“A Not-Very-Subtle Attack”: GOP’s Official SOTU Response Helps Obama Undermine Trump
At the beginning of her pre-recorded “response” to the State of the Union address, Nikki Haley echoed the president’s evocation of his 2008 campaign themes by taking up the old 2008 Republican theme of Obama being just a good speech-maker with no substance. Near the end she briskly went through the Republican critique of Obama and the standard GOP agenda of tax-cutting and Obamacare-repealing and defense-spending increases, etc. But in between these bookends, she did something very different.
The emotional and structural heart of Haley’s speech was a not-very-subtle attack on Donald Trump as a “siren voice” of intolerance:
During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices. We must resist that temptation.
No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.
That was clear enough. But Haley doubled down by making the saga of the Charleston massacre earlier this year — not coincidentally the beginning of her best moment in office when she squashed conservative resistance to the removal of the Confederate flag from state property — an allegory of the kind of tensions Trump is exploiting.
What happened after the tragedy is worth pausing to think about.
Our state was struck with shock, pain, and fear. But our people would not allow hate to win. We didn’t have violence, we had vigils. We didn’t have riots, we had hugs.
We didn’t turn against each other’s race or religion. We turned toward God, and to the values that have long made our country the freest and greatest in the world.
We removed a symbol that was being used to divide us, and we found a strength that united us against a domestic terrorist and the hate that filled him.
There’s an important lesson in this. In many parts of society today, whether in popular culture, academia, the media, or politics, there’s a tendency to falsely equate noise with results.
Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference. That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume. When the sound is quieter, you can actually hear what someone else is saying. And that can make a world of difference.
Not much doubt who she was talking about.
So Haley delivered the Republican Establishment’s message to and about Trump as much as any message to and about Obama. By doing so, she is presumably doing their will, and will store up treasure in heaven politically. But will it make her more or less viable as a possible vice-presidential nominee in 2016? That obviously depends on the identity of the person at the top of the ticket. But if I were Donald Trump and had any leverage over the GOP at the end of this nominating contest, I’d make sure Nikki Haley is buried at the Republican Convention in some pre-prime-time, five-minute speech slot, preferably confined to talking about the Tenth Amendment or something. She’s only 43, so maybe she’s shooting for a spot on the ticket — perhaps even the top spot — in 2024 or 2028.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 12, 2015
“State Of The Union Vs. State Of The Trump”: Our Political Spite And Meanness Have Gotten Out Of Control
Barack Obama really does not have it so bad. He gets $400,000 a year in salary, $50,000 in expenses, a fleet of planes, a car and driver, and almost all the golf he can stand.
In other words, the president’s life is almost as good as Donald Trump’s.
With one major exception: President Obama feels actual remorse. And considerable responsibility. And Trump may never have felt either.
In his last State of the Union speech Tuesday night, President Obama spoke of something presidents rarely speak of at such moments: regret.
Pointing out how “our public life withers when only the most extreme voices get attention,” Obama said, “Most of all, democracy breaks down when the average person feels their voice doesn’t matter, that the system is rigged in favor of the rich or the powerful or some narrow interest.”
He went on, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency: that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.”
And who is to blame, according to Obama?
Obama is to blame. At least a little.
“There’s no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide,” Obama said, “and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”
But he won’t hold the office for very much longer — only a little more than a year. And Obama said that if things are going to improve, somebody else needs to bear some blame around here: you and I.
Which made it an unusual political speech. If there is one rule of politics, one unbreakable commandment, it is this: Thou shalt never blame the voters.
The voters are holy. They can do no wrong. Or, rather, they can be blamed for no wrong. Because if you blame them, they may not vote for your party. And we couldn’t have that, could we?
Yes, we could, said Obama. Because our political spite and meanness have gotten out of control. And that must stop.
“My fellow Americans, this cannot be my task? — or any president’s — alone,” Obama said. “There are a whole lot of folks in this chamber who would like to see more cooperation, a more elevated debate in Washington, but feel trapped by the demands of getting elected. … It’s not enough to just change a congressman or a senator or even a president; we have to change the system to reflect our better selves.”
