“Can The Voters Change The GOP?”: The Electorate Must Realize That The Radical Right Is The Real Culprit
The central issue in this fall’s elections could turn out to be a sleeper: What kind of Republican Party does the country want?
It is, to be sure, a strange question to put to an electorate in which independents and Democrats constitute a majority. Yet there is no getting around this: The single biggest change in Washington over the last five years has been a GOP shift to a more radical form of conservatism. This, in turn, has led to a kind of rejectionism that views cooperation with President Obama as inherently unprincipled.
Solving the country’s problems requires, above all, turning the Republican Party back into a political enterprise willing to share the burdens of governing, even when a Democrat is in the White House.
For those looking for a different, more constructive Republicanism, this is not a great year to stage the battle. Because of gerrymandering, knocking the current band of Republicans out of control of the House is a Herculean task. And most of the competitive seats in the fight for the Senate are held by Democrats in Republican states. The GOP needs to win six currently Democratic seats to take over, and it appears already to have nailed down two or three of these. Republicans are now favored in the open seats of South Dakota and West Virginia, and probably also in Montana.
Nonetheless, there is as yet no sense of the sort of tide that in 2010 gave a Republicanism inflected with tea party sensibilities dominance in the House. The core narrative of the campaign has yet to be established. Democrats seeking reelection are holding their own in Senate races in which they are seen as vulnerable.
And then there was last week’s House fiasco over resolving the refugee crisis at our border. It served as a reminder that Republican leaders are handcuffing themselves by choosing to appease their most right-wing members rather than pursuing middle-ground legislation by collaborating with Democrats.
The bill that House Speaker John Boehner was trying to pass last Thursday already tilted well rightward. It provided Obama with only a fraction of what he said was needed to deal with the crisis — $659 million, compared with the president’s request for $3.7 billion. It also included provisions to put deportations on such a fast track that Obama threatened to veto it. A White House statement said that its “arbitrary timelines” were both impractical and inhumane.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi happened to be meeting with a group of journalists when the bill collapsed. “In order for them to pass a bill, they had to make it worse and worse and worse,” she said, referring to Boehner’s efforts to placate members who have entered into an unusual cross-chamber alliance with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to foil even conservative legislation if they regard it as insufficiently pure. When the bill was pulled back, Pelosi observed: “They couldn’t make it bad enough.”
On Friday, the GOP leadership pushed the measure still further right and added $35 million for border states to get it passed at an unusual evening session — but not before Republicans themselves had complained loudly about dysfunction in their own ranks.
In the meantime, the Senate was paralyzed on the issue by filibusters and other procedural hurdles that have rendered majority rule an antique notion in what once proudly proclaimed itself “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
As the House was preparing to pass its bill, Obama told a news conference on Friday that GOP leaders were well aware that he’d veto it if it came to him and bemoaned the fact that “even basic, commonsense, plain vanilla legislation” can’t get through because Republicans fear “giving Obama a victory.”
Last week’s legislative commotion could change the political winds by putting the costs of the GOP’s flight from moderation into stark relief. House Republicans found themselves in the peculiar position of simultaneously suing Obama for executive overreach and then insisting that he could act unilaterally to solve the border crisis.
Pelosi, for her part, went out of her way to praise “the Grand Old Party that did so much and has done so much for our country.” Commending the opposing party is not an election year habit, but her point was to underscore that Republicans had been “hijacked” by a “radical right wing” that is not simply “anti-government” but also “anti-governance.”
On balance, Washington gridlock has hurt Democrats more than Republicans by dispiriting moderate and progressive constituencies that had hoped Obama could usher in an era of reform. The key to the election will be whether Democrats can persuade these voters that the radical right is the real culprit in their disappointment — and get them to act accordingly on Election Day.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, August 3, 2014
“Calling It What It Is”: Holder Sees Racism In Obama Opposition — He’s Right
Right-wing pundits are jumping all over Attorney General Eric Holder for daring to suggest on Sunday that “racial animus” plays a role in the “level of vehemence” that’s been directed at President Obama. They’re denouncing him for “playing the race card” and “stoking racial divisions.”
Who do they think they’re fooling?
The rhetoric is what’s hateful. Calling people out for it is not.
The racism Holder described has been obvious since the 2008 campaign, when Obama was portrayed as someone who was not a “real American” — a Muslim, a Kenyan, a communist, even a terrorist sympathizer.
Since then, an entire movement has been built around the thoroughly discredited notion that the president’s birth certificate is a fake. And that’s just the beginning.
Newt Gingrich has called Obama the “food stamp president” and referred to his “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.”
