“The Toxic Culture Of Conservatism”: Conservatives Have A “Racist Jokes” Culture Problem
Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s reelection campaign had one of those days yesterday. You know, one of those days where you hold a press call with the lieutenant governor but instead of asking about your latest campaign ad like they’re supposed to, all the reporters insist on asking about how the campaign’s finance co-chair recently stepped down because campaign staffers made racist jokes.
Billionaire healthcare mogul Mike Fernandez was Rick Scott’s top fundraiser until last week, when he abruptly quit. The Miami Herald offered some detail on what led up to the decision:
Despite the praise, Fernandez has been unhappy for weeks with the struggling campaign’s direction and the attitude of some of its workers.
Fernandez began expressing his frustrations at least a month ago when he sent an email to top Scott allies and complained about two campaign aides who had joked around in a cartoon-style Mexican accent en route to a Mexican restaurant in Fernandez’s home town of Coral Gables.
The Scott campaign can assure you that it was not that bad:
“Mike was not in the van,” Scott’s campaign manager, Melissa Sellers, said in an email to the Herald.
So no harm done! Sellers also said: “If something was said in an accent, no one remembers what it was.” (Obviously someone remembers, but fine.)
The incident was reminiscent of the recently released internal emails from the staff of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. Those emails revealed an office where campaigning and politicking trumped governing, but they also showed a staff that saw absolutely no issue with forwarding deeply offensive (and stupid, and unfunny) “jokes” involving the inherent hilarity of people of color.
There has been some debate recently on the subject of urban “culture” and its relation to poverty and white supremacy. Conservatives argue, essentially, that the structural forces (white supremacy) holding back “urban” economic advancement have largely receded, and so, where there is still poverty, the problem is “cultural.”
With that in mind, I’d like to posit that one reason conservative minority outreach fails so often and so consistently is because of a tailspin of culture, among Republicans, of generations of men being giant racist pricks. Not just racially “insensitive,” like an old man who doesn’t know it’s not OK to say “Oriental” anymore, but actively, intentionally, overtly, aggressively racist pricks. Like “attend a blackface-themed frat party on MLK Day” racist. Most of us don’t think forwarding a racist joke or speaking in an insulting “comedic” accent is appropriate at the workplace. Unfortunately, for those raised in the toxic culture of conservatism, the sort of mentality that leads government employees to do those things is widespread.
There will be no successful minority “outreach” for the GOP — not even among the “high-achieving” groups — until this culture is addressed. They’ll have to do this work for themselves. Charitable groups have tried for years to educate and help conservatives, but they keep falling back into the same tragic patterns: asking “why isn’t there a WHITE history month,” demanding access to institutions of higher learning based not on merit but on skin color, infringing on free expression merely because it makes them uncomfortable. The list goes on and on. It’s time for the right to stop feeling entitled to lessons in basic human decency, and start addressing their own pathological culture.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 25, 2014
“No Separating The Son From The Father”: What Rand Paul Can Learn From George W. Bush’s Daddy Issues
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) recently told my Daily Caller colleague Alex Pappas that he has “pretty much quit answering” questions about his controversial father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul.
Referencing George W. Bush’s campaign for president in 2000, Paul continued: “Did he get tons of questions about his dad? … I don’t know that he did, to tell you the truth.”
This is a silly semantic game for Paul to play. Whether or not George W. Bush was directly asked a lot of questions about George H.W. Bush in the run-up to the 2000 race is almost irrelevant. Because it is something close to an irrefutable fact that the elder Bush has loomed large over W.’s career and life for decades. In the minds of millions of Americans, there was no separating the son from the father — much in the same way there is no separating Hillary from Bill, or Jeb from a pair of Georges.
A simple search of the news archives is telling. As far back as 1978, when George W. Bush lost a bid for Congress, Bush declared: “We don’t need dad in this race.” When his opponent attacked him over his family connections and pedigree, Bush responded: “Would you like me to run as Sam Smith? The problem is I can’t abandon my background. I’m not trying to hide behind any facade.”
George H.W. Bush was a congressman, director of the CIA, vice president, and president. It is a legacy no son could escape — particularly a son who entered his father’s profession.
Ron Paul does not have nearly the record that the first President Bush did. But he is still a leading political figure in his own right. Perhaps the country’s most famous libertarian, the maverick congressman from Texas has an extremely passionate following, and became a nationally known figure thanks to several failed presidential bids. Rand Paul is kidding himself if he thinks he won’t have to deal with his dad’s legacy.
