“GOP Will Sink Or Swim With The White Nativist Vote”: Doesn’t Matter What Rubio Or Cruz Campaigns Plan For This Election
This morning Greg Sargent did a good job of laying out the different electoral strategies of the Rubio and Cruz campaigns.
Marco Rubio has sought to project an optimistic, inclusive aura that seems designed not just to unite Republicans but also to appeal (at least on the margins) to Latinos and millennials. By contrast, while Cruz says publicly that he wants to win over Reagan “Democrats,” the more plausible interpretation of his approach is that it’s built around the idea that the electorate is hopelessly polarized and that maximizing conservative and GOP [white] base turnout is the route to victory.
The only thing I’d add is that, with his increasingly extremists statements during the primary, Rubio is likely going for what Eric Fehrnstrom described as Romney’s “etch-a-sketch” strategy: hoping that voters will wipe the slate clean when it comes time for the general election.
On the other hand, the Cruz strategy reminds me of something Adam Serwer wrote way back in 2011 in the lead-up to the 2012 election.
The Republican Party had a choice after 2008. They could continue to rely on a dwindling but still decisive share of the white vote to prevail, or they could try to bring more minorities into the party. While I’m not entirely sure how much of the decision was made by party leaders and how much is merely the unprecedented influence of Fox News, but whether it’s pseudo scandals of the past two years, from birtherism to the NBPP [New Black Panther Party] case, the GOP’s nationwide rush to ban sharia and institute draconian immigration laws, or characterizing nearly every administration policy as reparations, the conservative fixations of Obama’s first term indicate that the GOP will end up relying at least in part on inflaming white racial resentment to close the gap.
Sounds positively prophetic right now, doesn’t it?
Of course, the Republicans lost the 2012 presidential election and immediately performed their infamous “autopsy,” which found that they needed to do a better job of reaching out to women and people of color. We all know how that’s been going.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter what the Rubio or Cruz campaigns plan for this election. Back in the 1970’s the Republican Party decided to go with a Southern Strategy and built their electoral base on a platform of white resentment. Since then, they have only reinforced that with everything from Reagan’s “welfare queens” to Bush’s Willie Horton ad. At this point, they can’t abandon that base with any plausible effort to make their party attractive to people of color. The GOP will sink or swim with the white nativist vote.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Post, December 10, 2015
“Trump Proves That Liberals Have Been Right All Along”: Republicans Letting Expediency Get The Better Of Them
If you’ve been following Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and his effect on the Republican primary closely, you were perhaps beset Monday by a strange sense of speechlessness—one born less of ineffability than of tedium.
Trump’s plan to prohibit Muslim immigration into the U.S. is indeed extreme, but to students of the Trump phenomenon and conservative politics more broadly, it was neither unexpected nor the source of any new or profound lesson.
While closing the country to foreign Muslims altogether is a radical idea relative to our founding ideals and current policy, it is but an incremental step relative to the outer bounds of legitimate debate in the GOP primary. Republican presidential candidates have supported discriminating against Muslims in our refugee policy, and opposed the very notion of a Muslim-American president, all without subjecting themselves to universal condemnation. The most surprising part of the latest Trump story is that it proves a Republican candidate can take Islamophobia too far for his party’s tastes.
For most liberals, and for the Trump-backing or Trump-curious segments of the right, the Trump phenomenon needs little further explanation. The only people who claim to be befuddled by the Trump phenomenon are officials on knife-edge in the party he leads.
On the left, the view that Republicans allowed the conservative grassroots to turn their party into a political action committee for white ressentiment has evolved over the years from an argument into a creed. Since at least 2012, liberals have been warning (at times mockingly, but never disingenuously) that by indulging and at times fanning the hostilities and procedural extremism of this part of their coalition, Republicans were letting expediency get the better of them.
When large swaths of the conservative movement resisted the notion that the GOP needed to widen its appeal to minorities, and could win by appealing to a broader base of whites, it was liberals who warned that these voters would drag the party into a racial abyss.
