“The Conservative Struggle Against Demographics”: Republicans Should Spend Less Time And Energy Fighting The Inevitable
Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder said Trayvon Martin’s death was “tragic and unnecessary.” The continuing American tragedy is the lingering racial chasm in American society. The U.S. has a black president and a black attorney general. But Paula Deen uses racial slurs, the Supreme Court guts the Voting Rights Act and an innocent 17-year-old black youth dies because he was black and wears a hoodie.
Tuesday, Hillary Clinton and conservative blogger Erick Erickson weighed in on the Zimmermann case.
Erickson wrote, “Bad choices were made by George Zimmerman and by Trayvon Martin.” It’s easy to pick out the bad choices that George Zimmerman made. He decided not to leave the scene after the Sanford police department dispatcher warned him to get out way and let police officers handle the situation. Zimmerman’s biggest mistake, of course, was his choice to shoot an unarmed boy.
It’s much harder for me to identify the mistakes that Erickson thinks Trayvon Martin made. Was it a mistake for him to decide to buy Skittles? Did he set himself up for death by choosing to wear a hoodie? Or was it his choice to be black? Sorry, being black isn’t a choice, is it?
Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that “no mother, no father, should ever have to fear for their child walking down a street in the United States of America.” Fortunately neither the Clintons nor I had to worry that our teenage kids might be gunned down by a vigilante. Chelsea Clinton and my kids aren’t black.
The debate over immigration underscores the persistence of racial hostility in American society. The racial bias in the fight against immigration reform is palatable. Last year, during a Republican presidential debate in South Carolina, one of the candidates said the word “Mexico” and the crowd booed.
Republicans and their tea party supporters are fighting a rear guard action to keep the United States white. The Census Bureau estimates that white people will be in the minority in the U.S. by 2040. Demographers believe that the biggest state, California, became a minority white state earlier this year.
Some people just can’t stand the idea that white people in the United States are on their way to becoming a racial minority. Republicans worry, with good cause, that the rapid growth of Democratic demographic groups like Latinos and Asians will consign the GOP to political oblivion.
States with 102 electoral votes have voted for the GOP presidential nominee in each of the last six elections. The comparable Democratic base is 240. 38 of the 102 electoral votes in the Republican base are from Texas and demography threatens the Republican destiny there.
A majority (55 percent) of residents of the Lone State are either Hispanic or black but the GOP still dominates there because Latino political participation is so low. Mitt Romney won Texas by 1.2 million votes in 2012, but at least three million Latino residents eligible to vote didn’t turn out on Election Day. The Texas Democratic Party and a progressive group, Battleground Texas, have just started an effort to mobilize these Latino voters. If that work is successful, the GOP will lose a big part of its already small national electoral college base.
Demography is destiny, so Republicans and conservatives should spend less time and energy fighting the inevitable than figuring out how to attract supporters among the new American majority.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 18, 2013
“Congress’ Pity Party”: Drama Queens Who Choose Not To Solve The Nation’s Problems
This week’s congressional dysfunctional is brought to you by the letter “P.” Forget Democrats and Republicans: The party of the moment is pity.
Yes, yes, Congress is polarized, Republicans aren’t a governing party anymore, Democrats lack spines, everyone is beholden to corporate interests, and the open source world is changing how politicians interact with their constituents.
None of that has anything to do with the theatrics over the filibuster.
Every so often, Congress, frustrated and angry that the public bears them so much ill-will, decides to remind us that their inability to get stuff done is our fault.
We’re the ones who elected them. We’re the ones who keep voting for them. We’re the ones who demand that they sacrifice principles for expediency. Allegedly. But we don’t really pay attention to Congress, because they don’t do much, and when they do, it’s often comical.
So they get angry. They create a crisis. They give long, florid floor speeches about the crisis. They appear on television and bemoan. And bemoan and bemoan and bemoan what happened to this great institution, (if in the Senate: This saucer, this leavening chamber), this beacon of democratic representation in the world.
Right now, we’re in the pity stage. You know it because the political tabloids are publishing stories about how relationships between parties are at their lowest point since the last time these tabloids wrote the stories. Or that the majority leader and the minority leader can’t take each other’s phone calls.
Pity clears the room. Pity is such a turn-off because it absolves the bearer of any responsibility to solve his or her own problem.
Truth be told, the Senate can solve its problems. Its members just choose not to. But instead of admitting that manufactured crises are the catalyst for getting anything done, we are instead treated to spectacles that Congress can watch on TV and feel important again.
They negotiate publicly and privately, then create a solution.
Often, the solution sets up further crises, which will allow Congress to once again come back and get everyone’s attention, as they go through the performance and sweep in at the last moment and provide another solution, proving once and for all that Congress actually does work. Then they congratulate themselves on a job well done. Take that, American people.
