“The Politics Of Fear Comes With Fine Print”: If You’re Afraid Of Anything, Vote GOP, But Don’t Expect Us To Actually Do Anything
After a couple of Republican congressional candidates literally included ISIS propaganda excerpts in their anti-Democratic attack ads, the message of this year’s elections came into sharper focus. The GOP has effectively given up on running against “Obamacare” and unemployment – choosing instead to tell Americans there’s a monster under their beds and only Republicans can save them.
Last night in North Carolina, for example, Sen. Kay Hagan (D) debated her far-right challenger, state House Speaker Thom Tillis (R), who focused the bulk of his attention on Islamic State terrorists and the Ebola virus.
Does Tillis have any background in national security? No. Has he presented new ideas on keeping the public safe? No. Does he have any expertise in infectious diseases? Of course not. Are there any instances in which Hagan has made a misstep on these issues? Not even one.
But Tillis gets the sense North Carolinians are feeling anxiety, and the Republican hopes he can exploit that angst for personal gain.
As Jeremy Peters reported, there’s a lot of this going around.
With four weeks to go, the election has taken a dark turn as conservatives use warnings about Islamic State militants, the Ebola virus and terrorist acts to send a message: The world is a scary place, and the Democrats can’t protect you.
Take a new Republican ad aimed at Representative Ann Kirkpatrick of Arizona that warns of terrorists streaming across the Mexican border. “Evil forces around the world want to harm Americans every day,” it says. “Their entry into our country? Through Arizona’s backyard.”
Another one, against Senator Mark Udall in Colorado, plays a clip in which he says the Islamic State does not pose an imminent threat. “Really?” the announcer asks. “Can we take that chance?” An ad in another Arizona House race features the footage of the journalist James Foley right before his beheading.
There’s no denying the political potency of fear. Those who feel terrified are more easily manipulated, more likely to ignore reason, and more likely to show poor judgment. Those who otherwise have nothing worthwhile to offer the public often turn to demagoguery because it can be an effective substitute for substance.
But there’s one important flaw in the Politics of Fear, or at least the Republicans’ reliance on it.
The GOP pitch relates to government in a fairly obvious and direct way: your government, the argument goes, whatever its intentions, simply isn’t capable, competent, or prepared enough to keep you safe. Your family should therefore feel a sense of panic … and vote Republican.
Cooler heads might notice the flaw in the logic. An American in a constant state of fear about terrorism, diseases, the state of the Secret Service, migrant children, and creeping Sharia, might think twice about supporting the party that believes in slashing budgets, gutting the public sector, and generally avoiding governing whenever possible.
In other words, the Republican tack is burdened by an awkward contradiction: what Americans need is a strong, vibrant public sector prepared for every emergency, which is why Americans should vote for a party that wants to weaken and dismantle the public sector as quickly as possible.
Think of it this way: If Republicans could magically take control every federal office today, what exactly would they do differently than the Obama administration in, say, addressing Ebola? Privatize the CDC, cut taxes, and offer vouchers for protective gear? What would they do differently about ISIS? Continue the airstrikes President Obama launched back in early August – the ones Republicans don’t even feel like holding an authorization vote on?
The entire strategy is void of meaning and purpose if Republicans are pushing fear for the sake of fear – there’s still no agenda, no vision, no plans, and no ideas to serve as a foundation.
“If you’re afraid – of pretty much anything – vote GOP,” the message goes. “Just don’t expect us to actually do anything if we win.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 10, 2014
“GOP Goons Suddenly Run Scared”: What Three Anti-Women Warriors Want To Hide
When we last checked in on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, he was playing down his problems with women voters and boasting of his strong support among men. Somebody must have read his poll numbers a little more closely, because on Tuesday Walker came out with an ad that brazenly lies about his stance on abortion.
The guy who signed anti-choice legislation mandating an ultrasound and sharply regulating clinics looked straight into a camera and said he did it “to increase safety and to provide more information for a woman considering her options.” That’s not all. Walker had the audacity to claim, “The bill leaves the final decision to a woman and her doctor.”
But Walker wasn’t alone in trying to cut and run on his women’s rights stands this week. In Tuesday night debates, GOP Senate hopefuls Cory Gardner of Colorado and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, like Walker, shamelessly misrepresented their positions as well.
Gardner, Walker and Tillis tried to model three different approaches to hiding their awful records on women’s rights: the cool, the creepy and the clueless.
Gardner’s been the cool one. You’ll recall he decided he backs over the counter birth control pills, so they’re available for all you swingin’ ladies “round the clock” (though as I’ve observed before, birth control isn’t like Viagra or condoms, and picking up a last minute pack at the 24 hour Walgreens won’t prevent pregnancy.) Gardner did even better at his debate with Sen. Mark Udall, bragging that when television ads claimed he wanted to limit birth control, his wife said, “Didn’t you used to pick up my prescription?” Cool guy, always helping the ladies get it on.
