“RNC Boosts Evangelical Outreach”: The Religious Right Is Not Too Pleased With Republicans
In the wake of the party’s election setbacks last year, the Republican National Committee has focused on outreach to a variety of constituencies that have been turning towards Democrats: Latinos, African Americans, younger voters, women, etc.
But it’s against this backdrop that we also see the RNC boosting its outreach efforts to a group of voters that ostensibly represents the party’s existing base.
The Republican National Committee has brought on a director of evangelical outreach to massage the party’s complicated relationship with religious conservatives, GOP sources told CNN on Saturday.
The party organization has hired Chad Connelly, a consultant and motivational speaker who, until this weekend, was the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.
Connelly resigned from that job Saturday and informed members of the state party’s executive committee that he will be taking a job at the RNC…. Connelly, a Baptist, has told multiple South Carolina Republicans that he will be steering the national party’s outreach to faith-based groups.
There are two broad questions to consider. The first is, who’s Chad Connelly? The Republican is far better known for his work leading the South Carolina GOP than engaging in faith-based activism. Upon taking over the state party two years ago, Connelly vowed to become President Obama’s “worst nightmare,” and then largely faded from the national scene.
That said, Connelly wrote an 80-page book in 2002, called “Freedom Tide,” which made a series of ridiculous claims about the United States being founded as a “Christian nation.” The book was panned for its inaccuracies and wasn’t exactly a best-seller
But the other question is, why in the world would the Republican National Committee have to focus on evangelical outreach right now?
The answer, I suspect, has something to do with the fact that the religious right movement isn’t nearly as pleased with its RNC allies as one might assume. As we discussed in April, many of the movement’s most prominent leaders and activists publicly threatened to abandon the Republican Party altogether unless it continues to push — enthusiastically — a far-right culture war agenda.
The threats coincided with a call from Tony Perkins, president of the right-wing Family Research Council, that social conservatives stop contributing to the RNC until the party starts “defending core principles.”
That might help explain why the RNC hired Connelly, but as we talked about at the time, it’s not at all clear what more the religious right community seriously expects of the party.
After all, Republican policymakers are banning abortion and targeting reproductive rights at a breathtaking clip, pursuing official state religions, eliminating sex-ed, going after Planned Parenthood, and restricting contraception. Heck, we even have a state A.G. and gubernatorial candidate fighting to protect an anti-sodomy law.
What’s more, folks like Reince Priebus are condemning Planned Parenthood and “infanticide,” while Paul Ryan is speaking to right-wing groups about a future in which abortion rights are “outlawed.”
And social conservatives are outraged that Republicans haven’t pushed the culture war enough? Why, because the RNC hasn’t officially declared its support for a theocracy yet?
Presumably, it’s now up to Connelly to help make this clearer to the party’s evangelical base.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 10, 2013
“All They Have Is Their Anger”: Why Republicans Can’t Destroy President Obama
Over the past few years, liberals like me have pointed out countless times that the Republican party was being (or would be soon, as the case might have been) terribly damaged by the ideological extremism and general nuttiness of the faction that took over the party between 2009 and 2010. But we have to be honest and acknowledge that it didn’t always work out that way. They were able to win a number of tangible victories despite the fact that the public doesn’t look favorably on the things they wanted to do. In many cases, an extremist Republican ousted a perfectly conservative Republican in a primary, and now the extremist Republican is in possession of a safe seat. And of course, they won a huge victory in the 2010 elections. For all the fun we’ve had at the expense of people like Michele Bachmann, the damage they did to the GOP wasn’t always as serious as we thought it would be.
But I think we’re seeing the limits that the House Republicans’ extremism imposes on their ability to accomplish a practical political task. The task in question is taking full advantage of an administration scandal or two in order to do maximum damage to the President. And they can’t seem to manage it.
Let’s look, for instance, at the point man on all these questions, Darrell Issa, who runs the House Oversight Committee. On Sunday, in an impolitic moment, Issa called White House spokesman Jay Carney Obama’s “paid liar,” making him seem not like a sober-minded investigator looking for the truth, but an angry partisan. Sensing an opening, David Plouffe tweeted, “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today.” Plouffe was referring to some rather colorful episodes from Issa’s pre-politics career (details here); though he was never convicted of anything, there were credible charges on both counts. In any case, it makes him something of an imperfect messenger for suggestions of administration wrongdoing.