By: Marc Ambinder, The Week, July 16, 2013
“Bob McDonnell Is Unfit For Office”: A Sense Of Entitlement And A Conviction Of Invulnerability
There are two swift routes to political downfall. One is sex. The other is money. The first is humiliating but survivable. The second tends to be terminal, even criminal.
Today’s topic is the second, in the form of Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and the now mountainous evidence that — whether he technically complied with Virginia’s Swiss cheese disclosure laws or not in accepting thousands of dollars in gifts from a wealthy businessman — he has no business continuing in office.
The sordid McDonnell details in a bit, but first the comparisons between politicians and illicit sex and politicians and illicit money. They are linked to the twin delusions of the erring politician: his (I use the male form intentionally) sense of entitlement and his conviction of invulnerability.
I work so hard, the politician tells himself. I deserve a little (insert specific failing).
No one will find out, the politician tells himself. I was smart enough to get elected (governor/president/senator).
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
There are differences, as well, between the politician tripped up by sex and the one felled by greed. The former can argue that he was not thinking with . . . well, he was not thinking. He is hardly the first to do something dumb in the grip of lust, love, whatever.
Yet he most likely has a wife and family, collateral damage in his sexual escapades. Points off for that — and more off if he has his wife by his side at the confessional news conference.
The greedy pol is blameworthy in a different way, again both heightening and lessening his guilt. On the negative side, he was not swept away by the passion of the moment; he calculated that he could accept the money, the Rolex, whatever, and get away with it.
On the plus side — and this is explanation, not excuse — he may have been acting under familial pressure, and in what he conceived as the best interests of his family, rather than against it, as the straying spouse certainly has.
Much modern political corruption, especially of the penny-ante sort, can be explained by the yawning gap between the relatively paltry income of the politician and the wealth of the private-sector types fluttering around him.
The politician feels aggrieved, which in turn feeds his sense of entitlement. The political spouse sees her friends driving fancier cars, wearing fancier clothes — all this while her husband is probably working longer hours, to the detriment of his family. You can understand, although not excuse, the husband whose ethical judgment is warped by marital guilt, the wife whose judgment is warped by marital resentment.
Which brings us to the McDonnells, and the flagrant, repeated misconduct exposed by The Post’s Rosalind Helderman. The story began with relatively trivial, if astonishingly morally obtuse, bits of graft and back-scratching:
●The $15,000 check that businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr. gave to help cover the catering bill at the McDonnells’ daughter’s wedding — an event that took place three days after Virginia first lady Maureen McDonnell flew to Florida, where she touted a dietary supplement made by Williams’s company, Star Scientific Inc. Three months later, Star Scientific used the governor’s mansion for a luncheon, attended by the governor, to promote the supplement.
●The $6,500 Rolex, complete with engraved inscription, “71st Governor of Virginia,” that Williams bought for the governor at Maureen McDonnell’s behest. She allegedly requested the bauble moments before a meeting she had arranged for Williams to pitch a top state health official on the supplement.
● Maureen McDonnell’s reported $15,000 spree at Bergdorf Goodman, again on Williams’s tab — this a year after a staffer foiled McDonnell’s bid for a Williams-underwritten Oscar de la Renta inaugural gown.
Now comes reporting that raises the story to a new level of outrage: Williams last year gave $70,000 — supposedly a loan — to a corporation owned by McDonnell and his sister; plus $50,000 to Maureen McDonnell in 2011, and $10,000 as a wedding present this year to another McDonnell daughter.
As astonishing is the governor’s technocratic defense: that he is complying with the letter of Virginia disclosure rules, which do not require reporting of gifts to family members. “To, after the fact, impose some new requirements on an official,” McDonnell told a Norfolk radio show, “obviously wouldn’t be fair.”
But gifts and entanglements like these are simply wrong, a violation of the governor’s duty to citizens, whatever the rules. That McDonnell doesn’t get this basic point makes him unfit for office. Obviously.
By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 12, 2013
“New Revelations Imperil Virginia’s Governor”: It’s Becoming Increasingly Difficult To Imagine How Bob McDonnell Stays In Office
Just last night, while reporting on Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s (R) efforts to address one aspect of the scandal surrounding him, Rachel noted that the governor’s term in office ends officially in January, but “smart bookmakers everywhere are taking bets on whether or not he makes it that far.”
In light of a new Washington Post report, published this morning, the odds of McDonnell’s political survival are considerably worse.
A prominent political donor gave $70,000 to a corporation owned by Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and his sister last year, and the governor did not disclose the money as a gift or loan, according to people with knowledge of the payments.
The donor, wealthy businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr., also gave a previously unknown $50,000 check to the governor’s wife, Maureen, in 2011, the people said.
The money to the corporation and Maureen McDonnell brings to $145,000 the amount Williams gave to assist the McDonnell family in 2011 and 2012 — funds that are now at the center of federal and state investigations.
