“A Bizarrely Common Argument”: No, Hillary Doesn’t Have An Obligation To Try To Win Over Southern White Voters
Do presidential candidates have an obligation to campaign everywhere, and to make particular appeals to every demographic group? That’s the case made by this big article that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times and continues to drive discussion today. Here’s an excerpt:
Hillary Rodham Clinton appears to be dispensing with the nationwide electoral strategy that won her husband two terms in the White House and brought white working-class voters and great stretches of what is now red-state America back to Democrats.
Instead, she is poised to retrace Barack Obama’s far narrower path to the presidency: a campaign focused more on mobilizing supporters in the Great Lakes states and in parts of the West and South than on persuading undecided voters.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides say it is the only way to win in an era of heightened polarization, when a declining pool of voters is truly up for grabs. Her liberal policy positions, they say, will fire up Democrats, a less difficult task than trying to win over independents in more hostile territory — even though a broader strategy could help lift the party with her.
This early in the campaign, however, forgoing a determined outreach effort to all 50 states, or even most of them, could mean missing out on the kind of spirited conversation that can be a unifying feature of a presidential election. And it could leave Mrs. Clinton, if she wins, with the same difficulties Mr. Obama has faced in governing with a Republican-controlled Congress.
In terms of geography, this is a bizarre — yet bizarrely common — argument. I addressed this at some length in this piece at the American Prospect, but the simple fact is that as long as we have an Electoral College and 48 of the 50 states assign their electors on a winner-take-all basis, there is absolutely no reason for candidates to campaign in states where they have no chance of winning. So they don’t. They also don’t campaign in states where they have no chance of losing.
Neither the Democratic nor the Republican nominee will spend large amounts of time stumping for votes in California, nor in Oklahoma, because everyone already knows what the outcome in those states will be. Democratic senator Joe Manchin is quoted in the article saying Clinton should campaign in his home state of West Virginia, since if Al Gore had won the state in 2000, he would have been president. But in the last presidential election, Barack Obama lost West Virginia by 27 points. If Manchin actually thinks Clinton or any Democratic presidential contender has a shot there, he may not be quite the political genius he fancies himself.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributing Writer, The Plum Line, The Washington Post, June 8, 2015
“Let’s Talk About What Makes Governing Harder”: The Problem Is One Political Party Catering To An Ever Decreasing Group Of Voters
By now almost everyone has weighed in on the article in the NYT by Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman about Hillary Clinton’s strategy for winning the 2016 presidential election. Chuck Todd and his friends at First Read adopted the conventional wisdom of the Washington D.C. pundit class with their response titled: This is the Way to Win Elections (But it Makes Governing Harder).
Campaigns see an America more polarized than ever, and winning is all about coming out ahead in this polarized world. But it makes governing harder than it already was. Bottom line: Campaigns don’t engage in persuasion anymore. They simply look for unmotivated like-minded potential voters and find an issue to motivate them. And if someone wins office by not having to persuade a voter who actually swings between the two parties, there isn’t any motivation for said elected official to compromise.
Of course Ron Fournier joined that chorus immediately with his entry titled: The Right Way and Wrong Way to Win the Presidency.
My problem with this approach is that it works only until Election Day, when a polarizing, opportunistic candidate assumes the presidency with no standing to convert campaign promises into results.
Naturally, David Brooks agrees.
…this base mobilization strategy is a legislative disaster. If the next president hopes to pass any actual laws, he or she will have to create a bipartisan governing majority. That means building a center-out coalition, winning 60 reliable supporters in the Senate and some sort of majority in the House. If Clinton runs on an orthodox left-leaning, paint-by-numbers strategy, she’ll never be able to do this. She’ll live in the White House again, but she won’t be able to do much once she lives there.
This is a classic case of the media’s addiction to “both sides do it” as a way of explaining gridlock in Washington. It is a lie they tell themselves (and us) about what is going on in order to claim a false sense of balance in reporting to appease conservatives who constantly decry the “liberal media.” The fact that it is a lie matters less than their desire to prove that claim wrong.
So let’s take a moment to deal with the facts. As I pointed out before, the positions Hillary Clinton has articulated enjoy broad support among voters – including independents. In reacting to the same article, Steve M. dug up some of the actual numbers.
