Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has argued that Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty should skip Iowa because he will not pass all of the litmus tests imposed by the Hawkeye state’s Republican base. He has made similar points about former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

In Pawlenty’s case, could a candidate really get away with skipping a state that borders his own, especially when the core of his electability argument is going to be “I can win in the Heartland”?

I think probably not.

More broadly, Ambinder and others seem to assume that Iowa’s Republican base is considerably more conservative than the Republican base nationwide. That would be the argument a candidate wanting to skip Iowa would make to justify his or her decision, but intuitively, it doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Iowa Republicans didn’t pull their apparent obsession with issues like same-sex marriage out of thin air. Depending on whose narrative you believe, that issue either comes from the Bible or from Karl Rove’s political playbook. Either way, Republicans are against it almost everywhere. Same goes for abortion and for worldviews that seem to deviate from mainstream “Judeo-Christian values.”

While Iowa Republicans may be more conservative than the GOP primary electorate in New Hampshire (which includes registered independents), how many other early primary states aren’t dominated by social conservatives?*

If the dreaded Iowa litmus tests were so unfair as to weed out every “center-right” Republican in the field, Romney would not have been the frontrunner here for almost all of 2007, and he would not have won that coveted “silver medal” on caucus night.

Days after the overly-conservative caucuses, Romney won another silver medal in New Hampshire, from an electorate apparently dominated by moderates. How can one of those two states be rigged against him while the other is fertile ground?

Here’s what’s really going on:

As the Republican party has shrunk nationwide, its spectrum of acceptable political beliefs has shrunk with it. That’s not unique to Iowa; it’s a national story that is covered somewhere every day.

Before a “skip Iowa” strategy makes sense for a candidate, that candidate has to show an ability to win in South Carolina and other states with similar Republican electorates.

Like it or not, the Iowa delegation blends in ideologically at Republican conventions. The base of the party’s power has shifted to the right. If a candidate loses for being too moderate, it won’t just be because of the primary calendar.

* Comparing how some later states voted during the 2008 primary might be an appealing way to answer this question, but I’d argue that in the later, bigger primary states, name ID, money, and electability were just as determinative of success as a candidate’s positions on social issues. On paper, the candidates agreed on almost all social issues anyway.

Two developments today warrant some explication:

1. Political operatives don’t give up cushy jobs to work for a candidate who isn’t going to run for anything.

Republican Party of Iowa Executive Director Jeff Boeyink stepped down from his position today to work for Branstad’s campaign committee. The primary is less than a year away, so he wouldn’t have made this decision if Branstad was really still in the “exploratory” phase of his campaign. Any candidate that does not make a decision to run soon will miss the boat, and Boeyink would almost certainly have gotten assurances from Branstad before sailing into uncharted waters for the former governor.

Boeyink’s move also means that Branstad has alreaady raised enough money to pay his salary, which would be fairly significant, for at least a few months.

2. Calling yourself “NextGen PAC” doesn’t necessarily mean you represent a new generation of anything.

After the Draft Branstad PAC, which was actually a 527 group, was forced to shut down when Branstad filed papers to become a candidate for governor, 63-year-old former state Rep. Sandy Greiner announced the creation of a new committee called “NextGen PAC,” presumably to continue advocating (indirectly) for Branstad, who was first elected governor 27 years ago.

Many political committees have Orwellian names, but this one is a whopper. Do Greiner and Branstad really represent the GOP’s next generation of leaders? Who comprises the current generation of the GOP? Or the immediate past generation?

The new name clearly reflects a bit of conventional political wisdom: Turn your weaknesses into strengths before opponents have a chance to exploit them. If nothing else, this indicates that consultants and political professionals, not grassroots activists, are probably pulling the levers behind the scenes.

But for all the bellyaching, it’s important to remember that the political implications of slashing state spending aren’t really so bad.

Right now, critics are arguing that the cuts were only necessary because Culver and Democratic leaders in the legislature spent too much in their Fiscal Year 2010 budget. But on Election Day next year, voters who don’t pay as much attention to the barrage of press releases Republicans send out at the end of every legislative session bemoaning increases in spending won’t see it that way.

Here’s how Democrats will tell the story on the campaign trail: Democratic leaders passed a budget at the end of the 2009 legislative session that ended up being too big, based on estimates that were released half a year later. Once the lowered estimates were released in October, Culver took bold action within 24 hours, reducing state spending by 10 percentage points across the board. He rooted out unnecessary spending and forced all of state government to tighten its belt in the midst of a global economic recession that wasn’t Iowa’s fault.

In 12 months, I won’t be surprised to see Culver campaign ads actually touting this move to win the support of fiscal conservatives. The obvious contrast is that, faced with a similar situation, former Gov. Terry Branstad raised taxes — something Culver has vowed to avoid at all costs.

