“Yep, It’s A Problem”: Chris Christie Is A Bit Of A Hothead
We all know Chris Christie is a bit of a hothead. I mean, it’s a bit like saying a hothead is a bit of a hothead. It’s not observation but truism. Republicans love him or loved him for it. And Democrats started to too because his blow ups don’t all follow ideology. There was this time back in 2011 when he flipped out at a reporter for questioning whether a Muslim-American judge he’d appointed to the bench might be a security risk or sympathetic to al Qaeda.
Then there was Sandy. Republicans were irate; Dems cheered. What it all really comes down to is that in addition to being a very big man Christie is clearly a big-hearted man. I don’t mean that in the sense that he’s necessarily a great guy in every respect. But he doesn’t do artifice well. He has his emotions on his sleeve. And on his lapel and his pants and his hat if he’s wearing one. He’s just all out there in the 24/7 run of performance art called being Chris Christie.
But this calling the “hack” doctor thing strikes me as a big deal. Not in the sense of the fate of the republic being at stake but in the sense of Christie’s future above the rank of governor.
Here’s what TPM Reader JL just wrote in …
Christie never had the remotest shot at the nomination. At least not after Sandy. But he had a shot at making some noise. Not anymore I suspect. And I say that as something of a fan.The thing is that to take CC seriously as a prez candidate you have to believe that his anger is an asset that he deploys deliberately and skillfully. Which often appears to be the case. But if it starts to look like the anger controls him rather than the other way around, his appeal really plummets.
I suspect the ill advised phone call was a pretty big deal. If I were he, I’d be working overtime on damage control.
This strikes me as exactly right. Calling this women up and berating her over the phone is the sign of someone whose anger has the better of him and lacks impulse control.
Governors don’t have armies or security services. So if they’re a bit nuts or reckless it’s not that big a deal. People evaluate presidents very, very differently.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013
“Waiting For The Reckoning”: Inside The Republican Civil War
TPM Reader JB (a former GOP staffer if I remember right) doesn’t think either side of the current GOP struggle has reckoned with the first decade of this century …
I don’t think I rely on analysis dripping with the smugness and self-satisfaction your correspondent NS displays.
Instead, let’s eschew the pop psychology jargon and look at the public record. Both the Tea Party types and the big GOP donors represented by Karl Rove were fully on board with just about everything the Bush administration said or did. For all their zeal now, the only major policy issue on which Republicans now aligned with the Tea Party ever clashed with Bush was immigration reform — for which Bush himself, remember, didn’t actually fight that hard.
Neither side in this putative civil war has been willing to reckon honestly with the consequences of the Bush administration for the country (substantively) or the Republican Party (politically). Both do their best to present their views to the public as if the last Republican President had never existed. This has left both groups of activists somewhat unmoored; in politics, you talk ideology and principles when you can’t brag about accomplishments, because voters are a lot better at relating the latter to their own lives.
Since neither the Tea Party types or the big donors and the campaign operatives working for them are thinking of repudiating a Republican administration that lost two wars and wrecked the economy, they are left to air their differences on issues no one besides campaign junkies cares about. The self-styled conservatives complain that Rove and his people say mean things about them; the moneybags wing is dedicated to recruiting candidates who will avoid gaffes. Big deal.
Republicans in the 1930s and Democrats in the 1980s both resisted strongly the idea that their respective parties had earned defeat at the polls. In each case, several election cycles (and epochal world events) were required to restore the fortunes of the party that had earned the kind of defeat the Republicans suffered last fall — when a black incumbent Democratic President whose first term had coincided with the worst recession in 80 years nonetheless won reelection easily. It’s because neither the Tea Party nor the moneybags faction will face the real reason for that debacle that they are facing off against one another now.
By: Josh Marshall, Editor and Publisher, Talking Points Memo, February 8, 2013
“Let’s Enjoy The Spectacle”: Karl Rove’s Republican Defeat Project Hits The Road
The long simmering war between the GOP establishment and the Tea Party has finally come to a boil. Last week Karl Rove, the “brains” behind the Republican super PAC American Crossroads announced the creation of a new super group, the Conservative Victory Project.