Walker is just plain creepy. In his new ad, the dull-eyed governor looks into the camera and tries to feign concern for women who are seeking abortion. It’s a contrast with the way he glibly dismissed imposing the ultrasound requirement last year, telling reporters, “I don’t have any problem with ultrasound. I think most people think ultrasounds are just fine.”
Of course Walker’s not talking about a medically necessary, jelly-on-the-belly ultrasound that most people welcome to either diagnose disease or check on the health of a fetus. This is at best a coercive procedure and at worst, requires a transvaginal wand, in the case of early-term abortion. (Perhaps Walker should mandate that men seeking Viagra undergo a trans-urethral ultrasound.)
Then there’s clueless Thom Tillis, who presided over a radical retrenchment of women’s rights and voting rights in North Carolina’s GOP legislature. Now Tillis, like Gardner, is hyping his support for over-the-counter access to birth control pills and dissembling over his opposition to pay equity legislation. At their first debate, Tillis tried mansplaining the issue to Hagan, and that backfired. So on Tuesday he claimed he believed women deserved “the same pay as men,” but insisted “let’s enforce the laws on the books.” He called pay equity legislation a “campaign gimmick.”
Hagan shot back: “Speaker Tillis, I think you need to read reports. Women in North Carolina earn 82 cents on the dollar. I didn’t raise my two daughters to think they were worth 82 cents on the dollar.”
Gardner has also tried to back away from a personhood measure on the Colorado ballot, insisting he doesn’t support limits on contraception. Yet he’s still listed as a co-sponsor of House Personhood legislation. His explanation: It’s “simply a statement that I support life.” And he wouldn’t promise not to support Senate Personhood legislation if he defeats Udall.
It’s easy to see why Walker, Gardner and Tillis are trying to run from their records: They are being crushed by their opponents among women voters. But will it work? So far, Gardner’s contraception ads haven’t done the trick. “We’ve polled pretty extensively about whether people are persuaded by these ads, and Gardner has a problem,” a Democratic operative told Bloomberg’s Joshua Green. “The problem is that 40 percent of women don’t believe him.”
All three races are going to come down to turnout, and the men may yet pull it out, in a midterm year when Democrats are less likely to vote than Republicans. Still, the fact that all three feel they have to cover up their awful women’s rights records show they’re worried. But whether cool, creepy or clueless, these misleading last minute pitches aren’t likely to fool women.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, October 8, 2014
“Unreasoning Dread”: Freaking Out About Ebola Isn’t Helping
One afternoon two weeks ago, I did my best to calm a friend who’d become fearful that her son would contract Ebola in Syria. The young man had enlisted in the National Guard. She knew the U.S. was bombing ISIS terrorists there, and that people were talking about “boots on the ground.” She thought she’d heard about a Syrian Ebola outbreak on TV.
Because others were listening, I didn’t want to embarrass her. I suggested she’d misheard a reference to Sierra Leone, a tiny country in the tropical forest of West Africa where the Ebola epidemic rages — thousands of miles from Syria, which borders on Israel. The road to Damascus and all that.
The Bible reference helped. A guy in a John Deere cap backed me up. Syria was definitely not in Africa. My friend was mollified.
I’m sure she’s heard plenty more about Ebola since then, possibly even about Sierra Leone, a nation of which most Americans have zero knowledge. A lifelong map nut, I’d have had to search for it myself.
Although my friend is an intelligent person with a lively wit, it wasn’t her ignorance of geography I found so surprising. After all, polls showed only 17 percent of Americans could locate Iraq on a map back when the U.S. invaded in 2003. Rather, it was her unreasoning dread of Ebola, a tropical disease wholly limited at that time to three countries in West Africa.
Now that a single Ebola victim from neighboring Liberia has made his way to Dallas, isn’t that fear more justifiable? Shouldn’t we be running around with our hair on fire like the talking heads on cable TV? Isn’t it time for our government to do something drastic, such as banning all travel from West Africa to prevent Ebola-stricken refugees from bringing this terrifying plague to America?
Actually, no and no. Freaking out never helps when there’s real danger. For once, I felt sympathetic toward Gov. Rick Perry, who, because the Liberian victim ended up at Texas Health Presbyterian in Dallas, was compelled to act like a competent government official instead of a carnival barker.
“Rest assured that our system is working as it should,” Perry said during a hospital press conference. “Professionals on every level of the chain of command know what to do to minimize this potential risk to the people of Texas and this country.”
