“This Isn’t Complicated, People”: Joe Scarborough Will Never Be President For Many Very Obvious Reasons
I guess we’re doing this again? Morning show host and coffee chain pitchman Joe Scarborough has a book out, about how the Republican Party can save itself by being less angry and extreme, and trying to do more to appeal to “swing voters” and “moderates.” Scarborough has been giving lots of interviews about his book and its very original thesis. Ronald Reagan is on the cover of the book. Now people are asking Joe Scarborough if he is going to run for president, and he “won’t rule anything out.” He should. He definitely should rule it out, as soon as possible.
Now TPM says that Scarborough will be among the potential candidates in a survey taken at the Northeast Republican Leadership Conference in New Hampshire. That doesn’t really mean a whole lot. It’s not “proof” that Scarborough is dumb enough to actually run for president. He is, hopefully, just indulging the 2016 speculation to promote his book. But if he does even slightly well in this poll — and Northeast Republican Leaders are probably the closest thing to Scarborough’s “crowd” in the modern GOP, so it’s not impossible — there will be a lot of very insufferable words written, by the sort of people who appear or want desperately to appear on “Morning Joe,” about how Scarborough could make a serious run for the presidency. Mike Allen and Dylan Byers will say that “insiders” are “buzzing” about Scarborough 2016.
OK. Let’s be absolutely clear about this: Joe Scarborough is not a serious potential presidential candidate. That is nonsense.
The people who write credulously about candidate Scarborough tend to imply that because Scarborough is a television host, that he has built-in national name recognition and popularity. That is not actually true. Scarborough’s show is popular among people who follow politics closely. Most Americans don’t. And so, most Americans are watching something else most weekday mornings. Among Beltway (and New York) political journalists and media people, it is not a huge stretch to say that “everyone” watches “Morning Joe.” But in the real world, only a couple hundred thousand people watch it. That’s (a lot) fewer people than watch “Community.” I’m not trying to be harsh on Scarborough’s ratings, I am just trying to explain that the man is not, by normal standards, a huge television talk show star. He is more like the most popular local news guy for the Acela corridor.
Meanwhile, a million people watch Fox’s brain-dead morning program. Based on popularity as measured by ratings — a decent measure of popularity, I think — Joe Scarborough would be a less successful political candidate than Bill O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Chris Matthews, Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and the Rev. Al Sharpton. In a Republican primary, in any state, for any office, nearly any Fox News host — probably even that old rascal Shep Smith — would almost certainly beat Joe Scarborough.
Suggesting that Scarborough run for president because political junkies like his show is like saying a “Crossfire” panelist should have run for president in 1992. Except that when that actually happened, it wasn’t a total disaster. Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter turned TV pundit, ran for president three times. The second time, in 1996, he actually won New Hampshire, and came in close in Iowa. Still, he didn’t win. What can Scarborough learn from Buchanan’s campaigns? What made Buchanan a popular enough figure to actually win Republican primaries, beating the more experienced choice of the party elite?
Well, he was not a moderate pragmatist. Just not at all. The key to Buchanan’s almost-victory was that he was an outspoken white populist (and, in certain respects, white supremacist) who ran as the true conservative, opposed to the Washington establishment. He expressed anti-free trade beliefs that white working-class voters weren’t hearing from any other candidate in either party. He went big on the culture wars. His campaign semi-jokingly referred to its supporters as “the peasants with pitchforks.” It was, essentially, a proto-Tea Party campaign. That’s how Buchanan came close (though never that close) to winning the GOP nomination for the presidency: by doing exactly the opposite of what Joe Scarborough believes Republicans ought to do to win.
It is hard to believe that Joe Scarborough, coastal pro-business “moderate” who works for MSNBC, would do as well as Pat Buchanan, populist anti-corporate member of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, in a GOP primary campaign, even in 2016. A third-party or independent run would be a colossal waste of time and money. Please, stop suggesting that this could actually happen.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, March 13, 2013
“Deeply Foolish”: The Wrong Way To Tackle Immigration
At first blush, the fact that House Republicans actually voted on a bill related to immigration policy yesterday may have encouraged reform proponents. The GOP majority has been inclined to largely ignore the issue for quite a while.
But the legislation the House took up yesterday didn’t support reform progress; it did the opposite.
A House Republican bill aimed at forcing President Barack Obama to enforce immigration and other laws as they are written drew sharp rebukes Wednesday from the White House and House Democrats, who ripped the measure as anti-immigrant.
The legal dispute over President Barack Obama’s unilateral decision to suspend deportations for people brought to the country illegally by their parents, known as “dreamers,” has split the GOP and Democrats before.
At least on paper, the legislation, which passed 233 to 181, wasn’t explicitly about immigration. Rather, this was yet another election-year “message bill,” in which House Republicans pretended to be outraged about President Obama’s entirely routine executive orders. GOP leaders put together a bill – subtlely called the ENFORCE Act – intended to make it easier for members of Congress to sue the White House, forcing the administration to prioritize law enforcement in line with lawmakers’ wishes.