If after four years in the political limelight, Rand is already tired of answering questions about his dad, well, he’s got a long haul ahead of him. The “fortunate son” charge first lodged against Bush in 1978 was leveled more than two decades later, during the 2000 GOP primary. “If [John] McCain’s book is titled Faith of My Fathers,” quipped Margaret Carlson, “Bush’s should be called Friends of My Father.”
Of course, George W. Bush also faced the challenge of subtly distancing himself from his father’s “read my lips” flip-flopping image, without throwing the old man under the bus. Today, it’s easy to see 41 as a wise old statesman, but in 1999 and 2000, skeptical conservatives still didn’t trust the Bush clan.
The good news for the younger Bush was that after eight years of President Bill Clinton, Republicans were desperate for a winner (and the perception of being a winner can cover a multitude of perceived sins).
And for us mainstream conservatives, word had gotten out that Dubya was more conservative than his father — that he was “one of us.” He came of age studying Lee Atwater’s campaign style and Ronald Reagan’s political philosophy, we were told. The son was not like the father, the whispers went, answering questions we all had, even if they weren’t asked of the candidate himself.
Good luck finding any contemporaneous documentation to back this up, mind you. You’ll just have to take my word for it. We conservatives were somewhat quiet about it. But a 2003 Bill Keller article retroactively confirms this messaging: “That Bush is Reaganesque is a conceit that some conservatives have wishfully, tentatively embraced since he emerged as a candidate, and one that Bush himself has encouraged,” Keller noted. “The party faithful have been pining for a new Reagan since Reagan, and for Bush the analogy has the added virtue of providing an alternative political lineage; he’s not Daddy’s Boy, he’s Reagan Jr.” (Emphasis added)
For all the talk about Poppy and Dubya — and I’m sure they have a strong bond — the backers of George W. Bush had to burn a lot of calories distancing the son from his old man. And this lasted well into his presidency. “When Bob Woodward asked President Bush if he had consulted with his father about the decision to go to war in Iraq,” Bob Herbert recalled in 2005, “the president famously replied, ‘There is a higher father that I appeal to.'”
Similarly, Rand cannot escape his father, just as Jeb and George W. couldn’t, and just as Hillary Clinton cannot escape her husband. “Hillary Clinton spent eight years in the Senate and four at the State Department,” says Dave Weigel, “but has to answer for her husband’s actions in the mid-1990s. Paul, with three years behind him in the Senate, says he does not have to answer for what his father does right now.”
I’m not sure it’s fair to judge anyone based on the sins of their father, the successes of their father, or whom they’re married to. But these comparisons and questions are inescapable, and have always been so. Rand Paul cannot appeal to historical precedence to evade comparisons to his dad. Because fair or not, voters still want to know how far the apple falls from the tree — and they always have.
By: Matt K. Lewis, The Week, March 24, 2014
“Showing Why The Law Is Working”: The Koch Brothers Are Accidentally Advertising The Benefits Of Obamacare
Some new advertisements attacking the Affordable Care Act actually show why the law is working.
The ads are running in Colorado and Louisiana, two states where incumbent Democratic senators face difficult reelection fights. They come from Americans for Prosperity, the conservative organization backed by the Koch Brothers. And in the spots, a woman makes some fairly sweeping claims about how Obamacare is hurting average Americans: “Millions of people have lost their health insurance, millions of people can’t see their own doctors, and millions are paying more and getting less.”
The statements leave out critical context, as Politifact has observed. But the interesting thing about the ads is their style. The narrator isn’t claiming these things happened to her or, for that matter, to any particular person. It’s all very broad and unspecific.
That’s a change and it’s probably because so few “Obama-scare” stories have held up to media scrutiny. Remember “Bette in Spokane”? House Republicans claimed she had to pay twice as much for her new coverage. Reporter David Wasson, a local reporter with the Spokesman-Review, tracked her down and determined that Bette could actually save money if she bought Obamacare coverage on Washington state’s online marketplace. Then there was Whitney Johnson, a 26-year-old with multiple sclerosis, who claimed that she’d have to pay $1,000 a month for her new insurance in Texas. That didn’t sit quite right with journalist and policy expert Maggie Mahar. Mahar dug into the details and, in an article for healthinsurance.org, revealed that Johnson had actually found coverage for about $350 a month—what Johnson had been paying previously. Maybe the best-known story is the one of Julie Boonstra, a Michigan cancer patient who said that her new insurance policy was “unaffordable.” A series of reporters, first at the Washington Post and then at the Detroit News, determined that Boonstra is probably saving money because of Obamacare—all while keeping the physicians who provide her cancer care.
