“The Insanity Started A Long Time Ago”: Overheated Talk Against The Government Has Come Back To Bite The GOP
Julian Zeilzer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, isn’t buying the handwringing we’re seeing from David Brooks and the National Review about the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. In a case that others have made, but perhaps not so thoroughly, he says: GOP Establishment Deserves Trump, Cruz.
Going back to Reagan’s embrace of the Moral Majority, the racism Lee Atwater infused into George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign and the fact that it was McCain who chose Palin to be his running mate in 2008, Zeilzer demonstrates how GOP presidential candidates laid the groundwork for what is happening today.
He also captures how Boehner and McConnell initially embraced the election of tea party candidates like Ted Cruz back in 2010.
In the House of Representatives, Republican leaders were more than welcoming to the tea party revolution that took hold in 2010 — until it no longer suited their purposes. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell welcomed the energy and enthusiasm that tea party activists brought to the fight against President Barack Obama.
While the activists might have pushed the boundaries of acceptable partisan compact with threats like allowing the government to go into default, the discipline as a voting block and willingness to stand up to an ambitious President helped, in the leadership’s minds, to revitalize the standing of the party. Or at least that’s what Boehner thought before he felt he had to leave.
Zeilzer points out that conservative media has also played a role – echoing the warnings of conservative David Frum.
I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead. The real leaders are on TV and radio, and they have very different imperatives from people in government. Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds.
Finally, Zeilzer notes that overheated talk against the government has come back to bite the GOP establishment.
At the heart of the Cruz and Trump campaign is an essential message that has been a central theme of conservatism in the post-World War II period: that Washington is never good and career politicians are without virtue.
Their anti-politics rhetoric comes directly out of the “conservative establishment” politics that formed in the 1970s and 1980s. “Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said.
Once again today, David Brooks is pleading with Republicans to “stay sane.” His supplications completely ignore the path the GOP took that led them to where they are today. As Zeilzer notes, “the alliance, the ideas, the rhetoric and the style have all come from the heart of Republican politics.” In other words, there’s no “staying” sane. That’s because the insanity started a very long time ago.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, January 26, 2016
“Misreading The Nature Of His Revolution”: Bernie Sanders Is Attacking The ‘Establishment.’ He’s Only Half Right
In the Republican race for president, there are few slurs more cutting than when one candidate says another is too close to “the establishment.” But we hadn’t heard that from the Democrats until yesterday, when Bernie Sanders tarred Hillary Clinton with the dreaded “E” word. The problem is that it isn’t so dreaded among Democrats, and if Sanders thinks it is, then he may be misreading the nature of his revolution and the voters who are rallying behind it.
This started last night on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC, when Maddow asked Sanders about Clinton’s endorsements from Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign. Here’s what Sanders said:
“I would love to have the endorsement of every progressive organization in America. We’re very proud to have received recently the endorsement of MoveOn.org. We’ve received the endorsement Democracy for America. These are grassroots organizations representing millions of workers.
“What we are doing in this campaign, it just blows my mind every day because I see it clearly, we’re taking on not only Wall Street and economic establishment, we’re taking on the political establishment.
“So, I have friends and supporters in the Human Rights [Campaign] and Planned Parenthood. But, you know what? Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time. Some of these groups are, in fact, part of the establishment.”
This argument would be unworthy of note if it came from a Republican, but Clinton quickly criticized Sanders, tweeting, “Really Senator Sanders? How can you say that groups like @PPact and @HRC are part of the ‘establishment’ you’re taking on?”
On one level, Sanders is absolutely right: Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are indeed part of the Democratic establishment. They’ve been around for a long time, they have deep ties with other left-leaning advocacy groups and Democratic politicians (not least the Clintons), and they’re the kind of place where you’ll find former and future members of Democratic administrations. They endorsed Clinton for a lot of reasons — because she has a history of supporting their issues and interests, because people within the organizations have personal ties with her and the people around her, and almost certainly because they see her as the most likely nominee, and they want as much access and influence in the next Democratic administration as they can get. That’s what advocacy groups do.
But Sanders is wrong if he thinks that significant numbers of Democratic voters look at groups like those and say, “Yuck, the establishment.” Or even that the dissatisfaction that is driving voters to him is directed at the Democratic establishment itself.
