“Strength, Toughness & Resolve Is All It Takes”: On Display At CPAC; How The Presidential Primary Makes GOP Candidates Simple-Minded
The Conservative Political Action Conference is always guaranteed to produce head-shaking moments, as one future presidential candidate after another tells the crowd of activists what they want to hear, and then some. It’s a concentrated version of the long Republican primary process, with everything that characterizes contemporary American conservatism cooked down to its viscous essence over the course of a few days.
You may have already heard about Scott Walker’s comments yesterday at the conference, in which he made an analogy between his fight to crush unions in Wisconsin and the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to look at something Marco Rubio said this morning, because they go together in a way that tells us a lot about what we’re going to be hearing from these candidates for the next year and a half.
Speaking from the CPAC stage, Rubio said that “if we wanted to defeat [ISIS] militarily, we could do it.” But we haven’t done that, because President Obama “doesn’t want to upset Iran.” I’m sure many in the crowd nodded their heads. First you have the implication that despite the thousands of air strikes we’ve launched against ISIS, we’re not really trying to defeat them, and that doing so would be simple if only Obama had the backbone. But he won’t, because he’s so solicitous of another of our enemies, Iran. If you know that this president is a Muslim-coddling, terrorist-sympathizing weakling, it makes perfect sense.
But in reality, Iran, a Shiite country, despises the Sunni extremists of ISIS. ISIS threatens the government of Iraq, which is Iran’s ally (or lapdog, depending on how you look at it), which is why Iran has sent troops there to fight the terrorist group. Eliminating ISIS is exactly what Iran wants us to do.
Perhaps Marco Rubio understands that, and if given the chance he’d revise his comments. But doing so wouldn’t play too well with the people whose votes he needs, because it would be an acknowledgement that — guess what — things can get pretty complicated in the Middle East. We can be trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons yet still have shared goals with them when it comes to another issue.
That simplifying impulse is what got Walker in trouble, too. When he said yesterday in answer to a question about ISIS, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” the problem wasn’t, as many people said, that he was comparing Wisconsinites exercising their free speech rights in opposing his efforts to crush unions to brutal terrorists (he clarified later that that isn’t what he meant to say). The problem was that he was arguing that serious problems, whether it’s your own constituents who disagree with you or a terrorist organization, have essentially the same solution: strength, toughness, resolve. That’s all it takes, and he’s got it. He may not know a lot about foreign affairs, but he doesn’t need to know a lot about foreign affairs.
This is hardly new in the GOP. In 1964, Ronald Reagan said in a speech supporting Barry Goldwater, “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Republicans have seldom veered from the conviction that in foreign affairs in particular, there are nothing but simple answers.
The trouble is, we’ve seen where that gets you. George W. Bush knew in his gut that every problem had a simple answer. Just as Rubio sees Iran and ISIS in a fictional alliance, Bush thought that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda must have been working together, because they’re all Bad Guys, right? And once we show our strength and resolve, the problems will melt before us. We all know how well that worked out.
Try to imagine a Republican presidential candidate who saw the world as a complicated place where sometimes we have to choose between bad options, being strong only gets you so far, and you have to consider the possibility that your actions could have unintended consequences. Would he be willing to say that to his party’s primary voters? Or would he tell them that actually, the answers are all simple, if only we have the courage to see them clearly and act?
I think we all know the answer to that. Campaigns in both parties are seldom going to be full of nuanced exploration of policy issues. But the GOP primary campaign forces its contenders to be particularly simple-minded, whether that’s who they really are or they’re just pretending.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 27, 2015
“Rubio Blasts ISIS Strategy He Supports”: His Own Views On Foreign Policy Need Quite A Bit Of Work
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is clearly aware of the fact that many of the Republican presidential candidates are current or former governors. But the Florida senator believes he would have an important advantage over his GOP rivals.
“The next president of the United States needs to be someone that has a clear view of what’s happening in the world, a clear strategic vision of America’s role in it and a clear practical plan for how to engage America in global affairs,” Rubio said. He added that for governors running for the White House, international affairs will be “a challenge, at least initially, because they don’t deal with foreign policy on a daily basis.”
On the surface, that’s not a bad pitch. Indeed, presidential candidates from the Senate have made similar arguments against governors for many years. But listening to Rubio’s remarks this morning at CPAC, the trouble is that his own views on foreign policy need quite a bit of work.
“ISIS is a radical Sunni Islamic group. They need to be defeated on the ground by a Sunni military force with air support from the United States,” Rubio said.
