?

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The voting is over, and so for the most part is the counting. The delegate math, I leave to others; let’s take a look at how the popular vote has shaped up over the course of this primary season and what conclusions we can draw. First, the overall popular vote before Super Tuesday, on Super Tuesday, and to date.* In addition to listing the candidates’ individual vote totals, I’ve classified them in three groups: the five conservative candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain), the two moderate candidates (Romney and Hunstman) and the libertarian (Paul). While there will undoubtedly be some grousing over the use of those labels, I think it’s uncontroversial to note that Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain all built their campaigns around appealing first to the conservative wing of the party and reaching out from there, while Romney and Huntsman took the opposite approach (and Paul, of course, is in his own category), so this turns out to be a reasonably useful descriptor of how the electorate has broken out between the voters responding to these different appeals. If anything, this overstates the moderate voting bloc, as Romney’s “electability” argument, among other things (including religious loyalties among Mormon voters), has tended in exit polls to draw him some chunk of conservative support.

I. Popular Vote Totals To Date

There are three obvious conclusions here. One, Romney is steadily outpolling any one of his individual rivals, cementing his frontrunner status. Two, his frontrunner status derives entirely from the division among his opponents: the conservatives have consistently outpolled the moderates. And three, despite winning his home state of Massachusetts by a 60-point, 220,000 vote margin on Super Tuesday and despite none of the conservatives being on the ballot in Virginia, Romney’s not getting any stronger – even with Perry and Bachmann out of the race and Cain not drawing a single recorded vote, the conservatives drew a majority of the votes on Tuesday. Thus, as Romney pulls away in the delegate race and thus advances closer to being the nominee, he does so over the sustained objections of a near-majority faction of the party. More optimistically, the strength of the conservative vote – even in a year when that vote is fractured and underfunded and the remaining conservative candidates are decidedly subpar – bodes well for conservative candidates who can unify that vote in the future.

Let’s dig deeper below the fold:

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It can be difficult to summarize in one place all of Mitt Romney’s problems as a candidate and as a potential President. I have tried; I wrote, back in 2007, a series so lengthy on Romney’s flaws (some 15,000 words, Part I, II, III, IV & V) that I can’t possibly hope to rewrite the whole thing now, and explained why I preferred McCain to Romney. More recently I focused on the dangers of backing Romney to the integrity of his supporters, the conservative movement’s need to maintain its independence from Romney, and the problems with Romney’s technocratic approach. Let me try to zero in on four of his problems here: the unconvincing nature of his political conversion, the hazards of becoming enamored with candidates whose primary rationale for running is their money, the unprecedented difficulty of winning with a moderate Republican who lacks significant national security credentials as a war hero or other prominent foreign policy figure, and Romney’s vulnerability arising from his dependence on his biography.

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Here’s why tomorrow’s Michigan primary is so important: it’s about establishment confidence in Mitt Romney and the last outside chance of getting another entrant in the race.

There are, as I’ve noted previously, a number of different types of “establishment” vs “grassroots” divides in the GOP, but you don’t have to have any particular definition of ‘establishment’ to recognize that Romney’s candidacy leans heavily on the support he draws from traditional ‘establishment’ or ‘insider’ sources: money from big-dollar fundraisers, endorsements from big-name elected officials, and covering fire from right-leaning journalists at major mainstream publications and conservative journals. Romney has depended, time and again, on his ability to get out of trouble by having the resources to go more negative than whatever opponent he’s targeting: more money to dump on negative ads and a bigger chorus of voices amplifying those attacks.

Aside from Mormon support – which is somewhat sui generis to Romney – some of Romney’s structural support comes from people who know him personally or identify with him as a fellow wealthy businessman; some comes from people who fear running a bold-colors conservative; and some comes from those who, whether or not they’d support a conservative in theory, fear Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich as electoral liabilities, Santorum for his overly outspoken social conservatism, Newt for his long train of baggage. (It’s obviously Santorum who represents the more serious threat to Romney at present.) It’s the latter two groups whose loyalty Romney must retain.

But there have been significant signs that if Romney loses his home state, where he grew up and where his father was Governor, that support may at last start to crack. Elected officials not in the Santorum or Newt camps were increasingly vocal criticizing Romney after his tripleheader loss to Santorum earlier this month. There are reports that Romney’s fundraising may be ready to tap out, which would require him to increasingly self-finance. His polling among independents is poor, calling into question the whole “electability” rationale of his campaign. The clincher came ten days ago when ABC quoted an unnamed Republican Senator saying that if Romney loses Michigan, a new candidate is needed to avoid running Santorum:

“If Romney cannot win Michigan, we need a new candidate,” said the senator, who has not endorsed anyone and requested anonymity.