If Culver’s budget cut does continue to hurt him next year, it will not be among independents and Republicans, it will be among state employee unions like AFSCME and ISEA. And, despite the unions’ problems with the Culver administration over the past few years, they seem to be on board with this round of budget cuts already based on their public statements.

Frankly, it’s hard to see how budget cuts hurt Culver in 2010. If they have any impact at all, it will be a net positive.

Briefly, here are the high points: They would create some sort of online hub of information for consumers to find information about insurance plans, they would prevent insurance companies from dropping coverage due to preexisting conditions if a customer switches plans within the same insurance company (but, notably, not if a customer switches to a different company), and they would require insurance companies to give customers incentives for quitting smoking and making other healthy decisions.

The only problem? All of these ideas require maintaining the state-based regulatory system that the national GOP is aggressively trying to eliminate.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) proposed allowing consumers to buy insurance plans across state lines. Since then, GOP leaders in congress have latched on to the idea and continue to promote it as the best way to keep costs down, and Iowa’s own Republican members of congress have expressed support for it.

Conveniently, this idea gives Republicans an ideologically-consistent, free-market-based solution to the problems of health care. They can continue to argue that the market needs less regulation, not more, and they can deflect criticism that they don’t have health care policy ideas of their own.

Less convenient for local Republicans is the fact that such a proposal would probably prevent states from regulating health insurance at all. If insurance plans could be purchased across state lines, every insurance company would move to the state with the fewest regulations, where no other states’ laws could touch them. It would spark what policy wonks call a “race to the bottom.”

Essentially, it would create a South Dakota of health insurance, just like what exists now for credit card companies, and any efforts to regulate insurance at the state level would be all but impossible.

I admit I was not at the Iowa GOP’s press conference  today, so I do not know for sure whether this question was asked. Based on media reports that I have read, I don’t think it was, and that’s too bad. It’s a glaring inconsistency between national and local Republicans that should probably be addressed.

As Obama delivered his live address today, hundreds of school board members and candidates were trying to win elections across the state.

Most students here will not be deprived of the chance to see the nation’s first black president address their concerns directly. In 80 years, they will be able to tell their grandchildren that they remember the moment, even if they end up disagreeing with all of Obama’s political beliefs. But some students will be denied the opportunity, as school districts have accommodated conservative parents by making the speech optional. In some districts, only students whose teachers are willing to risk backlash by showing the speech on a tape delay will see it.

It’s as if parents think that today is the only day that President Obama’s name will be uttered in public school classrooms — that the identity of the leader of the free world remains a secret to schoolchildren on every other day.

That’s ridiculous. Students read age-appropriate newspaper articles that quote the president all the time in the course of their studies. Many schools likely aired the president’s inaugural address in January without objection.

But, because school board elections are held at this time of year in many states across the country, today’s speech sparked a political firestorm.

It’s no secret that the fringe conservative groups who have spearheaded the recent movement to prevent students from seeing Obama’s speech consider school boards an important battleground. In Iowa, many school districts claim members who oppose teaching students about evolution, a fairly basic tenet of biology. Some districts have refused to enact measures to end bullying of students based on sexual orientation, even after the state legislature required them to do so. One district in Iowa has gone as far as to implement a Bible studies curriculum in public schools.

Fights that you might think the Supreme Court settled decades ago are still being waged in many corners of the Hawkeye State, and the number of parents choosing to homeschool their children continues to increase (pdf). Though a strong public education system is perhaps the most important tool for achieving equality and upward mobility in the United States today, professional educators and school board members who want to keep their students on the same page as students in other districts across the country often find themselves battling uphill.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that at least some of the conservative groups lining up to oppose Obama’s speech are hoping that it will translate into votes for their candidates on the ground. School board elections are usually low-turnout affairs, in which the results reflect the preconceptions of the few citizens who take the time to vote rather than a broad consensus of all members of the community. Even in traditionally liberal parts of the country, a riled conservative base can swing a race from one candidate to another.

In Iowa, school districts have bent over backwards to allow parents to shield their children from the president, so the impact may not be so dramatic. But I wonder, if Obama’s speech was scheduled for next month instead of today, whether the opposition would have been as vitriolic.

The Iowa Constitution requires the state to balance its budget at the end of every fiscal year, and the governor can only transfer so much money out of the state’s cash reserves without approval from the legislature.

It remains unclear how large the budget deficit from fiscal year 2009 will be when the final numbers are available in September, but there is a chance that it will be too large for Culver to cover it with transfers on his own. That’s why some are predicting that he will have to call a special session, but so far, the governor has insisted that it will not be necessary.

