“Why Obama Makes The GOP Panic”: The Party Of Lincoln Has Metamorphosed Into A Confederate-Accented Political Cult
If you pay too much attention to opinion polls, as most people do, doubtless you’ve heard that a plurality of voters has judged Barack Obama the worst president since World War II. Thirty-three percent, to be precise, which as it conflates almost exactly with the number of hardcore Republicans, merely tells you something you already knew: GOP partisans dislike Obama with irrational zeal.
In short, the Quinnipiac University survey reveals more about them than about Obama. But hold that thought.
A presidential poll whose results might be worth heeding would measure the opinions only of people who could actually name the 12 U.S. presidents since 1945. I’m guessing that’d be maybe 10 percent of the electorate, tops.
Anyway, to put the bad news about Obama in perspective, back in 2006 when George W. Bush was in his sixth year in office — typically the nadir of a two-term president’s popularity – the same Quinnipiac poll found that 34 percent of Americans judged him the worst since 1945.
Even the sainted Ronald Reagan’s job approval numbers took a sharp drop during his sixth year due to the Iran-Contra scandal — selling missiles to Iran to finance right-wing terrorists in Nicaragua.
This year, however, a reported 35 percent in the Quinnipiac survey judged Reagan the best president since World War II. Apparently all is forgiven, forgotten, or — equally likely — never known.
Bill Clinton came in second at 18 percent; JFK third with 15 percent. Democrats, see, split their “best president” choices pretty evenly among Clinton, JFK and Obama. Meanwhile, 66 percent Republicans chose Reagan, a sharp rebuke to ex-presidents named Bush.
Indeed, some 28 percent in the 2014 survey still think that Dubya established a new low in presidential ineptitude. More significant, exactly 1 percent called Bush the best. One percent!
Even Nixon, who resigned the presidency ahead of impeachment, got one percent. Gerald Ford, who pardoned him, got one percent.
Historians agree about Dubya. A recent Siena College survey of 238 “presidential scholars” called Bush the fifth worst in U.S. history, and the only chief executive since 1945 to make the bungler’s Hall of Fame.
(Only one post-WWII president made the historians’ Top 10: Dwight D. Eisenhower, a judgment I wouldn’t dispute.)
Politically, the make-believe rancher turned portrait painter has become The Man Who Wasn’t There. Because Bush’s record is pretty much indefensible — asleep on 9/11, imprudent tax cuts, an unfinished war in Afghanistan, weak job creation, a financial meltdown that damn near destroyed the world economy, trillion-dollar budget deficits, an unjust, failed war and unfolding geopolitical catastrophe in Iraq — Republicans not named Dick Cheney make no serious effort to defend it.
Instead, they insist that the world began anew with the inauguration of Barack Obama. All references to the astonishing mess his predecessor left behind are forbidden lest one be accused of playing the “blame game.”
Rhyming slogans often prove irresistible to simpletons.
OK, so Obama asked for it. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets that part exactly right:
For years, I really didn’t believe the conservative snark about how Obama supporters all thought he would descend on Washington like a god-king and miraculously turn us into a post-racial, post-partisan, post-political country. Kumbaya! The reason I didn’t believe it was that it never struck me as even remotely plausible.
Of course Obama promised to transform America. “That’s what presidential candidates do,” Drum adds. “I believed then, and still believe now, that Obama is basically a mainstream Democrat who’s cautious, pragmatic, technocratic, and incremental…[But] by now, the evidence is clear that millions of Obama voters really believed all that boilerplate rhetoric.”
Hence bitter disappointment on the sentimental left. Oh, you wanted single-payer health care? So tell me where Obama was supposed to get the votes.
However, the real believers in Barack the magic enchanter have been Republicans. His presidency has driven a substantial proportion of the GOP electorate completely around the bend. To a remarkable degree, the party of Lincoln has metamorphosed into a Confederate-accented political cult on apocalyptic themes suggested by fundamentalist theology.
“The unhinged versions of this sensibility,” notes Jonathan Chait “held that Obama had launched a sinister ideological assault on the Constitution and American freedom, perhaps in the name of Islamism, or socialism, or, somehow, both.”
Mentioning Obama’s race as one cause of GOP panic is even more forbidden than bringing up George W. Bush. You want to argue about it? Check the comment lines to any online article about Obama, and then get back to me.
