“The Death Of The Swing Voter”: The Dominant Fact Of American Politics Is That Nobody Is Changing Their Mind About Anything
Here’s a strange thought to chew on a year before the presidential election: The votes of 95 percent of Americans likely to cast ballots are already determined. People who lean conservative will vote for any Republican who emerges from the scrum (with the possible exception of the divisive Donald Trump). Ditto for people who lean liberal. New research by Michigan State political scientist Corwin Smidt confirms that the percentage of voters who are truly “independent,” swinging from party to party, has plunged from 15 percent in the 1960s to just 5 percent today. Crossing over party lines to vote for the other tribe’s presidential candidate has become unimaginable. As Jonathan Chait put it this week at New York: “The dominant fact of American politics is that nobody is changing their mind about anything.”
It wasn’t always this way. For much of the latter half of the 20th century, there were liberal-leaning Republicans and conservative-leaning Democrats. It was not impossible to find common ground. Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton both actively sought the votes of people who traditionally vote for the other party, and enjoyed great popularity partly as a result. But since 2004, polarization on immigration, climate change, abortion, religion, and social issues has become so acute that every presidential election seems to represent a major turning point, with the very definition of our nation at stake. Polls suggest that the gulf between the two parties is actually widening. Republicans loathe Hillary Clinton as much as they do Barack Obama; Democrats see Trump and Ben Carson as wackos and frauds, and have only slightly less contempt for the rest of the field. So here’s a safe if depressing prediction: The new president John Roberts swears in on Jan. 20, 2017, will be very quickly despised and distrusted by roughly 45 percent of the nation. Is this a democracy, or a dysfunctional family?
By:Wlliam Falk, The Week, November 13, 2015
“Poppy Speaks Out At Last — Too Little, Too Late”: The American People Are Still Paying The Price
If only “Poppy” had quit in 1992, after one White House term, then the 41st president’s fruit would not be so bitter. George Herbert Walker Bush would have dined out on German reunification and the multinational coalition in the first Gulf War — a desert cakewalk. Through no fault of his own, the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended on his watch, and that should be enough for any man pushing 70.
“I didn’t finish the job,” Bush I said. He’s now 91.
Out on the stump, the monumentally ambitious president found he could not connect to the American people. A jolly good fellow who wrote a ton of thank-you notes, he went as far as China and Langley for the blue-chip resume, always a team player who never had “the vision thing.”
Earlier, in 1988, he won as Ronald Reagan’s chosen understudy. But like many men of his Ivy League WASP war hero mold, he could not speak straight to the heart of people at home. Not to save his political life. His speech often sounded strangled.
A new biography, an elegant volume composed by author and presidential historian Jon Meacham, is titled Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush. It’s based on the former president’s diaries and revealing chats, often at the family compound on the Maine coast.
The result of that sharing is the most generous portrait that the former president, nicknamed “Poppy” since prep school, could hope for. Meacham’s work is written in a gentlemanly spirit, just as his American Lion book on the gruff general and president, Andrew Jackson, glowed. For that he won the Pulitzer Prize. (Meacham once deftly edited a magazine piece of mine.) Meacham excuses Bush’s mean moments in political combat as untrue to his code. (The 1988 campaign was not pretty.) Nor does he pass judgment on Bush’s loyal service to President Richard M. Nixon.
Bush realized late there was no way to win against the young Bill Clinton, who could coax the stars out of the sky. The generational contrast was stark. We learn that Bush confided to his diary that he felt the war-high in his approval rating was thin ice. The future won; the past lost. Bush had been schooled and worked in exclusively male institutions; Clinton was educated in co-ed settings and married another Yale Law School graduate. (Barbara Pierce Bush dropped out of Smith College to marry Poppy.)
Now it turns out, tragically, Poppy’s speech troubles extended to his own firstborn son George W. Bush as wily Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney — who pushed the nation down the path of war in Iraq. More than most, the Bushes have played their family dramas out in public, at our expense. The American people are still paying the bill — and so are Iraq, Syria and other countries bathed in blood. The show was not even fun to watch.
