“I’m Not One Of Them, I’m You”: How Rand Paul Is Playing The GOP Base, And What It Means For 2016
Anyone who remembers the 2012 GOP presidential primaries knows that the 2016 contest will involve a lot of arguing about who’s the most conservative candidate. Any contender who has strayed from party orthodoxy on anything will have to undergo a sustained campaign of grovelling and humiliation to prove to Tea Partiers, religious conservatives, and everybody else that he will be faithful and true forevermore. This process leaves its participants battered and bruised, diminished in the eyes of general election voters.
But what if placating the right isn’t as hard as it appears? That question is right now being contemplated by Rand Paul, who is running for the White House harder than anybody.
Paul has now given a speech outlining his foreign policy vision (which every candidate is supposed to have). The speech shows just how Paul is navigating the tension between the two competing incentives that will define his candidacy. On one hand, he needs to reassure Republican voters that he’s conservative enough for them, but on the other hand, he also very much wants to be the “different kind of Republican” who will continue to receive glowing media coverage and prove appealing to moderate general election voters.
If you took out the five Reagan references and changed some words and phrases here and there, the speech Paul gave could have been delivered by Barack Obama. The difference between a Republican and a Democrat, apparently, is that the Republican says that we should always be prepared for war, but war should be a last resort, while the Democrat says that war should be a last resort, but we should always be prepared for war. Paul also added the controversial ideas that American values lead the world, and we’re stronger abroad when our economy is stronger at home. And also, Reagan, Reagan, Reagan.
The interesting thing is that, despite the similarity of Paul’s ideas to those of Obama, Paul’s speech showed that it probably isn’t all that hard to give GOP voters what they want on foreign policy. All it takes is a little dexterity to push the right buttons, as Paul does in this passage:
Although I support the call for defeating and destroying ISIS, I doubt that a decisive victory is possible in the short term, even with the participation of the Kurds, the Iraqi government, and other moderate Arab states.
In the end, only the people of the region can destroy ISIS. In the end, the long war will end only when civilized Islam steps up to defeat this barbaric aberration.
He takes a policy position many Republicans will disagree with, but leavens it with the mention of “the long war” and “civilized Islam,” giving a nod to the clash-of-civilizations sentiment so common on the right. Mission accomplished.
This is a marked contrast to the domestic realm, where there are many specific positions that are beyond negotiation. You have to support tax cuts, oppose Roe v. Wade, proclaim your hatred of Obamacare, want to Drill Baby Drill, and so on. Paul has stepped outside of conservative orthodoxy on a few domestic issues, such as with his criticism of mass incarceration. But that’s easy to do now, since crime rates have plummeted since then, the issue has receded and base conservatives won’t be angry with him for taking a contrary position. And at any rate, for some time, Paul has been slowly stepping away from the libertarian ideas on domestic issues that GOP voters would find truly objectionable, like legalizing drugs.
On foreign policy, Paul can probably have it both ways: he can say to the media and non-Republicans, “I’m different, because I don’t think we should arm Syrian rebels,” and he can say to Republicans, “I’m not different, because like you, I think Obama is screwing everything up.” It takes a little thought and planning, but it’s far from impossible.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 24, 2014
“Why Bigotry Persists”: The Neanderthals Among Us Are Getting Better At Camouflaging Their Prejudices
Soon after Barack Obama’s electoral victory in 2008, conservatives began depicting the event as a triumph of cosmopolitan and secular intellectuals, people of color, liberal pieties, and “socialist” hopes. Grassroots organizing accompanied an agenda of legislative sabotage led by the Republican congressional hierarchy. Media demagogues stoked the flames of resentment. President Obama was mockingly called “The One” and excoriated as an Arab, an imam, even the Antichrist. Posters identified him with Hitler, placed his head on the body of a chimpanzee, implied that he was a crack addict, portrayed him with a bone through his nose, and showed the White House lawn lined with rows of watermelons. Six years later, the fury has hardly subsided: Thousands of young people check on racist websites like Stormfront every month, anti-Semitism is again becoming fashionable, Islamophobia is rampant, and conservative politicians are suing President Obama in the courts for his supposed abuse of power while their more radical supporters are labeling him a traitor.
Most of these people don’t see themselves as bigots. They long to reinstate the “real” America perhaps best depicted in old television shows like Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. This completely imaginary America was orderly and prosperous. Women were happily in the kitchen; gays were in the closet; and blacks knew their place. But this world (inexplicably!) came under attack from just these (ungrateful!) groups thereby creating resentment especially among white males on the political right. They feel persecuted and wish to roll back time. Their counterattack is based on advocating policies that would hinder same-sex marriage, champion the insertion of “Christian” values into public life, deny funds for women’s health and abortion clinics, cut government policies targeting the inner cities, protect a new prison network inhabited largely by people of color, eliminate limits on campaign spending, and increase voting restrictions that would effectively disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged citizens.