Of course that wasn’t strictly true. Due to a communications snafu too common in hospitals, the first physician who examined the victim wasn’t told he’d traveled from Liberia, misread the chart, and bungled the diagnosis.
But that still doesn’t mean the sky is falling. Medical experts agree that while deadly in Third World environments, Ebola is both treatable and relatively hard to catch. Patients aren’t contagious until they’re visibly ill. Even then direct contact with a symptomatic person’s bodily fluids — saliva, vomit, stool, urine, etc. — is necessary. Unlike a cold, it can’t be transmitted through the air.
Writing in The New Yorker, brilliant surgeon and author Atul Gawande documents a South African case in which some 300 hospital workers treated an undiagnosed Ebola patient for 12 days without contracting the disease.
Isolate patients, monitor their intimate contacts, dispose of their waste properly, and Ebola can be stopped. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) the likelihood of a mass Ebola outbreak in the United States is remote.
Perhaps that makes the disgraceful performance of so many self-styled “conservative” pundits and GOP politicians a bit less disturbing. Going all Chicken Little and doing everything possible to use a public health crisis for partisan ends would be even more contemptible if the danger were as great as they pretend.
As usual, Fox News personalities led the charge. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee sought to use Ebola to foment petulant mistrust of government in general and President Obama in particular.
It all somehow reminded him of Benghazi.
“The Ebola scare,” Huckabee claimed “goes to the heart of a simple question: do you trust the government. Audience, do you trust the government?”
Fox News and ABC News contributor Laura Ingraham hosted crank medical conspiracy theorist Dr. Elizabeth Vliet, who accused Obama of downplaying Ebola for political reasons. Rush Limbaugh suggested that the president sees Ebola as a punishment for slavery, and won’t ban travel to and from West Africa out of political correctness.
Several GOP politicians, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have suggested basically quarantining entire countries, a “solution” that sounds sensible until you think about it for 30 seconds.
For example, would that mean volunteer doctors, nurses, missionaries and soldiers couldn’t come home? And then what? A catastrophically worsening epidemic in Africa, that’s what.
I’ll say this too: If Ebola were happening, in say, Denmark or Belgium, we’d be having a far saner conversation.
But then it couldn’t, which is part of the point.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, October 8, 2014
“Rand Paul Vs. Rand Paul On Personhood”: Every Week, Rand Paul Is Selling A New Version Of Rand Paul
There’s one “culture war” issue that seems to cause anxiety for many Republican politicians. Opposing reproductive rights in general and wanting to overturn Roe v. Wade is usually pretty easy for GOP candidates, but support for “personhood” has become something of a third rail. Given recent developments, it’s understandable – personhood measures wouldn’t just ban all abortions, they’d also block common forms of birth control.
And Republicans clearly realize that opposing birth control in the 21st century, when the party is already struggling with the gender gap, isn’t a credible option.
As a result, we see far-right Senate hopefuls like Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), and other ardent personhood supporters suddenly scramble to distance themselves from their previous position. Each of them assume the key to joining the Senate is backing away from an extremist policy like this one.
But let’s not forget that there’s already an enthusiastic personhood supporter in the Senate. Ryan Lizza reports on one of Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) most controversial proposals:
In recent Profile of Senator Rand Paul, Dr. John Downing, the Senator’s friend and former medical partner, expressed his worries about Paul’s sponsorship of the Life at Conception Act, also known as the personhood law. The bill would ban abortion and grant the unborn all the legal protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, beginning at “the moment of fertilization.”
To Downing, who is an ardent Paul supporter, this seemed like political madness. Downing said that he believed Paul’s personhood law would make some common forms of birth control illegal, and thus doom Paul’s Presidential hopes. “He’s going to lose half or more of women immediately once they find out what that would do to birth control,” Downing told me.
Part of the Kentucky Republican’s pitch is that he can be a national GOP leader by appealing to young people with his message of limited government. On the other hand, Rand Paul introduced – and has fought aggressively in support of – federal legislation that treats a fertilized egg as a full-fledged human being with constitutional rights, which in turn would prohibit any form of birth control (IUDs, emergency contraception, etc.) that prevents that egg from implanting in a uterine wall.
One assumes many younger voters, most notably women, might have a problem with that, especially coming from a candidate whose raison d’etre is ostensibly opposition to “big government.”
All of which brings us to last week, when Rand Paul seemed to hedge on his own legislative commitment.
American Bridge posted this item last Tuesday.
Paul was asked today in South Carolina about his position on the morning-after pill, and he affirmed his support for it. Which is all good and well, except that he brags about introducing personhood legislation that could make it illegal. He’s consistently been one of the most extreme politicians in Washington when it comes to women’s issues. Just check out this video that he recently scrubbed from his YouTube account.
