“The Eve Of Destruction”: Behind The GOP Curtain, The Year That Has Been, The Year That Is About To Be
It is almost impossible to find an establishment Republican in town who’s not downright morose about the 2013 that has been and is about to be. Most dance around it in public, but they see this year as a disaster in the making, even if most elected Republicans don’t know it or admit it.
Several influential Republicans told us the party is actually in a worse place than it was Nov. 7, the day after the disastrous election. This is their case:
The party is hurting itself even more with the very voters they need to start winning back: Hispanics, blacks, gays, women and swing voters of all stripes.
The few Republicans who stood up and tried to move the party ahead were swatted into submission: Speaker John Boehner on fiscal matters and Sen. Marco Rubio on immigration are the poster boys for this.
Republicans are all flirting with a fall that could see influential party voices threatening to default on the debt or shut down the government — and therefore ending all hopes of proving they are not insane when it comes to governance.
These Republicans came into the year exceptionally hopeful the party would finally wise up and put immigration and irresponsible rhetoric and governing behind them. Instead, Republicans dug a deeper hole. This probably doesn’t matter for 2014, because off-year elections are notoriously low-turnout affairs where older whites show up in disproportionate numbers. But elite Republican strategists and donors tell us they are increasingly worried the past nine months make 2016 look very bleak — unless elected GOP officials in Washington change course, and fast.
The blown opportunities and self-inflected wounds are adding up:
Hispanics. Nearly every Republican who stumbled away from 2012 promised to quit alienating the fastest-growing demographic in American politics. So what have they done since? Alienated Hispanic voters — again.
It is easy to dismiss as anomaly some of the nasty rhetoric — such as Rep. Don Young calling immigrants “wetbacks” or Rep. Steve King suggesting the children of illegal immigrants are being used as drug mules. But it’s impossible for most Hispanics not to walk away from the immigration debate believing the vast majority of elected Republicans are against a pathway to citizenship.
House Republicans are dragging their feet on immigration reform — a measure that most Republican leaders agree is essential to getting back in the game with Hispanic voters before the next presidential election. House leaders say there’s no chance they’ll bring up the broad measure that has passed the Senate. Instead, they plan a piecemeal, one-bill-a-month approach that is likely to suffocate comprehensive reform.
Some Republicans are praying that leaders will find a way to jam through something President Barack Obama can sign. But current signs point to failure. The House will be tied up all fall over fiscal issues — and there’s unlikely to be time to litigate immigration reform even if most members want to, which they don’t.
“If Republicans don’t pass immigration reform, it’ll be a black cloud that’ll follow the party around through the next presidential election and possibly through the decade,” warned Scott Reed, senior political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
African Americans. Republicans hurt themselves with other minorities by responding lamely — and, in some cases, offensively — to the Trayvon Martin case, and to the Supreme Court ruling that gutted Voting Rights Act protections.
“You can perform an autopsy until you’re blue in the face,” said Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chairman, now with Purple Nation Solutions. “But if the people you’re trying to reach have no faith or trust in the words you are saying, it doesn’t matter.”
It would be easy to dismiss Steele as bitter because he was forced out of the RNC and has feuded with his successor, Reince Priebus, since. But he has done something few Republicans have: risen to the top of American politics as a black Republican. On voting rights, Steele said, the party needs to actively deal with African-American complaints about voter suppression and impediments to voters’ registration. “We need to be saying: ‘We respect, yes, the rule of law. But we also respect your constitutional right to vote,’” he said. “We just can’t sit back and rely on, ‘Oh, gee, you know, we freed the slaves.’”
Steele was even more incensed about Republican reaction to the Martin case. “What African-Americans heard was insensitive,” he said. “Republicans gave a very sterile or pro forma response. There was no sense of even expressing regret or remorse to Trayvon’s mother.”
Republicans tell us privately that pressure from conservative media only encourages their public voices to say things that offend black audiences.
Gays. Polls show the Republicans’ traditional view is rapidly becoming a minority view in politics, but the party has done nothing this year to make itself more appealing to persuadable gay voters.
“We come off like we’re angry and frustrated that more of our fellow Americans aren’t angry and frustrated,” said a senior Mitt Romney campaign official who asked not to be named.
Republicans did show progress in the form of restraint, with many leaders offering a muted reaction to a pair of Supreme Court rulings related to same-sex marriage. In the past, many would have taken to the airwaves to condemn what they see as the crumbling culture around them. A number of top Republicans are counseling a more libertarian approach, letting people live their lives and letting states, or better the church, set the rules for marriage at the local level.
