“The Incredible Weakness Of The National Republican Party”: The GOP Is Now The Political Arm Of Fox News
One of the more interesting things about the GOP debate wasn’t even what happened at the debate, but the meta-narrative of how it happened. It’s also interesting how weak and helpless the Republican Party appeared as events unfolded.
First, the GOP was supposed to have its strongest field in decades. This should, in theory, have allowed for real contentions over major issues and a seesaw effect as governors and senators probed each other’s weaknesses and tested new ideas with the GOP primary electorate. But that hasn’t happened. Instead each of the major candidates has shrunk under the bright lights rather than grown. The field that appeared so strong on paper has turned out to look incredibly weak and slate.
As the major candidates were unable to seize control, an increasing number of also-rans became tempted to join the fray, producing an overcrowded clown car effect. During all of this the national Republican Party was entirely powerless to stop them and clear the field.
Then, of course, came Donald Trump. The Republican Party has never looked weaker than it has in dealing with the enormous black eye that is Donald Trump. Reince Priebus has looked variously baffled, snarky, pouty and kowtowing addressing the Trump problem. At every turn Donald Trump continues to thumb his nose at the establishment Republican Party, insulting its leaders and openly mocking any efforts it might make to reach out to women and minorities in order to solve its demographic problems.
And then comes Fox News. Fox News is often described as the media arm of the GOP. But over the years it has seemed more like the GOP is the political arm of Fox News. It was Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch who decided which candidates would appear on stage. It was Fox News’ Megyn Kelly who determined the lines of attack each candidate would face, and which ones would face an easier road than others. It was Fox News that controlled the post-debate spin. In all of this, the actual Republican Party seems to be an utter bystander at its own event.
Of course, there’s the spectacle the Koch Brothers and Shelden Adelson have made of their willingness to buy candidates outright and set up their own shadow field and campaign arms separate from the GOP.
And now comes the RedState forum. Erick Erickson has taken it upon himself to disinvite Donald Trump from the RedState forum. At first glance this might seem to be a boon to the GOP: national leaders desperately want to see the Trump “bubble” burst, and want to take the spotlight away from him in any way possible. But it’s still remarkable that in an election year when national Democratic leaders and the Clinton campaign made a decision to keep frontrunner Hillary Clinton away from the liberal Netroots Nation convention, it is the RedState forum itself that is disinviting the current Republican frontrunner. Once again, the national GOP seems to be utterly helpless.
The Republican Party is a total mess, and it has never looked weaker.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 8, 2015
“The Republican Party Can’t Escape Its Past”: Trapped At The Center Of A Tug-Of-War Between Its Own Ego And The Conservative Id
A lot can happen through three hours of political debate, enough to carry multiple headlines and just as many different analytical perspectives. Even before the main-stage debate Thursday night, a consensus gelled that Carly Florina had distinguished herself among the also-rans, that Rick Perry continues to struggle to communicate extemporaneously, and that most of the seven candidates who didn’t make the top 10 didn’t make it for a reason.
But nothing that any individual candidate—including Donald Trump—said or did tonight stuck out as more significant than the thematic fact that Republicans are still tripping over the long tail of the 2012 election.
Part of what makes this process so awkward for them is that the GOP never really reached consensus about what it needed to do differently in 2016 to avoid the result it achieved four years ago. Some of them think the biggest error Republicans committed in the last election was racing to a rightmost position on immigration at the beck and call of xenophobes. Others think it was Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan’s breezy willingness to disparage “takers”—and Romney’s statements about the 47 percent specifically. Still more thought the party’s only error was nominating a candidate whom conservatives didn’t instinctively trust.
Every single opposing viewpoint in this dispute is represented in the current primary—and among the Fox News moderators and other conservative journalists who have the greatest access to the candidates—and the result is deeply unstable equilibrium between factions. The Republican Party is trapped at the center of a tug-of-war between its own ego and the conservative id.
Donald Trump personifies this dynamic more than any other candidate. Surrounded by Republicans who vowed not to run independent candidacies, he refused to take the same pledge, making explicit reference to the leverage his threat gives him against a cowering GOP establishment. He swatted away questions about his crude sexism by attacking political correctness and reiterated his view that the government of Mexico is sending rapists and murderers to the United States. And nobody was willing (or able) to take issue with any of the substantive claims he made, except insofar as he represented himself as a true Republican.