Neanderthals still exist along with blatant examples of old-style prejudice and hatred. But the bigot is adapting to a new world. The bigot now employs camouflage in translating his prejudices into reality. To forestall criticism, he now makes use of supposedly “color-blind” economic and anti-crime policies, liberal notions of tolerance, individualism, the entrepreneurial spirit, local government, historical traditions, patriotism, and fears of nonexistent voter fraud to maintain the integrity of the electoral process. The bigot today is often unaware either that he has prejudices or that he is indulging them.
Unfortunately, popular understandings of the bigot remain anchored in an earlier time. His critics tend to highlight the personal rather than the political, crude language and sensational acts rather than mundane legislation and complicated policy decisions. Many are unwilling to admit that bigotry has entered the mainstream. It is more comforting to associate bigotry with certain attitudes supposedly on the fringes of public life. Words wound but policies wound even more. Everyday citizens grow incensed when some commentator lets slip a racist or politically incorrect phrase. But they are far more tolerant when faced with policies that blatantly disadvantage or attack the bigot’s traditional targets whose inferiority is still identified with fixed and immutable traits: gays, immigrants, people of color, and women.
Reactionary movements and conservative parties have provided a congenial home for true believers, provincial chauvinists, and elitists of an aristocratic or populist bent. Not exclusively: Liberals and socialists—though usually with a guilty conscience—have also occasionally endorsed imperialism, nationalism, racism, and the politics of bigotry. But while the connection between right-wing politics and bigotry does not hold true in every instance, it is true most of the time. It is certainly true today. Ideologues of the Tea Party provide legitimacy and refuge for advocates of intolerance while the GOP provides legitimacy and refuge for the Tea Party.
Not every bigot is a conservative and not every conservative is a bigot. Yet they converge in supporting an agenda that aims to constrict intellectual debate, social pluralism, economic equality, and democratic participation. Either the bigot or the conservative can insist that his efforts to shrink the welfare state are motivated solely by a concern with maximizing individual responsibility; either can claim that his opposition to gay rights is simply a defense of traditional values; and either can argue that increasing the barriers to voting is required to guarantee fair elections. Whatever they subjectively believe, however, their agenda objectively disadvantages gays, immigrants, women, and people of color.
Reasonable people can disagree about this or that policy as it applies to any of these groups. Any policy, progressive or not, can be criticized in good faith. But ethical suspicions arise when an entire agenda is directed against the ensemble of what President Reagan derisively termed “special interests.” No conservative political organization today has majority support from women, the gay community, or people of color. There must be a reason. It cannot simply be that the conservative “message” has not been heard; that members of these groups are overwhelmingly parasitical and awaiting their overly generous government “handouts;” or that so-called special interests are incapable of appreciating what is in their interest. A more plausible explanation, I think, is that those who are still targets of prejudice and discrimination have little reason to trust conservatism’s political advocates.
Is the conservative a bigot? It depends. Is the particular conservative intent upon defending traditions simply because they exist, supporting community values even if they are discriminatory; and treating political participation as a privilege rather than a right? Critics of the bigot should begin placing a bit less emphasis on what he says or feels than what he actually does. That conservative can always rationalize his actions—platitudes come cheap. But then perhaps, one day, he will find himself looking in the mirror and (who knows?) the bigot might just be staring back.
By: Stephen Eric Bronner, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University; The Daily Beast, September 28, 2014
“Neocons’ Ferguson Freakout”: Why Their Latest Attack On Obama Makes Them Look So Silly
Near the very end of his Wednesday speech to the U.N. General Assembly — a speech that pundits described as “Wilsonian” and “the most liberal foreign policy address” of his career — President Obama acknowledged that despite its claim of global leadership, the United States sometimes falls short of living up to its self-professed values. “I realize that America’s critics will be quick to point out that at times we too have failed to live up to our ideals,” Obama said. “In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri,” Obama continued, “where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”
This was the geopolitical equivalent of a boss trying to prove to her employees she’s relatable by noting that even she sometimes makes mistakes. And if they noticed this moment at all, most people likely saw it for what it was: a harmless act of genuflection, delivered by a U.S. president in service of his ultimate goal, rallying global opinion behind another American war in the Middle East. In other words, nothing to see here, folks; keep it movin’.
But as we now know all too well, neoconservatives are not like most people; their response to Obama’s Ferguson remark was nothing short of apoplectic.
