“Conservatives Get Glum”: Republican Are Very Worried About Whether They Can Break Out Of Its Fox Bubble
A look around the web today makes clear that the crisis of American conservatism in general, and conservatives’ relationship to the media in particular, is clearly our topic. First, none other than William Kristol, the very axis about whom the Republican establishment spins, is extremely worried about what has become of his movement:
And the conservative movement—a bulwark of American strength for the last several decades—is in deep disarray. Reading about some conservative organizations and Republican campaigns these days, one is reminded of Eric Hoffer’s remark, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” It may be that major parts of American conservatism have become such a racket that a kind of refounding of the movement as a cause is necessary. A reinvigoration of the Republican party also seems desirable, based on a new generation of leaders, perhaps coming—as did Ike and Reagan—from outside the normal channels.
There are elements of that racket on both sides of the aisle, but conservatives are particularly adept at fleecing their own people. Part of the problem the conservative movement faces now is that they’ve given so much power to media figures like Rush Limbaugh and the crew at Fox News, but those people’s primary interest is in making money, not in helping the GOP. Which is why Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins finds a bunch of Republican operatives who are very worried about whether their party can break out of its Fox bubble, both as a psychological and practical matter. Here’s my favorite part:
One Republican official recalled working earlier this year to get a potentially damaging story about a Democratic candidate into The New York Times — only to have an impatient colleague leak the scoop to a conservative website. The story shot through the online right, but failed to gain mainstream traction.
“I was like, great, we made the people who were already voting for us even angrier,” the official snarked to BuzzFeed. “Mission accomplished.”
Obviously, the politicians can start speaking more through non-conservative media outlets on their own initiative; John Boehner can just decide that he’ll do Meet the Press and Face the Nation, not just Fox News Sunday (and the idea that he’d get impossibly difficult questions on the first two is laughable). But might the conservative media themselves ask whether they can do anything to broaden their audience’s perspective so they don’t create such a reality-denying bubble? Harold Pollack, hoping against hope that there are people on the right as reasonable and fair-minded as he is, urges them to come up with their own version of MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, a program that would feature lengthy, substantive, interesting discussions between people who actually know things, as opposed to just “strategists” trading talking points:
What strikes me is the dearth of conservative-leaning shows built on the same model. Most FOX discussion shows are virtually unwatchable—not because they’re conservative, but because they offer so little intellectual nutrition to their core audience. Sticking to our home topic of health policy, legitimate conservative experts such as James Capretta and Tevi Troy are drowned out by less honest or reputable figures such as Betsy McCaughey and Dick Morris. The typical conservative FOX viewer is thus fed Pravda-style misleading information about what the Affordable Care Act really entails. The typical non-conservative FOX viewer—to the extent non-conservatives tune in at all—have no way of knowing what reputable Republican or conservative policy analysts are really thinking, or, indeed, who these experts really are.
The first thing you’d need for such a program to be created is an audience that would watch it. After all, MSNBC doesn’t air Hayes’ show as a public service. The people who produce the show are trying to create the best program they can, but the network’s bottom line is its bottom line. If it wasn’t making money, it would get cancelled (the show’s ratings are pretty good if not spectacular).
That doesn’t mean, however, that every potentially lucrative market niche is exploited. There might well be an audience waiting for more intelligent conservative programming, but as long as Fox is still the number-one cable news network (which they are) and is making money hand over fist (ditto), there’s little reason for them to go looking to change what is for them an extremely successful formula. And don’t forget that a Democratic president is great for their business; it gives them an endless supply of things to get mad about, which means more viewers.
Since the conservative media is unlikely to change, maybe there’s little people on the right can do but wait around, as Kristol says, for a new generation of leadership to come along and change things.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, December 11, 2012
“Democracy Loses”: Michigan Passes “Right To Work” Law With Support Of Koch Brothers
Without one hearing or any public comment in the midst of a lame-duck session after an election where Republicans lost five seats in the State House and their presidential candidate lost the state by 9.5 percent, Republicans in both Michigan’s House and Senate have passed so-called ‘right to work’ legislation.
Republican governor Rick Snyder, who campaigned as a moderate and continually said that ‘right to work’ was not on his agenda now, says he will sign the legislation.
Thus Michigan will become the 24th state in the union to pass legislation that bars unions from automatically collecting dues from all employees covered under a collective bargaining agreement. This highly symbolic move to strike at the heart of unions in the state where unionized auto workers helped create the middle class would not be possible without the support of multi-billionaires, specifically the Koch brothers and Rich DeVos, founder of Amway.