(A brief aside: There are some gay activists and intelligentsia who do indeed believe that the Human Rights Campaign is a bunch of sellouts. Without wading into the substance of that question, it’s safe to say that the proportion of Democratic voters who have any idea what that might be about is tiny).
This is where the difference with the Republican side is so stark, and where Sanders’s success is a product of a fundamentally different phenomenon than what’s fueling the campaigns of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. On the Republican side, anger at their elected officials, their party leaders, and the broader network of Washington-based organizations and individuals that make up that thing we call the establishment is intense. That anger almost constitutes its own ideology, even though it’s barely about issues at all, but is more concerned with tactics. It has been nurtured by “outsider” candidates, and by conservative media figures like Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham who fancy themselves a kind of counter-establishment. It vilifies people like Mitch McConnell and the departed John Boehner who are supposedly too willing to knuckle under to Barack Obama without forcing dramatic and quixotic confrontations. It promotes intra-party revolts and primary challenges to Republicans, and promulgates a narrative in which everything that has gone wrong for them in the last seven years is because of that establishment’s weakness and betrayal.
There’s nothing like that on the Democratic side. Yes, Sanders voters are dissatisfied. But they’re drawn to Sanders because of his ideological purity, his frank discussion of fundamental progressive values, his big ideas unencumbered by any buzz-crunching pragmatism about the mundane realities of governing, and his focus on the pathologies of the political system, particularly the influence of big money. They don’t despise Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid the way so many Republican voters despise McConnell and Boehner. They certainly aren’t going to take Clinton’s endorsements from the likes of Planned Parenthood as a reason to vote against her.
There’s also nothing comparable on the left to what those on the right hear from their favorite media figures. To begin with, liberal media isn’t nearly as central to the progressive movement as conservative media is to the conservative movement, either in influence or audience size. But even if it were, people like Maddow aren’t on the air every day railing against the Democratic establishment the way Limbaugh, Ingraham, and others rail against the Republican establishment.
Sanders is right that the Democratic establishment isn’t going to support him, but the biggest reason for that is that they don’t think he’s going to win the nomination and they don’t think he could win the general election if he were the nominee. Now it may be that this is the last time he brings this up, and he’ll go back to talking about the things that actually draw people to his revolution. But if he thinks it’s because they want to fight the establishment, he may have been spending too much time watching what’s going on in the Republican race.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, January 20, 2016
“Bearish Outlook On Trump’s Prospects”: Iowa Will Not Be Donald Trump’s Waterloo
The paradox of media coverage of the 2016 GOP presidential race is that the longer Donald Trump dominates the polls, the more insistent pundits are that the maverick candidate is headed for a fall. “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee,” Ross Douthat bluntly stated in a column for The New York Times last week, although he admitted that this flat prediction was becoming more difficult to argue with conviction. As Douthat noted, the conventional wisdom that Trump is doomed to fail is an assertion that increasingly “inspires sympathetic glances, the kind you get when you tell friends that you think your new personal-investment strategy is sure to beat the market.”
Yet Douthat is not alone in thinking that The Donald is going to go bust (politically, that is). A broad spectrum of pundits—ranging from Ezra Klein at Vox to Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight to John Fund in National Review—share this bearish outlook on Trump’s prospects. The pundit class has coalesced around the theory that Trump’s seemingly high level of support is a balloon ready to be punctured and that the Iowa caucus—now less than three weeks away—will be the occasion when the Trump campaign meets the pin that will prick its hopes. But these pundits might be underestimating how robust and intense the loyalty of Trump’s fan base is.
In late December, The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol predicted that when “Trump loses Iowa, the mystique disappears, [and] he’s just another candidate.” Writing in National Review, John Fund voiced a similar thought in an article titled, “Losing Iowa Could Be Trump’s Kryptonite.”
Yet attempts to explain how a Trump loss in Iowa could lead to the demise of his campaign tend to be cloudy and hand-wave-y. Consider Ezra Klein’s projection at Vox: “But there’s another model of failure. Trump could just … not win. He could lose the Iowa caucuses. He could fall short in New Hampshire. A loss in any early state might lead to a loss in every state. Losing a presidential primary is often like going bankrupt: It happens slowly, then all at once.” As Klein himself admits, “A lot of reporters and politicos believe something like this is going to happen to him. But the prediction is hard to talk through explicitly because it’s so maddeningly vague.”