Americans support gay marriage by a 60%-37% margin, and 58% want the Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage nationwide — and Hillary’s is a “liberal position”? There’s 72% support for legalization of undocumented immigrants — and her position on immigration is too left-wing? And when I Google “bipartisan support for criminal justice reform,” one of the first hits is a post with precisely that title from, um, FreedomWorks — but Clinton’s out of the mainstream? Oh, please.
So if Clinton is talking about issues that enjoy 60-70% support from Americans, where is the polarization coming from? What stops elected officials from compromising to address their concerns? Do you suppose it has anything to do with a Republican Speaker of the House who finds it hard to even utter the word “compromise?”
Let’s take a close look at just one example to make the point: immigration reform. Typically Democrats have prioritized a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people in this country while Republicans have prioritized border security. Not that long ago, a bi-partisan group of Senators got together to compromise by drafting a bill that included both priorities. With Democrats still in control of the Senate, it passed there. But Speaker Boehner refused to bring it up for a vote in the House. Part of Hillary Clinton’s agenda in her campaign is to support the Senate’s bi-partisan approach to immigration reform.
So let’s be clear about what makes governing harder: the problem is that we have one political party that is catering to an ever-decreasing group of voters that completely rejects any form of compromise to their agenda. When/if folks like Chuck Todd, Ron Fournier and David Brooks figure that one out – they will finally be able to start telling the American people the truth.
By: Nancy LeTournau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 9, 2015
“Preserving Their Dominance”: McKinney Pool Party Cop’s Vicious Hatred; This Is The Face Of White Rage
Why are libertarians so overwhelmingly white and male? This is a question that Jeet Heer of The New Republic explored last Friday, after a new CNN poll found that presidential hopeful Rand Paul, who happens to be the favorite among libertarians, is very competitive in the primaries amongst male voters, but almost completely rejected by females. This is a problem that has long haunted conservatism, but it is even more drastic for ultra-right wing libertarianism.
In a 2014 Pew poll, it was found that about one in ten Americans describe themselves as libertarian, and men were more than twice as likely to be libertarians. In a 2013 Pew poll that Heer states in his article, it was found about two-thirds (68 percent) of American’s who identify as libertarians are men, and 94 percent are non-hispanic whites. Compare this to “steadfast conservatives,” who were found to be 59 percent male and 87 percent white, or “business conservatives,” found to be 62 percent male and 85 percent white, according to another survey done by Pew. Clearly, the entire conservative movement is dominated by white males, but libertarians are the most male-dominated.
Obviously this is a major problem for anyone who is hoping for libertarianism to take off in American politics. So why are libertarians mostly white guys? Heer points out a few different possibilities that some libertarian writers have offered. One of them being that libertarianism has attracted many male-dominated subcultures, like computer programming (think Silicon Valley), gaming, mens-rights activists, and organized humanism/Atheism, and another, argued by Katherine Mangu-Ward, that libertarianism has long been a fringe movement, and fringe movements tend to be dominated by men.
Okay, so libertarianism attracts nerdy white males, but surely these are not the only ones making up the dedicated crowd? While looking at the larger conservative movement, it becomes a bit more clear that the hostility towards government and collective movements in general tends to attract white males who want to preserve their dominance in a society where they are quickly becoming minorities.
When my first book, a novel for young adults, was published a decade later, readers often remarked on its graduation-night scene, which involved a party, a racial slur, broken glass, a slashed face, and the protagonist ending up in the hospital–indeed a discordant scene in a novel that was focused largely on the internal narrative of a quiet, nerdy Asian American girl.
James Baldwin once wrote that first novels are always autobiographical because the author has so many things to get off her chest. In my novel, the police are called, the protagonist’s injuries are so severe and unequivocal, redress is available by pressing charges against her attacker, a white classmate. However, the protagonist ends up deciding not to press charges, a twist for which readers express surprise, frustration, and dismay. But looking back at this book that I started writing back when I wasn’t that much older than those kids at the pool party, I see that in transforming this event that actually happened to me to fiction, the inner violence became external, with ugly scars, but with an emotional escape hatch: the protagonist had a choice to press charges or not. Not the choice I would have made, but Ellen, my protagonist, had a choice of how to deal with her attacker.
