“Reagan Has Left The Premises”: The Republican Party Needs A Reality Check
In the summer of 1999, George W. Bush chose the first major policy speech of his presidential campaign to pick a fight with Grover Norquist. Bush flatly rejected the “destructive” view “that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved” — a vision the Texas governor dismissed as having “no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than leave us alone.”
Norquist had proposed to define conservatism as the “leave us alone” coalition — a movement united by a desire to get government off our backs. Bush countered that “the American government is not the enemy of the American people.”
Ed Crane, then the president of the libertarian Cato Institute, said the speech sounded as if it had been written by someone “moonlighting for Hillary Rodham Clinton.” I can formally deny that charge. But the Bush campaign was purposely attempting to alter the image of the Republican Party. And the party — rendered more open to change by eight years in the presidential wilderness — gave Bush the leeway to make necessary ideological adjustments.
It is the nature of resilient institutions to take stock of new realities and adjust accordingly. In a new cover essay for Commentary magazine, Peter Wehner and I detail the examples of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. Clinton broke a long Democratic presidential losing streak by emphasizing middle-class values, advocating the end of “welfare as we know it” and standing up to extreme elements within his coalition (thereby creating the “Sister Souljah moment”). In Britain, Blair went after the “moral chaos” that led to youth crime, abandoned his party’s official commitment to public ownership of the means of production and launched New Labor.
The Republican Party now needs similar transformation. Out of the past six presidential elections, four have gone to the Democratic nominee, at an average yield of 327 electoral votes to 211 for the Republican. During the preceding two decades, from 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six elections, averaging 417 electoral votes to Democrats’ 113.
This stunning reversal of electoral fortunes has taken place for a variety of reasons: changing demographics; the end of a GOP foreign policy advantage during the Cold War; a serious gap in candidate quality; the declining relevance of economic policies that seem better suited to the 1980s; and an occasionally deserved reputation for being judgmental and censorious.
A full Republican appreciation of these disturbing fundamentals was delayed by the 2010 midterms, in which an unreconstructed anti-government message seemed to be riding a wave. Just two years later came that wave’s withdrawing roar. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, lost by 5 million votes to a beatable incumbent presiding over an anemic economy. The explanation is not purely technical or personality oriented. At the national level, Republicans have a winning message for a nation that no longer exists.
In retrospect, last year’s Republican primary process was entirely disconnected from the actual needs of the party. One candidate pledged to build a 20-foot-high electrical fence at the border crowned with the sign, in English and Spanish, “It will kill you — Warning.” Another promised, as president, to speak out against the damage done to American society by contraception. Another warned that vaccinations may cause “mental retardation.” In the course of 20 debates and in tens of millions of dollars of ads, issues such as upward mobility, education, poverty, safer communities and the environment were rarely mentioned.
A Republican recovery in presidential politics will depend on two factors. First, candidates will need to do more than rebrand existing policy approaches or translate them into Spanish. Some serious rethinking is necessary, particularly on economic matters. In our Commentary essay, we raise ideas such as ending corporate welfare, breaking up the mega-banks, improving the treatment of families in the tax code, and encouraging economic mobility through education reform and improved job training. Whatever form Republican proposals eventually take, they must move beyond Reagan-era nostalgia.
Second, Republican primary voters, party activists and party leaders have a choice to make, ruthlessly clarified by recent events. They can take the path of Democrats in 1988, doubling down on a faltering ideology. Or they can follow the model of Democrats in 1992 and their own party in 2000, giving their nominee the leeway needed to oppose outworn or extreme ideas and to produce an agenda relevant to our time.
By: Michael Gerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 22, 2013
“The Unsubstantiated Smear”: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, And The Smear-Tacular Tea Party GOP
Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has gotten a lot of grief lately, and for good reason. His speculation about whether Defense Secretary nominee Chuck Hagel received secret payments from North Korea was the kind of unsubstantiated smear that takes your breath away. But in all the ballyhoo over Cruz something else seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle: the extent to which the unsubstantiated smear has become stock in trade for Tea Party senators.
Take, for example, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson. Earlier this month he gave a speech in which he set out to “describe” what “patriots,” “people who like freedom,” and “people who like this country” are “up against” these days. The answer: “liberals, progressives, Democrats, whatever they call themselves nowadays, Socialists, Marxists.”
That’s right, Senator Johnson. Having determined that the term “liberal” is too freighted with negative connotations, there are a lot of us Democrats calling ourselves Marxists these days. It’s a bit of rebranding and we have high hopes.
But regardless of what we call ourselves, the implication of Johnson’s observation is pretty clear: on the one side you have patriots (people like Johnson), and on the other you have people who neither love freedom nor America—those are the Democrats.