Trump is the fulfillment of that prophecy. Better than any Republican candidate in recent memory, he intuits the mood of the disaffected Republican electorate. Or rather, because he’s almost entirely uninterested in straddling party factions, he gives voice to their paranoia and racism without massaging it the way the pretenders to his lead do. It’s possible to imagine a more traditional politician, like Ted Cruz, taking up Trump’s mantle without ever making Reince Priebus or House Speaker Paul Ryan angry, but their platforms would look practically identical.
This is the main reason GOP protestations, five months after Trump reached the top of the polls, ring so hollow. Republicans behave as if Trump is both a self-contained phenomenon and a singular mouthpiece for the most important segment of their electorate. An unmetastasized malignancy and a vital organ, simultaneously. The former view serves to reassure the rest of the public (and GOP donors among them) that Trump is merely a passing fad—an unlovely figurehead for a perfectly lovely segment of the voting base. That once he’s gone, everything will return to normal.
But the former view is also facially incompatible with the latter. It’s why their condemnations of Trump are either half-hearted, or paired with some alternate, less overtly discrediting appeal to his fans. The modus operandi of second-tier candidates has been to tiptoe around Trump’s controversies, rather than create contrast with them. Even Ryan, who denounced Trump’s Monday comments in the most unambiguous terms, still pledged to support him should he win the Republican nomination.
The Republican National Committee developed its candidate pledge as a way to hem Trump in. The pledge has evolved into a symbol of the party’s commitment to keeping Trump’s fans in the fold. If Trump were to vanish suddenly, his supporters would either defect to an alternate poll leader over whom the party could better exert control, or else the remaining candidates would enter a race to the bottom to win their support.
And yet, while there’s something novel and fascinating about the pageant—the Republican House speaker rebuking his party’s presidential frontrunner; the fraying ties between Trumpistas and the rest of the party—the nature of the crisis is totally mundane to liberals. So common is it on the left to compare the Trump phenomenon (and the Sarah Palin phenomenon before it) to a Frankenstein’s monster, that the analysis has become trite.
To really shake things up—to raise new questions and provoke new thinking about conservative politics—the Republican Party would have to do something drastic like rescind the loyalty pledge as it pertains to Trump. Unless and until that happens, Trump is likely to continue shoring up support on the basis of increasingly grotesque views, and leave those of us who’ve been clear-eyed about it all along with nothing much to add.
By Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, December 9, 2015
“Down In The NRA Bunker”: NRA TV; A Day In The Life Of An American Gun Nut
Wayne LaPierre stood in front of an artificial backdrop the color of a cartoon midnight sky. He was dressed like a funeral conductor, in a black suit, white shirt and dark purple tie, but he looked like the corpse. Beneath his rimless glasses and permanently-furrowed brow, his face was hollow and his skin was gray, perhaps an effect of the grim topic he was preparing to broach.
“You and I didn’t choose to be targets in the age of terror,” he said.
“But innocents like us will continue to be slaughtered in concert halls, sports stadiums, restaurants and airplanes. No amount of bloodshed will ever satisfy the demons among us.”
As he spoke, an aria fit for a horror movie played in the background, making his message feel all the more dire, like an end-of-days commercial you might see on some far-flung channel in the middle of the night in between ads for Snuggies and home gyms.
“When evil knocks on our doors, Americans have a power no other people on the planet share: the full-throated right to defend our families and ourselves with our Second Amendment,” he said. “Let fate decide if mercy is offered to the demons at our door.”
LaPierre is the chief executive of the National Rifle Association, and this one-minute ad, released on November 30, after the Paris terror attacks, is part of the NRA’s effort to attract more members with commonsense fear-mongering as mass shootings—two in the last few weeks alone, in Colorado and California—and one-off, viral gun deaths—like the case of a 9 year old girl who accidentally shot her instructor in the head with an Uzi—threaten to tar the group’s reputation in the eyes of a incessantly-shaken public.
In 2014, the NRA unveiled plans to launch its own television network of sorts—a series of programs available “anytime and anywhere on your computer, tablet or mobile phone, or web-connected TV via browser, YouTube or Roku streaming player” that would allow people to see how empowering, fun and not-murderous gun culture can be.