The bill that Snyder will sign is nearly identical to model legislation written by Koch-funded group American Legislative Exchange Council. Another Koch-funded group, Americans for Prosperity, has been advocating for the legislation, reportedly pressuring lawmakers including Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville, who had previously refused to support the anti-union measure. For the Kochs, the intent of the bill is to clearly to diminish the power of the group that fuels the progressive movement–organized labor.
A group calling itself “Freedom To Work” has deluged Michigan’s TV airwaves in support of the legislation, arguing that the bill would both create jobs and “protect collective bargaining.”
According to state rep. Brandon Dillon, Freedom To Work is funded by Amway’s DeVos, a Michigan resident who ran for governor against Jennifer Granholm in 2006 and lost.
Longtime Michigan political advisor Dana Houle insists that this bill isn’t about making Michigan more competitive, as Governor Snyder suggests. It’s a about enacting a vast scope of right-wing legislation.
“Don’t anyone think that passing ‘right to work’ in Michigan is about economics, about jobs, about business,” Houle said. “It’s about wiping out the political and electoral power of unions so they can’t stand in the way of Dick DeVos electing apparatchiks who will enact his radical religious-right and anti-public schools agenda.”
Outside the Capitol, thousands of union supporters protested and several were hit with pepper spray, including former congressman Mark Schauer.
Unions are considering their options to undo the bills, which were designed so they cannot be overturned by a popular vote.
For those still wondering how ‘right to work’ or ‘right to work for less’ or ‘freedom to freeload’ could happen in a union stronghold like Michigan, take a look at this helpful breakdown of where the AFL-CIO thought the votes would come from. It turns out they were right.
Photo: AP Photo/Carlos Osorio; Chart: AFL-CIO
By: Jason Sattler, The National Memo, December 11, 2012
“Republicans Need To Wise Up”: It’s Not Their Uninspiring Candidates Or Unsound Tactics, It’s Their Unpopular Ideas
The biggest problem the Republican Party faces is not uninspiring candidates or unsound tactics. It is unpopular ideas.
This reality was brought home in last month’s election. It’s playing out in the struggle over how to avoid the “fiscal cliff.” And we’ll see it again in coming fights over immigration, entitlements, inequality and a host of other issues. Here’s the sad thing: Republicans get this stuff so wrong that Democrats aren’t even forced to go to the trouble of getting it right.
There will be those who doubt the sincerity of my advice to the GOP, since my standing as a conservative is — justifiably — less than zero. But I’ve always believed in competition, if only to prevent liberals from becoming lazy and unimaginative. One could argue that this is already happening.
Take the question of what to do about undocumented immigrants. The Republican Party takes an uncompromising line against anything that could be construed as amnesty — any solution that provides “illegal” immigrants with a path to citizenship. Much has been made of the impact the immigration issue had in the election, as Latinos voted for President Obama over Mitt Romney by nearly 3-1.
It is obvious to sentient Republicans why the party cannot afford to so thoroughly alienate the nation’s largest minority group. What the GOP seems not to grasp is that the party’s “send ’em all home” stance is way out of line with much of the rest of the electorate as well.
A Politico-George Washington University poll released Monday asked voters whether they favored “an immigration reform proposal that allows illegal or undocumented immigrants to earn citizenship over a period of several years.” That would be amnesty, pure and simple — and a whopping 62 percent said they were in favor, compared to 35 percent who said they were opposed.
You might expect Democrats, then, to be pushing hard for a straightforward amnesty bill. But they don’t have to. Because Republicans are so far out in right field on the issue, Democrats haven’t actually had to do anything to reap substantial political benefits. They’ve just had to sound more reasonable, and less hostile, than Republicans, which has not required breaking a sweat.
On the central fiscal-cliff question, the GOP is similarly out of step. The Politico poll found that 60 percent of respondents favor raising income taxes on households that earn more than $250,000 a year. The Republican Party says no — and thus allows itself to be portrayed as willing to sink the economic recovery, if necessary, to ensure that tycoons can keep their pantries stocked with caviar.
Where is the incentive for Democrats to get serious about fiscal matters? As long as the GOP remains adamant on what many Americans see as a no-brainer question of basic fairness, those who believe in progressive solutions get a pass.
The truth is that raising top marginal rates for the wealthy is probably as far as we should go on the tax front right now, given the fragility of the recovery. The best thing we could do for the country’s long-term fiscal health is spur the economy into faster growth, which will shrink deficits and the debt as a percentage of gross domestic product.