We must “end the practice of drawing our congressional districts so that politicians can pick their voters and not the other way around,” Obama said. “We have to reduce the influence of money in our politics so that a handful of families and hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections.”
In other words: Don’t hold your breath.
No, wait. That’s the kind of cheap cynicism that Obama wants to eradicate or at least reduce.
“What I’m asking for is hard,” he admitted. “It’s easier to be cynical, to accept that change isn’t possible and politics is hopeless and to believe that our voices and actions don’t matter.”
You bet it is! And if you get cynical and hopeless enough, they make you a columnist!
Obama blamed an array of people, most of whom turned out to be Republicans running for president.
Chris Christie was the target when Obama said, “As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands.”
Ted Cruz was the target when Obama said, “The world will look to us to help solve these problems, and our answer needs to be more than tough talk or calls to carpet-bomb civilians.”
And Trump was the target when Obama said: “When politicians insult Muslims … that doesn’t make us safer. That’s not telling it like it is. It’s just wrong. It diminishes us in the eyes of the world. It makes it harder to achieve our goals. It betrays who we are as a country.”
Making these statements — as true as they may be — will not do much to decrease the rancor in Washington, however.
Which Obama admits. He is not perfect. Often criticized for being aloof and academic, he is, in fact, proud of his toughness. If you are not tough in the world of today’s politics, nobody will respect you. Which means you have to be tough without being so tough that nobody will work with you, either.
“Our brand of democracy is hard,” Obama said Tuesday night. But there are good people in it who redeem it.
And Obama listed some of them, including “the American who served his time … but now is dreaming of starting over.”
“The protester determined to prove that justice matters.”
“The young cop walking the beat, treating everybody with respect, doing the brave, quiet work of keeping us safe.”
“The son who finds the courage to come out as who he is and the father whose love for that son overrides everything he’s been taught.”
And Obama ended with a Carl Sandburg-like list, saying Americans are “cleareyed, bighearted, undaunted by challenge, optimistic that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
By: Roger Simon, Politico’s Chief Political Columnist; The National Memo, January 13, 2015
“We Need Smart, Well-Educated White People”: White Power Party Swears Loyalty To ‘President’ Trump
If you live in Iowa and own a phone, you might get a call this week that sounds something like this: “I urge you to vote for Donald Trump because he is the one candidate who points out that we should accept immigrants who are good for America. We don’t need Muslims. We need smart, well-educated white people who will assimilate to our culture. Vote Trump.”
This jarring message is just one part of a robocall recorded on behalf of Donald Trump by The American National Super PAC, created by none other than the leader of The American Freedom Party, a prominent white nationalist organization.
In the last month, the political party— which once tried to revoke the citizenship of every non-white inhabitant of the United States—has evolved from supporting Trump’s candidacy to formally endorsing him for president. That endorsement made American Freedom Party history since they had never before endorsed a candidate outside of their own ranks. But the group that represents “the political interests of White Americans” was willing to make an exception for the Republican frontrunner.
“We do have our own candidate, but Bob Whitaker, our candidate, has told us that it is alright to endorse Donald Trump,” the American Freedom Party’s leader William Daniel Johnson explained in an interview with The Daily Beast.
He first tried to register the group with the FEC as the American National Trump Super PAC in November of last year, but was prohibited from naming it this because the PAC is not a committee authorized by Trump’s campaign. A spokesman for Trump did not respond for a request for comment for this article. Johnson subsequently submitted an amended statement of organization to the FEC on January 6, changing the name to the American National Super PAC just three days before the calls began in Iowa. He also created TheDailyTrump.org, complete with a logo depicting the candidate’s swooping golden locks, devoted exclusively to stories about Trump.
But Iowans have the pleasure of hearing not only Johnson’s voice on the opposite end of the telephone but also Filipino-American Reverend Ronald Tan and Jared Taylor, a spokesman for the Council of Conservative Citizens, which among other things, was cited as the group which inspired Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof.
“I think really it has to do with a nagging sense that white Americans have that their country is really slipping through their fingers,” Taylor said when asked why he got involved. “People realize that the United States is changing and it’s changing in a way that they find disagreeable. And it has enormously to do with a change in demographics. It’s becoming a third-world country.”