In the same speech, Johnson said “Liberals have had control of our culture now for about 20 years.” It’s part of their “diabolically simple” strategy to undo America. Wow, liberals must be a pretty nefarious bunch. Need proof? Johnson doesn’t offer much, but maybe he doesn’t need to. Twenty years ago was 1993. That year cross-dressing home wrecker Mrs. Doubtfire took the country by storm. It was pretty much everything liberals stand for in 125 minutes of heart-tugging hilarity.
And if Cruz and Johnson aren’t enough for you, take a listen to Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. In a recent interview with NPR Paul was asked to explain how Mitt Romney could have lost in 2012. Paul’s explanation: “it is much easier to offer people something for nothing, than it is to tell people that in reality hard work and sweat equity is how a country gets rich.” That evidently appealed to Obama voters because the president said “he was going to take from the rich and give to the poor. And there’s always more poor than there are rich. So, you can see in a democracy it’s easier to sell that message.”
Oh, OK. The way to success in America is hard work. But “poor” people would rather have the spoils of success handed to them than have to work hard. So a president who promises to do that has found himself a winning message. What a terrific view of people who labor at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder, the aspirations they have for themselves and their families, and the kinds of things they think about when they go to the voting booth (to say nothing of how it characterizes Obama supporters: we’re lazy, and just looking for a handout.)
To be sure, this isn’t the first time we’ve ever heard people say things like that. Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Dinesh D’Souza have been peddling this pabulum for years. And anyone who’s been in the middle of a congressional election with a Tea Party candidate has heard all of this and more.
But the frequency with which this kind of rhetoric emanates from conservative quarters ought not to inure us to its impact. It encourages the transformation of ideological differences into bright lines that allegedly divide good people from bad, and it gives sanction to the notion that difference is itself sufficient evidence that the other person could be engaged in any manner of nefarious conduct.
It’s the kind of thing that you’d like to think wouldn’t work in the American political system. But for the last couple of election cycles its worked like gangbusters, tapping a deep vein of grievance that animates the Tea Party, a myopic sense of victimhood and entitlement.
So holding Senator Cruz to account for his slander was a good thing. But if the recent past is any indication, the smear isn’t going anywhere. It wins votes. And that should be troubling to all of us, Democrats and Republicans, who share the pluralistic notions of democracy to which our country has long aspired.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World report, February 21, 2013
“Rush To The Defense? Not So Fast”: We Know Where Limbaugh Stands Today
Dear David from Georgia:
I want to thank you for the email you sent last week. It made me laugh out loud.
It seems you were unhappy I took a shot at Rush Limbaugh a few days back. Limbaugh had argued that John Lewis might have avoided having his skull fractured by Alabama state troopers while protesting for voting rights in Selma, AL 48 years ago, if only he’d been armed. I suggested, tongue in cheek, that Limbaugh would have given the same advice to Rosa Parks, who famously refused to surrender her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, AL, bus.
Which moved you to write: “If Rush Limbaugh were on that bus that day, like so many of us, he would have insisted that Ms. Parks REMAIN seated. … Rush doesn’t need me to defend him from your silly assumption, but I just like to bring it to your attention that just because Rush is WHITE doesn’t mean he is not a gentleman!”
Ahem.
David, Rush Limbaugh is the man who once said the NFL “all too often looks like a game between the Bloods and the Crips” and told a black caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back.” So the idea that, in Alabama, in 1955, as a black woman was committing an illegal act of civil disobedience, this particular white man would have done what 14 other white passengers did not is, well, rather fanciful.
But then, it’s seductively easy to imagine yourself or your hero on the right side of history once that history has been vindicated. So of course “Rush” would have stood up for Rosa Parks. Of course “Rush” would have defended Jews who were turned away while fleeing the Holocaust. Of course “Rush” would have supported women agitating for the right to vote. Of course he would’ve defended human rights. Wouldn’t we all?
Actually, no. Not then, and not now.
As it happens, David, your email appeared the same week as news out of Flint, MI, about Tonya Battle, an African-American nurse who is suing her employer, the Hurley Medical Center. Battle, an employee since 1988, was working in the neonatal intensive-care unit when, she says, a baby’s father approached her at the infant’s bedside, asked for her supervisor and then told said supervisor he didn’t want any black people involved in his child’s care.
So, of course, the hospital stood up for its 25-year employee, right?
No. According to her suit, a note was posted on the assignment clipboard saying, “No African-American nurse to take care of baby.” The hospital, naturally, has declined comment.
David, this is ultimately not about “Rush.” He is a rich blowhard and therefore, unexceptional. No, this is about the implicit, albeit unstated, “of course” that comes too easily to you and frankly, to many of us, when we contemplate how we would have responded to the moral crimes of the past.
There is to it an unearned smugness that insults the very real courage of those like Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo and James Zwerg, who did take the morally correct stand at hazard of life and limb. It is easy to “stand up” for the right thing when doing so requires only paying lip service 50 years after the fact, something at which Limbaugh and his brethren have become scarily adept.