NRA News, as it’s called, bills itself as “the most comprehensive video coverage of Second Amendment issues, events and culture anywhere in the world,” but it doesn’t feel of this world at all. It feels like how TV might be in a dystopian future where citizens hoard weapons inside their chrome hover-trailers, which they leave only to restock on Soylent and return to with a sunburn.
The network is broken up into different categories:
Commentary, from a varied cast including LaPierre, right-wing radio host Dana Loesch and Colion Noir (not his real name), a young black man who wears baseball hats, hates “political correctness and dishonesty” and, before being discovered by NRA News, had achieved minor YouTube fame with his pro-gun rants.
Investigative, which has a familiar-sounding show called “Frontlines” that covers things like how America’s energy infrastructure is vulnerable to terror attacks or, in the frantic words of NRA News, “The Fight For Light: The Coming Catastrophe.”
Lifestyle, which houses a vaguely-porny series called “Love At First Shot” that follows youngish women as they learn to shoot firearms for the first time with the instruction of other youngish women (sample description: “Julie Golob is about to show 21-year-old Kaytlin that with the proper instruction and safety in place, she can shoot large calibers with ease).
Profiles, home of “Armed & Fabulous” which, in episode 4, documented the life of Sandra Sadler, who looks like your average grandma except when she’s holding a dead animal by the antlers. She has, the narrator said, “a deep appreciation for the outdoors.”
Campaigns, another channel for the ads like LaPierre’s.
And History, which airs “The Treasure Collection,” the “Antiques Roadshow” of NRA News.
The videos are beautiful and slick, in the style of modern presidential campaign commercials or global warming documentaries. On YouTube, where over 200 of them are posted, they accumulate thousands of views. The clip of LaPierre has over 100,000. (The number of viewers for the shows on the NRA News website is not available, and the NRA did not immediately reply to a request for that information).
Aesthetics aside, the videos are attractive because in life inside NRA News, there are Good Guys and Bad Guys, Cops and Robbers, Freedom-Lovers Like Us and the godforsaken Them. Things are, apparently, simple when you are packing heat.
To the NRA, everything is black and white—but mostly white. Almost everyone featured on NRA News is white, except for Noir, David A. Clarke, a sheriff in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin who became a minor right-wing celebrity by attacking President Obama and Al Sharpton after the Ferguson protests and was featured in a video the NRA posted on 9/11 called “My Honor” (oddly, the NRA didn’t include Clarke’s name in the video, leaving it up to YouTube commenters to identify him), and an elderly woman whose name the NRA also did not include who, in a video titled “My Rights,” said she needed a gun because she lived in government housing where “gang-bangers walk down our halls every day.”
But it’s up against the NRA’s alternative universe of gun-slinging girls and mostly-white patriots in suits who want to preserve your rights that a different narrative is fighting competitively.
On Sunday night, from the Oval Office, Obama used an address about terrorism to condemn gun culture. “We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino,” he said. “I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies—no matter how effective they are—cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do—and must do—is make it harder for them to kill.”
Obama’s speech came a day after The New York Times ran an editorial on its front page, titled “End the Gun Epidemic in America,” which called for the “outlawing” of “certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition.”
Conservatives reacted in fury. Erick Erickson, the right-wing radio host, sprayed his copy of The Times with 7 bullets and posted a photo of the remains on Twitter, where it currently has over 1,000 retweets.
The Times editorial came a day after The New York Daily News ran a cover with a photo of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, above a row of white men: 4 of them mass shooters, one of them LaPierre. Farook was a terrorist, the News conceded, “(But so are these guys…AND this guy).”
On NRA TV on Monday, Cam Edwards, the burly red-headed, bearded host of Cam & Co (sponsored by Nosler, the ammunition manufacturer) nearly filled 3 hours of airtime with talk of the anti-gun elites in the media.
With the Times op-Ed, Edwards said, “they’ve let the mask slip. They’ve let their intentions be known.”
Behind Edwards, there was a sign which read, “KEEP CALM AND EAT BACON.”
Only in the universe of NRA TV does such serenity—punctuated by bouts of paranoia—seem possible.