Rush Limbaugh has said Obama — and Oprah Winfrey, too, by the way — have reached the pinnacle of their professions only because they’re black. He added this week that “so-called conservative media types” praised Holder’s nomination only because he’s black.
Glenn Beck has said the president, whose mother was white, has a “deep-seated hatred for white people, or white culture.”
Conservative hero and former rock star Ted Nugent, who was invited to campaign with the GOP nominee for Texas governor, called the president a “subhuman mongrel.”
A Confederate flag was waved in front of the White House during last year’s “Million Vet March.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina screamed “You lie!” during the president’s address to Congress in September 2009. When has that happened to a president before?
All manner of overtly racist posters have been seen at tea party rallies, including one depicting the president as a “witch doctor.”
We’ve repeatedly seen stories about conservative politicians sharing racist jokes about Obama.
And, we’ve seen an explosive growth of radical-right groups, including armed militias, since Obama was elected, and repeated threats that violence is needed to “take our country back” from the “tyranny” of Obama. This is part of a backlash to the growing diversity in our country, as symbolized by the presence of a black man in the White House.
I grew up in rural Alabama during the Jim Crow years and lived through the civil rights movement, when white supremacists did everything they could, including committing violent atrocities, to turn back the tide of progress. And I’ve stared across the courtroom at some of America’s most vicious hatemongers — men like neo-Nazi Frazier Glenn Cross, who recently killed three people and once targeted me. I know racism when I see it.
No one, of course, is suggesting that merely disagreeing with Obama is evidence of racism. That’s clearly not true.
But we have a political party and a right-wing media machine that pander incessantly to the racist reactionaries in our society, often through code words. It’s been going on since Nixon implemented his “Southern strategy” of appealing to white resentment in the wake of the civil rights movement.
I wish it weren’t so. But it is simply undeniable. We should call it what it is.
By: Morris Dees, Founder, Southern Poverty Law Center; The Huffington Post Blog, July 17, 2014
“The Moderate Revolution In Kansas”: The Center Is Fighting Back And The Right Wing Is Getting Pretty Nervous
A surprising political revolt is now brewing in Kansas, one that could provide a model for breaking the stranglehold of the hard right on the Republican Party — if enough people join in.
Moderates and Tea Partiers have jousted for several years in Kansas, just as they have elsewhere, and the right wing has largely won, ousting moderates from school boards, county commissions, and the Capitol. But now the center is fighting back, summoning an aggressiveness that like-minded Republicans have rarely employed at the national level or in other states.
On Monday, 104 moderates did something unthinkable, banding into a group called Republicans for Kansas Values in order to endorse a Democrat, Paul Davis, in his campaign to oust Gov. Sam Brownback from office. The main reason was Mr. Brownback’s ruinous tax cuts, which, as The Times editorial board noted on Monday, have severely reduced the state’s revenues, leading to a credit-rating reduction and less money available for schools and roads.
“Kansas has not had that kind of tradition,” said Dick Bond, a Republican and former president of the Kansas Senate. “We value higher education. We value K-12. And we’re abandoning that in the name of some kind of extreme policy.”
But the group’s bill of particulars against Mr. Brownback — a mini-Declaration of Independence for moderates — goes far beyond what it calls a “reckless tax experiment” that actually raised middle-class taxes and pushing the state’s economy below all of its neighbors. It points out that the governor’s refusal to expand Medicaid had hurt Kansas hospitals and driven people out of rural counties. It accuses him of trying to end the state’s merit selection process for judges so that he could install his own appointees.
And most powerfully, it says he damaged the Republican party by purging those who disagreed with him — exactly the method favored by Tea Party leaders across the country.
“Brownback shrunk President Reagan’s ‘Big Tent’ Republican Party by joining with special interests to campaign against and beat Republicans who disagreed with his policies,” the group’s statement says. “Brownback’s extreme agenda makes Kansas appear intolerant and backward. Brownback’s hand-picked legislators have spent two straight legislative sessions focusing on social issues that sparked national negative press and embarrassed Kansas. Brownback’s Washington D.C.-style approach downgrades Kansas’ character and brings embarrassing headlines.”
This is tough stuff in a conservative state, and the far right is regrouping fast. One state legislator, noting the many former politicians in the group, said it had “raided the nursing home” for its members. Rick Santorum flew in this week to campaign for Mr. Brownback, and actually said “the future of the free world is at stake” in the governor’s re-election, because liberals — whom he compared to the “eye of Mordor” — were trying to destroy true patriots.
“The New York Times has no idea where Kansas is,” he said, according to the Wichita Eagle, “but they’ve written several articles hammering Sam Brownback, because Sam is a descendant of the American Revolution.”
