Driving Ms. Bachmann: The Most Embarrassing Republican Presidential Candidates Of The Modern Era
For respectable Republicans, the embarrassment potential may be at an all-time high. The party is a year away from picking its next presidential candidate and never in the modern era has it faced a vacuum like this.
Sure, the odds are still strong that the GOP will ultimately settle on a “harmless enough” general election candidate — someone sufficiently generic and inoffensive to ensure that the party doesn’t fall far below its natural level of support in the fall of 2012. But the road from here to the convention looks unusually — and, if you’re a Democrat, comically — rocky for Republicans.
The party’s base — which nominated several utterly unelectable candidates in several high-stakes Senate races last year — is in revolt, thirsting for purity and likely to accede to a Romney or Pawlenty nomination only with reluctance. Before then, it figures to be tempted by an atypically large collection of red meat-spouting long shots: Michele Bachman, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, Rick Santorum, maybe even Sarah Palin or (why not?) Herman Cain — personally and politically polarizing extremists who validate a damaging stereotype of the Obama-era GOP. It’s not impossible that one of these ideologues will fare surprisingly well in one or more of the early nominating contests next year (most likely activist-dominated Iowa).
It is this possibility that makes 2012 potentially different from previous Republican contests, in which the party has generally — but not always — succeeded in keeping the embarrassments to a minimum. Here’s a look at the most embarrassing Republican candidates to be taken (at least somewhat) seriously by the media since 1980:
1. Rep. Phil Crane — 1980
The heir to Donald Rumsfeld’s old House seat, Crane came to Congress in 1969, a Goldwater campaign veteran made good. He spent the ’70s racking up one of the most conservative voting records in the House and, in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 White House bid, set out to run for the presidency himself in 1980. (His theory was that Reagan, because of age and his two failed bids for the GOP nod, would end up passing on ’80, leaving Crane to gobble up “New Right” support.)
Crane’s politics weren’t really more conservative than Reagan’s, but unlike the Gipper, he didn’t know how to mask his extremism with warmth and charm. Instead, he conformed to the popular image of a far-right whacko, purchasing (for instance) 30-minute blocks of time to air a speech in which he held up the Bible and quoted from it in an effort to establish America’s Christian roots. He also attracted unwanted attention when, at the height of the campaign, he was sued by Richard Viguerie, the direct mail pioneer, for unpaid bills.
More damaging, though, was the wrath of Bill Loeb, the notoriously vengeful publisher of New Hampshire’s largest (and most conservative) newspaper, the Union-Leader. Fearful that Crane’s presence in the race would hurt Reagan, Loeb skewered him in a series of front-page editorials, then commissioned a devastating story that used anonymous sources to portray Crane as a serial philanderer with a drinking problem. The story attracted national attention and helped Loeb achieve his goal: Crane finished a distant fifth in Iowa and won only 2 percent in New Hampshire. (Years later, he would publicly admit to a drinking problem and seek treatment.)
2. Pat Robertson — 1988
The pioneering televangelist’s candidacy was the logical consequence of the rise of the Christian right, which emerged as a force and embraced the Republican Party during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
But Robertson, the founder and president of the Christian Broadcasting Network, was a particularly kooky frontman for this movement. By the time he announced his candidacy for the ’88 GOP nod, he already had one false Armageddon prediction under his belt (1982 would be the year, he’d forecasted in ’76) and had also taken credit for using prayer to steer Hurricane Gloria away from New York City in 1985. As a candidate, he sought to present himself as a businessman more than a religious leader, bristling at suggestions that he had “followers” and accusing Tom Brokaw of religious bigotry for calling him a “televangelist” during one debate.
You can imagine, then, the profound embarrassment — and fear — that mainstream Republicans felt on the night of February 8, 1988, when Robertson finished 6 points ahead of Vice President George H.W. Bush to claim a shocking second place in the Iowa caucuses. Robertson quickly ran out of momentum — he finished dead last in New Hampshire a week later, behind even Pierre S. du Pont IV — and was blown out in South Carolina. But the Christian Coalition that he founded in the wake of his campaign played an instrumental role in creating the Republican Party that we know today.
3. Pat Buchanan — 1992 and 1996
Less than two months before announcing his challenge to Bush for the ’92 GOP nomination, Buchanan wrote a column offering advice to his party on how to win in the future: “Take a hard look” at the “portfolio of winning issues” being championed by … David Duke, the ex-Klansman who, in the fall of 1991, had won a place in Louisiana’s gubernatorial runoff (in which he was thumped by Edwin Edwards).