That said, it’s hard to imagine long-term solutions that don’t eventually require more tax revenue from the middle class as well as the rich. But why should Democrats mention this inconvenient fact when Republicans, out of ideological stubbornness, are keeping the focus on the upper crust?
The same basic dynamic plays out in the question of reforming entitlements. Republicans proposed turning Medicare into a voucher program; polls show that voters disagree. The GOP seems to be falling back to the position that the eligibility age for the program should be raised. Trust me, voters aren’t going to like that, either.
Nor, for that matter, do voters like the GOP’s solution for the millions of Americans who lack health insurance, which Romney summarized as, essentially, go to the emergency room. A smart Republican Party would stop focusing exclusively on how government can pay less for health care and, instead, begin to seriously explore ways to reduce health-care costs. A smart GOP would acknowledge the fact that Americans simply don’t want to privatize everything, which means we need new ideas about how to pay for what we want.
Faced with an opposition that verges on self-parody, progressive thinkers are mostly just phoning it in. This won’t change until somebody defibrillates the GOP, and we detect a pulse.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 10, 2012
“Never Ever, Ever, Ever…”: Grover Norquist’s Pledge Used To Be Politically Expedient, Now It’s Not
A few words to ponder as we sail toward the fiscal cliff. Those words would be: “That was then, this is now.”
Strip away the false piety and legalistic hair-splitting offered by Republican lawmakers rationalizing their decision to abandon a pledge that they will never ever, ever, ever vote to raise taxes, and that’s pretty much what the explanation boils down to.
Rep. Peter King says he understood the pledge, propounded by the almighty Grover Norquist and his group Americans for Tax Reform, to obligate him for only one term. Apparently, he thought it had to be renewed, like a driver’s license.
Sen. Lindsey Graham says that if Democrats agree to entitlement reform, “I will violate the pledge … for the good of the country” — a stirring statement of patriotism and sacrifice that warms your heart like a midnight snack of jalapeño chili fries.
In other words: bull twinkies. If you want the truth of why a trickle of GOP lawmakers is suddenly willing to blaspheme the holy scripture of their faith, it’s simple. The pledge used to be politically expedient. Now it is not.
This is not, by the way, a column in defense of the Norquist pledge. The only thing dumber than his offering such a pledge was scores of politicians signing it, an opinion that has nothing to do with the wisdom or lack thereof of raising taxes and everything to do with the fact that one ought not, as a matter of simple common sense, make hard, inflexible promises on changeable matters of national import. It is all well and good to stand on whatever one’s principles are, but as a politician — a job that, by definition, requires the ability to compromise — you don’t needlessly box yourself in. Never say never.
Much less never ever, ever, ever.
So this revolution against “he who must be obeyed,” however modest, is nonetheless welcome. It suggests reason seeping like sunlight into places too long cloistered in the damp and dark of ideological rigidity.
But it leaves an observer in the oddly weightless position of applauding a thing and being, simultaneously, disgusted by it. Has politics ever seemed more ignoble than in these clumsy, self-serving attempts to justify a deviation from orthodoxy? They have to do this, of course, because the truth — “I signed the pledge because I knew it would help me get elected, but with economic ruin looming and Obama re-elected on a promise to raise taxes on the rich and most voters supporting him on that, it’s not doing me as much good as it once did” — is unpretty and unflattering.
In this awkward about-face, these lawmakers leave us wondering once again whether the vast majority of them — right and left, red and blue, Republican and Democrat — really believe in anything, beyond being re-elected.
There is a reason Congress’ approval ratings flirted with single digits this year. There is a reason a new Gallup poll finds only 10 percent of Americans ranking Congress “high or very high” in honesty and ethics.
Lawyers rank higher. Advertisers rank higher. Even journalists rank higher.
This is the sad pass to which years of congressional grandstanding, fact spinning, cookie-jar pilfering and assorted harumphing and pontificating have brought us. And while a certain cynicism toward its leaders functions as a healthy antigen in the body politic, it cannot be good for either the nation or its leaders that so many of them are held in plain contempt.
The moral malleability exemplified by the likes of King and Graham will not help. Perhaps we should ask them to sign a new pledge: “I will always tell you what I think and what I plan to do in plain English, regardless of whether you like it or it benefits me politically.”
But no lawmaker would make that pledge. And who would believe them if they did?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, December 10, 2012
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