By: Olivia Nuzzi, The Daily Beast, December 8, 2015
“Lindsey Graham’s Untimely Truth”: The GOP Battle Over Identity Politics Has Already Been Won
It would be easy to dismiss Lindsey Graham as a sore loser even before the contest has been decided. In the Republican presidential campaign, his support has hovered between the negligible and the nonexistent. “I’m at 1 percent,” Graham quite honestly admitted to the Republican Jewish Coalition last Thursday. “The election is still long away. Help me stay in the race.” But it is precisely because Graham is doing so poorly that he offers some valuable insights on the outcome of a battle within the GOP that began with Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012.
When not begging for a lifeline from the audience, Graham went on the offensive against the three candidates who have the clearest path to winning the nomination: Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. All three, Graham argued, were waging campaigns that threatened to alienate constituencies that the GOP could ill-afford to lose, Hispanics (in the case of Trump) and young women (in the case of Rubio and Cruz). Both were identified by the Republican National Committee as voting blocs that were key to the GOP’s rehabilitation.
Given the fact that the three targets of Graham’s wrath have all been doing well in recent polls, it’s tempting to wave away his speech as mere sour grapes. Yet as a rock-bottom candidate, Graham also has the freedom that comes with not having any real supporters to alienate. His speech was remarkably blunt, and articulated the very real issues around ethnicity and gender that the GOP is facing in national politics.
Graham pitched his speech as a direct response to Cruz, who was the previous speaker. During the question-and-answer period of his speech, Cruz was asked how he, as a pro-lifer, would make his pitch to “staunchly pro-choice voters” who are otherwise conservative. He argued that in order to win the next presidential election, the GOP had to tack to the right, not the center. “In Washington, there are political consultants who tell us over and over and over again that the way you win is you run to the middle,” Cruz said. “Every time we follow that advice we get clobbered. It doesn’t work. And the reason it doesn’t work is very simple. If you compare 2004, the last race we won nationally, to 2008 and 2012, the biggest difference is the millions upon millions of conservative voters who showed up in ‘04 and stayed home in ‘08 and stayed home in bigger numbers in ‘12. And I believe if we are going to win, the central question in this general election is how do you motivate and inspire and bring back to the polls the 54 million evangelical Christians who stayed home in 2012.”
Speaking immediately after Cruz, Graham dropped the prepared talk he had been planning on giving, which focused on ISIS and the Middle East. Instead, Graham said, he wanted to “take issue” with Cruz’s analysis. “Why do we lose?” Graham asked. “How many of you believe that we’re losing elections because we’re not hardass enough on immigration?” There was a smattering of applause, as some in the audience seemed to agree with this premise. “Well, I don’t agree with you,” Graham went on, with a tightly pursed smile. “I believe we’re losing the Hispanic vote because they think we don’t like them.
“I believe that it’s not about turning out evangelical Christians,” he added. “It’s about repairing the damage done by incredibly hateful rhetoric driving a wall between us and the fastest-growing demographic in America, who should be Republicans. I believe Donald Trump is destroying the Republican Party’s chance to win an election that we can’t afford to lose.”
Graham went on to note that Republicans aren’t just turning off Hispanics, but also young women. “How many of you believe we have a problem with young women as Republicans?” Graham asked, before zeroing in on both Cruz and Rubio’s opposition to abortion even in cases of rape.
As a critique of how Republican identity politics are alienating key demographics, Graham’s speech would be hard to top. The only problem is that Graham’s own way of finessing divisive social issues was hardly better than those he criticized. “How do you get a pro-choice person to vote for you?” Graham asked. “Let me tell you what I will do: I am pro-life, you are pro-choice, ISIL is neither.” This bizarre non sequitur was no more a response to the problem than Cruz’s fantasy about 54 million missing evangelical voters.
Graham seemed angry for most of his speech and when he walked away from the podium he stumbled and nearly fell. His flustered behavior seems to mirror the frustrations of sidelined Republicans, like John Kasich and Jeb Bush, who have gotten nowhere with their appeals to voters outside the conservative hard core.