It’s in the Bible: “The guilty flee, where no man pursueth.”
Along with existential panic goes an inability to keep things in proportion. Benghazi equals invading Iraq. The IRS “scandal” equals Watergate. Forty-five consecutive months of job growth and shrinking budget deficits get airbrushed out of the picture.
Over time, fear will abate. Then we’ll see what we see.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, July 9, 2014
“They’ll Be Waiting A Long Time”: The Illusory Conservative Campaign For The “Right” Minority Voters
I’ve been pretty harsh about the racial aspects of Team Chris McDaniel’s argument that the MS GOP SEN runoff was “stolen” from him. But let’s bend over backwards to be fair and adopt Dave Weigel’s interpretation of what hyper-conservatives mean when they complain about the “wrong kind” of appeals to African-Americans:
The Tea Party, a movement that helped elect Allen West to Congress and helped make Herman Cain—Herman Cain!—a presidential contender, and wants to elect Mia Love to Congress in Utah, believes that conservatives can win black votes while remaining conservative. When West talks about escaping “the liberal plantation,” that’s what he means. The “racist” party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.
Taking this seriously, of course, means ignoring the thousands of dog whistles blown during the endless Tea Party efforts to demonize “looters” and “food stamps” and “voter fraud”–and of course, the first African-American president. There’s no binary choice on the table either to offer minority voters “largesse” or to attack their integrity, work ethic, and even patriotism for participating in federal programs when they qualify for them. The whole “plantation” meme beloved particularly of African-American conservatives is an ongoing insult bordering on a blood libel, which is why you don’t find many African-Americans supporting Allen West or Herman Cain.
But intentions aside, if conservatives are waiting for the “right” kind of Republican appeal to attract the “right” kind of minority voters, they’ll be waiting a long time. The simple fact is that the already-meager Republican share of the minority vote has been steadily sliding since the GOP began its latest lurch to the Right. George W. Bush won 11% of the African-American vote and 44% of the Latino vote in 2004. In 2008 John McCain won 4% of the African-American vote and 31% of the Latino vote, and in 2012 Mitt Romney won 6% of the African-American vote and 27% of the Latino vote. That’s a pretty calamitous decline, and any conservative unwilling to admit that endless GOP attacks on “redistribution” and “illegal immigrants” and “welfare” has nothing to do with that is either dishonest or smoking crack.
Check out the language in this tweet over the weekend from McDaniel campaign manager (and state legislator) Melanie Sojourner, made in the course of saying she’d never endorse the “race-baiting” Thad Cochran:
Throughout my campaign and since I’ve repeatedly made comments about how I felt the Republican Party was doing itself a disservice by not reaching out to conservative African-Americans. Where I’m from, in rural Mississippi, I grew up knowing lots a [sic] God-fearing, hard-working, independent conservative minded African-American family’s [sic]. On the McDaniel campaign we had two young men from just such family’s on our staff.
Sojourner’s idea of “outreach” seems to be to wait for minority voters to develop sufficient character to vote for the GOP exactly as it finds it today. That presumably means accepting conservatives have been right all along–dating back to Jim Crow–about the evil nature of the Welfare State and a federal government large and strong enough to support civil rights laws.
Do people like this really believe in their heart of hearts they’re being “color-blind?” I cannot peer into their souls, but it’s no more or less plausible than the constant complaints from southern white conservatives I heard growing up that segregation was good for both races. Lord knows anything’s better for African-Americans than being consigned to the plantation of dependence on Washington for help in feeding one’s kids and gaining access to health care and keeping open threadbare public schools and securing the right to vote. Perhaps if the GOP becomes even more conservative the great minority voting breakthrough will finally occur.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 8, 2014
“Ryan The Wonk Losing His Street Cred”: He’s Clearly Overdrawn At The Intellectual Credit Bank
In all the recent attention being paid to “Reform Conservatives” (some galvanized by Sam Tanenhaus’ lengthy profile in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine), a glaring absence has been noted in the sparse ranks of the reform movement’s political sponsors. Yes, one-time Super Wonk Paul Ryan, who until recently epitomized Big Brains in the GOP, is nowhere to be seen, and may actually be diverging from the reformers on key tax and budget issues.