Making matters slightly worse, the Post also reports this morning on a $10,000 “gift” the Star Scientific CEO gave to McDonnell’s eldest daughter, intended to help defray costs of her May 2013 wedding. You might be thinking, “Wait, didn’t we already know about Jonnie Williams helping pay for one of the governor’s daughter’s wedding?” We did, but this is another daughter — Williams gave $15,000 to help pay for Cailin McDonnell’s wedding in 2011 and then $10,000 to help finance Jeanine McDonnell’s wedding this year.
All of the extravagant gifts coincided with McDonnell and his wife working to promote Star Scientific and its products.
The governor may have a very good attorney, but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine how the governor stays in office. Indeed, one angle to keep an eye on in the coming days is how quickly Virginia Republicans begin to distance themselves from McDonnell as the scandal grows more serious. For one noteworthy GOP official in particular, that’s likely to be tricky.
The University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato said last night that we should expect state Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, for example, to “break openly and sharply” with the governor “very soon.” And that would certainly make sense — Cuccinelli is in a competitive race to replace McDonnell, and won’t want to be tarnished by the allegations.
But that may be more difficult for Cuccinelli than is commonly known. Star Scientific’s Jonnie Williams may have been almost criminally generous to McDonnell, but he also directed over $13,000 worth of gifts to Cuccinelli, too — gifts the right-wing state Attorney General did not disclose.
On several occasions, Cuccinelli even vacationed in Williams’ beach house, despite the fact that Cuccinelli was ostensibly overseeing Star Scientific’s $1.7 million tax dispute with Virginia at the time.
Cuccinelli may want to start backing away from McDonnell in light of the scandal, but that’s easier said than done.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 10, 2013
“Goodbye Rick Perry”: Those Of Us Out In Fake America Will Miss You
Farewell, Rick Perry! We’ll miss you, those of us out in fake America, unless Texas is fake America, because of the whole Republic thing, in which case you will be missed in all the various Americas. Because once you are done as governor of your massive, slightly ridiculous oil-soaked state, you will pretty much be done.
Perry is not going to seek a fourth term as governor of Texas, a high-status, low-authority gig that he has worked at longer than anyone else in history. The next governor will likely be Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (Stu Rothenberg is keeping the position listed as “Safe Republican”).
Perry isn’t just going to go away, or at least he doesn’t intend to. He is not going to put on a stupid hat and retire to a ranch that was until very recently named something unspeakably awful. He is going to run for president. Because once a sufficient number of people have convinced an egomaniac that he would be a very good president, it’s hard for that egomaniac to let go of that dream, even after a bunch of voters do everything they can to discourage it.
In 2011, we in the rest of America were told to look out for Perry, that he was savvy, a brilliant politician, and that he’d be totally irresistible to the electorate once he made his inevitable decision to run for president. He turned out to be a dunce, completely incompetent at basic tasks like “debating” and “public speaking.” Maybe it was pain meds (but then, who decides it’s a good idea to jump into a national race while you’re on pain meds?), but either way the last presidential campaign was a disaster for the Perry brand. No one in 2016 will be particularly frightened of him, and he also probably won’t have the luxury of running against a field made up entirely of clowns and a front-runner no one in the party actually liked.
He’s amiable, decent-looking, and right-wing enough to suit the modern Republican Party, but he is also a bit of an idiot and nothing about him appeals to anyone outside his state. Republicans aren’t interested in him anymore, even in Texas. Public Policy Polling (a liberal shop, but still) has Hillary Clinton beating Perry 50 to 42 in a potential presidential contest. A University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll showed Texas Republicans preferring Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul over their finally outgoing governor. And if they don’t want him there’s no reason to suggest Republicans anywhere else will want him. “Vote for your dumb right-wing dad” won’t work any better in 2016 than it did in 2012.
Still, Perry’s decision to join Texas Republicans in provoking a big fight over abortion access does make a bit of sense in this light: He I guess wants to be 2016′s Rick Santorum, the choice of the fundamentalist set who don’t necessarily like the recent rhetorical ascendency of pseudo-moderation and pseudo-libertarianism in the GOP. Rick Santorum still might want to be the Rick Santorum of 2016, of course, but he also might be too busy making Christian movies. (Though none of the major 2016 Republican front-runners, with the possible exception of Jeb Bush, are remotely “moderate” on abortion access, it should be pointed out.)
It is always a happy day when the political careers of mediocre right-wing hacks like Rick Perry come to an end, even if it is by choice and not a forced resignation following a humiliating scandal or exposure of criminal activity. Texas will probably be better off without Rick Perry, even if the next guy is an asshole (and he is probably going to be an asshole), and Rick Perry will get to see his dream end in tears once more in 2016, at which point his only hope to remain in elected office will be a Congressional seat or something. Though obviously he will also make a great deal of money “consulting” for some awful rich person or another, so it’s not all good news.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 9, 2013
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