This isn’t the issue that most Republican Party leaders wanted center stage in the first 2016 primary debate. And it’s arguably only there because the party retreated from its tepid commitment to pass an immigration bill in 2013, and chose instead to pander to the same nativists, while surrendering their power to influence policy.
During the undercard debate, one moderator structured a question about labor market weakness in America around the premise that too many people are choosing to idle about on the dole rather than work for a living. She clearly believed everything Romney said in the 47 percent video and wanted the dark horse candidates to vouchsafe all of it. To their modest credit, none of them took the bait, exactly. They framed the issue instead as a problem with government spending fostering dependency—a slightly less dismissive, slightly more infantilizing way of describing the same, mostly imagined phenomenon. Certainly many of them still see the issue exactly the same way they did four years ago. And though nobody used the most damaging possible language in this instance, the 47 percent idea, and the fierce certainty many Republicans have that Romney was exactly right about it, litters the conservative mindshare like unexploded ordnance.
What you saw tonight—and the vastness of the field made this tension more vivid—are several candidates who want to hew to a new line of some kind, only to be pulled back, like the Godfather, into a morass they were trying to escape.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, August 6, 2015
“Sure, Why Not?”: Is Donald Trump Serious About His Independent Threat?
Might Donald Trump run for president as an independent next year as he is threatening? Sure, why not.
My first reaction to the report in The Hill that former reality TV star Donald Trump is threatening to run for president as an independent if the GOP is too mean to him was a derisive chuckle – of course he’s not going to run as an independent, I thought. But hey, I also doubted that he’d ever actually declare for the presidency in the first place and even after he did that I wouldn’t have guessed that he’d file a real financial disclosure but he has. (And it’s the classiest, most unprecedented financial disclosure God ever created – I mean, Trump Drinks Israel?)
But having given it a little more thought … sure why not?
The fundamental question one must ask when pondering Trump’s “candidacy” is how seriously to take him as a politician seeking office. Does he really believe that he can be elected president and does he actually want to be? Does he, in other words, believe the nonsense that pours forth from his perpetual-motion-machine mouth? Or is this just a publicity stunt, a more elaborate version of his near-quadrennial attention grab?
If you’re not sure of the answer, consider this from The Hill’s story: “Real estate mogul Donald Trump said … he could run for president as an independent if he’s unable to win the Republican nomination in 2012.” Oops, sorry – that was The Hill’s story from April, 2011. So yeah, we’ve seen this show before.
In any case, regardless of whether you buy Trump as a serious candidate or not, an independent bid is sure-why-not plausible.
Suppose for a moment that he’s serious. If he’s really vainglorious enough to think he can win the GOP nomination barring establishment dirty tricks – and if he really thinks what the country needs is a Trump White House (and of course I mean that literally, with his name in huge gold letters on the roof) then why not run as an independent? Is he worried that he’s going to lose his credibility with Republicans? That he’s going to burn his political bridges? Like he cares? Trump’s political convictions are hardly set in stone. (For example: Per Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, the day before he told The Hill he might run as an independent he told conservative radio host Dana Loesch that “I will only ever run as a Republican.”)
The case for an unserious run is even more compelling: What better way to keep himself in the spotlight without having any chance of actually having to take on any responsibility or govern? What’s the downside? He has already demonstrated an unparalleled ability to get the media’s attention (and so, thus far, keep his poll numbers rising) so all he’d have to do is make some nutty pronouncement every few days and he could continue to soak up the limelight.
Does it ultimately matter if he decides to run? Less than you might think. Running as an independent requires the kind of 50-state political infrastructure for which Trump has demonstrated neither an interest nor any ability. There are 50 different sets of rules for getting your name on the ballot – sorry, Donald, you can’t simply license your name onto it – with 50 different deadlines. If he isn’t on a significant number of ballots is he likely to get onto a debate stage? Or siphon a determinative number of votes from, presumably, the GOP nominee?
It takes more than a sure-why-not campaign to make that sort of difference.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, July 23, 2015
“A Paradox In The Making”: For The GOP, Donald Trump May Be Evil Incarnate — Literally
What if a candidate for president were evil?
I’m not talking about the way “evil” is thrown around as an insult. I’m talking about real evil, the kind you find in the Bible. Chuckle if you must, but Donald Trump’s opponents are beginning to make the case that he is truly evil. And the deeper you look, the more you see that it’s no laughing matter.
The prevailing wisdom says Trump is riding high because the Republican base is raising a middle finger — once again — to the establishment. But the prevailing wisdom also says the base is dominated by Christian conservatives. That’s a paradox in the making.