Republicans, who are quick to accuse Democrats of spending recklessly, are clamoring for a triumphant, unscheduled return to the capitol this summer. Hoping that a special session would draw more attention to their attacks, GOP leaders have attempted to frame the debate so that if a special session becomes necessary, it will look like a Democratic admission of guilt. Culver’s emphatic resistance only serves to reinforce that perception.

Lost in the hyperbolic spin coming out of both sides in this debate is one simple fact: the budget shortfall is really neither party’s fault.

The nonpartisan Legislative Services Agency projected much higher revenue through the end of fiscal year 2009 than what the state ended up receiving. Democrats fulfilled their responsibilities in this year’s session by passing a budget that fit within official, nonpartisan estimates. That’s what they were supposed to do. At the time, the alternative would have been to assume that the experts’ revenue estimates were wrong and to make deeper cuts to state services than what might have been necessary.

That would have meant laying off state employees, closing courthouses for even more days, covering health care for fewer children, or even raising taxes. Those are things legislators should only do when they are absolutely necessary, and at the time, the numbers said they weren’t.

Bad budget estimates happen no matter which party holds the pursestrings. When former Gov. Tom Vilsack called a special session to balance the state’s budget in 2002, it had already received a stamp of approval from Republicans, who controlled the legislature.

Many of the Republicans now attacking Culver over this year’s budget were instrumental in passing the faulty budgets for fiscal years 2001 and 2002. I can only assume their press releases from back then were a little less vitriolic.

Of the “pitfalls” of a public health insurance option, Grassley writes:

A government-run option would have bureaucrats in Washington setting prices and determining which treatments are covered. It would cause 119 million Americans to shift from private coverage to the government plan, according to experts, and put America on the path toward an entirely government-run health care system. Doctors and hospitals already are paid less by Medicare and Medicaid, and they make up the difference by passing the cost onto their other patients.

If more people entered government plans, even more doctors would stop seeing Medicare, Medicaid and public plan patients. Employers would stop offering coverage because they could tell employees to get coverage from the government. Eventually, the government plan would overtake the market, and we’d have a Canadian-style system but without the ability that Canadians have to go to the United States for innovative treatments for cancer and other life-threatening illnesses.

Setting aside the canard that Canadians have worse health care than their southern neighbors, Grassley’s objections seem to stem from the fear that a public health insurance option would be so desirable that Americans would drop their private plans in droves if one became available.

If that’s true, then the second part of his argument, that a public health insurance system would lead to inadequate health care run by “bureaucrats in Washington,” doesn’t make much sense.  If a public option is inherently bad, why would so many people gravitate to it? (Don’t most people see their private insurance companies as giant, coldhearted bureaucracies anyway?)

But that’s not the only contradiction in Grassley’s piece.  Two paragraphs earlier, he writes, “We need stronger rules on insurers, such as requiring them to cover people and preventing higher premiums for pre-existing conditions.”  Wouldn’t that entail the federal government fixing prices and determining what medical conditions are covered?  The implementation of that proposal, like all other federal proposals, would require the work of much-maligned “bureaucrats in Washington.”

Though Grassley’s strong words seem to imply that he has made up his mind already, advocates of a public health insurance option might find at least one reason to remain optimistic: if a public plan could be crafted to avoid the sorts of pitfalls that Grassley considers inevitable (if, for instance, the public plan were administered by a quasi-non-governmental organization and required to reimburse providers at higher rates than Medicare and Medicaid), would he still have grounds to object?

The meeting, sponsored by Democracy for America, the activist organization spawned by his unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign, included brief introductory remarks from Dean followed by a question and answer period.  In his remarks, Dean dropped anecdotes from his time campaigning around Iowa, and he touted his own efforts to get health insurance for more citizens as governor of Vermont.

Just like his campaign stops in 2003 and 2004, there was a large contingent from the Service Employees International Union, and there was more than one “Dean for America” bumper sticker in the parking lot. (Also parked outside were at least 11 Toyota Priuses — a sign that some things do change.)

At any moment, Joe Trippi could have walked in and started lurking in a back corner, and he wouldn’t have been out of place.

Though Dean’s time as chair of the DNC may have forced him to dial back on the direct, confident speaking style Iowans came to know six years ago, he has returned to full form.  He distinguished frequently between an ideal health care reform plan and the plan he thinks could garner enough votes to pass.  “One thing about single-payer is it is more efficient than any other system,” he said before essentially dismissing the proposal, which would abolish the nation’s employer-provided health insurance system, as politically infeasible.

“I think President Obama has put together the best plan, politically, that I’ve ever seen,” he noted.

A few protesters later interrupted Dean’s speech, angry that single-payer had been taken off the table, but Dean seemed more open to the idea than most officials in Washington, D.C., and he pointed that out himself.