The Bushes are not just genteel from a long New England line. Their manners mask a cutthroat bunch — jocks who don’t crack books much — when they aren’t writing adoring notes to fellow Bushes. Winning and loyalty are cherished, whether it’s horseshoes or the Florida presidential contest in 2000. They have their men, like lifelong friend James Baker, always there to help in a pinch. In Florida, with brother Jeb Bush as governor, the cliffhanger was almost a cosmic family thank-you note to opponent Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president — whom Poppy had once referred to as a pair of “bozos.” (Now he and Clinton are tight.)
Cheney’s war-mongering as his son’s vice president offended Poppy; building up his own power base was the last thing he would have done as Reagan’s No. 2. Bush, ever the good team player, found Cheney’s aggression a terrible influence. Yet Poppy had hired Cheney to be his secretary of defense and so — well, it was all in the tribe. As a seasoned foreign policy hand, Poppy knew the “axis of evil” language used by his son was trouble. But he never spoke “mano a mano” to his son, as columnist Maureen Dowd noted.
So why not say something at the time to us, the American people? It’s clear: We’re not their kind, dear.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Featured Post, The National Memo, November 13, 2015
“The Poor Are Bad And Irresponsible People”: The Grotesque Moral Atrocity Of Blaming The Poor For Being Poor
The Republican Party has long struggled with how to package its blatantly pro-rich policy portfolio of top-heavy tax cuts and deregulation. Such things are deeply unpopular — even self-identified Republicans are divided on whether the rich pay their fair share of taxes — but the GOP’s wealthy donor class demands them.
Thus far in the 2016 presidential race, candidates have basically landed on the George W. Bush formula: Sweeten your handouts to the wealthy with far smaller ones for the rest of Americans, and sell it with utterly preposterous promises of 50 zillion percent growth. Jeb Bush promises a growth rate not achieved since FDR started his term at the very bottom of the Great Depression and ended it at the peak of World War II mega-spending. Donald Trump promises half again as much as that.
Marco Rubio has one small change from the usual formula. Sure, he’s got the typical titanic handouts for the rich — incredibly, including the total abolishment of the capital gains tax. But he’s also got new welfare spending for middle-class families. However, in a sad demonstration of the conservative mindset, the poor are deliberately excluded from Rubio’s plan.
Here’s how Rubio’s new welfare benefit works: It’s a non-refundable tax credit of up to $2,500 for people with children — meaning unlike the Earned Income Tax Credit, it gives nothing to people who already have no federal tax liability. This means that the average lower-middle-class family — as Matt Bruenig calculates, ironically including households like the one Rubio grew up in — would receive nothing whatsoever from the credit.
Cutting out the poor is surely intentional, and the reason is obvious: Many conservatives basically think the poor are bad and irresponsible people who have made stupid, disgusting choices — particularly having kids outside of marriage — that put them in the place they are today. Hence, giving the poor welfare will merely short-circuit the process of bourgeois norm-formation at the root of their actual problems. Government handouts will just turn the poor into shiftless parasites.
If you spend much time in conservative comment sections, or among the #tcot crowd, then this idea will be extremely familiar. But even high-minded policy elites will own up to it on occasion. Robert Stein, the original creator of Rubio’s tax credit, told me it is “not designed to encourage fertility in the poor over and above what we already do.” W. Bradford Wilcox, another conservative thinker, wrote that he made a similar tax credit proposal non-refundable to “reduce the possibility that an expanded [child tax credit] might encourage single-parenthood.” Charles Murray has written several books wholly premised on poor-blaming, the most influential of which was probably 1984’s Losing Ground, which argued for abolishing welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, housing subsidies, and disability insurance (a tiny fraction of which might be replaced).
Indeed, until fairly recently, poor-blaming was mainstream Democratic Party thinking, too. Murray’s book was hugely influential on the right, but Democrats embraced it as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton said in an interview that Murray’s analysis was “essentially correct,” recounting how a classroom of children once agreed with the idea that welfare would increase single parenthood. (I should note that while he pummeled the very poor, to his credit President Clinton also passed a sizable expansion of the EITC, which boosted benefits for poor people a bit higher on the income ladder.) Until the early 2000s, Hillary Clinton would routinely say similar things, boasting about how after welfare reform, recipients were “no longer deadbeats,” or that they had transitioned “from dependency to dignity,” as Buzzfeed News reports.