Certainly, just because you’re Christian doesn’t mean you’re a wimp when it comes to politics. You can stand up and cheer, or grimly nod along, when someone — anyone — cuts through today’s tightly scripted Beltway blather with random rants and oh-no-he-didn‘t jabs.
But it’s becoming clear that Trump’s candidacy asks Christians to go much further than that — down the road of perdition, if Trump’s enemies are to be believed.
It all started when Trump went on record describing an attitude toward sin that would make the average churchgoer flinch. At the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Frank Luntz asked Trump to share with the audience whether he’d ever asked God for forgiveness.
“I don’t think so,” said Trump. “I think if I do something wrong, I think, I just try and make it right. I don’t bring God into that picture. I don’t.”
He went on. “When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed. I think in terms of ‘let’s go on and let’s make it right.'”
Many Americans would probably hesitate to be so forthright about their view of communion. But Trump’s apparent honesty threw his insurgent campaign in a scary new light.
In secular America, one of the most broadly accepted ways to describe Trump is with swear words. People straining to be decent often resort to calling him an ass. But in Christian America, there’s another term of opprobrium that gets more to the heart of the matter. It’s not just that Trump’s campaign revolves around his harsh and ungenerous demeanor. It’s that he’s all about sowing discord. It’s what he does. It’s who he is.
And sowing discord, in the Christian imagination, isn’t just mean or nasty. It’s evil.
For Rick Perry — a man who might very well have to sit out the GOP primary debates while Trump hogs the mic — it’s time to call a spade a spade. He didn’t explicitly call Trump an evildoer at the Opportunity and Freedom PAC forum in Washington, D.C. But he came about as close as you can get.
“In times of trouble, there are two types of leaders,” he warned, “repairers of the breach and sowers of discord. The sower of discord foments agitation, thrives on division, scapegoats certain elements of society, and offers empty platitudes and promises.”
Readers of Dante will recall that, in the Inferno, a special slice of hell is reserved for the sowers of discord — schismatics who tried to advance themselves by dividing institutions. For these evildoers, Dante meted out the poetically just punishment of physical dismemberment. Just as they hacked apart the human bonds around them, so their bodies now were sliced and diced forever.
Readers of the Bible will remember that Dante wasn’t just freestyling. As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, God “tempered the body” of Christendom together so that “there should be no schism” and “the members should have the same care for one another.”
Or as Perry put it, the sower of discord “offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: a toxic mix of demagoguery, mean-spiritedness, and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued.”
“Enter ye by the strait gate,” runs an early English translation of Matthew 7:13; “for the gate that leadeth to perdition is large, and the way is broad, and there be many that enter by it.”
Trump’s candidacy, Perry went on, “cannot be pacified or ignored, for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world — the cause of conservatism.” In sum? Trump’s evil ways tempt Republicans to turn away from their greatest moral purpose — a sin worthy of damnation.
Perry is the first to advance this argument so bluntly. But we can expect it to catch on, because Trump’s candidacy is forcing the base’s hand. If The Donald can keep up his numbers without a come-to-Jesus moment, that either means that the base has become a lot less religious, or that it’s so frustrated that it’s willing to cast aside the better angels of its nature.
Either of those developments promise Armageddon for Trump’s bedeviled rivals.
By: James Poulos, The Week, July 24, 2015
“Give Up, Evangelicals”: The Republican Party Isn’t Going To Help You
Evangelicals are not thrilled about a third coming of Bush. Concerned that former Florida Governor Jeb Bush will receive the GOP nomination thanks to his credit with the party establishment, Evangelical leaders around the country are in talks “to coalesce their support behind a single social-conservative contender,” The New York Times’ Trip Gabriel reports. Evangelicals do not believe that Bush “would fight for the issues they care most about: opposing same-sex marriage, holding the line on an immigration overhaul and rolling back abortion rights,” and fear that another bruising round of Republican primaries could lose the GOP the presidential race by failing to unite the party’s base.
Evangelicals have good reason to be worried. Despite Evangelicals’ willingness to throw their support behind establishment candidates—they enthusiastically voted for Mitt Romney and John McCain—the United States seems to resemble the Evangelical vision less and less. Since the mobilization of the Christian right as a useful voting bloc back in the 1980s, Evangelicals have enjoyed careful courtship from the Republican establishment, as evident in Senator Ted Cruz’s mating dance with right-wing Christians at his Liberty University announcement speech on Monday. But despite being Republicans’ “biggest, most reliable voting bloc,” in the words of Republican National Committee faith engagement director Chad Connelly, Evangelicals appear to have received relatively little from their arrangement with the GOP.