When the hyperbole reaches the level of Tolkien, you know the right wing is getting nervous. Moderate Republicans have been silenced in state after state, too afraid of a vicious backlash to speak their minds. But now, coming from a very unexpected place, there is an example of courage to follow.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, The Editorial Page Editors Blog, The New York Times, July 16, 2014
“The Right’s Ahistorical Look At Global Turmoil”: According To John McCain, We Haven’t Invaded Enough Countries
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made yet another Sunday-show appearance yesterday and offered some historical perspective that stood out as interesting. Asked about the disagreement over foreign policy between Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), McCain replied:
“So I’m not particularly interested in getting between Senator Paul and Governor Perry, but I do believe that the things we’re seeing in the world today, in greater turmoil than at any time in my lifetime, is a direct result of an absence of American leadership.”
Now, for McCain, the “absence of American leadership” roughly translates to “we’re not engaged militarily in enough foreign countries,” so this is obviously easy to dismiss.
But to believe the world is in “greater turmoil” than at any time in McCain’s lifetime is an amazing claim. I suppose there’s some subjectivity to this – one observer’s turmoil may be another’s unrest – but John McCain was born in 1936.
I mention this because his lifetime includes the entirety of World War II and the beginning, middle, and end of the Cold War. McCain wants to talk about global “turmoil”? We can have a spirited chat about Hitler taking swaths of Europe while Japan invaded China. That’s “turmoil.” By comparison, today’s global stage is almost tranquil.
McCain added in the same interview, “I would argue that given conditions in the Middle East, this might be more dangerous than any time in the past.”
Really? Any time? Conditions are more dangerous now than during any Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iran-Iraq war, the Iranian revolution, the Egyptian revolutions, every Islamic uprising and civil war of the 1970s, and the rise of al Qaeda?
This is not to say the Middle East is a model of stability right now, but to say that it’s “more dangerous” than at “any time in the past” is a little over the top.
Let’s also note that McCain has made curious historical arguments like these before. In 2008, at the height of his presidential campaign, the senator said the conflict between Russia and Georgia was the first “serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War” – overlooking 9/11, both wars in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, two conflicts in the Balkans, multiple crises in Israel, Darfur, and the rise of a nuclear North Korea, among other things.
But it seems this general train of thought is nevertheless common. The Wall Street Journal reports today:
A convergence of security crises is playing out around the globe, from the Palestinian territories and Iraq to Ukraine and the South China Sea, posing a serious challenge to President Barack Obama’s foreign policy and reflecting a world in which U.S. global power seems increasingly tenuous. […]
The chaos has meant that the Obama administration finds itself in the middle of a second term reacting to rather than directing world events.
Remind me, when was this era in which U.S. officials were capable of “directing world events”? Here’s a hint: there was no such era. This is an ahistorical Republican talking point working its way into a purported news story.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 14, 2014
“The Rock Is Beckoning”: An Open Letter To Sarah Palin
Dear Ms. Palin:
I feel sorry for you. I truly do. It must be terribly frustrating to be so irrelevant. To have your rabble-rousing, race-baiting drivel limited to Fox’s Sean Hannity Show in your desperate, pathetic, never-ending quest for attention. You are, put simply, one of the most ignorant, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, hate-filled, polarizing individuals ever to hit the national political stage (thank you John McCain).
Your new video, in which you call for President Obama’s impeachment because of his “lawlessness,” is an unconscionable, unpatriotic piece of garbage. The level of disrespect, condescension, sarcasm and reality-butchering is astounding. To say that your fake-cutesy, sing-songy, snarky delivery is vomitous would be a colossal understatement. You’re also quite tone-deaf, comparing your suffering over his presidency to that of a “battered wife.” There really are no groups you won’t offend, are there?
Impeach Obama? For what, doing his job amid relentless Republican obstructionism and intransigence? For trying to keep government operating efficiently? For growing the economy? For creating millions of new jobs? For caring about 8-year-olds crossing the Mexican border alone? For wanting to find a practical, compassion solution to the immigration issue? For providing everyone health care? For trying to narrow the income inequality gap? For protecting women’s rights? For allowing people who love each other to marry?
That you, like that other heartless conservative Dick Cheney, even have a perch from which to still spew your venomous hate-speak, is unfortunate. No one, not even the Fox faithful, should be subjected to your incendiary bile. You’re a failed, disgraced politician who, despite becoming a humiliating punchline following the 2008 election, refuses to crawl back under your rock. Trust me: no one except Hannity, a few horny white Republican dudes and a smattering of their intellectually bankrupt women are interested in what you have to say.
Ssshhhh….hear that sound? It’s the rock beckoning….
By: Andy Ostroy, The Huffington Post Blog, July 10, 2014
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