Jonathan Chait argues that the cool pragmatism of the Reform Conservatives is at odds with the “apocalyptic” attitude towards Obama and liberalism that Ryan shares with the Tea Folk. But TNR’s Brian Beutler is more precise in noting that the reformicons’ antipathy to the tax agenda of the business community and support for “family-friendly” tax policies is at odds with where Ryan is likely to go as the next chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee:
In his most recent budget, Ryan emphasized his support for a tax reform package that would, among other things, reduce the current seven tax brackets to two, at 25 and 10 percent rates. The dual-bracket structure has long been the dream goal of conservative, supply-side tax reform. It would not just simplify the code, a goal even liberals share. It would also reduce rates on the wealthy. But such a plan could not be revenue-neutral without sharply increasing middle class taxes. It’s a mathematical certainty.
And such a plan is definitely at odds with the reformicons’ stated concern that the conservative movement’s fiscal policies are in danger of fatally alienating middle-class voters, and even the GOP’s critical white working class constituency.
It’s worth remembering, of course, that Ryan’s hardly the only ambitious GOP pol who’s likely to prefer praise from the Wall Street Journal‘s editorial board than from the reformicon ranks. So it’s hardly a good betting proposition that the reformers’ fiscal priorities will find champions among the 2016 GOP presidential field, even if Marco Rubio regains his pre-immigration-reform standing.
But for the moment, it’s refreshing to see that Ryan looks more and more like a standard GOP business hack with an unhealthy addiction to Ayn Rand novels, and less and less like the Brains of the GOP. He’s certainly overdrawn at the intellectual credit bank.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 8, 2014
“The GOP Is Not Trying To Change”: The Direction The Republican Party Is Headed Is Destined For Political Ruin
John Harwood has an article in today’s New York Times with the headline: Shut Out of White House, G.O.P. Looks to Democrats of 1992. What’s not clear is whom the headline writer means by G.O.P. As best as I can tell, the subject here isn’t any of the likely candidates or any kind of consensus from the party base. It’s these people:
“A lot of work to do,” said Kate O’Beirne, a veteran conservative commentator. Pete Wehner, who was an aide to President George W. Bush, fears that Republican gains expected in the midterm elections this fall will offer another “false dawn,” as they did in 2010.
Kate O’Beirne and Peter Wehner are not representative of the Republican Party. They are Washington insiders who are well paid to spin the party’s message. But they aren’t so much spinning at the moment as hoping for a miracle.
A nominee’s power to recast the party’s image on high-profile issues offers a safety valve for Republicans in 2016, whatever they do now on immigration or other issues. At least, they hope so.
As Ms. O’Beirne, the conservative commentator, observed hopefully, “A talented politician can turn things around pretty handily, right?”
Mr. Wehner and Ms. O’Beirne are in no way representative of their party, but they are both savvy political observers who realize that the direction the Republican Party is headed is destined for political ruin. Their salvation idea is that a candidate will win the nomination and then turn sharply to the middle, thereby bringing the party faithful back to positions that have national viability.
A parallel is offered by Harwood:
But Mr. Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, used discretion in targeting Democratic constituencies such as labor unions. He embraced ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, for instance — but not until he had secured the Democratic nomination.
So, what we are supposed to expect is a Republican nominee who embraces gay marriage and immigration reform, but not until they have secured the Republican nomination. The thing is, this is a seemingly impossible task. To pull it off, the GOP would need to find a candidate like Dwight D. Eisenhower who could be embraced for reasons entirely separated from political ideology. A consensus bipartisan national hero could conceivably win the Republican nomination and then feel free to forge a completely independent stance on the issues, resulting in a remolded party that isn’t wedded 100% to the conservative movement, particularly on social issues.
It’s a pleasant thought, even for Democrats, but there are no Eisenhowers in contemporary American culture. In 2012, we saw a version of what Wehner and O’Beirne are looking for in the candidacy of former Utah governor and ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman. In the end, Huntsman earned two delegates to the Republican National Convention and .04 percent of the primary vote.