Next month, the Supreme Court will tackle same sex marriage, and all signs indicate that the justices will legalize same sex marriage nationally. The last bastion of hope for Evangelicals in such a circumstance would be religious freedom legislation like the bill recently signed into law by Indiana Governor Mike Pence, which would allow, inter alia, Christian businesses to refuse service to gay customers. These laws represent a kind of retreat from calls for gay-marriage bans, a shield of isolation around small enclaves of Evangelical sentiment that were ultimately incapable of winning the larger political fight. Likewise, despite the willingness of GOP candidates to speak to Evangelical concerns about abortion—29 percent of Evangelicals consider it a “critical issue” for our country—Roe v. Wade has not been overturned, and abortion is not illegal in a single American state. Instead, states have taken to fiddling with regulations relating to waiting periods, counseling, invasive ultrasounds, and parental notification in order to construct makeshift de-facto bans. Pornography, despite the best efforts of Evangelicals over several decades, is not banned. Evolution, too, persists in public schools, along with sex-ed; indeed, the only broadly Evangelical-backed political project that seems to have a prayer at the moment is comprehensive immigration reform, the success of which will largely depend upon keeping people like Ted Cruz out of office.
Some Republicans, like former Fox News host Mike Huckabee, are upfront about the fact that Evangelicals have been taken for a ride by the GOP. “They’re treated like a cheap date,” Huckabee told Politico during a 2013 interview, “always good for the last-minute prom date, never good enough to marry.” Evangelicals are always game to hit the polls, in other words, when the GOP needs to pull out a win: but that doesn’t necessarily mean Republicans will be invested in pushing Evangelical issues once they get into office, or that they’d have any success if they tried.
Faced with the inability of their alliance with the Republican Party to produce much more than militarism and deregulation, neither of specific moral interest to Evangelicals, the Evangelical polity itself has begun to split, with some clinging to the triumphalist rhetoric of the past, in which America was a Christian nation and Christianity was an American religion, while others have moved on to lobbying for cells of legal protection from the country’s rapidly shifting moral landscape. For this reason, Religion Dispatches’ Sarah Posner notes, most Evangelicals would “rather hear the candidates talk about religious freedom, not offer overwrought displays of piety blended with patriotism.”
If Jeb Bush is interested in capturing the Evangelical vote, he could promise to push for laws that protect religiously motivated employers from legal censure should they choose to refuse business to LGBT clients. The fact that these laws have been a struggle even at the state level (Arizona governor Jan Brewer, no fan of same sex marriage, still vetoed such a measure last February, while Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature settled on a compromise earlier this month) suggests that they would be even more of a headache at the national level. But if history has revealed anything about the relationship between Evangelicals and their Republican allies, it’s that the promises made and positions telegraphed during campaigns don’t have to be kept.
Still, it seems that the rift between establishment Republicans and Evangelicals will be injurious to the GOP in the long term. As time passes, leveraging the necessary political force to reverse many of the decisions that most rankle the Christian right, including Roe and same-sex marriage, will become even more challenging, making it less likely that an Evangelical favorite could do much to roll these policies back even if elected. And, as failures on that front continue, Evangelicals will likely keep seeking out alternative candidates to rally around, further fracturing a GOP base already tugged in strange directions by the Tea Party. Any Evangelical darling (Huckabee, for example) would likely turn out unelectable in a national election, meaning that Evangelical success will add up to an easy win for Democrats, and another round of disappointments for the Evangelicals themselves. In short, the romantic alliance that was sold to Evangelicals when the Moral Majority helped deliver Ronald Reagan to the White House appears finally to have unraveled altogether.
Which ultimately might be an improvement for Christian politics. As Kevin Kruse notes in his forthcoming book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, the alliance between Christian voters and politicians on the right was largely a calculated product born of plush industrialist funding and the handy rhetoric of the McCarthy era. But with the threat of Soviet aggression dissolved and the political promise of the Republican-Evangelical coalition played out, perhaps Evangelicals will be able to look beyond a frustrating alliance in which their interests were always low priority. The faith and family left, as the Pew Foundation has termed it, awaits their support.
By: Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, The New Republic, March 31, 2015
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