“Put together a coalition of armed regional governments to confront [ISIS] on the ground with U.S. special forces support, logistical support, intelligence support and the most devastating air support possible,” he added, “and you will wipe ISIS out.”
Rubio’s remarks solicited applause from the mostly college-aged audience, as did the senator’s claim that “the reason Obama hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS is because he doesn’t want to upset Iran,” during sensitive negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.
Given Rubio’s interest in the issue, and the months of research and preparation he’s completed, I’m genuinely surprised at how bizarre this is.
Right off the bat, the notion that the president wouldn’t go after ISIS because he “doesn’t want to upset Iran” is bizarre – ISIS and Iran are enemies. Tehran is more than happy to see U.S. forces go after ISIS targets; in fact, Iran has done the same thing. When it comes to the terrorist group, Americans and Iranians are on the same side. How could Rubio not know this?
For that matter, the argument that Obama “hasn’t put in place a military strategy to defeat ISIS” is plainly untrue. Rubio should know this, not only because he’s a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an unannounced presidential candidate, but also because Obama’s strategy to defeat ISIS is largely identical to Marco Rubio’s.
The senator fleshed this out at CPAC: target ISIS by using local ground forces, coupled with air support from the United States, all while U.S. officials take the lead in assembling an international coalition.
That, as of this morning, is Rubio’s plan. It’s also exactly what Obama has been doing since August.
This isn’t even the first time the senator has run into this problem. A month after the president launched a military offensive against ISIS targets, Rubio wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post with the following pitch:
To confront the Islamic State terrorists, we need a sustained air campaign targeting their leadership, sources of income and supply routes, wherever they exist. We must increase our efforts to equip and capacitate non-jihadists in Syria to fight the terrorist group. And we must arm and support forces in Iraq confronting it, including responsible Iraqi partners and the Kurds. In addition, we must persuade nations in the region threatened by the Islamic State to participate in real efforts to defeat it.
I’m not accusing Rubio of plagiarism, but this is awfully close to a word-for-word summary of the Obama administration’s policy.
If the senator wants to complain about the pace of progress against ISIS, fine. He’s not alone. But for Rubio to criticize Obama for adopting a policy Rubio endorses, all while getting Iran’s position backwards, is a bad sign for a guy whose “clear view of what’s happening in the world” is supposed to set him apart from his GOP rivals.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, February 27, 2015
“CPAC’s Bleeding-Heart Conservative”: A Misleading Appearance Of A Movement Crackling With Spirited Intellectual Frisson
Conservatives who hope to distance themselves from the whackadoodlier elements of CPAC often refer to the conference as a sideshow.
But this year, the sideshow has a sideshow: not a more extreme iteration, but an ideological double negative.
Down the hall from the main stage, there’s a three-day 9-to-5 “activist bootcamp” going on. Coordinator Matt Robbins considers it the first “comprehensive, timely, practical” attempt to turn CPAC’s unkempt exuberance into strategic, ground-game-winning competence.
If CPAC seems crazy to outsiders, it has something to do with the conference’s fundamentally incompatible aims: You can’t both serve as a training ground for future leaders and have speakers on the main stage regularly rattle off the reasons why civilization is doomed.
The conference’s young attendees, largely libertarian-leaning and not worldly enough to think that compromise is necessary, are presented with a slate of panels that give the misleading appearance of a movement crackling with spirited intellectual frisson.
At the same time, would-be presidential candidates deliver the same calculated one-liners designed to elicit hoots of agreement but are largely devoid of substance. No wonder it’s failed to produce an actual youth movement.
In the cocoon of CPAC, the next generation of leaders hears no good argument to change anything about the last generation’s approach.
They are New Coke (if you’ll pardon the pun) distributors at a New Coke conference where the liveliest debate has to do with why more people don’t like New Coke, and the loudest cheers are for the insults heaped upon those who refuse to drink it.
Robbins is here to tell them that some people do not like New Coke.
He is president of American Majority, a nonprofit [501c4] founded in 2010 to focus exclusively on state-level races and below. They say they have 2,700 trainees go on to run for office and 300 in office today—almost all of them at the county or even school board level.
CPAC has featured career fairs and activist workshops in the past, but, says Robbins, “those were mainly about how to get jobs in the movement. I don’t care about that. I want to get people elected.”
The solutions are, admittedly, mostly cosmetic and familiar to anyone that’s been around organizing of any kind—database building, coalition management, social media-tending.
But Robbins also wants to deliver a sharp message to a soft audience completely unprepared for criticism.
“This conference hasn’t been about actually winning for years.”