Now Rand Paul thinks he can lie his way to the middle and twist himself into a candidate with broad appeal. It seems every week, you wake up and Rand Paul is selling a new version of Rand Paul.
Lizza’s report, which noted that religious-right activists were not at all pleased with the senator’s position, added, “Paul, having spent the last few years convincing pro-life activists that he firmly believes that the state should protect fertilized eggs the same way it protects all Americans, now simply shrugs at pro-life concerns over emergency contraception.”
All of which is made worse when one considers how many other issues Rand Paul has changed his mind about, shrugging at other positions he also used to hold dear.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 9, 2014
“The Larger Context Of Restrictions On Voting”: Making Voting As Difficult And Cumbersome As Possible For The Wrong Kind Of People
Yesterday the Supreme Court issued an order overruling an appeals court decision about a series of voting restrictions passed last year by the state of North Carolina, which will allow the restrictions to remain in place for this year’s election, until the case is ultimately heard by the Court. And in a happy coincidence, on the very same day, the Government Accountability Office released a report finding that voter ID requirements reduce turnout among minorities and young people, precisely those more-Democratic voting groups the requirements are meant to hinder. There’s a context in which to view the battle over voter restrictions that goes beyond whether Republicans are a bunch of meanies, and it has to do with the things parties can change easily and the things they can’t.
I’ll explain exactly what I mean in a moment, but first, the law at issue was passed just weeks after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing North Carolina and other states to change their voting laws without the Justice Department preclearance that had been required since the 1960s. The N.C. law was basically a grab-bag of everything the Republican legislature and governor could come up with to make voting more difficult and inconvenient, particularly for those groups more likely to vote for Democrats. It included an ID requirement, of course, but also shortened the early voting period, eliminated “pre-registration” (under which 16 and 17-year-olds who would be 18 by election day could register before their birthdays), repealed same-day registration, and mandated that any voter who cast a ballot at the wrong precinct would have their vote tossed in the trash. Every provision was aimed directly at minority voters, young voters, or both.
As I’ve argued before, these kinds of restrictions are almost certainly all going to be upheld by the Supreme Court, because Anthony Kennedy, for all his pleasing evolution on gay rights, is firmly in the conservative camp when it comes to voting rights. That means there will be five votes in favor of almost any hurdle to voting that a GOP-controlled state can devise.
Making voting as difficult and cumbersome as possible for the wrong kind of people is a longstanding conservative project, but it has taken on a particular urgency for the right in recent years, which helps explain why 22 states have passed voting restrictions just since 2010 (and why stuff like this keeps happening). Republicans are doing it because they can, but also because they believe they must.
Both parties approach every election with a set of advantages and disadvantages, some of which are open to change in the short term and some of which aren’t. The last couple of presidential elections, the Democrats had a more capable candidate than the Republicans did; that could be reversed next time or the time after that. The Democrats have policy positions that are on the whole significantly more popular than those of the Republicans, particularly on things like the minimum wage, taxes, and Social Security. While it would be possible for the GOP to change its positions on those issues, it’s a slow process (as they’re now seeing on gay rights), and sometimes it’s impossible.
On the other hand, Republicans have a geographic advantage we’ve discussed before, with their voters spread more efficiently throughout the country, enabling them to keep a grip on a House majority even when more Americans vote for Democratic congressional candidates, as they did in 2012. Their dominance in rural states helps them stay competitive in the undemocratic Senate, where 38 million Californians elect two Democrats, and 600,000 Wyomingers counter with their two Republicans.
There isn’t much Democrats can do about that weight sitting in the right side of the scale, but they have their own structural advantage in the fact that their coalition is a diverse one, including some of the fastest-growing segments of the population, while the Republicans are stuck with a constituency fated to shrink as a proportion of the population. In other words, the GOP’s essential disadvantages lie in the interplay between what they believe and who they are.
One way to make up for those disadvantages is by making changes to the rules to tilt things a little bit back in your favor. Making it harder for some of the other side’s constituencies to vote won’t transform elections in and of itself—and it will often spur a reaction from Democrats as they redouble their GOTV efforts—but it can give that boost of a point or two that in the right circumstances can turn defeat into victory.
Republicans, of course, claim that all these voting restrictions have no partisan intent whatsoever—that they’re just about stopping fraud and maintaining the integrity of the system. Not a single person in either party genuinely believes that’s true (even if Republicans do believe that Democrats try to steal every election, they know that things like ID requirements and shortening early voting don’t touch the biggest locus of actual voter fraud, which is absentee ballots). If it didn’t help Republicans overcome their disadvantages, at least on the margins, you can bet they wouldn’t be pursuing so many voting restrictions with such fervor.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 9, 2014
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