It is, by any sensible measure, a deeply foolish proposal. How many House Republicans, some of whom surely knew better, had the sense to vote against this transparent nonsense? Zero.
But immigration stood at the center of the debate because Republicans put it there: to prove Obama’s tyrannical tendencies, GOP lawmakers used the administration’s deferred action on Dream Act kids as Exhibit A.
In practical terms, then, the Republican bill was part of an effort to force Obama to deport immigrant children who came to the United States with their families.
It’s almost as if House Republicans decided, as an election-year gambit, to enrage the Latino community on purpose.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney was eager to criticize the GOP scheme.
“[T}his runs contrary to our most deeply held values as Americans, and asks law enforcement officials to treat these DREAMers the same way as they would treat those with criminal records, those with violent criminal records.
“We urge House Republicans to focus on actually fixing our broken immigration system to provide opportunity for all instead of legislation designed to deny opportunity to those who are Americans in every way, in their hearts, in their minds, in their experiences in every way but on paper.
“So you hear a lot of talk about where people are on this issue. It doesn’t require much to look at what House Republicans are doing today to question whether or not they’re serious about moving forward on comprehensive immigration reform.”
Looking ahead, the bill approved by the House yesterday stands no chance of success in the Democratic-led Senate and would be quickly vetoed by the president if it somehow reached his desk. GOP leaders obviously know this, but wasted time on the bill anyway, instead of doing real work (on immigration or anything else).
Why? Party leaders apparently decided it was time for a little stunt to show the party’s far-right base that House Republicans are standing up to Obama for using his executive authority the exact same way every other president has for more than two centuries.
As for the future of immigration reform, the DREAM Coalition, a group representing the children of undocumented immigrants, said the vote “demonstrates Republicans can no longer be relied upon to bring up a sensible and practicable immigration reform bill this year.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 13, 2014
“An Inconvenient Constitution”: Fighting Obama On Immigration Is Not Enough, GOP Wants To Sue Him Too
The House Republican caucus wants to sue President Barack Obama.
They say he isn’t living up to his constitutional obligations on a range of issues—and in particular, that he’s not faithfully executing immigration laws. They cite his Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, put into place by executive order in 2012, which halted deportations of people who were brought to this country as children—the so-called “dreamers.” There are roughly 1.1 million of them, according to the best estimates.
To gut that measure, along with parts of the Affordable Care Act and a grab bag of other administration policies, House Republicans crafted and passed what they are calling the “ENFORCE the Law” Act. It would create what amounts to a legal shortcut. House members could file a lawsuit against the president, and it would go directly to three-judge panel of a federal district court—and from there, could be appealed straight to the Supreme Court.
The measure is unlikely to become law, since Senate leaders have declared it dead on arrival. Even if they hadn’t, it might not survive a court challenge: Experts say it openly tampers with the constitution.
Still, the vote for ENFORCE is a statement, and one that directly violates the immigration principles Republicans outlined in January. At the time, the leadership professed support for a pathway to “legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children through no fault of their own, those who know no other place as home.” But that was nearly two months ago—and ENFORCE represents the House’s first vote of the year on immigration.
It makes the vote Democrats have been demanding, on the reform bill that passed the Senate last year, seem a lot less likely. (And it’s not like prospects were good in the first place.) “It doesn’t require much to look at what House Republicans are doing today and question whether or not they’re serious about moving forward on comprehensive immigration reform,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Wednesday. That’s a departure from statements that both the president and House Speaker John Boehner have made this winter, insisting legislative reform still stands a chance. Last month, Carney called a meeting about immigration between the two men “constructive”; Boehner called it “healthy.”
Republicans may have been trying to underscore a message with the vote: that Obama should not even consider addressing deportations with executive authority, as he did with DACA, and as immigrant-rights groups are demanding he do again. “If he stopped deporting people who are clearly here illegally, then I think any chance of immigration reform is dead,” Senator Lindsey Graham warned in February. But as the prospects for immigration reform dim, Obama may wonder why he’s waiting for the House to meet him partway.
By: Nora Caplan-Bricker, The New Republic, March 13, 2014
“Paul Ryan’s Worthless Attempt To Save Face”: Why He’s Still An Overrated Fraud
Beltway writers have recently tried to outdo themselves with breathless profiles of a “new” Paul Ryan, deeply concerned about the poor. I’ve warned repeatedly that Ryan’s views on poverty are just warmed-over Reaganism, and now we have proof. McKay Coppins’ piece “Paul Ryan Finds God” should have revealed that his God is no longer Ayn Rand but Charles Murray, the man who put a patina of (flawed) social science on Reagan’s lyrical lie, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”
But let me explain all of what it means to cite Charles Murray in 2014. Murray is so toxic that Ryan’s shout-out must be unpacked. First, Rep. Barbara Lee is absolutely right: Ryan’s comments about “inner city” men who are “not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work” are, in fact, “a thinly veiled racial attack,” in the congresswoman’s words. “Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’”
Ryan denied that Wednesday night. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” On Thursday morning, he issued a statement saying he regretted being “inarticulate” in trying to make his point.
