“Republican Fear Factor”: Even Syrians Are More Optimistic About The Future Than US Republicans
Syrians, who are fighting a civil war in which 40,000 of them have died just this year, are still more optimistic about their own future than US Republicans, recent polls reveal. Republicans also are much less optimistic than Greeks, whose economy may still bring down the whole of Europe, and Afghans, who are hopeful despite three decades of on-and-off civil war.
A Gallup Poll of global sentiment concludes that Greeks are the most pessimistic people in the world, in fact much more so than Syrians. But the survey did not break down results by political party. If it had, US Republicans would have topped the list. A new Washington Post-ABC poll shows that 72% of Republicans are fearful about what 2013 holds in store for them personally. (In the same poll, just 20% of Democrats are fearful.)
According to Gallup, 42% of Greeks foresee a grimmer future, along with 33% of Syrians. And in a recent Asia Foundation poll, 52% of Afghans said their country is moving in the right direction.
What troubles Republicans?
The Republican fear factor is a gigantic leap into trepidation—in 2008, 54% of Republicans said they fear what is ahead; in 2006, the number in the same poll was just 20%. What troubles Republicans? It is fear for the world at large (79% expect a bleaker 2013, compared with 36% of Democrats) and the US economy in particular (82% are pessimistic about next year; 28% of Democrats feel that way).
But what about their personal situation did the Republican respondents fear? The poll does not appear to have asked. But oddly, 62% of Republicans are optimistic about their family’s financial situation next year, lower than the 78% of cheery Democrats but a definitively rosy outlook.
One possibly correlating number is support for owning guns: If you own a weapon or support liberalized availability of them, you may be a hunter, but you may also seek protection against a perceived threat out there. In a Pew Poll released Dec. 20—after the Sandy Hook massacre in which a gunman murdered 20 first-grade students with a semi-automatic weapon—69% of Republicans said continuing to protect the right to own guns is more important than regulating ownership (72% of Democrats took the opposite view).
But are we talking fear, such as worry about personal safety, or something more idiosyncratic? Consider the Gallup poll, whichalso gauged “positive emotions” (this is a relevant question since one can reasonably regard fear of the future as a negative emotion). It found that 85% of Panamanians feel pretty good, compared with just 46% of Singaporeans, who are much wealthier on a GDP basis. Here are the questions that comprised the gauge of this good feeling:
Did you feel well-rested yesterday? Were you treated with respect all day yesterday? Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday? Did you learn or do something interesting yesterday?
By: Steve Levin, Contributor, Business Insider, December 25, 2012
“Just Zip It”: GOP Attacks On Obama’s Bin Laden Success Are Hypocritical
Former Gov. Mitt Romney and his advisers and surrogates are going apoplectic over the anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden and the attention President Obama is getting for the success.
They absolutely hate that he is using the events in ads and are especially defensive that the Obama campaign is pointing out Romney’s own statements that he “wouldn’t move heaven and earth” to get bin Laden and that he was against going into Pakistan unannounced.
Well, as I write this, the networks just reported that President Obama has arrived in Afghanistan on a surprise visit. My, my, now we are really going to hear from the Romney campaign, or won’t we?
If I were them, I would just zip it. The Republicans look unbelievably hypocritical on this one.
Remember “Mission Accomplished”—landing on that aircraft carrier declaring victory in Iraq? Oops. Remember the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004? Remember President Bush and the Republicans trying to use 9/11 as a political club to beat Sen. John Kerry?
Go back and review the speeches at that Republican convention from Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in particular. Or how about Ed Koch, or Bernard Kerik, or even retired General Tommy Franks? And, yes, even one Mitt Romney, who declared, “George W. Bush is right, and the ‘Blame America First Crowd’ is wrong!”
Playing politics with the tragedy of 9/11 or even the war in Iraq was the Republicans’ mantra.
I guess they were for it before they were against it, huh?
The bottom line is that President Obama did the right thing at tremendous risk to the lives of men under his command and with a real risk of failure. He knew, as we all do now, that had this mission not been successful lives would have been lost and his political career would have been over. And, yet, he had the courage, the grace under pressure, to make the call. That is what we call leadership.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World report, May 1, 2012
Our Great Moral Decline: “Two Distinct Monologues”
Asked to explain his support for Rick Santorum in Michigan’s primary, voter Sandy Munro said, “Now what we need is a strong political leader to do something to get us out of the moral slump that we’re in.”
Mr Santorum would agree, having noted that “Satan has his sights on the United States of America.” As would Mitt Romney, who has attacked the decay caused by Barack Obama’s “secular agenda”. Newt Gingrich has gone the furthest, stating, “A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts driving God out of public life shouldn’t be surprised at all the problems we have.”