Swing voters. Republicans are in jeopardy of convincing voters they simply cannot govern. Their favorable ratings are terrible and getting worse. But there is broad concern it could go from worse to an unmitigated disaster this fall. Most urgently, according to a slew of key Republicans we interviewed, conservative GOP senators have got to give up their insistence that the party allow the government to shut down after Sept. 30 if they don’t get their way on defunding Obamacare.
The quixotic drive — led by Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) — is part of Rubio’s effort to make up with the conservative base after he was stunned by the backlash over his deal-making on immigration. Pollsters say the funding fight makes Republicans look even more obstructionist and causes voters to worry about the effect a shutdown would have on their own finances.
Whit Ayres of North Star Opinion Research, who has been drilling down on this issue for the conservative public-opinion group Resurgent Republic, said: “Shutting down the government is the one way that Republicans can turn Obamacare from a political advantage to a political disadvantage in 2014.”
By: Jim Vandehi and Mike Allen, Politico, August 16, 2013
“Ideology Is For Losers”: GOP Caucus And Primary Voters Are Only Going To Tolerate Chris Christie If He’s The Means To Their Ends
The more you listen to Chris Christie, the more you have to wonder if he’s the political equivalent of a catchy Top 40 song: sounds pretty good for a while, but gets tedious and even abrasive after you’ve listened to it twenty or thirty times.
Here’s a report on Christie’s most direct rap yet about the Republican Party’s future, at a closed RNC meeting, per CNN’s Peter Hamby:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie planted himself firmly in the Republican Party’s establishment wing Thursday with a pugnacious speech calling on his party to focus on pragmatism rather than ideology and crippling internal debates.
“We are not a debating society,” Christie told a lunchtime audience at the Republican National Committees summer meeting in Boston. “We are a political operation that needs to win.”
The speech marked Christie’s first-ever appearance at a meeting of the RNC.
Christie’s remarks, relayed to a reporter by GOP officials who attended the closed-press event, were interpreted by many here as another jab at Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, a potential rival for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Christie and Paul tangled earlier this summer after the New Jersey governor criticized Paul’s libertarian-tinged worldview as “esoteric” and “intellectual,” drawing a series of pointed rebukes from Paul and his allies.
“I am in this business to win. I don’t know why you are in it. I am in this to win,” Christie said at the RNC luncheon.
“I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors,” he said. “Now college professors are fine I guess. Being a college professor, they basically spout out ideas that nobody does anything about. For our ideas to matter we have to win. Because if we don’t win, we don’t govern. And if we don’t govern all we do is shout to the wind. And so I am going to do anything I need to do to win.”
By most accounts, Christie’s remarks were met with enthusiasm by the nearly 200 state GOP chairmen, staffers and party insiders who attend these quarterly meetings to plot election strategy and hunt for business.
Now there’s zero question “electability” is going to be Christie’s strong suit if he does run for president in 2016. He probably won’t have to keep reminding Republicans of that; they do read polls, even if they like to ignore the ones that tell them stuff they don’t want to hear. And he sure won’t have to remind the kind of people he was talking to at the RNC meeting, who probably spend a perilous amount of time imagining the power and money they will command if Republicans do seize total power in Washington.
If he’s smart, he’ll just stipulate that, and try to burnish his own conservative ideological credentials, just as his “pragmatist” predecessors John McCain and Mitt Romney did before their successful bids for the presidential nomination. Conservatives are not in the mood to be told their “ideas,” or their fantasies of a nation where unions don’t exist and “job-creators” walk tall and those people stop being able to trade votes for federal benefits, are a lot of egghead vaporizing. The critical bulk of Republican caucus and primary voters are only going to tolerate Christie if he’s the practical means to the ends defined by people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan. If he has contempt for those ends, then all the favorable poll numbers in the world won’t save him. But you get the sense that contempt is one emotion Chris Christie has a real hard time disguising, and that could be his undoing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal August 16, 2013
“Misleading Others And Lying To Themselves”: Why John Boehner Has To Keep Making Crazy Threats
You probably read yesterday about the efforts of John Boehner and the Republican leadership in the House to convince the rank-and-file members that shutting down the government until Obamacare is defunded is a Bad Idea, and not a Brilliant Political Maneuver. Robert Costa’s account in the National Review has the basic narrative. It looks, now, like Boehner has succeeded in defusing the shutdown threat. All he had to do was promise something worse. Now we are going to not raise the debt ceiling instead.