The senator believes Romney will ultimately win in Michigan but says he will publicly call for the party to find a new candidate if he does not.

“We’d get killed,” the senator said if Romney manages to win the nomination after he failed to win the state in which he grew up.

“He’d be too damaged,” he said. “If he can’t even win in Michigan, where his family is from, where he grew up.”

(There was similar talk when Romney seemed in danger of losing Florida to Newt Gingrich) Talk of this nature has quieted a bit as Romney’s polling improved in Michigan, but it could revive in a big way if he loses there, while continuing to trail badly in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Such a response is, in my view, the last remaining plausible path to nominating someone other than the 4 candidates presently in the race.

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For your Presidents’ Week (or whatever they call it these days) enjoyment, the birth month of all the presidents, plus presidential candidates:

This is…not evenly distributed in terms of quality.

January: Nixon, FDR. McKinley, Fillmore

February: Reagan, Lincoln, W.H. Harrison, Washington

One of these things is not like the others. Then again, at least Harrison did no damage in office.

March: Cleveland, Tyler, Jackson, Madison

(Mitt Romney was born in March)

April: Grant, Buchanan, Monroe, Jefferson

May: JFK, Truman

(Rick Santorum was born in May)

June: George H.W. Bush

(Newt Gingrich was born in June)

July: George W. Bush, Ford, Coolidge, J.Q. Adams

August: Obama, Clinton, LBJ, Hoover, B. Harrison

Poor Benjamin Harrison, in this company.

September: Taft

There wasn’t room for another one.

October: Carter, Ike, TR, Arthur, Hayes, Adams

Character of this list changes a lot if you ignore History’s Greatest Monster.

November: Harding, Garfield, Pierce, Taylor, Polk

Pierce is the only one who was alive five years after being elected. Polk rather stands out in this crowd.

December: Wilson, A.Johnson, Van Buren

At the CNN GOP debate last night in Arizona, the candidates were asked this question:

Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?

The question was roundly booed by the audience. Republicans hated this line of questioning when it was aired in a debate a few weeks back by former Democratic White House Communications Director George Stephanopoulos, at a time when it seemed to have nothing at all to do with the issues in the campaign. Since then, President Obama has forced the issue into the public debate with the HHS mandate that all employers, even those with religious objections, include contraceptive coverage in employer-provided health care plans, so the subject can’t be avoided entirely. And in fact, for various good reasons, Republicans will probably be talking a good deal about the assault on religious liberty in general and the Catholic Church in particular in the months to come. But there’s a simpler way of framing the right answer to this in a debate.

Newt Gingrich came pretty close to the right answer to this question, before the other candidates rambled off in various wrong directions, although Rick Santorum came back to something like the right note right at the end of his. First, here was Newt’s answer, which may prove the final installment of the “Newt crushes the debate moderators” series we’ve been seeing for the past seven months:

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It’s time for Democratic politicians like Elizabeth Warren who are courting Catholic voters, or who – like Senator Bob Casey – profess the Catholic faith themselves, to distance themselves from Daily Kos over the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing bigotry of Contributing Editor David Waldman.

Waldman, @KagroX on Twitter, is one of the leading figures at Daily Kos, the largest left-wing blog; a former Hotline staffer, he’s a contributing editor and front-page writer, runs the affiliated site Congress Matters, and his tweets are frequently quoted and retweeted by Markos Moulitsas. In an angry, profanity-laden tirade last night on Twitter over a flap between a local Virginia church and the Girl Scouts, Waldman unloaded his hatred of the Church, grasping for every anti-Catholic trope he could reach (examples: “Catholic Church: the ones we don’t rape, we’ll alienate by calling them communist b****es” or “Catholics are the next Shakers. No one under 35 will ever stay in this church”) and complaining that there are too many Catholics on the Supreme Court (“Oh that’s right. Six Catholics. Fantastic.”) Waldman’s vicious rant would have been right at home with the anti-popery screeds of the Klan in its heyday, the Know-Nothings of the 1840s or the “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” trope that cost James G. Blaine the 1884 presidential election.