But more importantly, Issa just doesn’t seem to be all that effective at this role. You might say that even if the Republicans had a real ace in that chairmanship it wouldn’t much matter, because the facts of the mini-scandals just don’t leave them much to work with. On the ultimate questions, like “Can they impeach the President over this?” that’s probably true, but along the way they might be having more of an impact.
And Issa isn’t the only one making himself look a little foolish. You’ve got all kinds of Republican members of Congress, including quite influential ones, talking about a fictional White House “enemies list” and making one baseless accusation after another which fall apart under even cursory scrutiny. As Steve Benen says, “Initially, GOP leaders saw value in avoiding cheap shots—they knew that if the story became a partisan food fight, it wouldn’t be taken seriously, and the political costs to President Obama would be limited. But as is usually the case, the overreach instinct among Republican partisans is simply uncontrollable.”
I think these kinds of outbursts happen because hatred today’s Republicans have for Barack Obama is completely genuine. If you compare it to how Newt Gingrich felt about Bill Clinton, it has a much harder edge. Yes, Gingrich wanted to destroy Clinton (and his rank-and-file despised Clinton), but he was driven more than anything else by his own grandiosity. He made plenty of strategic miscalculations, but it wasn’t because his rage got the better of him.
Anger can be useful. It motivates your supporters to work, organize, and vote. But eventually it can be your undoing if what the moment requires is something more careful and methodical. And there isn’t even anyone leading and coordinating this effort. It isn’t Issa, who’s blundering about. It isn’t John Boehner, who can barely hang on to his job (read this story, which contains the interesting news that a group of House Republicans were about to oust Boehner until God told them to back off for a while). Nobody’s in charge. All they know is that they hate Barack Obama, but that isn’t nearly enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 5, 2013
“More Autopsies In The Future”: The GOP Makeover Is The Same As It Ever Was
In March, the Republican National Committee released its so-called autopsy of the 2012 elections. It focused mainly on the growing Hispanic vote — of which Mitt Romney garnered only 27 percent.
To avoid being seen as the party of “stuffy old men,” the report said, the GOP would have to change its messaging, become more inclusive, and embrace issues like immigration reform. Otherwise, the “Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
How is the rebranding effort working so far?
Not great. Earlier this month, Pablo Pantoja, the GOP’s Hispanic outreach director in Florida, switched to the Democratic Party, citing a “culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party.” He said he was partly inspired by the revelation that Jason Richwine, who co-authored a widely publicized anti-immigration report for the Heritage Foundation, once wrote a controversial dissertation arguing against admitting Hispanic immigrants with low IQs.
Incidents like that certainly aren’t helping the GOP’s image. Worse, fringe GOP candidates are making a splash in prominent statewide races, writes Josh Kraushaar at National Journal. He points to two states, Virginia and Colorado, where Republicans are losing ground despite the fact that Democrats there are vulnerable.
In Colorado, where Hispanic people made up 42 percent of all population growth between 2000 and 2010, Republican Tom Tancredo, who has taken a hard line against immigration reform, has emerged as a legitimate contender in the 2014 governor’s race. If Tancredo has read the RNC’s report, his March op-ed in the Christian Post — in which he chastised Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) for speaking Spanish, and supported Romney’s disastrous “self-deportation” strategy — certainly doesn’t show it.
Virginia is even more worrisome for the GOP. The party’s nominee for the gubernatorial race in 2013, Ken Cuccinelli, is a hardcore conservative who has not only pushed for English-only workplaces, but has defended laws that criminalize sodomy, alienating younger voters who overwhelmingly identify with the Democratic Party. Polls show him trailing his Democratic opponent, Terry McAuliffe, despite the fact that McAuliffe has been called a “soulless hack” by members of his own party and worse.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s nominee for lieutenant governor, E.W. Jackson, is even more conservative, dragging the Republican ticket down further. (Among other controversial statements and positions, Jackson has claimed that Planned Parenthood has killed more blacks than the KKK.) As Dave Weigel at Slate put it, “Democrats win in Virginia, in off-years, when they convince suburbanites that the GOP has lost its mind.”