As Jonathan Chait points out, replacing the shutdown threat with a default threat is actually much crazier and more potentially disastrous. But Boehner couldn’t get Republicans to agree to just give up on defunding Obamacare this year. He had to promise to exchange their one crazy plan to do so with another one that will go into effect later. And when it is time for that one to go into effect, he will need to find something else to distract them for a little while, until the next crazy plan is ready to go. As Brian Beutler says, we’ve seen this play out over and over again. Boehner has to promise to let Republicans do some apocalyptic thing later in order to get them to avoid doing some apocalyptic thing now. So far we’ve avoided an apocalypse.
But the people Boehner is trying to deal with here don’t see any of these threats as particularly apocalyptic. They don’t really see anything at all that might contradict their ideological stances. The House members Boehner’s trying to walk back from the ledge don’t read the Times or the Post. They don’t care what Brookings or the CBO or CRS say. They believe every “nonpartisan” or “objective” information source to be a part of the vast liberal conspiracy, and they rely for their facts and predictions strictly on sources explicitly aligned with the conservative movement. And those sources are just telling them crazy, untrue things, all the time.
That’s Boehner’s problem: He’s trying to ease his members into the real world, where defunding Obamacare is impossible as long as Obama is in the White House, and where attempts to do so via incredibly unconventional means could have disastrous consequences. What makes his job more difficult is that this reality isn’t acknowledged by most of the conservative organizations his members, and his party’s voters, exclusively follow.
Take Heritage, for years the most influential conservative think tank (it is still in the top five, depending on how you categorize advocacy groups like FreedomWorks). Heritage has been attempting to convince Republicans that a shutdown wouldn’t be such a big deal. Polls commissioned by Heritage say a government shutdown wouldn’t cause anyone to lose their seats, so have at it! The poll, by the way, was conducted entirely in Republican or Republican-leaning House districts.
Now, the venerable Heritage Foundation isn’t saying this. The poll, and the shutdown encouragement, were issued by “Heritage Action for America,” the 501(c)(4) group founded as Heritage’s sister organization in 2010, to take advantage of the new post-Citizens United “almost anything goes” rules for supposed “social welfare” organizations. “Think of it as the Heritage Foundation with teeth,” Betsy Woodruff said in the National Review. So far Heritage Action has been using those teeth to drag the GOP into the world of right-wing fantasy, in which the Farm Bill must be rejected because it does not cut food stamps enough, and the border “surge” amendment to the immigration reform bill must be opposed because $38 billion worth of fences and agents aren’t enough.
For years, the Heritage Foundation’s mission was to craft conservative policy ideas that would both be possible to implement and be broadly popular. School vouchers and welfare reform and tax cuts are all ideas within the realm of the politically possible, and they are also all ideas that have polled quite well at various times. This was effective: Reagan and George W. Bush’s domestic agendas came largely prepackaged by Heritage. But now the organization is using its lobbying arm to just demand total fealty, damn the consequences, to the most extreme form of conservatism possible. That is something of a shift. But it’s a shift the movement has seemingly embraced in the Obama era. Now even supposedly “sober” and “grown-up” conservatives argue that breaching the debt ceiling wouldn’t be so bad — may even indeed be pretty good depending on how you look at it! — and work to convince Republicans that the way to handle demographic change is with strict immigration limits and the militarization of the border, combined with making the party even more dependent solely on white votes.
This is not a left-winger pining for the days of Republican “moderation.” Heritage and the National Review were always very conservative. They were just realistically conservative. Professional conservatives graduated some time ago from misleading others to lying to themselves.
If you want evidence, look at the rapturous praise that greeted the publication of “American Betrayal” by Diana West, a book that argues that … McCarthy was right about everything and that the FDR administration was a puppet regime for Stalin, and that we purposely delayed winning World War II so that the Soviets could have more of Europe when it was finished. The book is just untrue, start to finish. Conservative historian Ronald Radosh — writing in the online publication of David Horowitz, a man who is not unfriendly to wild conspiracy theories about leftists — patiently and at length knocked down nearly every single one of its claims in a review. The book is so silly that Radosh planned to ignore it, but he couldn’t once he saw how the movement had fallen for it:
But I changed my mind after seeing the reckless endorsements of its unhinged theories by a number of conservative individuals and organizations. These included the Heritage Foundation which has hosted her for book promotions at a lunchtime speech and a dinner; Breitbart.com which is serializing America Betrayed; PJ Media which has already run three favorable features on West; Amity Shlaes, who writes unnervingly that West’s book, “masterfully reminds us what history is for: to suggest action for the present”; and by conservative political scientist and media commentator Monica Crowley, who called West’s book “A monumental achievement.”