In an attempt to flesh out this “maddeningly vague” sense that Trump will lose steam, Klein’s colleague David Roberts offers a theory of Trump’s supporters. Trump sells himself as a winner, Roberts contends, which makes his popularity brittle because it is subject to disenchantment if he ever loses. Like the proverbial rodents fleeing a sinking ship, Trump supporters will flee him once the stench of failure can be sniffed.
“If your value proposition is that you’re a winner, your value evaporates the minute you’re no longer winning. Losing refutes a winner, and no one wins forever,” Roberts argues. “Trump’s vulnerability (like his strength!) is that his appeal is entirely personal, entirely based on the expectation that he’s a winner who will win.”
There’s a smidgen of truth to this argument: Trump does ceaselessly talk about how he’s a winner. But he does so in the manner of a military leader like Patton or an athlete like Muhammad Ali, as a way of rallying his supporters and his own psyche for combat. Losing individual battles doesn’t refute such boastfulness; it only reinforces a sense that victory must be won.
To say that Trump’s appeal is “entirely personal” ignores the fact that Trump has won an enthusiastic fan base by taking hardline stances on immigration and terrorism. Pat Buchanan was on surer grounds when he told The New York Times that, under Trump’s influence, the Republican Party is likely to become “more nationalist and tribal and more about protecting the border.” Buchanan’s sentiments were backed up by Leo Martin, a 62-year-old machinist who told the Times, “The Republican Party has never done anything for the working man like me, even though we’ve voted Republican for years. … This election is the first in my life where we can change what it means to be a Republican.”
As these remarks make clear, Trump’s support comes not just from who he is, but what he stands for and what he promises to do. As Fund acknowledges, focus-group research shows that Trump’s supporters display “remarkable loyalty to the real-estate mogul and scant interest in other candidates.” This loyalty is best understood as devotion to the nationalist and tribalist policies Trump is putting forward, rather than simple enthusiasm for Trump as a man. And losing a few primaries isn’t likely to make such devotion melt away.
Trump, for his part, has some experience bouncing back from losses outside the political arena. He knows how to craft a comeback story for himself. In the field where he claims to have mastery (business), he’s declared bankruptcy four times, but has turned that into a narrative of his cunning in exploiting existing law. The need to overcome adversity doesn’t necessarily tarnish a winner, but can instead reinforce the idea that he or she is a fighter and a hero. If Trump were to lose in Iowa, there are any number of ways he could turn the narrative to his advantage, either by implying trickery on the part of his enemies or by selling himself as a “comeback kid” if he wins another primary.
On top of all this, it’s uncertain that Trump will lose Iowa, or if he loses whether the loss will be a significant one. Fund, like many others, points out that Trump might be weaker in Iowa because the caucus system, which requires not just casting a ballot but devoting hours to meetings, tends to weed out poorer voters (who lack resources to spend a day caucusing) and those who haven’t participated in the caucus before—both groups that skew toward Trump. But Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, reports that Trump is building a get-out-the-vote machine in Iowa that could overcome such hurdles.
As of right now, the polling we have doesn’t support the idea that Iowa will be the anti-Trump firewall that his opponents are hoping for. According to the aggregation of Real Clear Politics, Cruz has only a narrow lead over Trump: Cruz is at 28 percent and Trump at 26 percent. Marco Rubio stands third at 14 percent. The most likely scenario is a close three-way race as Rubio improves his position. But Trump could easily spin such a narrow race in a way to make himself the winner.
It’s easy to understand why both the Republican establishment and many liberals want to see Trump disappear fast. He’s a toxic presence in American public life. But scenarios of a quick solution to Trump—some silver bullet or Kryptonite to finish him off in Iowa—simply don’t have plausibility.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, January 12, 2016
“Why McCain’s Shot Across Cruz’s Bow Matters”: In The Senate, ‘Assisting Mr. Cruz Would Amount To A Foreign Concept’
There was a fleeting moment around this point eight years ago in which some questioned John McCain’s eligibility for the presidency. The Republican senator, well on his way to becoming his party’s nominee, was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936, prompting some pointless questions about whether he was literally a “natural-born citizen.”
Few took those questions seriously; even McCain’s harshest critics dismissed the concerns out of hand; and the Senate quickly approved a resolution – written and sponsored by Democrat Claire McCaskill – declaring, “John Sidney McCain, III, is a ‘natural born citizen’ under Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States.” It passed without opposition.
The recent history adds a degree of irony to McCain’s comments about Ted Cruz yesterday.