Now to be fair, Bill Clinton noted that while he agreed with Murray’s prediction about policy mechanics, whether it would be morally correct to starve people out of single motherhood was the more important question. But it turns out Murray was wrong about both points, as he was about just about everything else in his book. Welfare reform did nothing to halt the long decline of marriage, which has been steadily eroding for decades, nor did it decrease the rate of single motherhood. On the contrary, as is seen in many other developed nations, a big fraction of children are now born to cohabiting couples who are neither married nor poor.
Welfare reform, in fact, didn’t do much but snatch money from very poor families with children, increasing the fraction of people living in extreme poverty by 150 percent.
Many conservatives and ’90s-vintage Clintonites imagine that most poor people are an unchanging core of working-age adults who are too busy having constant unprotected sex to go out and get jobs, but in reality, over 80 percent of them are either children, disabled, students, or involuntarily unemployed, constantly churning in and out of poverty. These people are poor because they generally can’t work. In a purely capitalist economic system, such people will always fall through the cracks. Neither work requirements for cash benefits nor Paul Ryan’s goofy “life plan” paternalism will conjure up jobs for 5-year-olds or the seriously mentally ill.
It’s also important to note that traditional welfare was a small program targeted at the very poor — the rest of the welfare state, notably Social Security (by far the largest anti-poverty program), Medicare, and Medicaid, has survived largely intact. So while welfare reform was a grotesque moral atrocity, it didn’t much affect the ongoing war on poverty, which has been a big, if incomplete, success.
But welfare reform does make a good test case. We can predict what will happen if Rubio gets to fulfill his desire to “reform” the rest of the welfare state along Clintonesque lines: The number of people in poverty will explode. And after that, conservative policy hacks will construct convoluted theories about how a decline in traditional marriage norms or something is to blame. The point, always, is to justify and deepen the existing social hierarchy.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, November 3, 2015
“Scandalizing Hillary”: If The First Time Is Tragedy, Then The Second Time Is…
With a self-proclaimed socialist running a credible campaign for president, perhaps the time has come to revive Karl Marx’s wittiest aphorism – although his pungent quip is relevant to Hillary Clinton, not Bernie Sanders.
At the outset of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, the young revolutionary said Hegel had once observed that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
That piercing insight can be applied to the “Clinton scandals,” now playing again, courtesy of the Congressional Republicans and especially the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Chaired by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), that committee is hardly the first on Capitol Hill to investigate, at great length and expense, a series of vague accusations against Bill and/or Hillary Clinton and/or various staffers and/or associates. (Indeed, it is the seventh Congressional committee to investigate this particular set of vague accusations concerning the former Secretary of State, with none of the earlier probes finding any evidence of wrongdoing by her in the consulate attack on September 11, 2012.)
Back in 1994, just before the Republicans gained control of Congress in the midterm elections, Newt Gingrich gloated that his agenda as Speaker of the House would include multiple investigations of the Clinton administration, the President, the First Lady, and all their friends and associates. He wasn’t kidding. Whitewater? Definitely. Travelgate? Certainly. Filegate? Absolutely. Even those obviously fabricated tales implicating the president in cocaine smuggling at a tiny Arkansas airstrip called Mena? Of course!
While the national press corps treated all those farcical “investigations” as matters of the utmost gravity, even a cursory glance at the underlying facts would have quickly showed that there was nothing to investigate (as Gene Lyons and I explain in considerable detail in our free ebook, The Hunting of Hillary).
Whitewater was a defunct land deal that cost the Clintons about $45,000 and ended long before his election as president. Travelgate was an inter-office dispute of no consequence to anyone, except the traveling press corps that had enjoyed favors from a few White House employees. Filegate was a complete fake, based on a misreading of a list of former staffers. And no, there was never any evidence that Clinton knew about drug trafficking at Mena. But a presumably sane Republican Congressman from Iowa named Jim Leach pretended to believe it for a while, anyway.