Dean also tackled the question of how to fund universal health care.  He admitted bluntly that it would probably be most strategic to avoid answering that question with any specificity until after a health care reform plan passes.  The more specific a plan becomes, the more enemies it attracts, he said.

Then Dean answered the funding question anyway, explaining that the best way to pay for a public health insurance plan would be through a carbon tax.  Dean isn’t the only serious person to support the idea of a carbon tax, but most admit that it is too heavy a lift to accomplish alongside health care reform.

Dean’s main purpose for the visit was to highlight the necessity of a public option in whatever health care reform proposal ends up passing Congress.  “If [Americans] want to be in a public option, let them be in a public option,” he said.  Without a public option, he argued that private insurance companies would find a way to manipulate whatever new system is created, and nothing would really change.

Aside from the protesters, who seemed committed to getting either single-payer or nothing, it seemed that everyone in the room already agreed with him.  So they asked the sorts of questions that you might hear at a presidential campaign stop, challenging Dean on specifics without regard for the fact that he would not be in the room with the senators who  ultimately hash things out.

I left the meeting with the same sense of Dean that I had when I first saw him on the presidential campaign trail: the guy knows so much about what he talks about that he can seem abrupt and even arrogant in the face of questions.  As we learned in the waning days of the 2004 Iowa Caucuses, that can be both a blessing and a curse.

It is true, the size of Gov. Chet Culver’s proposed multi-year bonding plan remained in question throughout the week, but lawmakers reached an agreement with the governor that was pretty close to what everyone was expecting.  And it was a lower number than what Culver initially asked for.

None of the four workers’ rights bills — Fair Share, Prevailing Wage, Choice of Doctor, and Open-scope Collective Bargaining — came up again.  The plan to eliminate ‘Federal Deductibility’ on Iowans’ state income taxes petered out before it reached the House floor for lack of support among that chamber’s Democrats.

If you want to know why debate lasted for so long, blame parliamentary procedure, which allows legislators to introduce and demand votes on amendments that bear little relationship to the bills they are attached to and have little chance of passing.  Republicans in the House attached dozens of amendments that they knew had no chance of passing (or even being ruled ‘germane’) in just the final legislative day alone.

No one should begrudge the minority party for doing this, as it is their right, and it is how a republic should work.  But, before you lay the blame for late-night debates squarely at Democrats’ feet, remember who actually made the days stretch on for so long, and remember whose interests are best served by the suspicious appearance of a late-night debate in the first place.

The next time someone tells you about the Democrats’ aggressive tactics for ramming through their far-left agenda at the very last minute, ask for examples.  In a state where Democrats have made gains in the state legislature for several election cycles in a row, where Democrats’ voter registration advantage has increased each year since 2006, the ruling majority has precious little to show for all its supposed back-room dealings and secret plans this year.

There are few images more effective in a campaign mailer than a photo of a sketchy guy’s shadow superimposed on a sidewalk next to a playground.  Or a photo of kids looking vulnerable, without their parents in sight, with apocalyptic text asking “Why does candidate X refuse to protect our children?”

The most recent, high-profile example of this tactic came from an independent expenditure during last year’s Democratic primary for the 3rd Congressional District.  Former State Rep. Ed Fallon, famous for being a lone “no” vote on countless bills during his time in the legislature, was attacked in mailings because he voted against Iowa’s original “2,000-foot rule,” which prohibited sex offenders from living near schools and certain other places where children congregate.

“Ed Fallon thought it was more important to cast his vote to make a political statement than to cast a vote that protects our kids from these dangerous predators,” the mailing said, beneath a photo of an inmate watching children at play.

Ironically, nowadays almost everyone — lawmakers, analysts, and peace officers — agree that the old law was inadequate and potentially counterproductive.

In the Senate, the issue was pretty cut-and-dried, and both the Democratic and Republican caucuses supported the new bill.  The House appears to be more fractured (as has often been the case this year), with GOP leaders saying they plan to try to kill significantly alter the measure.

That is probably making a lot of state representatives from both parties nervous.  During the next campaign, both sides of the issue could cast the other as soft on sex offenders.  A “yes” vote would allow more sex offenders to live near schools, but it would also allow law enforcement to arrest the most serious offenders for loitering near a school, even if they don’t live there.  A “no” vote would allow sex offenders to continue loitering near children without much interference from law enforcement, but it would keep the stricter 2,000-foot rule in place.

In the strained logic of a direct mail campaign, either vote could have dire political consequences, and the winning side will be the one that is willing to make the most intellectually dishonest argument.  That’s not a good place for the state of Iowa to be.

On sex offender bills, legislators must seek strength in numbers if they hope to avoid a messy and expensive direct mail war in 2010.  Only an overwhelming vote in one direction or the other can prevent it.