Arizona Sen. John McCain said he doesn’t know if the Canadian-born Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is eligible to be president, saying the Supreme Court might have to decide if Cruz is eligible to be president.
“I don’t know the answer to that,” said McCain on the Chris Merrill Show on KFYI550 on Wednesday of Cruz’s eligibility.
As the BuzzFeed report added, McCain went on to say, in reference to Cruz, “I think it’s worth looking into.” McCain added he thinks Cruz should try to get ahead of these eligibility issues, though without access to a time machine, how he’d go about doing this is a bit of a mystery.
It’s a genuine shame that Donald Trump has pushed this issue into the spotlight, because as best as I can tell, this entire line of attack is misguided. For all intents and purposes, natural-born citizens are those who were citizens at the time of their birth. This applies to Cruz. End of story.
I can think of about a thousand reasons to be concerned about a Cruz presidency, but his eligibility isn’t one of them.
What I find more interesting, however, is Cruz’s sudden need for friends in high places.
With the developments surrounding McCain in 2008 still in mind, the New York Times asked this morning, “Now the question is, will the Senate again weigh in to clarify the constitutional status of another one of its members and declare Mr. Cruz eligible to be president?”
The answer is, almost certainly not. Among senators from both parties, Ted Cruz is extremely unpopular. He’s gone out of his way to alienate his colleagues, pick fights with his own party leadership, and generally make as few friends in the chamber as possible during his tenure.
On the campaign trail, this serves as a point of pride. Cruz can, in complete honesty, boast to the Republican base that the GOP establishment inside the Beltway has nothing but disdain for him – and the feeling is mutual. John McCain himself once referred to Cruz as a “wacko bird,” which is why it’s not too surprising that the Arizona Republican was needlessly adding fuel to a foolish fire yesterday. He just doesn’t seem to like his colleague very much.
Right about now, Cruz would probably love to see the same level of Senate support McCain received eight years ago, but he shouldn’t hold his breath. As the Times added, for most senators in both parties, “assisting Mr. Cruz would amount to a foreign concept.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 7, 2016
“No Sense In Which That Description Is True”: Being Less Crazy Than Donald Trump Does Not Make Marco Rubio ‘Moderate’
Marco Rubio built his presidential campaign upon a strategy that has succeeded many times in the past, and (if betting markets are correct) stands a strong chance of succeeding again. He is running a campaign that is more or less optimized for the general election rather than the primary — a tactic that holds him back from viscerally channeling conservative anger, but which, by maximizing his electability, makes his nomination more attractive to party elites. But because Rubio has found himself principally challenged by Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, who are running campaigns based purely on gratifying Republican base instincts, his strategy has magnified the contrast to the point where Rubio’s principal ideological identifier is now “moderate.” The term has been employed everywhere — by Rubio’s rivals, by his friends, and by neutral reporters. There is no sense in which that description is true — not in relation to modern Republican politics, and perhaps not even in relation to his allegedly more extreme opponents.
Rubio burst onto the national scene in 2010 as a self-described “movement conservative” who managed to draw backing from important Establishment Republicans, like the Bush family, and tea party groups. On foreign policy, he has embraced full-scale neoconservatism, winning enthusiastic plaudits from figures in the right-wing intelligentsia, like William Kristol. While much of the Republican Party has recoiled from the excesses of the Bush administration’s wild-eyed response to the 9/11 attacks, Rubio has not. He was one of 32 senators to oppose the USA Freedom Act, which restrained the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance. He was one of just 21 senators opposing a prohibition on torture, insisting, “I do not support telegraphing to the enemy what interrogation techniques we will or won’t use.” Indeed, Rubio now delights his audiences by promising to torture suspected terrorists, who will “get a one-way ticket to Guantánamo, where we’re going to find out everything they know.”
On social issues, Rubio has endorsed a complete ban on abortions, even in cases of rape and incest (a stance locating Rubio to the right of George W. Bush). He has promised to reverse executive orders protecting LGBT citizens from discrimination and to appoint justices who would reverse same-sex marriage. The centerpiece of Rubio’s domestic policy is a massive tax cut — more than three times the size of the Bush tax cut, and nearly half of which would go to the highest-earning 5 percent of taxpayers. By reducing federal revenue by more than a quarter, Rubio’s plan would dominate all facets of his domestic program, which is otherwise a mix of conventional Republican proposals to eliminate Obamacare, jack up defense spending, and protect retirement benefits for everybody 55 and up. Rubio has voted for the Paul Ryan budget (“by and large, it’s exactly the direction we should be headed”). He has proposed to deregulate the financial system, thrilling Wall Street. (Richard Bove, author of Guardians of Prosperity: Why America Needs Big Banks, wrote a grateful op-ed headlined, “Thank you, Marco Rubio.”)