Taylor, who surmises that most white Americans want a white-only nation, has sung the praises of Trump in the past writing in his own publication the American Renaissance that “this could be the last chance whites have to vote for a president who could actually do something useful for them and for their country.”
He has also concluded in past writing that “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization—any kind of civilization—disappears.” His organization is the modern iteration of the White Citizens Council which fought against desegregation in southern schools in the 1950s and 60s. It has referred to African-Americans as a “retrograde species of humanity” and opposes “efforts to mix the races of mankind.”
Taylor said he recorded his part of the robocall upon Johnson’s request and he would consider joining Trump’s campaign if asked to do so.
“It’s marvelously refreshing to find a fella who shoots from the hip,” Taylor said describing his fandom. “Can you imagine Jeb Bush saying something that would actually surprise you?”
Seeing as the PAC is very new, Johnson doesn’t have a long-term strategy with it as of yet. He’s put in $9,000 of his own money and is willing to put in more depending on how well this round of robocalls performs in getting Trump an Iowa caucus win.
“I think it’s a foregone conclusion that Trump will be the nominee and the president,” Johnson confidently said. “I think he will probably not win Iowa unless my efforts are successful.”
While these calls might ring as unwanted and riddled with problematic language to Iowa voters, the Federal Election Commission’s hands are really tied when it comes to dealing with the content of robocalls. According to deputy press officer Christian Hilland, the only time that the FEC is made aware of the existence of robocalls is when a PAC spends $10,000 or more and has to file an independent expenditure report.
“That would be beyond the scope of our regulations,” Hilland said when asked if the FEC would police any unsavory content in political robocalls. “You’d probably have to look at something like the DOJ.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment about whether it had been made aware of the content of these calls.
Geoff Greenwood, communications director for the Iowa Attorney General, told The Daily Beast that “there’s no screening process” when it comes to the distribution of political robocalls in the state. According to Federal Communications Commission standards, the calls are qualified as protected free speech if they go to a landline. If a cell phone receives the calls, the user has to have given express permission to receives calls at that number. A representative for the FCC told The Daily Beast that details of any complaints could only be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
But at least one expert said that the content of the calls could stoke hatred among listeners.
“These robocalls are too brief to engage in a complicated critique of their use of hate,” Dr. Michael S. Waltman, a professor at the University of North Carolina who specializes in hate speech told The Daily Beast. “But they do manipulate the hatred of potential listeners. Jared Taylor’s comments directly state that Muslims are not good for America and that they are not good for America because they are Muslims (he even suggests that Muslims are not well-educated when he claims that we should only admit well educated people to the country).”
There are no legal limits if Johnson wants to expand these calls to New Hampshire, which is something he’s considering, unless someone files a complaint with the FCC. Which means, there could be a lot more of Johnson and his friends throughout the month as the first primary nears.
Those friends include Reverend Ronald Tan, who immigrated to the United States in the 1980s and now supports Trump’s immigration policies.
“I have nothing against building the wall,” Tan told The Daily Beast. “There’s a lot of danger right now with an open-ended policy. I really want to safeguard the process in terms of more stringent background checks. It’s very difficult given the kind of world that we live in right now where terrorism and radical Islam has permeated even social media.”
Tan, who said that he gets invited to churches “all the time,” has no specific place of ministry and rather practices it “through a radio program” at the moment. That show called “For God and Country” and co-hosted by Johnson, is set to air on an Iowa radio station from January 12-January 22, in order to provide voters with “Christian and Nationalist reasons to support Donald Trump,” according to a press release from the American Freedom Party.
For now this ragtag group of white Nationalists can only hope that they are playing a part in what they view as a historical moment in American politics.
“If you were born in the United States and suddenly find that you are living in an outpost of Guatemala or Haiti or Nicaragua or Vietnam, you’re going to be angry,” Taylor said describing the changing demographics of the country. In Trump, voters “see a man who says ‘hold on, let’s look over some of these people who are coming. Maybe some of them are rapists. Maybe some of them are murderers. Maybe some of these Muslims really are undesirables. Simply having said that is a huge earthquake in American politics.”
