The New Republic : Debt Deal forces GOP Nominee to the Right - Impossible to Pivot to the Center - Conservatives in Congress and in the early primary states are doing everything they can to help Democrats paint devil horns on their eventual nominee

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General election strategy for Obama and Democrats : Frighten swing voters and unhappy progressives with the specter of what an extremist Republican government might do.

Obama has invaded the Center and the Land of Independents. It makes impossible for the GOP Nominee to use the same narrative and paint himself or herself as a Republican Moderate.

The Republican Party is now dominated by Ideology and Stubborn Ideologes with no slack and no flexibility, they have no room for maneuver and change of ideas. They are not adjustable and adaptable to new situations.

Obama being a moderate, centrist and compromiser has made the task of creating enthusiasm for their bigotry and fanaticism more difficult.

The New Republic
The Debt Deal Makes It Nearly Impossible for the GOP Nominee to Pivot to the Center
By Ed Kilgore
Ed Kilgore is a special correspondent for The New Republic.
August 3, 2011


The Debt Deal Makes It Nearly Impossible for the GOP Nominee to Pivot to the Center


Some excerpts :

The big debt limit vote in Congress, it is increasingly obvious, is just an appetizer for the divisive, voter-alienating struggles it has built into the schedule at key points during the 2012 presidential campaign, making an eventual GOP presidential nominee’s efforts to “pivot to the center” an athletic feat, at best. And as Tea Party activists and other conservatives have made clear in their reactions to the deal just signed, their efforts to force everyone in the GOP to join in future hostage-taking exercises aimed at middle-class entitlements and other targets beloved of voters have just begun.

Indeed, this week’s agreement didn’t really kick the can that far down the road. In September, after the field has finally filled out and been winnowed in Ames, congressional conservatives will be engaged in a savage fight to cut domestic appropriations—complete, no doubt, with government shutdown threats—below the levels spelled out in the debt limit deal. Another provision of the deal requires that when the current “temporary” debt limit is reached, probably around the end of September, the president must request another increase in the limit, which will lead to a “disapproval” vote in Congress and, if it passes, a presidential veto and a veto override vote (all just Kabuki theater, but a noisy and divisive exercise nonetheless).

Soon after that, an even bigger battle over the “debt committee” recommendations, and the fallback automatic spending cuts that will be triggered in their stead, will break out, culminating in December when the candidates competing in the early primary states will be in a full-on teeth-grinding frenzy for votes. Both these fights will inevitably involve trade-offs—between entitlement cuts, defense spending cuts, and tax increases—that divide the GOP and the country, and they will force candidates to choose again and again between the views of Tea Party activists—including early primary-state Big Dogs like Jim DeMint—and the general public.

And that hardly ends the gauntlet of fiscal litmus tests. As TNR’s Jonathan Cohn explained yesterday, the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts, and the next anticipated deadline for yet another debt increase, will coincide at the end of 2012, casting a long shadow over the presidential campaign. Budget guru Stan Collender has summed it up: “It’s absolutely certain Congress and the president, the House and Senate, and Democrats and Republicans will all be fighting constantly over the budget during the next 18 months.”

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