Waldman’s full outburst, in reverse chronological order, is below the fold; warning, it includes language we do not ordinarily permit on this website):

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The Ninth Circuit’s 2-1 decision last week in Perry v. Brown upheld the decision of Judge Vaughan Walker holding that the people of the State of California violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment by passing – in a statewide referendum in 2008 – Proposition 8. Prop 8 amended the California Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman, restoring the rule previously set forth in California statutory law until overturned by the California Supreme Court earlier in 2008. Prop 8 garnered over 7 million votes, two million more than John McCain in liberal California – it was the supported by 52.3% of the same electorate that broke 61-37 for Barack Obama, including 58% of black voters and 59% of Latino voters.

Despite some game efforts to meddle with the burden of proof based on the sequence of events, the core of the decision – written by veteran arch-liberal Judge Stephen Reinhardt – was the same as that of the district court: the assertion that there is no possible rational basis for distinguishing between traditional, opposite-sex marriage and same-sex marriage. More specifically, in the California context, the court found that the federal constitution gives federal judges the right to dictate the language itself, holding that California’s voters were not even permitted to reserve the term marriage to opposite-sex marriage while providing effectively all the practical state-law benefits of marriage to same-sex couples through “domestic partnership.”

There are arguments for and against same-sex marriage as a policy matter, but the argument for declaring that the Constitution mandates that only one set of those arguments be considered “rational” is itself irrational and intellectually indefensible. This is so not only because it begs the question by redefining the language and because it ignores basic biological reality, but most of all because the argument for striking down Proposition 8 treats history, culture, tradition and social convention inconsistently. It should not be taken seriously as constitutional law.

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My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this tide) and the underlying history that led to the wide fissure currently visible in the party and the movement on the Right. As I noted in my followup essay, the loss of trust in the Establishment over spending is by no means the only such divide, but it’s the one that has brought longstanding tensions out in the open and has overcome the natural tendencies of Republicans and conservatives to defer to authority, hierarchy and gradualism. The break is not a sudden onset of irrationality, as some would have us believe, but an entirely rational response to a long and depressing history of failure to check the growth of federal spending, the federal entitlement state, and federal regulation, leading us to the point where our private sector can no longer carry the burden of a perpetually growing public sector.

This observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.

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Following my essay on the nature of the Establishment vs Tea Party or Outsider divide on the Right as driven primarily by a divide over whether and how we can roll back the seemingly endless growth of spending and the size of government, a number of people offered criticisms. Some noted that there are longstanding divides between the DC-based professional class (officeholders, staffers, pundits and journalists who have a direct stake in particular people having political power) and those outside. Which is true and a contributing factor (as any student of public choice theory could tell you), but not new, and in any event self-defeating definition: if the people in power are definitionally opposed to those without, then new elections are purposeless exercises. History tells us otherwise: the professional class may restrain and co-opt, but there are always those officeholders (new and experienced) who are willing to stick their necks out for genuine changes in the long-term trajectory of public policy. Others pointed to the cultural divide such as the one that Angelo Codevilla identified in his 2010 essay distinguishing between a Ruling Class and a Country Party. Codevilla’s analysis is certainly a useful part of the debate, and is another longstanding fault line that laid the groundwork for the current schism. But it doesn’t really reflect why now, at this time, conservatives are willing to lock horns with the organs of Republican and conservative leadership that, in the Bush years, commanded a good deal of loyalty from the rank and file – willing enough to line up cheering throngs of responsible citizens behind the most unlikely of 21st century populist champions, Newt Gingrich.

The most sustained critique comes from sometime National Review contributor Avik Roy, writing in Forbes. Roy calls Redstate a “bastion of populist conservatism,” which is true even if I’m not exactly anybody’s idea of a populist. He says that Ben Domenech is “one of the best conservative writers on health care issues,” which is certainly true, and faults the rest of us at RedState for not developing “serious proposals for entitlement reform,” in contrast to NR’s columnists – which should be unsurprising to Roy if he thinks about the fact that most of us have day jobs, to say nothing of the fact that RedState’s principal role is activism rather than think-tankery.

Roy seems most upset at my references to National Review, which is a shame, because as I said I have nothing against NR, and I agree with Roy that NR as a whole still provides an awful lot of good punditry, analysis and advocacy (and I remain a big fan of many of its long-time writers); I was just trying to explain precisely why so many people on the Right were agitated at it. In any event, Roy misses some crucially important points that undermine his entire argument.

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