But what are these problems? When considering America’s moral decline, my first instinct was to look at the crime rate. If Satan is at work in America, he’s probably nicking wallets and assaulting old ladies. But over the past several decades the crime rate has fallen dramatically, despite what you may think. The homicide rate has been cut in half since 1991; violent crime and property crime are also way down. Even those pesky kids are committing less crime. There are some caveats to these statistics, as my colleague points out, but I think we can conclude that crime is not the cause of America’s moral decline.
So let’s look elsewhere. Abortion has returned as a hot-button issue, perhaps it is eating away at our moral fiber. Hmm, the abortion rate declined by 8% between 2000 and 2008. Increases in divorce and infidelity could be considered indicators of our moral decay. There’s just one problem: according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is the lowest it has been since the early 1970s. This is in part due to the recession, but infidelity is down too.
Other areas that might indicate declining virtue are also going against the perceived trend. For example, charitable giving is up after a decline during the recession. The teenage pregnancy rate is at its lowest level in 40 years. And according to Education Week, “the nation’s graduation rate stands at 72 percent, the highest level of high school completion in more than two decades.” So where is the evidence of this moral decline?
Here’s one for the declinists: the number of Americans not affiliated with any religion has increased, while the number of those attending worship services has declined. And here’s another: out-of-wedlock births have increased in America so that now at least four in ten children are born to unmarried women. This is something Mr Santorum has focused on during the campaign, and he is right in pointing out that the children of unwed mothers in America tend to do worse in terms of health, schooling and income later in life.
But here’s where the real debate over America’s moral position comes into focus. As the New York Times notes, out-of-wedlock births are increasing in much of the developed world—for example, over half of babies in Iceland and Sweden are born to unwed mothers. But according to Wendy Manning, a professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, “In Sweden, you see very little variation in the outcome of children based on marital status. Everybody does fairly well… In the US, there’s much more disparity.”
So out-of-wedlock birth need not correspond to worse outcomes for children. And if it didn’t in America, should we still consider out-of-wedlock births a moral problem? One could ask a similar question about religion. While rates of religious participation may be declining in America, young people today have similar moral beliefs as their parents and grandparents. So is the decline in religious observance a moral problem?
When it comes to out-of-wedlock births, the issue is complicated because discouraging these types of the births may be a more efficient way of securing children than the type of nanny-state intervention that can be found in a country like Sweden. But in general, I think the debate over America’s moral position comes down to this: Republicans want the best outcomes based on solutions that fit into preconceived notions of what society should look like. So even if there are few tangible harms that point to our moral decay, any move away from their vision of society is evidence of declining virtue. Democrats, on the other hand, are more concerned with outcomes, even if that means upending the way things were (or accepting that they have been upended and cannot be restored).
So in the case of out-of-wedlock births, Republicans would probably see the increase as a moral problem regardless of the outcome. Whereas Democrats might feel more comfortable with, say, promoting a corresponding increase in stable familial relationships outside of marriage. It is a dynamic we’ve seen elsewhere recently, in regard to issues like gay marriage and contraception. And it leads to a debate over what “moral” really means. If “immoral” means “causing avoidable harm to other people” then gay marriage, pornography, sex, reality TV, soft-drug use and euthanasia are hardly immoral, even if distasteful to some.
But as we grind through the Republican primary process, it seems like the debate over morality in America has less to do with moral outcomes and more to do with a vision of how society should look based on idealistic remembrances of how things were. So people like Mr Munro and the Republican candidates believe America is in a moral slump. The odd thing is, people on the left might actually agree, though for very different reasons. They are upset by the perceived greed of the 1%, and the broad acceptance of torture and war as foreign-policy tools. In the end, the debate over morality more closely resembles two distinct monologues.
By: Democracy in America Blog, The Economist, March 2, 2012
Mitt Romney’s Extremist Agenda Often Overlooked
Watching video clips of Romney’s flip-flopping on just about every major issue is a tiring experience. But his lurid history of pandering to exploit the latest trends in political idiocy should not distract voters from the raw truth of what he stands for today, which is an all-out capitulation to the agenda of the vulture capitalists.
The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuval explains it well in her WaPo op-ed, “Extremist in Pinstripes.” Vanden Heuval reviews Romney’s extremist positions on social issues, immigration, increasing the military budget and notes his call to push the Supreme Court even further to the right with his appointments.