By: Gideon Resnick, The Daily Beast, January 11, 2015
“What Donald Trump Owes George Wallace”: Demagogue’s Ability To Tap Into Fear And Anger In American Politics
Donald J. Trump, reality television star and real estate mogul, is different in many ways from major political figures in our past. But there are striking similarities between Mr. Trump and George C. Wallace, the Deep South politician who ran for president each opportunity he got from 1964 through 1976. The connections between the two — their rhetoric and their ability to fire up crowds — give us a better sense of what Trumpism will mean once he is gone from the campaign stage. After all, political losers as well as winners can shape the future.
Mr. Trump started his business career with what he called a “small loan” of a million dollars from his father. Mr. Wallace, the son of a struggling South Alabama farmer, clawed his way to power with hard work and a political antenna always ahead of the next public opinion poll.
And despite his reputation as a belligerent speechmaker, the insecure Mr. Wallace privately sought to ingratiate himself with friends and foes alike. It’s hard to imagine the egotistic Mr. Trump beginning a call to a hostile newspaper editor by cheerfully explaining, as Mr. Wallace once did, “I just called up to kiss your ass some more.”
What both share is the demagogue’s instinctive ability to tap into the fear and anger that regularly erupts in American politics.
Mr. Wallace’s 1963 inaugural address as governor of Alabama (“Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”) and his “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” that same year seemed to limit his role to that of a strictly regional figure, part of Dixie’s long tradition of racist politicians. His presidential candidacy in 1964 and surprising strength in Democratic primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana and Maryland did little to change that national image. In April 1967, when Mr. Wallace told a Syracuse, N.Y., audience that he had decided to run for president as a third-party candidate, the television networks ignored his announcement, as did most of the major newspapers.
But in 1968, against a backdrop of urban riots, a war in Vietnam that dragged on inconclusively, tumultuous antiwar demonstrations and the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, a fiery Mr. Wallace began to draw interest across the nation; by September the crowds at his rallies rivaled those for his two main opponents, Richard M. Nixon and Hubert H. Humphrey. Mindful of his reputation as a defender of segregation, the Alabama governor avoided explicitly racist language. He was a pioneer in the use of code words to attack African-Americans while seldom mentioning race, instead condemning “asinine” school busing, the “bloc vote” and the “thugs” from America’s inner cities who supposedly stalked the nation’s streets.
Uncertain of what to make of the political upstart, the nation’s print media initially played down their coverage of Mr. Wallace rather “like parents who refuse to look when their child is doing something naughty for fear it might encourage him to show off,” in the words of one British journalist.
As his poll numbers rose from single digits in the spring to more than 20 percent by the fall, it was no longer possible to ignore Mr. Wallace, and the major newsmagazines and largest newspapers attacked him with a barrage of thinly veiled invective: He was “simplistic”; he had not “one constructive proposal to offer a troubled nation”; he sought “political profit in fear and hate.” Attacks by the mainstream media only strengthened his support. As one of Mr. Wallace’s followers told a newspaper reporter, “I could care less what Time magazine thinks; I only use it once a day in the outhouse.”
The hypersensitive Mr. Trump obviously cares a lot more about Time’s opinion. When the magazine failed to choose him as its 2015 Person of the Year, he complained that, despite being “the big favorite,” Time had snubbed him in favor of Germany’s Angela Merkel, “who is ruining Germany!”
Hostility to the civil rights movement was only a part of Mr. Wallace’s rhetorical repertoire. He was a “populist” of sorts, defending good, hard-working (white) Christian Americans, but his enemies were not the economic bankers and monopolists of his 19th-century forebears. He had found new dragons to slay.
On paper his speeches were stunningly disconnected, at times incoherent. But videotapes of those 1968 rallies captured a performance. A wild energy seemed to flow back and forth between Mr. Wallace and his audience as he called out their mutual enemies: bearded hippies, pornographers, sophisticated intellectuals who mocked God, traitorous anti-Vietnam War protesters, welfare bums, cowardly politicians and “pointy-head college professors who can’t even park a bicycle straight.”