Furthermore, the GOP is struggling to come up with mainstream candidates who can compete in Senate races in Colorado and Virginia in 2014. The irony is that the GOP should be in a position of strength in those races, writes Kraushaar:
What’s remarkable is that these swing-state setbacks are taking place in what’s shaping up to be a promising political environment for Republicans. The off-year electorate, on paper, should be more conservative than in 2012, with younger voters and minorities less likely to show up for a midterm election. The scent of scandal threatens to weigh down Democrats over the next year. The implementation of Obama’s health care law, polling as poorly as ever, will be taking place right as the midterms begin in earnest. This is the stuff that should be catnip for prospective GOP recruits.
But instead we’re hearing crickets in these two Senate races, not to mention a handful of other battleground contests (Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire) where Republicans should be faring better. [National Journal]
Exacerbating the problem is that most elected Republican officials have no incentive to go after the Hispanic or youth vote. The average Republican district is 75 percent white and GOP congressmen overall represent 6.6 million fewer minorities in 2012 than they did in 2010, according to USA Today.
While the massive redistricting that produced those numbers might help Republicans keep their House seats, they certainly won’t help the party expand on a national level — which is where the ultimate prize, the presidency, will be determined.
Then there are the stream of controversial comments from the party’s right wing — like this from conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, and this from pundit Ann Coulter. Put together, the party’s perceived hostility toward non-white groups could offset any goodwill built by the likes of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has championed immigration reform in the Senate. The success of that legislation is seen by many GOP analysts as crucial to the party’s electoral prospects.
It’s worth keeping in mind that there’s a lot of room for growth in the Hispanic vote in the next couple of elections. Esther J. Cepeda at The Washington Post crunched the Census numbers and found that only 48 percent of eligible Hispanic voters went to the polls in 2012, compared to 64.1 percent of white voters and 66.2 percent of black voters.
If Democrats can rally those voters, especially in swing states, Republicans will be releasing more autopsy reports in the future.
By: Keith Wagstaff, The Week, May 30, 2013
“Kindergartner’s Behaving Badly”: The GOP Is Too Juvenile To Govern
With budgetary tantrums in the Senate and investigative play-acting in the House, the Republican Party is proving once again that it simply cannot be taken seriously.
This is a shame. I don’t share the GOP’s philosophy, but I do believe that competition makes both of our major parties smarter. I also believe that a big, complicated country facing economic and geopolitical challenges needs a government able to govern.
What we don’t need is the steady diet of obstruction, diversion and gamesmanship that Republicans are trying to ram down the nation’s throat. It’s not as if President Obama and the Democrats are doing everything right. It’s just that the GOP shrinks from doing anything meaningful at all.
The most glaring example, at the moment, is in the Senate. For four years, Republican senators lambasted their Democratic colleagues — with justification — for not approving a budget, one of the basic tasks of governance. Sen. John Cornyn(R-Tex.), and others regularly took to the Senate floor to announce the number of days since the body last produced a spending plan and to blast Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) for this shocking failure.
Two months ago, Reid and the Democrats finally passed a budget. Since the House has already passed its version — the controversial plan authored by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — the next step should be for both chambers to appoint members of a conference committee that would iron out the differences. But Republicans won’t let this happen.
Specifically, far-right conservatives including Ted Cruz of Texas, Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky are refusing to allow the Senate to appoint its representatives to the conference. Yes, having demanded this budget for four years, Republicans are now refusing to let it go forward.
Some Republicans, that is. Establishment types such as John McCain of Arizona are apoplectic at the antics of their tea party-inspired colleagues, which McCain called “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.”
Cruz and the others are worried that a conference committee might not only work out a budget but also make it possible to raise the federal debt ceiling without the now-customary showdown threatening default and catastrophe. They believe that brinkmanship is the only way to stop runaway government spending, which produces massive trillion-dollar deficits, which add to the ballooning national debt, which . . .
Hold on, senator. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the deficit is shrinking rapidly and will fall to $642 billion this fiscal year. That’s still substantial, but it’s less than half the deficit our government ran in 2011. More important, if annual deficits continue to decline as the CBO predicts, the long-term debt problem begins to look more manageable. That’s good news, right?
What Republicans ought to do is declare a victory for fiscal conservatism and move on to the battle to have their priorities reflected in the budget — a promising fight, since the conferees appointed by the GOP-controlled House are hardly going to be flaming liberals. Instead, the party seeks not consensus but crisis.
This is no way for a 2-year-old to act, much less the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
And speaking of juvenile behavior, I would be remiss not to mention how Rep. Darrell Issa of California and his GOP colleagues in the House are embarrassing themselves by straining to turn Obama administration missteps into Watergate-style scandals.