“I was stunned,” neocon hero and former Vice President Dick Cheney said of the Ferguson reference during an appearance on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show later that night. The president’s rhetorical pairing of the turmoil in Ukraine and the Levant with that in Ferguson, Cheney said, was simply unacceptable. “In one case, you’ve got a police officer involved in a shooting, there may be questions about it to be sorted out by the legal process, but there’s no comparison to that with what ISIS is doing to thousands of people throughout the Middle East,” Cheney said, before huffing: “To compare the two as though there’s moral equivalence there, I think, is outrageous.”
Washington Post columnist and fellow neoconservative Charles Krauthammer hit a similar note in his response (also delivered on Fox News, naturally) by dusting off a circa 2009 anti-Obama talking point and describing the speech as “a continuation of the apology tour.” Echoing Cheney, Krauthammer declared Obama “intended [to draw] a moral equivalence” between ISIS and America. He then snarked about the silver lining of having Obama “talking about our sins” at the U.N. in New York City, rather than doing so while on foreign soil. (Like, say, Montreal, where Krauthammer spent his childhood.)
Last — and considering this is the man who helped organize the smear campaign against Bowe Bergdahl — very much least, there was Richard Grenell, former top aide to every neoconservative’s fantasy presidential candidate, ex-U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. Writing at, yes, Fox News’ website, Grenell argued the president’s mentioning Ferguson was “a big mistake.” Grenell conceded that “humility and self-reflection are admirable leadership qualities” but nevertheless warned how Obama’s speech “gives foreign diplomats from Arab countries and Russia the excuse they need to dismiss America’s condemnation of their actions.” Because they were otherwise so primed for genuine cooperation…
To state the obvious, it is not surprising to find neoconservatives blasting the president, even if he’s currently launching a war against ISIS that, in significant respects, justifies itself intellectually through neoconservative-friendly arguments. Dedicated neoconservatives tend to be rigid partisans when it comes to politics, uninterested in compromise and focused primarily on controlling U.S. military power. What’s striking about the neocon attack isn’t its churlishness, therefore, but rather its transparency. Think of the characteristic emotional tics of neoconservatism — its paranoia, its insecurity, its obsessive fear of looking weak — and look back again at the words of the president’s neocon critics. They’re all there.
An example: For Cheney, Krauthammer and Grenell, the obvious but unstated assumption is that an American president addressing the United Nations must do so as if he has something to hide. Obama’s attempt to emphasize the U.S.’s role as both leader and member of the international order — to approach the world as an eager partner instead of an overbearing hegemon — is offensive to them because it treats the idea of a global community as an aspiration instead of a nuisance. Most neoconservatives, as Grenell’s old boss Bolton infamously made plain, aren’t much interested in the idea of a U.N. Since the U.S. can militarily do almost whatever it wants, they don’t see the purpose.
Along the same lines, the response from all three men included expressions of outrage at the president’s supposedly drawing a moral equivalence between ISIS and Ferguson’s police. The fear of the pernicious results of moral equivalency can be found throughout the right, but in the realm of foreign policy, it’s most pronounced among neoconservatives, for whom any recognition of the most basic shared humanity between the U.S. and its foes — and I’m talking basic, here; like the capacity to make mistakes — is tantamount to swearing off any claim to moral legitimacy. The fact that the United States is a more humane, responsible and decent global citizen than the genocidal ISIS is obvious enough to most of us (and not saying much, either). But, again, the neocons are the exception.
Finally, the neocon pushback also highlights what is to my mind one of their most distinctive and revealing features — their utter lack of interest in domestic policy. Neo-imperialists that they are, neocons often see domestic politics solely through the lens of foreign affairs. And because they’re so zeroed-in on what they imagine the world’s perception of the U.S. is (as well as what it should be), they’ll not infrequently analyze domestic events with a kind of myopia that prioritizes the U.S. #brand above all else. Richard Grenell doesn’t know enough about the goings on in Ferguson to understand that Michael Brown’s killing had nothing to do with his alleged robbery, which officer Darren Wilson did not know of when he came into conflict with the teen. He refers to it as a “burglary-turned-shooting.” (I suppose we could chalk Grenell’s mistake up to laziness and/or a desire to mislead, but I’m feeling generous.)
“Bonzo Goes Bonkers”: Boehner’s Contempt For Obama Reaches Tipping Point
As a rule, those who ask House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) about his relationship with President Obama tend to hear the same answer: the two leaders “get along fine,” the Ohio Republican likes to say.
But as Boehner’s frustrations mount, his commitment to a respectful tone has disappeared. The Speaker sat down with KTGO in North Dakota on Friday and showed real contempt for the president with a tone that seemed unusually caustic for Boehner.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) blasted President Obama’s domestic and foreign policies in a recent radio interview, saying Obama was “not prepared for the job.” […]
Boehner also blamed global tensions on Obama’s “apology tour” five years ago.