This was par for the course for Buchanan, who had also used his media platform to opine that women were “less equipped psychologically” than men to handle the business world and to defend accused Nazi war criminals — most notably John Demjanjuk. In the 1980s, he had also ridiculed third-world nations pushing for sanctions against apartheid South Africa, arguing that they were motivated by “racism and the resentment that failure always feels for success.”
Buchanan went on to fare alarmingly well in the ’92 New Hampshire primary, powered by the GOP electorate’s frustration with the economy and Bush’s broken “no new taxes” pledge. It was the high-water mark for Buchanan’s ’92 campaign, although it also helped him earn a prime-time speaking slot at the ’92 convention — a speech best remembered for Buchanan’s divisive declaration of “culture war” and his long-windedness, which knocked Ronald Reagan’s speech out of prime time.
Four years later, Buchanan gave the GOP an even bigger headache when he finished a close second in Iowa and then won New Hampshire, although his momentum was quickly arrested as a panicked party establishment rallied around Bob Dole.
(Note: Duke himself also sought the ’92 GOP nod, although he’s not included in this list on the grounds that — unlike the others — he was thoroughly isolated and shunned by the party’s establishment. No one respectable would touch him, not even Buchanan.)
4. Rep. Robert Dornan — 1996
A few highlights of the political career that preceded “B-1 Bob’s” absurd 1996 White House bid:
* On the House floor in 1985, he attacked fellow Rep. Tom Downey as “a draft-dodging wimp,” then grabbed the New York Democrat by his collar. Downey claimed that Dornan threatened him physically; Dornan said he’d merely been trying to straighten his tie.
* In 1993, he took the House floor to accuse President Clinton of giving “aid and comfort to the enemy” during the Vietnam War. He also branded the president “a flawed human being” and “a draft-dodging adulterer not fit to lace the boots” of America’s troops.
* In 1994, he outed fellow Rep. Steve Gunderson on the House floor, making reference to the “revolving closet door” on the Wisconsin Republican’s closet.
* During his 1992 House campaign, he bragged that “every lesbian spear-chucker in this country is hoping I get defeated.” And when Dornan was confronted by AIDS activists at a public event, his wife snapped, “Shut up, fag!”
* Court records made public in 1994 indicated that Dornan had been convicted and ordered to jail in 1996 for physically attacking his wife (although there was no record he’d actually done time). Dornan and his wife denied that any abuse had occurred and blamed the case on a drug problem she had at the time.
Dornan ran on the slogan “Faith, Family and Freedom” but struggled to raise money and assembled a staff that consisted primarily of family members. One of his final acts as a candidate came at a New Hampshire party dinner the weekend before that state’s primary. He literally begged the audience for sympathy votes, so that he would avoid the indignity of finishing with 0 percent. He didn’t get his wish.
5. Alan Keyes — 1996 and 2000
Described in one of Al Franken’s books as a “Reagan administration functionary,” Keyes entered politics in 1988, waging a hopeless Senate campaign against Democratic incumbent Paul Sarbanes in Maryland. He was trounced, but tried again four years later against Barbara Mikulski. He was slaughtered again, but this time he made national news — for taking the unusual step of giving himself a salary of $8,500 per month with campaign funds. A few years later, he set out to run for president.
Keyes ran on a platform of Puritanical morality, lashing out at America’s “licentious, self-indulgent culture,” lashing out at the Clinton administration and its “condom czars” and focusing almost obsessively on abortion. He also had this exchange with a local right-wing radio host, as reported by the Chicago Tribune:
Muller says slavery has been misconstrued by many blacks. “This whole slavery thing has been bastardized into ‘Oh, we were oppressed. Now we don’t have to do anything because of what happened 300 years ago.'” Keyes, who is black, agrees, saying the devastation imposed on black families by liberal government programs, such as welfare, has been worse than slavery.
By: Steve Kornacki, News Editor, Salon, March 31, 2011
Why Boehner Must Shut Down The Government
How should Republican leaders deal with the dilemma of being caught between a base that will view any budget deal with President Obama as a sellout and independent voters who are likely to turn on them if they shut down the government? Jonathan Bernstein thinks they should bite the bullet and cut the best deal they can, figuring they’ll get hit by the base no matter what:
what Boehner has to do is to convince Republican Members of the House that the hit they’re going to take from the right for compromising is inevitable. They’ll be seen as sellouts if they cut a deal before a shutdown. They’ll be seen as sellouts if they cut a deal after a six week shutdown. True believers will always be convinced that complete and total victory was just a week away if only the cowardly politicians had been willing to hang in there. They can’t win that game.