Still these official hoaxes dragged on for months and years, courtesy of the Republican majority and an independent counsel appointed by Republican judges (a position happily eliminated from the statute books when its enabling legislation finally expired). Their aim was blatantly political, even though nobody in the GOP leadership was stupid enough to brag about driving down Clinton’s poll numbers. And they all ended with nothing to show for the millions of taxpayer dollars expended. In fact, the following midterm elections saw the most prominent figures on the Senate Whitewater Committee – Alfonse D’Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina – abruptly ousted from their seats.
If Whitewater wasn’t quite tragedy, despite the damage inflicted on many innocent people in Arkansas, #Benghazi/email is assuredly farce. Not only has Rep. Kevin McCarthy exposed the scam with his juvenile bragging on Fox News Channel, but now a second Republican member, Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) has confirmed that the Benghazi committee was “designed” to “go after…an individual, Hillary Clinton.”
According to the New York Times, the committee’s members and staff occupy their time with a “wine club” and a “gun-buying club,” while issuing subpoenas to Clinton’s friends and associates – and failing to discover anything of consequence about that incident in Benghazi. Gowdy likes to claim that he uncovered Clinton’s use of a private email server – as used by many public officials, including her predecessor Colin Powell – but even that fact, obviously known to many in the Obama administration, had been revealed by a Romanian hacker long before the committee was appointed.
At the first Democratic debate, Sanders turned to Clinton and declared that the American people “are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails.” Laughing, she agreed. Nevertheless the damned emails will return on October 22, when Clinton appears before the Benghazi committee for a full day in open session to answer the committee’s questions, and say a few words about the committee and its masterminds.
As that date approaches, let’s hope this partisan burlesque, at the very least, provides a few more laughs before its inevitably ignominious conclusion. We’ve already spent more than $4 million in tax revenues on its production, and we’ll never get that money back.
By: Joe Conason, Editor in Chief, Editors Blog, Featured Post, The National Memo, October 15, 2015
“Burning Down The House”: Newt Gingrich’s Mean-Spirited Republican Party Lives On In Donald Trump And The House GOP
This is the House that Newt Gingrich built as speaker, in front of us, still alive and well. The house that Donald Trump is building for us all will feel a lot like Newt’s, but more palatial, with more gold “TRUMP” signs all over.
Trump’s leading presidential candidacy is no fluke, but the direct result of Gingrich’s fiery ascent to House speaker in the 1994 Republican revolution. Fueling each: angry white men who feel disenchanted by the political order. They make a potent force, and the rest of us should beware and prepare.
The House that Newt built in 1995 was full of angry white Republican men, the majority that ran on the so-called “Contract with America.” I saw the whites of their eyes in the Speaker’s Lobby off the floor. As a rookie reporter, I liked to ask them to tell me their favorite points of the contract – if they even remembered them. Often, they didn’t.
Policy was not their strong point, as they stormed the house of American democracy. Many in the new majority were from the South and Midwest. Gingrich personally recruited them to be candidates.
One other thing stood out: They did not accept the constitutional authority of the president. Especially not Bill Clinton. They came loaded for Clinton – the fire of their fury daily stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who was honored as the class of 1994 mascot at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Yeah, they lavished love on one of the best haters of our time. It was remarkable to witness.
John Boehner, the shallow House speaker who’s stepping down soon, was a lieutenant in Newt’s army, which came to power 20 years ago. He was more than just a placeholder for Gingrich’s Republican revolution; he supported its churlish know-nothingness toward immigrants and women’s rights, and its insurrections against the president – this time, Barack Obama. The press tends to paint him as a sympathetic son of an Ohio “barkeep,” but he’s just one of the boys.
The wind blowing the aggressive Trump into his confounding first place in the Republican primary trails? It’s all in that tornado in November 1994. Overnight, the House and the Senate changed hands to Republican control. The sea change was stronger in the House. It was remarkable to witness and worth remembering.
Brazen and mean-spirited, the House class of 1994 came to Washington ready to burn down the House. An anti-government force, many slept in their congressional offices. It’s a charming Republican custom and another way to disrespect Washington. As Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who almost became speaker, would tell you: Don’t ever act like you belong here, to this House.
McCarthy got consumed by the beast Newt started: The House Republicans seem to hate governing so much that they can’t govern themselves. Meanwhile, Trump still sails on the winds of rage.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, October 13, 2015
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