Graham spoke like a prophet crying in the wilderness. Given the fact that Trump has not just dominated the polls, but also set the terms of the Republican political debate, there is no real audience for the message Graham was preaching. With the contest narrowing down to a battle between Trump and Trump-lite figures like Cruz and Rubio, Graham’s arguments that the GOP needs to be more inclusive and reach out to voters it has alienated in earlier elections is an untimely truth—accurate enough as analysis, but with no bearing on who the Republican nominee will be.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, December 7, 2015
“The Political Stupidity Of The GOP’s Political ‘Experts'”: Simply Out Of Touch With Political Reality
The GOP’s political specialists — its political operatives and consultants — aren’t very smart about politics.
GOP operatives seem to believe that what GOP voters really like about Donald Trump is his “style” and “populism.” If only other Republican candidates would imitate some aspects of Trump’s style, the consultants bleat, they could surf some of the Trump wave.
This is facile nonsense.
Political operatives and the media like to blast “Trumpism” as substance-free bluster. But the parts of Trumpism that have most resonated with GOP voters actually map onto a clear and fairly obvious political agenda: hostile to immigration, trade and globalization, foreign adventures, and an economic and political system that seems to be rigged by insiders against outsiders. Combine that with a big appetite for national greatness. Regardless of the merits of this agenda, it’s an agenda. Call it the radical center, as my colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty and the Washington Free Beacon‘s Matt Continetti have.
This is why Republican insiders’ attacks against Trump have been singularly ineffective. He’s not a true conservative! they shout. Yes, and Trump voters are, at least in part, rebelling against conservative orthodoxy. If you want to deflate Trump, you have to put forward actual proposals that will appeal to Trump voters in a package that doesn’t have Trump’s baggage. Emoting like a reality TV star while peddling a flat tax simply won’t do.
But the GOP political class’ political stupidity goes beyond Trump. Consider immigration. I’d have my own super PAC if I got a dollar for every time a GOP political operative told a journalist on background that the way for the GOP to be nationally competitive and win Latinos is to support comprehensive immigration reform. This is simply not true, as Real Clear Politics‘ Sean Trende has exhaustively and laboriously documented.
If it supported comprehensive immigration reform, the GOP would lose a chunk of the white vote, and anyhow, Latino voters are by and large driven by the same concerns as other voters, not just immigration. The GOP’s disadvantage among them has more to do with the income difference between Latino voters and median voters than with anything intrinsic to Latino voters.
Or consider another issue where GOP political operatives are simply out of touch with political reality: abortion. While most Republicans are socially conservative, most GOP political operatives tend to fall more on the libertarian side of the conservative spectrum and are often socially liberal. Their advice to most GOP politicians: Just shut up about abortion, lest you turn off women. Just do the minimum required to signal to pro-life voters that you’re on their side, and thereafter duck the issue.
This is wrongheaded, and almost certainly hurts the GOP nationally. Millions upon millions of women are more likely to call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice.” What’s more, the significant political gap within women is between single women and married women. Single women are very pro-choice, and very Democratic anyway. Many more married women are Republicans — and the rest are up for grabs. They may even be the single most important swing constituency. And many of them are pro-life, albeit squishy on the issue.
Republicans have a built-in political advantage against Democrats on abortion. They could use something like late-term abortion to drive a wedge between the Democratic nominee and key swing voters — especially suburban moms. For the GOP, it is a tragedy of politico groupthink that the party doesn’t use this strategy more.
Political operatives think voters are boobs. And sure, your average voter may not be a policy wonk, but that doesn’t mean she’s stupid. People can be quite canny, especially when you’re talking about their wallet. So no, Trumpism isn’t just about flash, and giving flash without substance in response won’t change it, because voters (yes, even Trump voters) do care about substance. Similarly, Latinos are not an interest group that cares only about issues related to their identity, but care instead about a broad spectrum of issues. And women, believe it or not, are not defined by their uteruses, and are just as capable as men of forming their own considered views on abortion, as with any other issue.
Voters want to feel like politicians understand them, yes, but they also want politicians to give them answers that will solve their problems, and they do have a capacity for evaluating these answers and formulating views about them, and that does influence how they vote.
And if the GOP got a better class of politicos, it might win more elections.
By: Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Week, December 7, 2015
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