In political science circles, there are often spirited debates about whether anyone is ever truly “prepared for the job” of the presidency, but the fact remains that Barack Obama has some of the most significant accomplishments of any president in a generation, even in the midst of crises few of his predecessors have had to endure. Boehner, on the other hand, is routinely ignored and bullied by his own members, struggles to complete even routine legislative tasks, and his most notable accomplishment as Speaker – indeed, arguably his only accomplishment – was a government shutdown with no apparent purpose.
One of these two leaders is probably “not prepared for the job,” but it’s not who Boehner thinks.
As for the Speaker’s reliance on the “apology tour” talking point, it’s a painfully dumb argument, but more importantly, it’s beneath Boehner’s office. We expect lazy, recycled rhetoric from random talking heads on Fox, not the Speaker of the House.
Wait, it gets worse.
“There’s nobody more frustrated than I am, but we’re the minority party,” Boehner added.
Well, not really. Boehner is the Speaker of the House because his party isn’t in the minority, at least not in the House. It’s a divided government, but Boehner is nevertheless the ostensible leader of the majority party in one chamber.
Boehner said he is committed to reforming the country’s “broken” immigration system, but until “we have an administration committed to security of the border, it won’t happen.”
“We’ve tried and tried and tried, but he just won’t go there,” he said.
Wait, does the Speaker now want sympathy? The truth is, the Obama administration has already improved border security, and would improve it further as part of comprehensive immigration reform. Boehner won’t even bring a popular, bipartisan bill to the floor, refuses to unveil an alternative, refuses to negotiate with Democrats, and refuses to even consider a compromise.
“We’ve tried and tried and tried”? Have all of these efforts happened in secret because when it comes to immigration policymaking, it appears the only folks who aren’t trying are Boehner and his far-right caucus.
As for the larger point, does the Speaker believe such rhetoric will improve governing prospects over the next couple of years? Almost certainly not, though by all appearances, Boehner no longer cares.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 18, 2014
“The Tin Man With No Heart”: Mitt Romney, A Hollow Man Who Views The Presidency As His Entitlement
Mitt Romney, now we know you after a lost seven days in September which you and Ann will look back on and forever rue by the fireplace in one of your vacation compounds.
As one volunteer at the Democratic convention put it, “He’s the Tin Woodman with no heart, in the Wizard of Oz.” She did the stiff walk that, sure enough, captured the starched style of the man seeking a job that requires some heartfelt encounters with the American people. Starting in frigid Iowa, along a campaign trail that resembled the freakish Wizard quest, there has been precious little show of heart from a hollow man that views the presidency as his entitlement. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the enchanting tale published back in 1900, remains a rich source for American character archetypes.
The volunteer’s name was Brenda Lee Monroe, a 51-year-old African-American Atlanta resident, laid off three weeks earlier from a good job managing medical records. Jobs in her field are being outsourced as far as India. Yet she was upbeat and undefeated that night in the Charlotte arena, which was hopping.
To Romney, this spirited woman of grace would be part of the 47 percent, to be exact, which are not his “job to worry about,” as he callously put it in at a tony May fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. The tape of his talk to wealthy donors was released yesterday by Mother Jones magazine.
But first there was the unforgivable foul on the foreign policy front. To review: Romney didn’t wait for the sun to rise, for the bodies of four countrymen to grow cold, before he started blaming and speaking way out of school on the death of the American ambassador in Libya. The tone-deaf, tin Romney stooped so low he violated the laws of decency, not just politics, with his ugly outburst. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, said it was strange. Let’s get more real: It was un-American.
Romney’s rashness added to fears and whispers that if elected, he and his good buddy Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who’s hectoring President Barack Obama on Iran like a spoiled child, might just rush to judgment on bombing Iran. That would be bad, literally igniting the Middle East.
Then came the tape that revealed how Romney would govern on domestic policy, given a chance. The answer is that he’d govern only with the upper-class half in mind, those whom he presumes would vote for him.
As for the rest of us, we are not worth worrying about, he went on, as the other half that lacks a sense of responsibility and depend on the federal government for things like healthcare, housing, and food. “My job is not to worry about those people,” he said with chilling candor. Well, not everyone can take care of themselves all the time. And the president is supposed to represent all of us, we the people, not to divide us from them.
Think about it. Have we heard a single nice word out of Romney since this whole thing began on an Iowa ice floe? No, I don’t think so. The statement that corporations are people doesn’t count. For such a high-stakes candidate, it must be hard to get good wordsmith help these days. But the real problem lies within.
Nine months is too long to hide the truth and we will soon reach that water-mark in the election cycle. Romney has not yet authentically spoken to all the American people, not a word that shows spark, compassion, wit, humanity—or a heartbeat in there. He will pay a price for that, a high price even for a rich man.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, September 18, 2012
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