A tip for Ryan: If the racial subtext of your remarks “never even occurred to me,” as you cite a writer who has been repeatedly charged with racism, who is categorized as a “white nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (I’m not sure I’d go that far), well, that in itself is a problem. As Murray himself told the New York Times about his landmark book “Losing Ground:” “A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” Apparently Ryan is one of them, if we give him the benefit of the doubt and call him “well-meaning.”
But Murray proves you can embrace noxious racial stereotypes about African-Americans, and also hold contempt for a lot of white men, and women. He demonstrated that in his last book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.” Murray argues that white people have developed the same character problems that claimed African-Americans 50 years ago, which he outlined in “Losing Ground”: They prefer shacking up to marriage, they don’t go to church, they’re lazy and dishonest and enjoy the government dole. After all, the same percent of white children are now born to single mothers – just over 25 percent — as were black children back when Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his alarms about “the Negro family.” And the reasons are largely the same: promiscuity, laziness, women who insist on equality – and lower IQ.
“Coming Apart” relies on the same ugly genetic fatalism and bogus notions of genetic differences Murray’s been peddling for years – this time among upper- and lower-income whites. In his awful book “The Bell Curve,” he relied on explicitly racist (and mostly discredited) scientists to argue that blacks and Latinos lagged behind whites and Asians in wealth and income because they had lower IQs, and the basis wasn’t centuries of oppression and deprivation but genetics. This time around Murray told his reviewers he was going to dodge the racial trap, and talk about white people. And again, he finds an IQ gap between the “cognitive elite” and lower-class whites that he says helps explain our winner-take-all society.
The other deeply offensive argument Murray makes in “Coming Apart” is that feminism helps explain the decline of work among lazy lower-class men. He approvingly cites Reagan-era anti-feminist George Gilder, author of the insane “Sexual Suicide,” who blamed women’s equality for letting women give up the job of civilizing men. “Gilder saw disaster looming as women stopped performing this function, a position derided as the worst kind of patriarchal sexism,” Murray noted. “But put in less vivid language, the argument is neither implausible nor inflammatory: The responsibilities of marriage induce young men to settle down, focus and get to work … George Gilder was mostly right.”
And again, the proof of Murray’s sexist theorizing turns out to be bogus geneticism:
There are genetic reasons, rooted in the mechanisms of human evolution, why little boys who grow up in neighborhoods without married fathers tend to reach adolescence not socialized to the norms of behavior that they will need to stay out of prison and hold jobs….[Liberals] will have to acknowledge that the traditional family plays a special, indispensable role in human flourishing and that social policy must be based on that truth.
All of that helps explain why Ryan thinks he can get away with insisting, “This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” Rick Santorum pulled the same trick when he claimed he didn’t say “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money.” (It gets funnier every year that we were supposed to believe he said “blah people.”) Santorum, too, quoted Charles Murray and “Coming Apart” on the campaign trail, and even said explicitly that white people were coming to share the same “dependency” on government that had ruined African-Americans.
But it’s worth noting that even with all the evidence that Murray is now stigmatizing a lot of white people, Paul Ryan is still using dog-whistle racist language like “inner city” to share his concern about poor people lacking “a culture of work”. In denying any racism behind his remarks, he actually didn’t use the best evidence he could have mustered. He didn’t have the courage to say, “Hey, my boy Charles Murray thinks lower-income white people are lazy and shiftless, too!” But that would require insulting much of the GOP base. Ryan’s too ambitious for that.
I once foolishly believed Murray’s equal-opportunity contempt for the poor and working class might wake up those struggling white folks that he and his Republican admirers disrespect. That didn’t happen, because outside of the rarefied confines of right-wing think tanks and the occasional Rick Santorum speech, they don’t talk about white people that way. The folks Murray – and Ryan – hold in contempt went big for Romney-Ryan in 2012.
But there’s one final reason that Paul Ryan’s hailing a “culture of work” and stigmatizing government assistance is particularly offensive. This is the same Paul Ryan whose family’s construction firm fattened itself on government contracts; who received Social Security survivor benefits after his father died and used that public money to put himself through college; who then went on the government payroll and has never done anything other than attack poor people while on the government’s dime; who makes $174,000 a year in taxpayer dollars while keeping himself camera-ready with his PDX90 routine (Paul Ryan shirtless is still one of the top prompts on Google); who enjoys $350 bottles of wine thanks to lobbyists; and then dumps on the lazy, immoral inner-city poor with gambling addict and fellow government assistance recipient Bill Bennett.
This is the guy to whom the GOP is outsourcing its anti-poverty policy. Maybe he can hook the “inner city poor” up to the gravy train he’s ridden his entire life.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 13, 2014
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