“Please Proceed”: The Top Two Words Of 2012 That Describe Republicans Walk Down The Road To Oblivion
So many end of the year lists are cluttered with five, seven or even ten things. Not this one. What we have here is two words, delivered in a single phrase, that didn’t just define the fall election, but reflect the broad political situation going into 2013. Those words?
Please proceed.
These two words, delivered by President Obama at the second presidential debate, have already drawn praise from Markos as his favorite moment of the election season, but they apply far beyond Mitt Romney’s debate stumble.
In saying these words, President Obama invited the Republican nominee to carry on indulging in the right-wing, echo chamber fantasy. Romney’s confidence that the president could not have used the term terrorists in association with the Benghazi attacks was gestated in a conservative movement that’s become so divorced from reality, that it felt free to invent its own narrative of events, and so convinced of its fantasies that it felt sure they would be accepted by everyone else.
It can be argued that those words were not all that important in securing the election. By that point, whatever temporary boost Romney (remember him?) had gained in the first debate had already faded in all but the most Republican friendly—and ultimately inaccurate—polls. However, that moment was important as the point where one thing became crystal clear to a majority of Americans: Republicans have gone crazy. Granted, that’s been true for awhile, and absolutely definitively true since the elections in 2008, but Romney’s high-profile walk through conservative conspiracyland was the nail in the coffin for the GOP as a reasonable, mainstream alternative.
Those words continue to fit. They could be used at any point in the last month as the Republicans proved themselves ever further divorced from the national will. Please proceed in your rigid ideology that places minor adjustments in the top tax rate over the economy and jobs. Please proceed in hyperbolic attacks on modest changes in the health care system. Please proceed in blind obedience to the NRA even as they turn every school in America into Thunderdome Elementary. Please proceed to publicly, loudly demonstrate that you’re being driven by demons of orthodoxy … with no real idea who defines what’s orthodox.
Really, GOP, please proceed.
It’s far too early to write an obituary for the Republican Party. They’ve stumbled from their deathbed in the past, flooding midterm voting booths with tea party zombies that still stink up the House and far too many state legislatures across the country. But in 2012, they showed a remarkable ability, not to recover from mistakes, but to proceed down the road that leads to oblivion.
By: Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, December 31, 2012
“The Choir Preaching Problem”: The GOP’s Lost Year In The Fox News Bubble
Suffering an election hangover after having been told by Fox News that Mitt Romney’s victory was a sure thing (a “landslide” predicted by Dick Morris), some Republicans have promised to break their addiction to the right-wing news channel in the coming year. Vowing to venture beyond the comforts of the Fox News bubble, strategists insist it’s crucial that the party address its “choir-preaching problem.”
Good luck.
This grand experiment of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand failure in 2012. But there’s little indication that enough Republicans will have the courage, or even the desire, to break free from Fox’s firm grip on branding the party.
For Fox News chief Roger Ailes, the network’s slash-and-burn formula worked wonders in terms of catering a hardcore, hard-right audience of several million viewers. (Fox News is poised to post $1 billion in profits this year.) But in terms of supporting a national campaign and hosting a nationwide conversation about the country’s future, Fox’s work this year was a marked failure.
And that failure helped sink any hopes the GOP had of winning the White House.
From the farcical, underwhelming GOP primary that Fox News sponsored, through the general election campaign, it seemed that at every juncture where Romney suffered a major misstep, Fox misinformation hovered nearby. Again and again, Romney damaged his presidential hopes when he embraced the Fox News rhetoric; when he ran as the Fox News candidate.
Whether it was botching the facts surrounding the terrorist raid on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, parroting the Fox talking point about lazy, shiftless voters who make up “47 percent” of the electorate, or Romney’s baffling embrace of reality TV show host-turned Fox News pontificator Donald Trump, the Republican candidate did damage to his chances whenever he let Fox News act as his chief campaign adviser.
Fox viewers didn’t fare much better. Fed a year’s worth of misinformation about the candidates, and completely misled about the state of the race (all the polls are skewed!), Fox faithful were left crushed on Election Night when Romney’s fictitious landslide failed to materialize.
“On the biggest political story of the year,” wrote Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, “the conservative media just got its ass handed to it by the mainstream media.”
Indeed, Fox’s coverage of the campaign has been widely panned as an editorial and political fiasco. The coverage failed to move the needle in the direction of its favored Republican candidate, and the coverage remained detached from campaign reality for months at a time. (Megyn Kelly in July: The Obama campaign is “starting to panic.” That was false.)
Following another lopsided loss to Obama, Republican strategist Mike Murphy urged Republicans to embrace a view of America that’s not lifted from “Rush Limbaugh’s dream journal.” (The Fox News dream journal looks nearly identical to Limbaugh’s.)
And San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll wondered if Romney’s defeat marked the end of a Fox News era:
You had to wonder about Fox. This is the third presidential election in which Fox has been a major player, and the Democrats have won two of them. A combination of big money and big propaganda was supposed to carry the day for Romney and the Republicans, but it didn’t. Could it be that the Fox model has played out?
Is the Fox model of a cable paranoia played out in terms of ratings? It is not. Is the Fox model of cable paranoia played out as an electoral blueprint? It sure looks that way.