I’m a Democrat who believes in the axiom that the best thing to do when Republicans are lined up in a circular firing squad is to stay out of the way, watch, and enjoy the spectacle. Rove’s brainchild is wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start.
But I’ll start with visibility. Up to this point, the war between the Republican Party has been confined to party confabs like state conventions and cocktail hour at the Heritage Foundation. The creation of the Conservative Victory Project means that the battle will be a lot more visible taking place on television in front of the faces of millions of voters.
What is worse, two feet of snow in the Northeast or Karl Rove’s two feet of clay? Then there’s the question of effectiveness. American Crossroads was a miserable failure in 2012. Rove’s super PAC spent close to $200 million, almost all of it in races where the Republican candidate lost. If the Conservative Victory Project performs as poorly against the Tea Party as it did the Democratic Party, then there will be even more hapless Tea Party candidates like Christine O’Donnell and Todd Akin who win primaries and lose to Democratic candidates. If Rove wants to spend millions of dollars to defeat Tea Party candidates instead of Democrats, I’m all for it. Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect.
If Rove and his moneyed minions were serious about taking on the Tea Party, they should have done it before the Tea Party took over the Republican Party in 2009. If Rove and his acolytes were really serious about crushing the extremists in the GOP, they would step up to the plate and take on Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity who rile up the crazies in the GOP daily. Hannity may rhyme with sanity but the two words are not synonyms.
A Tea Party official suggested the name: Conservative Victory Project group was “Orwellian” because the real goal of the group was to defeat conservative candidates. I don’t get a vote but in my opinion, a more appropriate name would be the Republican Defeat Project.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, February 8, 2013
“Indifference To The Truth”: Modern-Day Know-Nothings Take Control In The South
For as long as I’ve lived in Arkansas — most of my adult life — people like the now-famous state senator Jason Rapert have made most of the noise and lost most of the elections. Now they’ve come to power, courtesy of Southern Republicans’ cult-like rejection of President Obama and large infusions of corporate campaign cash. And with the state legislature in session, the tragi-comedy is under way.
It’s happening all across the South. Sample news story: “Representatives approved a bill titled ‘The Church Protection Act of 2013′…85-8, to permit concealed handguns in churches and other houses of worship.”
Because Jesus, of course, was all about smiting them dead before thou art smitten.
Anyway, “famous” may be an exaggeration with regard to Sen. Rapert. But a YouTube clip of the man haranguing a 2011 Tea Party gathering about his anger at “minorities” running the country has gotten Arkansas lots of unfavorable national attention. Meanwhile, his indignant, if not particularly honest, denials have succeeded only in generating more ill will and bad feeling.
Full disclosure: this same Jason Rapert is also my neighbor in rural Perry County, AR. He invited us to a Memorial Day Picnic three years ago, where his bluegrass band provided the entertainment. He’s a genial host and a terrific country fiddler and guitarist. A few days later, his wife graciously dropped off a CD the band had recorded. She pretended not to mind when my horse left deep hoofprints in their yard. The couple has two lovely young daughters.
However, the same fellow is also a stone religious crank who’s absolutely certain that God agrees with every one of his opinions; also that everybody who disagrees with God and him is going straight to hell. Jason’s not shy about telling you about it, either. He once advised me to leave the U.S. on account of supporting Obamacare. I reminded him that my side had won the 2008 election. (And good luck finding a country without “socialist” health care and with indoor plumbing.)
But I’d never have suspected him capable of the kind of insidious rhetoric he displayed for the Tea Partiers. The video, first unearthed by Lee Fang in The Nation, captures Rapert in full revivalist mode. No, his speech wasn’t “racist” in the simplistic way liberals often charge. I’m confident he’d vote for Condoleezza Rice, for example.
It’s not President Obama’s color that offends Rapert’s sensibilities—although I’m less sure about his audience’s. It’s everything else about the man that makes him suspect from a paranoid, neo-nativist perspective.