For the television networks the spectacle became irresistible, particularly since rallies often erupted into violent chair-throwing confrontations between Mr. Wallace’s supporters and angry demonstrators. Hunter S. Thompson understood that George Wallace’s followers were not interested in position papers on banking regulations or the pros and cons of thermal energy. Watching the Alabama governor perform was awe-inspiring to the gonzo journalist, who likened the rallies to a Janis Joplin concert “in which the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us.”
Both George Wallace and Donald Trump are part of a long national history of scapegoating minorities: from the Irish, Catholics, Asians, Eastern European immigrants and Jews to Muslims and Latino immigrants. During times of insecurity, a sizable minority of Americans has been drawn to forceful figures who confidently promise the destruction of all enemies, real and imagined, allowing Americans to return to a past that never existed.
At the same time, the rejection of the euphemisms of polite political rhetoric is part of the great appeal of such figures. As one of Mr. Trump’s supporters at a Dallas rally told a Slate reporter: “I love that he’s talking in everybody else’s language. He’s not trying to be politically correct.”
That response is simply an update from one of Mr. Wallace’s 1968 followers: “George doesn’t give us some mealy-mouth ‘on the one hand and on the other’ spiel. He tells it like it is and if it offends some government bureaucrats and loudmouth civil rights agitators, so what? He’s standing up and fighting for real Americans.”
George Wallace was never going to be president; neither is Donald Trump. But their influence, even far from the White House, has an impact. The Alabama governor’s success in mobilizing white working-class voters forced other candidates — particularly Nixon — to adapt a housebroken version of his rhetoric and policies. Mr. Wallace may have begun his career as a New Deal Democrat, but the way he appealed to these predominantly Democratic voters by channeling their frustrations against the federal government did much to pave the way for Ronald Reagan’s more genial anti-government ideology.
It is more difficult to assess the long-term implications of a figure like Mr. Trump, whose “policies” seem even more incoherent than those of George Wallace. He, too, has learned how to exploit the deepest fears and hatreds of white Americans frightened about the present and despairing of the future.
Whether he is nominated by the Republican Party or simply disappears into the long line of discredited demagogues, he has already left his mark. Just listen to what some of his fellow Republican candidates are saying.
By: Dan T. Carter, Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina; Opinion Pages, The New York Times, January 8, 2016
“This Should Be A ‘Have You No Decency’ Moment”: The Deafening Silence Of The GOP Contenders On Trump’s Ad
When Donald Trump first watched his new TV ad that began airing this week, he said, “Play it again. I love the feel of it.” I, too, had to play it again, not because I too loved the feel, but out of amazement that this is what the front runner for the Republican nomination had chosen to put in his first TV ad of the campaign.
Forget the usual introductory bio or soaring vision for America. The ad itself pieces together the most extreme, bigoted pieces of Donald Trump’s platform including banning all Muslims from entering the country and building a wall to keep out immigrants. Perhaps worse than the ad itself was the lack of any kind of reaction from the other GOP contenders for the nomination, their deafening silence speaking even louder than the ad.
The ad proclaims that banning Muslims from entering our country is the right way to keep Americans safe, and in video that turns out to be footage from Morocco, not Mexico, we’re warned that closing off the border with a wall is the only immigration reform we need.
This should be a “have you no decency?” moment, but sadly, we shouldn’t be surprised that no candidate has stood up to Trump’s ad in any meaningful way. They’re not speaking out because they are in lock step, following Trump’s lead.
Marco Rubio has proposed shutting down mosques in the United States. Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz believe we should only allow Christian — not Muslim — refugees from Syria. Ben Carson likened refugees to “rabid dogs.”
Of course, demeaning rhetoric and policies aren’t just limited to the anti-Muslim comments we’re hearing from the Republican candidates. Discussing immigration policy, Chris Christie compared immigrants to trackable FedEx packages. Jeb Bush compared President Obama’s executive actions that protect DREAMers from deportation to those of a “Latin American dictator.” Marco Rubio stated that we should “absolutely” have a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border; and he’s jumped on the Trump bandwagon of over-the-top rhetoric, insisting that President Obama has “deliberately weakened America.”
Silly us to expect that any candidate will call anything that Trump says or does “a bridge too far,” when it is a bridge they have already crossed themselves.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way, The Blog, The Huffington Post, January 6, 2016
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