Of course, conservatives should have thought that through before handing over the control of a political movement to Ailes and his misinformation minions. They should have thought twice about the long-term implication of having irresponsible media outlets like Fox supersede leadership within the Republican Party, and should have figured out first if Fox News had an off switch to use in case of emergencies.
It doesn’t.
Yet as Fox News segued into the de facto leader of the Republican Party, becoming the driving electoral force, and with Ailes entrenched in his kingmaker role, candidates had to bow down to Fox in search of votes and the channel’s coveted free airtime.
And Andrew Sullivan noted in January:
The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their mainfold products, from Hannity to Levin. They rule on the talk radio airwaves and on the GOP’s own “news” channel, Fox.
There’s a reason New York magazine labeled Ailes “the head of the Republican Party.” And that’s why a GOP source told the magazine, “You can’t run for the Republican nomination without talking to Roger Every single candidate has consulted with Roger.”
That meant campaigns were forced to become part of the channel’s culture of personal destruction, as well as to blanket itself in Fox’s signature self-pity. (Here was Mitt Romney adopting the right-wing whine that the conspiratorial press was out to sink his campaign.)
Still, the right-wing bubble was a comfortable place to inhabit if you thought of Obama as an historic monster, or if you required to be reminded of that fact many time a day, every day of the year. The bubble is the place where followers for four years were fed the feel-good GOP narrative about how Obama’s presidency was a fiasco, that the Americans suffered a severe case of 2008 buyer’s remorse, and that the president’s re-election defeat was all but pre-ordained.
The one-part-panic, one-part-denial message may have cheered obsessive Obama-haters, but it didn’t prepare conservatives for the reality of the campaign season. And it cost the GOP a lost year in the Fox News bubble.
By: Eric Boehlert, The Hufington Post Blog, December 30, 2012
“A Collection Of Nutballs”: Republicans Still Can’t Grasp Why They Lost
One of the latest tidbits from Tiger Beat On The Potomac is that the Republican National Committee is going to convene a gathering of its wisest heads to try and determine what in the hell happened this year. This is my opinion — your party, in a perfect expression of everything that it has stood for over the past three decades, threw up a collection of nutballs, thereby making it inevitable that the guy with all the money whom nobody liked got to be the nominee. There. Can I have 150 large now?
The Growth and Opportunity Project is going to be chaired by RNC committee member Henry Barbour, longtime Jeb Bush adviser and political operative Sally Bradshaw, former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, Puerto Rico RNC committee member Zori Fonalledas, and South Carolina RNC member Glenn McCall. Priebus, who is running for a second term, is holding a call with committee members to roll out the plan this afternoon.
And there we have it, your Republican equivalent of the platoon in one of the old World War II movies — Haley Barbour’s nephew, C-Plus Augustus’s paid liar, a couple of ladies, one of them the lady from Puerto Rico at whom all the Ron Paul people yelled in Tampa, and a black guy from South Carolina. And all of them working (for the moment, at least) under the direction of obvious anagram Reince Priebus who, against all odds, has not yet been sent back to work the Notions counter at the five-and-dime in Mukwonago. And what will this group of super friends be about?
Still, the source insisted that “the GOP has problems but they are solvable. We have to look at what we are doing right and what we’re doing wrong and lay out our vision and plans for Americans so everyone knows what we stand for. 2010 was the biggest mid-term win for one party since the 1938 election. Our ideas still resonate, but we need to examine what’s working and what isn’t. We have 30 Governors right now, but we want to listen and learn so we do better in presidential years as well.”
It’s becoming increasingly clear to everyone, except this source, that the 2010 election now has all the historical aspects of the last-gasp of the old order. (The GOP seems to realize this, too, deep in its lizard brain. It is taking this whipping a helluva lot more seriously than it did 2006 or 2008. There seems to be no appetite for pure retrenchment this time around.) It seems still to have blinded the Republicans to the fact that, absent gerrymandering in the various state houses, their only chance in elections outside the deep South involving more than, say, 30,000 people is to do all they can to depress turnout, and this past election showed nothing if it didn’t show that the people are onto that particular game. Eventually, though, we get to the nub of their gist — the fact that those “ideas” that “still resonate” do so right now in echoes in which the country says almost as one, “Holy god, are you people kidding?”
Still, given the complaints about the party, the composition of the committee includes at least one Priebus ally – Barbour – and others with ties to Bush-world. It includes demographic diversity, but less so ideologically. Officials said the review will include a broad swath of people within the party, including donors and grassroots members, but it remains to be seen how conservative activists react.
I can tell you how they’re going to react. You’re seeing it now, as one generation of conservative grifters moves aside to make room for another, and as his caucus has John Boehner’s balls for breakfast. They’re going to go completely mad, and there’s nobody at the RNC, not even this new pet committee, that is going to be able to rein them in, because they are where all the party’s money and energy is right now. The party is all independent centers of power, many of them nutty, and all of them with their own agendas. That’s what’s going to happen. You can send my check along any time.