So far, the only evidence that any entity that can be termed the “GOP” is looking to emulate the 1992 Democrats led by Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council is the autopsy report that RNC Chairman Reince Priebus solicited after the 2012 election. That report said that Republicans must pass comprehensive immigration reform and embrace gay equality or they’ll be unable to even get a hearing from young voters or Latinos. Assuming that analysis was valid, and I think it was, there has been little progress so far and there are no reasons to think that a nominee running on those issues would have snowball’s chance in hell of winning the Republican nomination.
The only sign of heterodoxy I can detect is Rand Paul’s uneven willingness to buck the status quo on foreign policy, privacy rights, and voting rights. But let’s not forget that Rand Paul is on the record as believing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is unconstitutional because it forces private businessmen to serve blacks in their restaurants.
That’s not exactly a Sister Souljah moment. And I don’t think dissing Sister Souljah was key to Clinton’s success in any case.
By: Martin Longman, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 5, 2014
“Calling The Shots”: Who If Not Tea Folk Control GOP Agenda?
We’re now in the less fertile summer plain of primary elections, with no contests this month other than the unfinished business of runoffs in Alabama and North Carolina on July 15 and Georgia on July 22. So it’s a good time to look back on what Republicans in particular hath wrought, and at TPMCafe Harvard’s expert on (among other things) the Tea Party, Theda Skocpol, suggests we should be looking at Congress rather than the primary outcomes for a sense of where things stand inside the GOP.
An obsession with toting up wins and losses in primaries completely misreads how Tea Party forces work, how they have moved the governing agendas of the Republican Party ever further right and maintained a stranglehold on federal government action….
Tea Party clout in and upon Republican officials, officeholders, and candidates is actually maximized by the dynamic interplay of top-down and bottom-up forces, both pushing for absolute opposition to President Barack Obama and obstruction of Congressional action involving compromises with Democrats. Tea Party forces are neither inside nor outside, neither for nor against the Republican Party in any simple sense, because they are sets of organizations and activists seeking leverage over the choices and actions of Republican leaders and candidates.
This dynamic long preceded the inauguration of Obama and the formal launching of the Tea Party Movement, but has surely intensified since 2009.
To see that the Tea Party remains supremely effective, just look at what Congressional Republicans are doing, or not doing. Eric Cantor’s sudden defeat sealed the GOP House’s determination to block immigration reform, but that reform was already effectively dead even before that one primary election happened. Republicans have pulled away from decades-old compromises to fund transportation systems, to support agricultural subsidies along with Food Stamps, to renew the Export-Import Bank that most U.S. business interests want continued. House and Senate Republicans are spending their time mainly on obstruction and media-focused investigations, anything to challenge and humiliate President Obama. In state houses, Tea Party-pushed Republicans are mainly passing anti-abortion restrictions and blocking the expansion of Medicaid favored by hospitals and businesses.
What do primary elections have to do with such effective agenda control? Not nearly as much as the basketball finals approach to tallying total wins and losses implies. In a way, unpredictable and somewhat random victories against fairly safe Republican power-brokers are the most effective outcomes for Tea Party voters and funders. Sure, the big Tea Party funders would like to have gotten a win for Chris McDaniel, their guy in Mississippi, and they are furious that they did not. But backing up and looking at the big picture, does anyone really imagine that nervous GOP officeholders are reassured that the Tea Party is dead or “under control” following a scenario in which old timer Thad Cochran had to raise millions for what should have been a taken-for-granted primary victory, and his allies had to orchestrate an all-out voter mobilization effort that even reached out to some African American Democrats? Cochran’s near-death sends a powerful message that loudly hewing hard-right on policy issues and obstruction is the way to go. Similarly, Eric Cantor’s huge defeat is even more frightening to many Republican politicians because it happened without big-money backing from the likes of Heritage Action.
Another way to put it is to ask whether there’s any issue on which the GOP has decisively pushed back on the Tea Party agenda? Yes, there was the decision to abandon the government shutdown last year, but even the Tea Folk understood that couldn’t go on forever. Other than that, it’s hard to see where and how the alleged “Establishment” primary victories are going to make any actual difference. Look at the Common Core educational standards issue, supposedly a huge priority for the business community that has given so generously to the Establishment cause. Chamber of Commerce beneficiaries Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa and Jack Kingston of Georgia have all come out against Common Core. Who’s really calling the shots in the GOP, if not the radicalized conservative movement we call the Tea Party?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 4, 2014
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