She provides a disturbing account of Romney’s blase certitude in support of draconian cuts in Pell grants, Medicaid and food stamps, children’s health programs and aid to people with disabilities to “give multinationals a tax holiday” and give millionaires a nearly $300K tax cut, and adds:
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Romney, as Mike Huckabee once famously noted, “looks like the guy who laid you off.” At Bain, he was the guy who fired you. In a review of 77 major deals that Bain capital did when Romney headed the firm, the Wall Street Journal found that “22% [of the businesses that Bain invested in] either filed for bankruptcy reorganization or closed their doors by the end of the eighth year after Bain first invested, sometimes with substantial job losses.” Of course, Bain produced remarkable returns for its investors, including Romney.
Romney’s flip-flopping proclivities are the easy target for commentators and pundits. But no one should be deluded by speculation that Romney will flip back toward moderate conservatism, if elected. As vanden Heuval argues,
…This isn’t the plan of a moderate. The conservative garb isn’t something Romney has donned for the primaries. These policies…are consistent with Romney’s background as a corporate raider. And as his fundraising shows, they play well in the plush offices of big finance where Romney made his fortune. He is a champion for the 1 percent, peddling a program that will ensure that working Americans bear the cost for the mess left by Wall Street’s extremes while the buccaneer bankers, corporate raiders and private equity gamblers are free to go back to preying on America.
Vanden Heuval’s article should provoke a sobering reassessment among those who have entertained the fantasy that Romney would govern as a moderate. As E. J. Dionne points out, chameleon Romney has proven highly adept as deluding his fellow Republicans across the party’s ideological spectrum that he reflects their views. Dems should not be so gullible, for there is every reason to believe his election would unleash the worst elements of vulture capitalism.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, January 11, 2012
“Not That Kind Of Conservative”: Do Republican Primary Voters Actually Prefer Moderates?
George H.W. Bush. Bob Dole. George W. Bush. John McCain. For all the talk about how Republicans are desperate for a conservative alternative to Mitt Romney — and the audition process that elevated Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum in turn — a look back at the men who’ve won the GOP nomination since Ronald Reagan left office suggests that maybe a majority of Republicans are happy to have a moderate as their nominee. On some issues, the Republican Party has moved to the right over time. Still, Republicans behave at the ballot box as if 1964 and 1980 were exceptional years when the conservative choices, Barry Goldwater and Reagan, won the nomination. More often, the conservative candidates lose, and while the losers are explained away by ticking off their particular flaws, the fact is that the more moderate alternatives have always been flawed too.
This year Mitt Romney won handily in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nate Silver has him leading in South Carolina. This despite the fact that no one would mistake him for a flawless candidate. But if Republican primary voters aren’t really as interested in nominating a conservative as is generally thought, what explains the conventional wisdom to the contrary? What mixes us up?
One place to begin is the thesis that most Republicans do want a conservative alternative, but they’re splitting their vote among a bunch of different choices. This is perhaps true, but misleading. A social conservative might prefer someone who is more conservative on abortion, like Rick Santorum. But if he drops out, the social con may decide to support Romney because he’s turned off by Rick Perry’s avowed desire to send troops back into Iraq and Ron Paul’s insistence on ending the Fed. He’s to Romney’s right on abortion, but to Perry’s “left” on foreign policy and Paul’s left on size of government. The moderate winds up being the best choice, which is to say, the one that most closely reflects his views on the whole spectrum of issues.
The label “conservative” tends to obscure the fact that the religious right, neo-cons, and fiscal conservatives diverge a lot in their attitudes about various matters, and the “most conservative” (here I mean farthest right) voice in each group tends to freak out all of the others. They all say they want a conservative, but confronted with actual choices, they wind up thinking to themselves, but not that kind of conservative, which is basically what Newt Gingrich meant when he stated that he couldn’t bring himself to support Paul if he’s the nominee.
There is also the fact that presidential elections are the moment in American politics when conservatives enjoy the fewest advantages. Think about it. In House elections, redistricting and safe seats has made it easier for folks farther right or left than the population as a whole to get elected. Fox News and talk radio cater to and amplify the voices of the niche conservative audience inclined to consume ideological media, not to moderate Republican voters. In contrast, presidential primaries encompass the whole pool of Republican Party voters, and more than usual, even the conservatives among them are concerned about electability. It’s no wonder that in some ways the process reveals the GOP to be more moderate than it does when it’s mouthpieces are firebrand House members or Rush Limbaugh or National Review.
Perhaps the GOP always has been and always will be inclined to nominate relative moderates, and conservatives only break through if they manage an exceptional mix of principle and charisma, and come along at exactly the right moment. By those metrics and others Goldwater and Reagan were candidates unusually well suited to the primaries in which they triumphed. This year Paul is the only Romney alternative who has managed to excite anyone for an extended period of time. And if that’s the choice, more Republicans than not will probably prefer the moderate.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 11, 2012
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