He gives only one workshop personally, “7 Grassroots Cheats Never Heard Of,” and it is less Alinsky than Oprah. He stresses making voters feel good about their choices. It is aggressively non-party-specific. Do listen to people you don’t agree with! Don’t manage your own social media!
His advice for a candidate posed the “gotcha” question as to whether Obama loves America is to take the political rhetoric out of the issue.
“Every president loves his country,” he says. “Every executive loves their country,” should be the response. “You may disagree, but that has to be the message.”
Toward the end, one audience member seems put off by the lack of red meat and asks, pointedly, why do conservative candidates need to do all this image-management stuff.
“If we can get the message out past the mainstream media,” he says, “the ideas can sell themselves.”
Robbins looks tired and amused.
“Can I be honest with you?” he says, not waiting for an answer: “No one cares. No one cares about our economic policy. No one cares about small-government federalism. No one cares about white papers.”
He returns to teaching mode and asks the audience, “You’re a candidate and you knock on someone’s door, what’s the first thing they want to know?”
“Who are you?” shouts someone. Robbins shakes his head.
After a few more guesses, Robbins interrupts.
“No, not ‘Who are you and what can you do for me,’ but, ‘Are you authentic, and do you care about me?’”
Voters want to know that the candidate is looking out for them, he explains. They will let the details slide.
This is clearly a sore spot. For another 10 minutes, Robbins harps on the GOP’s empathy gap almost exclusively.
It’s his theory for what’s behind the GOP’s slow-motion demographic implosion: Not enough candidates that seem genuinely interested in the problems of voters, whereas Obama definitely projects concern and Bill Clinton “was like a puppy dog in his enthusiasm for people.”
This seems, at first read, like an elegant way to get around the real problem: not the lack of empathic Republican politicians, but the lack of empathy that’s built into Republican policies.
This thought occurs to me after Robbins’ workshop, and I admit I am delighted, because it means I will get to ask someone my very own “gotcha” question.
When I follow up with him later, I deliver as rehearsed: “Do you think the fact that you have trouble recruiting empathetic candidates might have to do with how conservative policies themselves don’t appeal to people that have a lot of empathy?” Pencil poised, I await stammering. I am not rewarded. Or, rather, I am, but not by telltale hemming and hawing, but a simple, “You have point.”
“If you’re a small government-minded conservative, and you enact those policies, someone is going to lose. Something is going to get cut,” he admits, and people attracted to that philosophy have to be OK with that.
He suggests that perhaps such surety is the luxury of those who have never met those on the receiving end. Robbins worked in the Virginia statehouse and recalls being floored by the constant roll call of emergency requests: “There were tens of thousands of Virginians without running water… people going hungry…with mental health problems out on the street…These are people with real needs and there’s no homeschool association to take care of them, no church that can take care of them, no neighborhood group—it’s a situation where government does seem like the answer.”
“I am not sure most conservatives believe that world exists,” he says. “Or, they do, but since they think those problems exist because of Democrats’ policies, those problems SHOULDN’T exist, and then their brains lock up and start to smoke when you ask for a solution.”
So, how do you fix that? I ask.
“If I had my way, every candidate would go on a ride-along with police on the coldest night of the year, when they pick people up because they literally won’t survive otherwise.”
And, he said, there needs to be more conservative candidates and fewer movement activists, period—more people faced with the task of looking in the eyes of those on the other end of an philosophically unpalatable policy “and trying to thread that needle.”
“You know it only costs, on average, $2,000 to $4,000 to run for school board? How many people here do you think could afford that? Stop watching Fox News and go run.”
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, February 27, 2015
“Name An Accomplishment”: A Question Republicans Shouldn’t Ask
With her boffo appearance at CPAC, it became obvious why Carly Fiorina masquerades as a presidential candidate: She loves the attention! According to National Review, her CPAC remarks scored a hit, if only because she trashed Hillary Clinton’s record as Secretary of State. Fiorina certainly proved her cred as a Fox News Republican. She eagerly parroted familiar talking points about Clinton – “Name an accomplishment!” – and accused Clinton of saying, “What difference does it make?” in response to the attack on the Benghazi consulate. Such craven willingness to lie for a cheap cheer at CPAC is all they – or we – need to know about Fiorina.