By: Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Politics Blog, December 11, 2012
“2012, The Year Of Conservative Absolutism”: The Republican Party Embraces An Inflexible And Combative Conservative Ideology
Between now and New Year’s Day, I will occasionally post thoughts about the big political phenomena of 2012. The biggest was the decision made the Republican Party’s rank-and-file and leadership to embrace an unusually inflexible and combative conservative ideology as it sought to topple an incumbent Democratic president and regain control of the Senate. In my opinion, this counter-intuitive approach had more to do with the ultimate results than any other single factor, including the Obama campaign’s great strengths and Mitt Romney’s personal weaknesses, and the thousands of daily events on the campaign trail we all talked about. The only thing that perhaps rivaled the unforced error of the GOP’s basic messaging was the steady if unspectacular improvement in the objective condition of the country–from the economy to national security to the first positive benefits of Obamacare–which made it easier for Democrats to make the election a clear choice of future policy paths.
It didn’t have to be that way. In Mitt Romney the GOP had a presidential nominee who would have been perfectly happy to campaign as a different version of himself, among the many versions he has presented over the years. Republicans did not have to choose a list of Senate candidates so bad–many either open extremists or former “establishment” GOPers afraid to risk conservative criticism–that they managed to lose seats in a cycle when big gains should have been relatively easy. The party’s dreadful performance among younger and minority voters was largely self-inflicted. Nobody made them raise reproductive rights as an issue, particularly in a year when their own pundits and candidates constantly insisted–as though mumbling to themselves–that “social issues” were off the table.
Yet there they were, as prospects for winning the White House and the Senate slipped away, stuck not only with absolutist positions on abortion and LGBT rights that have become increasingly universal in recent years, but with equally absolutist and unpopular positions on tax rates for the wealthy, economic stimulus, health care, climate change, and “entitlement reform.” By the time Romney tried to pose as a “moderate” in the autumn, praying for media complicity in presenting yet another dishonest self-portrait, it was too late.
Yes, demographic trends played a big role in the outcome, but given economic conditions and what might have been a serious falloff in turnout for Obama’s 2008 coalition, a less ideologically rigid GOP would have had a decent chance to prevail.
This is all worth reiterating because there are scarce signs of any Republican reconsideration of basic ideological positioning following the election. Sure, they’ll move partway back to the George W. Bush positioning on immigration–though not without savage internal dissension–and will probably shut up about marriage equality in most parts of the country. Institutions associated with the Tea Party Movement, and some of its leaders, may decline in popularity–not that it much matters insofar as that movement’s point of view has now been largely internalized by the “Republican Establishment,” as Steve Kornacki notes at Salon today. But even as the image of an extremist party continues to sink in, and even as demographic trends make a party of old white people even less attractive to the entire electorate, the prospect of “better” candidates and shrunken midterm turnout patterns will almost certainly prevent any real internal change.
So those of us who thought Barack Obama deserved a second term, and who were horrified by what a Republican White House and Congress might have done–by now we’d be looking right down the barrel of the Ryan Budget being rammed through Congress via reconciliation–owe a lot to the many ideological enforcers of the GOP who made even modest accommodations to political necessity so difficult. And despite the frustrating inability or unwillingness of some in the Beltway media to grasp the basics of asymmetrical polarization, the conservative movement’s constant aggressions convinced enough self-conscious “centrists”–from Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein to yours truly–that something unsavory was going on in the Elephant Party which had to be repudiated. This enabled Obama and his highly competent campaign to lead a united coalition through thick and thin, and–who knows?–may now help him govern despite all the obstacles he now faces.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 27, 2012
“Don’t Tell Rick Scott”: Florida Legislators Introduce Bill To Restore Early Voting Days
Last year, the Republican-led Florida legislature slashed the state’s early voting period in half and cut out voting on the final Sunday before the election — a day when many African American churches turned out parishioners in high numbers. As a result, long lines were the norm for Floridians this year; some even had to wait six hours or more to vote.
After witnessing the negative effects of reducing early voting from 14 days to 8, a number of state lawmakers have introduced legislation to restore those days that had been axed.
State Sens. Arthenia Joyner (D) and Gwen Margolis (D) have pre-filed two bills, SB 80 and SB 82, that would re-institute 14 days of early voting in Florida, beginning on the 15th day before an election and continuing through the Sunday prior to Election Day.
The News Service of Florida has more:
More voting hours also could be available under the bills. Current law requires at least six hours of voting per day, while the bills would require 12 hours per weekday and 12 hours total on the weekend.
In another change proposed by Joyner and Margolis, local supervisors of elections could expand the types of places where early voting is allowed. Currently, supervisors must offer early voting in the supervisor’s offices, and can allow voting in libraries and city halls. The bills would allow supervisors, if they want, to also offer early voting in other government facilities such as a courthouse, as well as colleges, churches, or community centers. The bills would also prevent counties from reducing the number of early voting sites from what they used in 2008.
Though Republicans control both chambers of the legislature, both incoming Senate President Don Gaetz (R) and incoming House Speaker Will Weatherford (R) have “promised that lawmakers will try to figure out what went wrong on Election Day that led to the long lines, and do something about it.”
By: Scott Keyes, Think Progress, December 5, 2012
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