I think the frustration and heartbreak I felt that graduation night had to do with feeling that this was somehow my problem and my problem alone. The Texas teens will have to deal with the aftermath of experiencing violence at the hands of a so-called authority figure, yet–judging from what I see on social media–among many otherwise sensible white acquaintances, there seems to be less concern for the avoidable trauma these kids experienced than the pursuit of the idea that the black kids had to be doing something wrong. And no one wants to question why this narrative exists. Why a cop arriving on a scene asks no questions, openly separates out the black kids and acts like they are all criminals, no matter how polite they are, no matter if they comply, or, perhaps, more sensibly, try to get away. The irony being that he may have arrested everyone except the one person who may have committed an actionable crime, the white woman who slapped the teen who called her on her racism.
Race, race, race, it’s all about race to you, people complain. But I want to complain back: why is this something we have to bear alone? For every person who’s going to excoriate me for not mentioning, say, that there were black kids at the pool party who were indeed from outside Craig Ranch ergo invalidating my entire thesis, this is actually a fundamental misunderstanding and blindness to how omnipresent racism has become–and being a person of color and told I’m overreacting is itself a manifestation of racism. It’s not enough for white people to say, “I don’t use the ‘N’ word, therefore I’m not racist”–this is a self-rationalizing trope that willfully ignores, as poet Claudia Rankine has said, of how so many of our daily interactions are polluted by racism, whose toxic effects, like with pollution of our air and water, last for years and years–maybe a lifetime. And sometimes leads to death.
By: Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Salon, June 9, 2015
“Judgment Day For Pervert Priests?”: Tackling The Enablers Of Child Abuse, The Bishops
For the first time in the long and sordid history of the Catholic Church’s saga with pedophile priests, the Vatican has approved a special judicial tribunal that could bring to justice the bishops who have helped protect offending priests.
But is it enough to protect kids? Survivors groups hope that this time the Vatican has come up with an approach that will work.
“It could be, but only time will tell,” David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests (SNAP), told The Daily Beast. “But this isn’t like horseshoes. Every ‘miss’—however close it seems to be to the peg—means more kids will be raped.”
The new tribunal was the brainchild of American cardinal Sean O’Malley, who has become a central figure in the popular papacy of Pope Francis, which may make him a major contender when it comes time for the next conclave. As head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and one of the pope’s trusted confidantes who sit on the elite Commission of Cardinals, O’Malley presented the plan at a meeting of the pope’s key men in Rome this week. They adopted it unanimously.
The tribunal will not focus on the abusers themselves per se, but rather on complicit bishops who moved the abusers around, knowing full well they were putting children in harm’s way. The five-point plan drafted by O’Malley allows for a number of changes to the current procedure, including making it a duty for diocese to report claims of abuse to Rome, according to Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi.
For years, the Vatican has distanced itself from its field offices, effectively toeing the party line that what happens in individual dioceses cannot be blamed on the central church in Rome. By making it compulsory to instead alert the Rome-based tribunal of all complaints, the Vatican is effectively closing the gap and effectively taking greater responsibility for what happens in its dioceses.
The real question, though, is whether the new process will actually translate into effective punishment for proven offenders, and whether the secular courts will still be kept at bay when it comes to punishing child abusers and sex offenders. The organization Bishop Accountability, which keeps a database of extensive public records of accusations against abusers, warned that the very office that enforces accountability must itself be accountable.
“A public docket, prompt announcements of decisions, and release of documents are essential,” the group said in a statement.
The new tribunal will operate under the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), which was reincarnated from the old Universal Inquisition department of the Holy See. It will have dedicated staff to sort through complaints and help process claims, and it will pass down judgments if it finds bishops complicit in the abuse.
Survivors groups are hopeful, but they say they would prefer that all sex abuse cases are all handled in the secular courts, not dealt with in a Vatican-operated tribunal.
“I don’t think we welcome any new internal cleric-dominated process, especially when it’s in the CDF, which, for decades, has refused to defrock or delayed defrocking some of the worst predator priests,” Clohessy says. “On paper, a mechanism like this looks good. But church abuse mechanisms always look good on paper. If this one is used to prevent cover-ups and punish ‘enablers,’ we’ll be surprised and pleased. If, however, it’s used to mollify distraught parishioners and generate good headlines, we won’t be surprised. That’s been the history of nearly all of the hundreds of church abuse panels over the past three decades.”