Not a bad argument. The counter is that it’s one thing to cut a deal with Obama, and another to be perceived as cutting that deal without really fighting. If Boehner shuts down the government and then cuts a deal, at least he’s demonstrated some willingness to go to the mat and fight, right? Bernstein is right that he’ll have angry Tea Partiers regardless, but I do think he needs to show that he’s fought the good fight. A deal with Obama is bad no matter what, but a deal without a shutdown looks like surrendering the fort without firing a shot.
The other quibble I have with Bernstein’s analysis is that I don’t think he’s really thinking about this the way Boehner is, or even should, be thinking about this. What is the downside to a shutdown? Republicans get less popular, have a lower chance to win the presidency in 2012, and maybe a higher chance of losing the House as well. What is the downside to cutting a deal? GOP backbenchers revolt against Boehner and depose him as Speaker of the House.
If I’m Boehner, I’m more worried about the guns pointed at my back then the guns pointed at my face. A shutdown increases the small chance that he goes from Speaker to Minority Leader in 2013, but a deal increases the chance that he goes from Speaker to (R-OH) in 2011. The right-wingers do not trust Boehner, and he has very little slack. He also lived through a series of purges and attempted purges in the late 1990s, always taking the form of purists complaining that the leadership had gone soft.
Boehner’s top priority is probably staving off internal revolt. That means shutting down the government.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 30, 2011
The High Price Of Rigidity: The GOP Wants A Government Shutdown
House Republicans have already won so much in this year’s federal budget standoff that they could easily declare victory and put an end to the maddening and dysfunctional cycle. Previous Congresses would have noticed that millions of people are still struggling in an economic downturn and tried to help, but Republicans have succeeded in shutting off that conversation.
They have won the philosophical war, compelling Democrats to agree to tens of billions in spending cuts. Yet that does not seem to be enough for the Republicans who now control the federal steering wheel.
With a hard deadline looming, talks to prevent a government shutdown have been stymied for a week because Tea Party members of the House have demanded everything: not just some of their cuts but almost all of them, and not just a reduction in spending but a reduction only in the programs they don’t like. Many are insisting Democrats also agree to nonbudgetary riders, like ending the financing of Planned Parenthood or health care reform.
They simply will not accede to anything that looks like a compromise with President Obama. Caught in this position, Speaker John Boehner knows the public is likely to blame Republicans for the pain of a shutdown, once it sees that the Democrats offered difficult compromises that his caucus rejected. That is the price he pays for riding to power on the backs of people who don’t understand that government cannot be built out of ideological rigidity.
If Mr. Boehner cannot persuade his members that the public does not want a government shutdown and will blame them, then much of the government will close its doors on April 8, when the current stopgap funding measure runs out. So far, the Republicans have wrung $10 billion in cuts from earlier deadlines, but their bill to butcher the current year’s budget with $61 billion in radical cuts was voted down in the Senate.
Democrats have put together a package of $20 billion in cuts, on top of the $10 billion already agreed to. They have not released the details, but officials say they could include some current spending and some mandatory programs, like agriculture subsidies. This package is likely to be far more painful than the last one and will almost certainly pull back the reins much further than is prudent when the economic recovery is still sputtering. But in the split-the-difference culture of Washington, it will get them halfway toward the Republican goal line, further than imaginable just a few weeks ago.
Does that mean the House will end the week-by-week bloodletting that is already hampering many federal agencies? So far the signs do not look promising. Republicans have told Democratic negotiators that the cuts can only come from their original, rejected bill. Many are still clinging to the ideological riders that will certainly draw a presidential veto. One way or the other, Tea Party lawmakers are about to learn a lesson in how government operates; the only question is whether the public must suffer for their education.
By: Editorial, The New York Times, March 29, 2011
Joe Scarborough And The Straw Man Problem
Joe Scarborough has an op-ed in Politico premised entirely on the false premise that left-wingers who once “condemned [President Bush] as an immoral beast who killed women and children to get his bloody hands on Iraqi oil” have now “meekly went along” with President Obama’s Libya intervention.
Now, there are all kinds of things wrong with this argument. For one, there are some massive differences in the two cases. Scarborough describes the Libya intervention as an “invasion,” but that’s quite a stretch given that no ground troops are involved. Libya is a multilateral response to an imminent massacre, while Iraq was neither. Third, and worst of all, those who most fervently opposed the Iraq invasion — the blood for oil folks described by Scarborough — are all opposed to the Libya intervention. Has he not been following the debate on this?