Delivered in a countrified drawl that’s more his preacher’s voice than the one he uses in his daytime job as an investment advisor, Rapert’s speech hits all the conspiratorial high spots: Obama’s supposedly missing birth certificate; his sympathy with gay rights; also, most ominously, his secret belief in the wrong God.
Anyway, here’s the business end of Rapert’s speech:
“You’ve got to change the hearts and minds of the people that live around you. You’ve gotta pray. It says ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.’ And I wonder sometimes when they invited all the Muslims to come into the White House and have them a little Ramadan supper, when our president could not take the time to go attend a National Prayer Breakfast — I wonder what he stands for.
“You know what, what they told us is …what you do speaks so loudly that what you say I cannot hear. I hear you loud and clear, Barack Obama. You don’t represent the country that I grew up with. And your values is not goin’ to save us. We’re gonna try to take this country back for the Lord. We’re gonna try to take this country back for conservatism. And we’re not going to allow minorities to run roughshod over what you people believe in.”
Does it help to know that President George W. Bush never missed a Ramadan dinner? Nor has President Obama skipped a National Prayer Breakfast. New York magazine posted photos of him presiding at every single one.
What’s most alarming isn’t Rapert’s racial views, but his continuing indifference to the truth and his disdain for religious liberty. His views are scarcely distinguishable from those of the Know-Nothing party of the 1850s. Then it was German and Irish Catholics who were suspect; today, it’s Muslims.
Over time, it’s a losing strategy. Eventually, Americans come around to supporting the First Amendment and rejecting religious bigotry.
How things will play out in the shorter term is harder to say. It’s one thing to dislike Obama, quite another to embarrass an entire state, region and political party. Arkansans in particular have been touchy about their image dating back to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and beyond.
If politicians like Rapert don’t learn to moderate their tone, even in the South their ascendancy could be a short one.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 6, 2013
“Playing The Fools Against The Marks”: Why Fox News Finally Dumped Dick Morris
I suppose I should have weighed in on this already, given that it’s been an entire day, but in case you were wondering, here’s what I think about Fox News’ decision to finally give Dick Morris the boot. Erik Wemple probably spoke for many people when he said, “this is a time to celebrate Fox News. It has seen the lunacy of Dick Morris, and it’s taking the appropriate step to inoculate itself against the ravages.” This comes fast on the heels of Sarah Palin being shown the door, some post-election house-cleaning that thankfully has left sage contributors like Karl Rove standing.
So what does this show? It doesn’t, alas, indicate that real accountability is coming to the pundit industry. I’ve always thought it’s too simplistic to view Fox News as nothing more than a partisan organization, as many people on the left do. Since he started the network in 1996, Roger Ailes’ genius has lied in a careful melding of business and ideology, in which neither one ever moves too far ahead of the other and each serves the other’s needs. Fox is extremely valuable to the Republican party and the conservative movement, and it’s also a huge money-maker for Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Anyone who appears on the channel has to satisfy both strands of that ideological/financial double helix.
And as Morris shows, satisfying the ideological needs of Fox’s viewers is more complicated than just telling them what you think they want to hear. Morris was so laughably wrong in almost everything he said that even many die-hard conservatives no doubt found him to be a buffoon. When he tells you over and over again that there’s no way your side can lose, and then they do, his credibility suffers even with people who want to believe him. But what really did him in, I think, was when it came out in December that he was, in all probability, running a scam on the Fox News viewers whom he implored to contribute to his super PAC to defeat Barack Obama. None of the money went to that cause, instead probably finding its way back into Morris’s pocket. It’s one thing to treat Fox viewers like fools—most of the network’s personalities do that every day. But it’s quite another to treat them like marks. If you do it as blatantly as Morris did, the entire brand is threatened.
In the end, it became too obvious that Dick Morris wasn’t working for the betterment of the conservative movement, or the Republican party, or Fox News. He was working for the betterment of Dick Morris. Once that became all too obvious, I’m sure Ailes had no qualms about showing him the door. After all, there’s plenty more where he came from.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, February 6, 2013
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