But the need for real courage, for willingness to stand up for human dignity, did not end in 1955, something to which our gay, Muslim and immigrant friends — and Tonya Battle — would surely testify. So there is something starkly fatuous in your vision of “Rush” defending Rosa Parks. No, sir. We know where he would have stood then because we know where he stands now.
Perhaps you find comfort in your delusion. But some of us realize we live in an era where bigotry has its own talk show and cable network. Can we find comfort in delusions like yours?
Of course not.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo. February 20, 2013
“Still More BS”: The Bowles-Simpson Commission Is The Fiscal Zombie That Just Won’t Die
We all do things that we regret. President Obama must surely regret that he ever listened to the extreme deficit hawks back in early 2010, when he appointed the Bowles-Simpson Commission, the fiscal zombie that just won’t die.
The commission is long defunct. The recommendations of its majority report never became law (because that required a super-majority). But the dreams and schemes of B-S have become the gold standard of deflationists everywhere. The test of budgetary soundness is: does it meet the recommendations of Bowles and Simpson?
On Tuesday, the depressive duo were at it again, calling for additional deficit reductions of $2.4 trillion over a decade. This is almost a trillion dollars beyond what President Obama and Congress are considering.
This clarion call was issued under the aegis of the corporate group, “Fix the Debt,” a bunch of millionaires and billionaires urging regular people to tighten their belts for the greater good.
Quite apart from the impact of particular cuts (Social Security, Medicare, domestic discretionary spending), this is economic lunacy—because it sandbags an already depressed economy. The Congressional Budget Office has calculated that growth would be 3 percent this year, but will only be half that rate because of the effects of the sequester (or cuts of a similar magnitude)—and Bowles and Simpson are calling for annual cuts of twice the scale of the sequester, and over a whole decade.
President Obama has focused on heading off the sequester—$85 billion of mandatory cuts in the next ten months. But he has bought into the deeper mischief wrought by Bowles and Simpson, by embracing further cuts of $1.5 trillion over a decade.
As the latest pronouncement by the B-S boys shows, the cuts are never enough. If Obama accepts $1.5 trillion, they counter with $2.4 trillion.
They are more gentlemanly than Grover Norquist, but the ideological goal is the same—a government small enough to drown in a bathtub. Even worse, deflationary cuts slow growth, making the debt load larger in real terms, no matter how much we cut.
We’ve now had a real-time experiment, in countries as diverse as Greece, Spain, and Britain. Austerity only breeds more austerity.
By: Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect, February 21, 2013
“A Patron Saint For Handguns?”: The Lizard Incident That Produced Wayne LaPierre And The NRA
When a new pope gets elected later this month, one of the many decisions he will face is whether to grant official recognition to anoint a Patron Saint of Handgunners.
The candidate is Saint Gabriel Possenti, a 19th century Italian monk who allegedly saved a village from bandits with a handgun before dying of tuberculosis at 23.
The St. Gabriel Possenti Society established itself over 20 years ago with the sole purpose of getting Possenti recognized as handgun enthusiasts’ official saint, agitating and campaigning on his behalf. The 501(c)3 charity group, whose seal includes a drawing of Possenti and a revolver, encourages members to lobby local clergymen, write letters to Vatican officials, and “obtain numerous Gun Saint tokens and deposit them in church collection baskets of your denomination.”
According to the group, Saint Gabriel Possenti saved the villagers of Isola del Gran Sasso from a marauding gang of 20 renegade soldiers by demonstrating his marksmanship with a revolver in 1860. When the gangsters (whom the group notes were also “would-be rapists”) descended on the town, Possenti fired at a lizard in the road and killed it with a single shot.
The bandits, terrified by his excellent shot, fled the town and the day was saved. “St. Gabriel Possenti performed this feat of courage without causing physical harm to a single human being,” they note.
The legend, however, may be little more than that, as some allege the gun incident never occurred. One website dedicated to the saint notes that the tale only appears in one of the four biographies on Possenti, and that the author of the relevant one, Rev. Godfrey Poage, acknowledged that “some of the accounts in his book were invented to ‘enliven’ the story.” Furthermore, Possenti died only two years later and thus would likely have been in late stages of tuberculosis, the critics note, and thus in no shape to fight off 20 armed gangsters.
In a statement sent today marking the upcoming feast day of the saint, Society Chairman John Snyder acknowledged the historical dispute and defended the “lizard incident.”
“The Poage account of the lizard incident remained non-controversial for over a quarter of a century. It wasn’t until I began promoting St. Gabriel Possenti as a Patron of Handgunners in the late 1980s that anti-gun bigots began a belated attempt to attack the account of the lizard incident. It seems they are more concerned with being politically correct than historically accurate,” Snyder said.
Snyder wrote a whole book about the incident, “Gun Saint,” which features an illustration of the young Saint Gabriel Possenti firing a gun as bearded gangsters flee in all directions.
The group even claims biblical passages support the use of guns for self-defense. You can read about them in a printed monograph, which the Society will send to you for a reasonable contribution of $10.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, February 21, 2013
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