The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya, resulted from a security lapse of the kind that every recent administration, unfortunately, has suffered. Since future administrations will have lapses as well, congressional oversight could be useful in at least making sure the specific mistakes of Benghazi are not repeated. But instead, House Republicans summon the television cameras and ask round after round of tendentious questions — without paying the slightest attention to the answers.
Similarly, on the question of how and why the IRS gave added scrutiny to conservative “social welfare” groups seeking nonprofit status, House inquisitors seem barely interested in what actually happened. “What did the president know and when did he know it?” was an appropriate question. But the follow-up — “Harrumph, well then, why didn’t he know sooner?” — isn’t much in the way of scandal material.
And concerning the Justice Department’s overzealous crusade to thwart classified leaks — and investigative reporting — it is amusing to watch House Republicans twist themselves into champions of the hated Lamestream Media. Who knew?
None of this is boosting the GOP’s poll numbers. I’ve got an idea: Why don’t they try doing the people’s business for a change?
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 30, 2013
“At War With Reality”: The Grand Old Party Needs A Reboot
The political party of Abraham Lincoln is in trouble, threatened with irrelevance, even extinction. Its weaknesses are legion.
Its congressional leaders are quite unpopular, polls show. So are the party’s positions. Its beliefs — animosity to same-sex marriage, hostility toward saner gun laws, rejection of higher taxes for the wealthy, suspicion of popular entitlement programs — are not shared by the majority of Americans.
It is bereft of ideas, committed to formulas that don’t work (cut taxes, no matter the economic conditions) and to a rejection of reasoned analysis (climate change is a hoax). It has alienated the nation’s voters of color, who represent growing blocs of influence.
As if those deficiencies were not enough, the party is falling into a civil war, its internal feuds increasingly loud and obstreperous. The only thing that still unites all parts of the Republican Party is an irrational hatred of President Barack Obama.
That’s not good for the country. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, the United States needs at least two competitive political parties dedicated to solving problems. Their solutions will differ, of course, but each should offer them. At the moment, the Republicans have no solutions — to anything.
It wasn’t so long ago, a couple of decades back, that the GOP prided itself on being the party of ideas. Its wealthy funders had created a network of research institutions to funnel their policies into Congress and state legislatures. There’s little doubt that those wealthy donors were looking to protect their own interests by emphasizing low taxes and less government regulation.
But it’s also true that GOP thinkers came up with some good ideas. The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, widely known as Obamacare, was one of them. The earned income tax credit, which reduces the federal income tax burden of lower-earning families to zero or less, was also born of conservative thinking. Unfortunately, the current GOP has either renounced or distanced itself from both of those programs.
Some of the party’s more practical members have begun to plead with their fellow partisans to change course. Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, has openly fretted about the GOP’s future. Maine senator Susan Collins has expressed frustration with her party.
And last week Bob Dole, well-respected former senator and onetime presidential nominee, gave GOP leaders a bit of advice: “I think they ought to put a sign on the national committee doors that says ‘closed for repairs’ until New Year’s Day next year and spend that time going over ideas and positive agendas.”
Here’s hoping Republican strategists do as Dole suggested — figuratively, anyway. The GOP needs to reinvent itself as a party dedicated to policies that offer solutions to current problems. That’s what Democratic leaders did back in the mid-1980s, when they finally came to terms with their growing obsolescence.
The Democratic Party was in a similar slough then. It was riven with competing factions, saddled with unpopular positions and tainted by the perception that it coddled criminals and deadbeats. It was only when the Democratic Leadership Council assiduously reinvented the party, with Bill Clinton as its standard-bearer, that it emerged from the political wilderness. And it emerged with ideas, such as a new fiscal responsibility, that gave it gravitas.
At the moment, Republicans are still at war with ideas — at least those that grow from a rational grasp of facts. There is no way, for example, to cut the deficit without raising taxes, but GOP congressional leaders insist on a voodoo math that defies that. They are obsessed with their belief that Obama has “covered up” his responsibility in the deaths of four Americans at a diplomatic post in Benghazi, though countless hearings have found no evidence of any such cover-up. They insist that Obamacare will kill jobs, though they present no evidence.
In a larger sense, the GOP is at war with reality — a reality of fewer white voters, myriad family structures and challenges that demand scientific solutions. Until it makes peace with reality, it cannot recreate itself as a winning party.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, June 1, 2013
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