What, then, accounts for Rubio’s moderate image? One reason is the issues Rubio has chosen to emphasize. His conventionally conservative domestic policies would, if enacted, bring about an epochal shift in the role of government and the distribution of wealth in the American economy. (And given his party’s entrenched majorities in Congress, Rubio would be able to enact those policies.) But Rubio has not emphasized these ideas publicly. He has given far more attention to his plan to increase college affordability. As Rubio has said, “You’ll hear me spend a tremendous amount of time talking about higher-education reform.” This formulation perhaps gives away more than Rubio intends. Rubio’s higher-education reform plan, while largely innocuous, is also minuscule in scale — a third-tier throwaway line in a State of the Union speech. Its importance is trivial in comparison to his radical domestic-policy commitments. Rubio spends a tremendous amount of time talking about it because doing so allows him to position his platform as new and different from those of a generic Republican without any of the risk of actual heterodoxy.
A second reason is Rubio’s ill-fated 2013 attempt to shepherd bipartisan immigration reform through Congress. Because of the prominence of his role in that episode, which consumed a large share of his brief tenure in national politics, Rubio’s support for reform has disproportionately colored his public image. But his history provides no reason to believe the issue sits close to Rubio’s heart. As a Senate candidate in 2010, Rubio forcefully opposed any path to citizenship as “amnesty.” In the wake of the 2012 election, after the Republican Party wrote a post-mortem calling for the passage of immigration reform and efforts to reach out to young people and minorities, Rubio loyally reversed his position and led the pro-reform charge, and initially he drew support from important figures in the party. But when restrictionists revolted against the bill, Rubio abandoned his own proposal and has promised never to support comprehensive reform again. The fairest conclusion to draw from his two reversals is that Rubio does not hold especially strong beliefs on the issue at all, taking whichever position seems to be the most effective means of advancing traditional Republican policies (for which he has displayed consistent support). Republican donors naturally adore Rubio.
While Rubio’s willingness to sponsor immigration reform tells us very little about his convictions, though, it reveals a great deal about his political strategy. Rubio is a political pragmatist. And pragmatism is the fundamental divide inside the GOP. While split on foreign policy between neo-conservatism and neo-isolationism, Republicans have near-unanimity on economic and social policy. A domestic Rubio presidency would look very much like a Cruz presidency or a Bush or a Walker presidency. Any Republican would sign the bills passed by Paul Ryan’s House and Mitch McConnell’s Senate.
What Republicans disagree about is how to handle a situation where the president does not sign those bills. Cruz’s response to whip up conservative suspicions that the Republican failure to enact its agenda over President Obama’s objections represents a secret betrayal. Trump’s response is to break the stalemate through unique force of personality. Both of them signal their solidarity with the base through demonstrations of anger and cultural resentment. But, while making themselves attractive to their base, Trump and Cruz harden a cultural polarization that seems to leave their party at a disadvantage in the general election. He avoids statements that make him appear ostentatiously deranged, like Cruz visually comparing Obama to a Nazi, or Trump … doing just about everything Trump has done. The third cause of Rubio’s moderate image is that he declines to indulge right-wing paranoia on such topics as whether Obama is a Marxist, or the looming threat of Sharia law in the United States, trading the opportunity to indicate solidarity with the base for general election viability. He husbands his potential electoral weakness for matters of policy, not symbolism.
Rubio’s value to the party is that he approaches its predicament realistically. He will reach out to Democratic-leaning constituencies with personal appeal without compromising on core agenda items Republicans care about. Everything Rubio says — his message of generational change, a “new American century,” his frequent invocations of his parents — ties into his youth and heritage as the son of immigrants. If Democrats attack his policies, he will change the subject to his biography. “If I’m our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck?” he boasted at a Republican debate. “I was raised paycheck to paycheck.” Rubio is the embodiment of the Republican donor class’s conviction that it needs to alter nothing more than its face.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, June 6, 2016
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