The conservatives’ struggle to find more airtight stories might seem mystifying, given that there’s no shortage of people with real and serious complaints about the Affordable Care Act. Quite a few Americans, probably numbering in the low millions, lost their old policies and are now paying more for replacements—usually because the old plans lacked benefits like maternity and mental health or because insurers can no longer avoid the sickest and most expensive beneficiaries. You’ve read about some of those people in these pages. These people are not happy and it’s easy to see why: The president and his allies promised that everybody who liked their olds plans could keep them. But, as Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik has observed, these stories inevitably have a lot of nuance. These are people who, almost by definition, are healthy enough to have gotten cheap insurance before or make enough money that they don’t qualify for the Affordable Care Act’s insurance discounts. That makes their tales less dramatic.
A better subject for future conservative advertisements might be people with serious, even life-threatening diseases who need access to very specific specialists or hospitals—and are now having difficulty, because their new plans have very narrow networks of providers. But even these stories have mitigating circumstances that media attention would reveal. Most of these people can find their way to comparable, albeit different, doctors and hospitals—and at least some can keep the old ones if they’re able and willing to pay more for it. Also, this kind of thing was a problem long before Obamacare came along. And that’s not to mention the fact that, previously, many of these people lived in fear of losing their insurance altogether.
In short, these stories may generate sympathy but they are rarely the stuff of tragedy. And that’s because of the protections Obamacare provides—which is to say, the very things that Koch-funded right-wingers want to gut.
After all, it’s Obamacare that sets a minimum standard for insurance, so that all policies include comprehensive benefits and set limits on out-of-pocket spending. It’s Obamacare that puts coverage within financial reach of many more people than before, by offering those subsidies and then, for some people, reducing out-of-pocket expenses even more. In the old days, it wasn’t so hard to find tear-jerker anecdotes: People without insurance or with inadequate insurance were filing for bankruptcy, losing their homes, and missing out on essential medicine. Now those stories are less common and, for the most part, they are among people who had these same problems previously. Telling the stories of these people would be a rationale for expanding the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it.
At some point, conservatives will find some tragic stories that are real. It’s a big country, and a complex law, and there are bound to be a few people for whom the new changes work out really badly. But there are also good news stories—lots of them. And while those stories inevitably have complications of their own, some are pretty dramatic. Democrats may not have figured out the politics of Obamacare. But it looks increasingly like they got the policy right.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, March 21, 2014
“Aligned Agenda’s”: The Tea Party and Wall Street Might Not Be Best Friends Forever, But They Are For Now
“Our problem today was not caused by a lack of business and banking regulations,” argued Ron Paul in his 2009 manifesto End the Fed, which outlined a theory of the financial crisis that only implicated government policy and the Federal Reserve, while mocking the idea that Wall Street’s financial engineering and derivatives played any role. “The only regulations lacking were the ones that should have been placed on the government officials who ran roughshod over the people and the Constitution.”
There seems to be some confusion about the relationship between the Tea Party and Wall Street. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait says the two “are friends after all,” while the Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney insists that the Tea Party has loosened the business lobby’s “grip on the GOP.” So let’s make this clear: The Tea Party agenda is currently aligned with the Wall Street agenda.
The Tea Party’s theory of the financial crisis has absolved Wall Street completely. Instead, the crisis is interpreted according to two pillars of reactionary thought: that the government is a fundamentally corrupt enterprise trying to give undeserving people free stuff, and that hard money should rule the day. This will have major consequences for the future of reform, should the GOP take the Senate this fall.
On the Hill, it’s hard to find where the Tea Party and Wall Street disagree. Tea Party senators like Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz, plus conservative senators like David Vitter, have rallied around a one-line bill repealing the entirety of Dodd-Frank and replacing it with nothing. In the House, Republicans are attacking new derivatives regulations, all the activities of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the existence of the Volcker Rule, and the ability of the FDIC to wind down a major financial institution, while relentlessly attacking strong regulators and cutting regulatory funding. This is Wall Street’s wet dream of a policy agenda.