At face value, at least, this plan does feel fresh, if only because the Vatican has never directly mandated the investigation of bishops before. But it does call into question what this means for some of the most high-powered Vatican officials who are now facing allegations of taking part in the cover-ups, like Cardinal George Pell the Vatican’s financial czar who has been facing allegations in his native Australia for decades that he bribed victims and mishandled the case of defrocked pedophile priest Gerald Ridsdale.
Last week, Peter Saunders, one of the few non-clerical members of O’Malley’s Protection of Minors Commission, told Australia’s 60 Minutes program he thought Pell should be removed. “He has a catalogue of denigrating people, of acting with callousness, cold-heartedness, almost sociopathic,” Saunders told the program. “I consider him to be quite a dangerous individual.” Pell has threatened legal action against the program, and the Vatican was quick to distance itself and O’Malley’s commission from Saunders’ remarks, even though he is a member of the group.
Whether Pell’s case will be among the first heard by the new Vatican tribunal is anyone’s guess, but there are certainly plenty of others who could keep the tribunal busy once it is in place. Polish Archbishop Jozef Wesolowski, for one, is in Rome after being brought back from the Dominican Republic where he was the papal nuncio. At the time of his removal, the Vatican promised that Wesolowski would be investigated and brought to justice for the alleged abuse of young boys. So far as anyone knows, that has not happened. By being whisked back to Rome, he escaped secular court judgment in the Dominican Republic and even though he has been defrocked, he still enjoys immunity by living inside Vatican City.
Lombardi said that the O’Malley has given the new tribunal a five-year period to evaluate its success and effectiveness. God only knows how many children will be saved or be made to suffer while the Vatican and the victims groups work out whether the new plan works.
By: Barbie Latza Nadeau, The Daily Beast, June 1, 2015
“The Learning Curve For Bush Remains Steep”: The Problem With Jeb Bush’s Saber-Rattling
As promised, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush delivered remarks in Berlin yesterday, and the former governor did exactly what he intended to do: he shook hands with Chancellor Angela Merkel, he avoided any obvious mistakes, and he lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin.
But in his remarks, Bush also chided President Obama’s foreign policy in a way that’s worth considering in more detail:
“Ukraine, a sovereign European nation, must be permitted to choose its own path. Russia must respect the sovereignty of all of its neighbors. And who can doubt that Russia will do what it pleases if aggression goes unanswered?”
This is a standard argument in Republican circles. Putin’s aggression went “unanswered,” which only emboldened him and other bad actors around the world. It’s up to the White House to step up in situations like these, and Obama didn’t.
The problem, of course, is that the exact opposite is true. Obama didn’t allow Putin’s aggression to go unanswered; Obama acted quite quickly to impose tough economic sanctions on Russia, which have taken a real toll. Indeed, it was the U.S. president who rallied international allies to isolate Putin diplomatically and economically.
Bush may believe these actions weren’t enough, and he would have preferred to see more. Fine. But he then has a responsibility to tell U.S. voters now, before the election, what kind of additional steps he has in mind when confronting a rival like Russia. If economic and diplomatic pressure are insufficient, is Bush on board with a military confrontation?
(Incidentally, if Bush is looking for actual examples of the United States allowing Russian aggression to go unanswered, he might look at his brother’s inaction after conflict erupted between Russia and Georgia in 2008. He could also look at Reagan’s reaction to Russia killing 269 people, including an American congressman, by shooting down a civilian airliner.)
That’s what ultimately made Jeb Bush’s saber-rattling yesterday so underwhelming: it was largely hollow.
At one point yesterday, Jeb said U.S. training exercises in the region wasn’t “mean” enough. Really? What would a “mean” Bush foreign policy look like, exactly?
He added, “To deal with Putin, you need to deal from strength. He’s a bully, and bullies don’t – you enable bad behavior when you’re nuanced with a guy like that. I think just being clear – I’m not talking about being bellicose, but just saying, ‘These are the consequences of your actions.’”
So Bush envisions a “mean” policy lacking in “nuance” that delivers “consequences.” But he hasn’t explained in detail what such a policy might look like.
The Florida Republican’s first foray into foreign policy was in February, and at the time, it went quite poorly. Four months later, it seems the learning curve for Bush remains steep.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2015
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