The whole failure of Scarborough’s argument points to one of my professional hobbyhorses, which is the need for opinion journalists to quote the people they’re criticizing. It’s a really simple step, but it’s absolutely vital, one that allows your readers to see if the belief you’re attacking is actually held by anybody influential. If Scarborough decided to find some examples of lefties who were wildly denouncing Bush as a wanton murderer of civilians driven by a lust to steal Iraqi oil who also supported the Libya intervention, he’d have quickly discovered that there aren’t any, and that his whole argument is based on a false premise.
Indeed, at the end of his op-ed, Scarborough does cite one real life-example — Katrina Vanden Heuvel, who he calls “one of the few liberals to take a principled stand.” But she’s not the exception. She’s just the one actual case study he bothered to look at.
Now, calling people out by name is sort of rude, and the most prestigious outlets of opinion journalism tend to shy away from it. I believe New York Times columnists are actually instructed not to argue with each other in print, which leads to these weird “Tell Joe I won’t pass the salt until he apologizes” indirect debates. It’s probably no surprise that a chummy guy like Scarborough would only want to name liberals he praises, while leaving the targets of his criticism unnamed. But this is a habit of opinion journalism that leads to terrible, straw man arguments.
By: Jonathan Chait, The New Republic, March 29, 2011
Is Birther Donald Trump A Democratic Sleeper Agent?
I’m becoming concerned that a certain political figure in the 2012 presidential field has a sinister, hidden agenda. We all like to laugh and be dismissive–but it’s increasingly hard to ignore the questions about his birth certificate. One has to ask: Is Donald Trump, seemingly a “birther” running for the GOP presidential nod, really an Obama sleeper agent?
Trump has been ratcheting up his embrace of birtherism–the spurious accusation that President Obama was born outside of the United States but has cleverly covered it up, in part by inducing the state of Hawaii to produce a fake birth certificate testifying to his U.S. origin. Trump upped the birther ante Monday morning on Fox News Channel:
This guy either has a birth certificate or he doesn’t. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, but I will tell you, it is turning out to be a very big deal. People are calling me from all over saying please don’t give up on this issue. If you weren’t born in this country, you cannot be president. You have no doctors that remember, you have no nurses — this is the President of the United States — that remember. Why can’t he produce a birth certificate? I brought it up just routinely, and all of a sudden, a lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether he was born in this country?
(As an aside, I love the idea that in 1961, when doctors brought a half-white, half-black baby into the world, they should have committed the moment to memory because “this is the President of the United States.”
Trump’s comments are grabbing a great deal of attention. David Frum, for example, wants to know whether Trump is nuts or just thinks GOP primary voters are stupid. Like I said at the top, I’m wondering if perhaps the Donald is really an Obama catspaw.
Republicans firmly grounded in reality have long groused that birtherism is a construct of Democrats, liberals, and the media, a–no pun intended–trumped up issue designed to make conservative look like nutty conspiracy theorists. Polls showing large numbers of GOPers doubting Obama’s origins seem to belie that, as do apparent dog-whistles by GOP leaders who dance around the birther question by treating it as something other than proven fact (“we should take the president at his word,” Michele Bachmann said last month) or refusing to call out the birthers (“it’s not my job to tell the American people what to think,” John Boehner demurred last month).
But with a GOP primary field composed of professional politicians who know better than to tread beyond winks, nods, and dog-whistles, who benefits the most from a GOP candidate willing to go full birther? With Trump in a presidential debate (the first one will be May 2) making birtherism his signature issue, the rest of the GOP field will be forced to weigh in definitively and either alienate the rabid base (the people who vote in Republican primaries and, according to one recent poll, are majority birther) or risk alienating centrist voters.
The Democratic National Committee’s opposition research department must be licking their collective chops. They couldn’t have invented a better sabotage candidate than Trump: Unserious enough to actually wave the bloody birth certificate, but wealthy and famous enough that he’s impossible to ignore.
Now, do I believe that Donald Trump is really a Democratic plant? It’s tempting to say that I’m just raising questions about the Donald in the same spirit that he is about the president. But I’d put it this way: This conspiracy theory requires as big a suspension of disbelief as does contemplating President Donald Trump.
Politico’s Ben Smith brings the kicker to the whole story. Trump made a big show Monday of releasing his own birth certificate in an effort to push the “issue.” One problem: He didn’t release a legally valid birth certificate, which would have the New York City Department of Health’s seal and the signature of the city registrar. Smith adds, tongue happily in cheek:
Trump’s mother, it should be noted, was born in Scotland, which is not part of the United States. His plane is registered in the Bahamas, also a foreign country. This fact pattern — along with the wave of new questions surrounding what he claims is a birth certificate — raises serious doubts about his eligibility to serve as President of the United States.
Hmmm, makes you wonder…
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, March 29, 2011
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