Note the lack of any Republican counter-proposal or framework. The few that have been suggested, such as David Camp’s bank tax or Vitter’s higher capital requirements have gotten no additional support from the right. House Republicans attacked Camp’s plan publicly, and Vitter’s bill lost one of its only two other Republican supporters immediately after it was announced. So why is there a lack of an agenda? Because the Tea Party thinks that Wall Street has done nothing wrong.
The story of the crisis, according to the right, goes like this: The Community Reinvestment Act and other government regulations forced banks into making subprime loans, and the “affordability goals” of government-sponsored enterprises made the rest of the subprime that crashed the economy. The Federal Reserve pumped a credit bubble, as it always does when it tries to push against recessions. In other words, the financial crisis in 2008 was entirely a government creation, and could have been solved by just putting all the financial firms into bankruptcy. There’s no such problem as “shadow banking,” and to whatever extent Wall Street misbehaved, it was only the result of the moral hazard created by the assumption that there would be bailouts. Or as Senator Marco Rubio said in his 2013 State of the Union response, we suffered “a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.”
This narrative is an easy one to believe for people who distrust government, but it’s far from the facts. The CRA didn’t even cover the fly-by-night institutions making the vast majority of subprime loans. The GSEs lost market share during the housing bubble and subprime loans account for less than 5 percent of their losses. Low interest rates likely account for only a quarter of housing price shifts, and even then, low interest rates likely offset capital coming into the country from abroad.
The mainstream account of the crisis, as Dean Starkman pointed out in The New Republic, is that we’re all to blame—or, as Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin wrote in his recent survey of the crisis, that it was a “perfect storm.” Starkman argues that the Everyone-Is-To-Blame narrative is partially responsible for the lack of serious homeowner help in the Home Affordable Modification Program. As he demonstrates in his piece, “there’s a big and growing body of documentation about what happened as the financial system became incentivized to sell as many loans as possible on the most burdensome possible terms.”
The lack of any Republican policy on financial reform is the result of several factors. Mitt Romney thought it would be a liability to put forward his own agenda in 2012. By voting nearly unanimously against Dodd-Frank, Republicans were able to make this moderate, lukewarm response to the crisis look like a partisan takeover of finance (financial reform is hard and may not work, so all the better to have Democrats own the issue so they can be clubbed with it later). Rather than wage total war against Dodd-Frank through partisan outfits, the smartest minds on the right are weakening the law through law firms and K Street. And the conservative infrastructure has been solely focused on privatizing the GSEs completely.
This lack of policy has allowed the far right and Austrian School acolytes to occupy the intellectual space in the party. It’s the minority party for now, but all it takes is a few Senate seats changing hands before the Tea Party narrative becomes the prevailing one on the Hill—and nothing would delight Wall Street more.
By: Mike Konczal, The New Republic, March 21, 2014
“The Dick Morris Award For Pre-Election Hype”: Pre-spinning Elections Is Even More Obnoxious Than Spinning The Results
I know I have zero influence over the rhetoric deployed by Reince Priebus, but still, I’d like to start a backlash against this particular formulation by the RNC chairman:
The way Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus sees it, 2014 won’t be an average election for the party out of power. It’ll be a “tsunami” wave election.
At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on Tuesday Priebus said Republicans would see massive gains in the 2014 election, especially in the Senate.
“I think we’re in for a tsunami election,” Preibus said. “Especially at the Senate level.”
“Wave elections” are big-trending events beyond normal electoral expectations. We have two recent examples in 2006 and 2010. “Tsunami” elections, if the term means anything at all, means really big wave elections. 1974 and 1994 are pretty good examples; 2010, at least at the state level, might qualify as well.
It will be normal, not a “wave,” for Republicans to make sizable gains in the Senate this November, if only because of inherently pro-Republican midterm turnout patterns, the tendency of the party holding the White House to lose seats in midterms (especially second-term midterms), and an insanely pro-Republican landscape of seats that happen to be up. If Republicans pick up eight or nine Senate seats, that might represent a “wave.” They’d have to exceed that significantly before we can talk about any sort of “tsunami.”
So cut out the crap, Reince. Pre-spinning elections is even more obnoxious than spinning the results, unless you are angling for the Dick Morris Award for pre-election hype.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 18, 2014
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