“Name an Accomplishment” is a game that everyone can play, however, and I daresay that Hillary Clinton and her avid defense team have plenty of answers. As for Fiorina, she came close to wrecking Hewlett-Packard, a major U.S. technology firm whose owners and shareholders hope never to see her face again. Many of her former colleagues there consider her utterly without qualifications for any role in government, no matter how small. (They make her sound like a pretty awful person, too.) Beyond her dubious résumé, Fiorina’s most memorable achievement was the moronic “Demon Sheep ad,” nominated by NPR’s Ken Rudin as “the worst political ad ever” – aired with her approval, of course.
Few former secretaries of state can actually point to a single, world-historical achievement distinguishing their tenure. Clinton went far, and not just literally, toward restoring American prestige and alliances after the nadir of the Bush administration.
As for Bush’s secretaries of state, both share responsibility for bringing this country to a very low point: Colin Powell with his infamous UN speech on Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction,” a decision that he has since disowned; and Condoleezza Rice, with her “mushroom cloud” fakery and a long series of lies on the same topic. Hundreds of thousands dead, still more grievously wounded and left homeless, trillions of dollars squandered, and a violent Islamist movement rising from the ruins: Now there’s a whole series of accomplishments! Neither Powell nor Rice is likely to be remembered for much else.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, The National Memo, February 27, 2015
“Vainly Trying To Rewrite History”: Deranged By Obama, Republicans Are Spouting Nonsense
Republicans had better divert some of their campaign cash toward finding a cure for Obama Derangement Syndrome. If they don’t, their nemesis will beat them in a third consecutive presidential contest — without, of course, actually being on the ballot.
GOP power brokers and potential candidates surely realize that President Obama is ineligible to run in 2016. Yet they seem unable to get over the fact that he won in 2008 and 2012. It’s as if they are more interested in vainly trying to rewrite history than attempting to lay out a vision for the future.
Obama Derangement Syndrome is characterized by feverish delirium. The Republican Party suffered an episode last week when former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani began speaking in tongues about Obama’s patriotism.
“I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America,” Giuliani said. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up, through love of this country.”
This is obviously a nonsensical thing to say about a man who was elected president twice and has served as commander in chief for more than six years. Pressed to explain himself, Giuliani ranted and raved for several days about Obama’s upbringing, made demonstrably false claims about the president’s supposed denial of American exceptionalism, insisted that “I said exactly what I wanted to say” — and then finally issued a non-retraction retraction in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.
“My blunt language suggesting that the president doesn’t love America notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to question President Obama’s motives or the content of his heart,” Giuliani wrote. But of course he did intend to question Obama’s motives, heart, patriotism and legitimacy, albeit in a self-destructive, laughingstock kind of way.
I speak as a sufferer from Bush Derangement Syndrome eight years ago who recovered by facing reality.
Giuliani can perhaps be dismissed; his future in presidential politics is as bleak as his past, which consists of one spectacularly unsuccessful run for the GOP nomination. But if he was speaking as the party’s id, surely Republicans who consider themselves in the mix for 2016 would play the role of superego and tamp down such baser instincts. Right?
Wrong. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker — a guest at the dinner where Giuliani had his eruption — refused to repudiate the offending remarks. “The mayor can speak for himself,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on whether, what the president thinks or not. . . . I’ll tell you I love America, and I think there are plenty of people, Democrat, Republican, independent and everyone in between, who love this country.”
Walker, who is on a roll lately in terms of self-embarrassment, wasn’t finished. Asked if he believes Obama is a Christian, Walker responded, “I don’t know.” A spokeswoman later clarified that what the governor meant to say was yes, of course he knows the president is a Christian; Walker declined to respond because it was a “gotcha” question. Which it wouldn’t have been, if Walker had given that answer in the first place.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, another 2016 hopeful, volunteered that “the gist” of what Giuliani said “is true.” Later, Jindal went further and declared: “I hate to say this, but we have a president right now who is not qualified to be our commander in chief.”
It’s true that Generalissimo Jindal is a long shot to win the nomination. But most other potential GOP candidates were either silent or didn’t give a direct answer. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and former Florida governor Jeb Bush said it was a mistake to question Obama’s motives. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee offered no opinion. Former Texas governor Rick Perry said, “I think the president, in his mind, loves this country.”
Only Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was bold enough to say there is “no doubt” that the president of the United States does, in fact, love the United States. Good for him.
Giuliani’s burst of nonsense is important because it speaks to the Republican Party’s mind-set. If the party is going to contend for the White House, it first has to fully acknowledge and accept that it lost the last two presidential elections. The nation voted twice for Obama and his policies. Deal with it.
Republicans need to abandon the fantasy that there’s some sort of grand deception underlying the Obama presidency. They’re only deceiving themselves.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 23, 2015
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