Hey, there’s Heritage again! And Amity Shlaes, who wrote a book about how FDR made the Depression worse with liberalism. That book didn’t really coherently build an economic case against Keynesianism but because it had a thesis conservatives liked it quickly became popular, and she has been writing for Forbes and the Wall Street Journal ever since. (And Bloomberg View, for some reason.) This West book is just another step away from reality, into the sweet embrace of fantasy. FDR didn’t just make the Depression worse, he also surrounded himself with Stalinists! The far right has been pushing this shit for decades, obviously. It used to be the mainstream right’s job to make sure it only traveled as far as was politically expedient. Now they lap it up themselves.
This is why Boehner is having so much trouble. He can’t live entirely in this wonderful fantasy world. He has to actually raise the debt ceiling and make sure essential government services get funded. All the institutions designed to make his life easier, to corral the voters, activists and even legislators into supporting the agenda and ensuring the future success of the Republican Party, are all too busy make-believing about the 1930s and convincing themselves that they can defeat Obamacare if they simply want to bad enough, to be of any assistance.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, August 15, 2013
“Hiding From Town-Hall Hollering”: GOP Now In Awkward Position Of Disappointing Far-Right Activists They Worked So Hard To Rile Up
About a month ago, the House Republican Conference produced “exceptionally detailed” guides for their members on how best to survive the lengthy August recess. Party officials offered some rather remarkable advice in the “planning kit,” including “planting questions” so local events remain on message.
Of course, that assumes lawmakers will actually host local events in the first place. The New York Times reports today that this summer, many members of Congress have suddenly lost their interest in town-hall forums.
Though Republicans in recent years have harnessed the political power of these open mic, face-the-music sessions, people from both parties say they are noticing a decline in the number of meetings. They also say they are seeing Congressional offices go to greater lengths to conceal when and where the meetings take place. […]
With memories of those angry protests still vivid, it seems that one of the unintended consequences of a movement that thrived on such open, often confrontational interactions with lawmakers is that there are fewer members of Congress now willing to face their constituents.
A unnamed Senate Republican aide told the NYT, “Ninety percent of the audience will be there interested in what you have to say. It’s the other 5 or 10 percent who aren’t. They’re there to make a point and, frankly, to hijack the meeting.”
I don’t want to sound unsympathetic. I’ve never worked for a member of Congress, but I imagine it’s quite frustrating when you go to the trouble of organizing an event and “planting questions,” only to see some local troublemakers derail your plans.
Of course, I’d remind these lawmakers that democracy can be messy, and that hiding from constituents doesn’t seem especially healthy.
The Times piece doesn’t quantify the observation, so it’s hard to say with confidence whether there’s been a significant drop in the number of town-hall discussions or if this is just something “people from both parties say they are noticing.” Once the recess ends, it’d be interesting to see an official tally to bolster the point — counting up all of the meetings held by all of the members, and comparing the totals to previous years.
But if the argument is based on a real trend, it’s worth considering in detail why, exactly, members who used to love town-hall meetings suddenly changed their mind.
It’s easy to blame annoying loudmouths who show up and cause trouble, but I find it hard to believe this is a new phenomenon.
Rather, I think there are two other angles to this. The first is that the Republican Party base is starting to push for things Republican Party lawmakers don’t want to deliver — a government shutdown, national default, impeachment, hearings into the president’s birth certificate, a special committee to investigate Benghazi conspiracy theories — and town-hall forums put GOP officials in an awkward position of disappointing the far-right activists the party has worked so hard to rile up.
The second is the flip-side: the Republican Party base is pushing for extremism, many Republican officials are going along, and invariably someone catches this on video.
Note, for example, that three GOP members of Congress have embraced the birther conspiracy theory in the last two weeks — and in each instance, they were speaking at a town-hall forum, being egged on by birther constituents.
In other words, we’re looking at a dynamic in which Republicans (a) will be pressed to say something stupid; or (b) will go ahead and say something stupid.
Is it any wonder so many members are hiding?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 13, 2013
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