“An Apocalyptic Cult”: The GOP’s Biggest Problem Is Itself
“How ya like me now?” — Barack Obama
OK, so Obama didn’t really say that, but surely he must have thought it behind a private smile at some point Tuesday night.
There are no smiles among the Republicans, however, only a pressing question: Can the GOP fix itself? Can a party whose appeal is wholly white and mainly male learn to appeal to a rainbow electorate which is neither? Especially after it has spent so many years denigrating that rainbow, drawing lines in the sand, placing chips on its shoulder.
There are hopeful signs that our long national hissy fit may at last be over. House Speaker John Boehner was making conciliatory noises about resolving the economic impasse the day after the election. Some of the party’s most prominent voices, including Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, have been speaking of the need for the GOP to broaden its appeal. So maybe the adults are finally returning home.
But the place is a wreck, because the kids (looking at you, Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain) have been having quite the party. And repairing it is going to be a long and difficult process.
In the first place, any sudden GOP outreach to those it spurned while courting angry older white men must unavoidably appear conniving, self-conscious and self-serving. And once you get past the problem of appearances, there is the simple question of what it will take to undo the damage the party has inflicted upon itself with those groups.
How long will it be before gay men and lesbians are willing to forgive and forget that the party has routinely demeaned their relationships and impugned their moral fitness?
How long will it take before Hispanics are willing to let bygones be bygones with a party that spoke of “self-deportation” and cheered the notion of a border fence to electrocute undocumented Mexican workers?
And how much time must go by before African-Americans are willing to look past the GOP’s unrelenting and deeply personal disrespect toward the nation’s first African-American president, its insistence on treating him as some foreign Other who, in John Sununu’s memorably tawdry phrase, must “learn how to be an American”?
All that said, the biggest question here is not whether the GOP can transform itself, but whether it can even try. At this point, the Republicans are less a traditional political party than what disenchanted former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren has called an “apocalyptic cult.”
And cults are remarkably fact-resistant. Cultists live in a reality of their own construction and, far from being chastened by it, they thrive on rejection. So while the grownups in the party may be reading the writing on the demographic wall and believe it calls on them to abandon extremism, there is every reason to believe the rest of the party will think that writing requires them to double down on it instead.
Indeed, even as Rubio and Boehner were talking sense, party icons were talking the same old craziness. Donald Trump called for revolution in the wake of Obama’s re-election. Ted Nugent called Obama supporters “pimps, whores … welfare brats” and “soulless fools.” Bill O’Reilly said people voted for Obama because he will “give them things.”
And so on.
This, then, is the dilemma Republicans have created for themselves by their own short-sightedness. It was all well and fine to embrace angry white male extremism so long as white male extremism was able to deliver elections. That day is passing and the party awakens in a new America, desperately needing to change but quite possibly prevented from doing so by the very craziness it has so long cultivated.
Ain’t that a kick in the head? For years, the party has won elections by inventing enemies for angry white men to fear. But at this point, the GOP has no bigger enemy than itself.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, November 12, 2012
“We Don’t Like You Either”: When “We Don’t Like Your Kind” Becomes A Problem
There are a lot of ways to parse a loss like the one the GOP suffered on Tuesday, but what ought to be increasingly clear to smart Republicans is that there’s something fundamentally problematic in how they’ve gone about assembling their electoral coalitions. Conservatives are complaining a lot in the last couple of days that Obama ran a “divisive” campaign, I guess because he once called rich people “fat cats” or something, but the truth is that Republicans have been experts at division for a long time. Much of their appeal, at one level or another, has been “We don’t like those kind of people.” Sometimes it’s welfare recipients, sometimes it’s undocumented immigrants, sometimes it’s people who come from big cities or have too much education or enjoy a coffee drink made with espresso and steamed milk. They’ve been very good for a very long time at telling voters, “We’re just like you, because we both hate those people over there.”
As a political strategy, this can be very effective, so long as the “them” at whom you’re directing your contempt isn’t too large a group. But once “them” grows too big, you’ve dug yourself an electoral hole. That’s the problem they now have with Latinos. Their anti-immigrant rhetoric sent two simultaneous messages, one about policy and one about identity. The first message was that we don’t support policies you do support, like the DREAM Act. The second message, which Latinos heard loud and clear, was this: We don’t like people like you.
The problem can be seen in other areas too. As Sommer Mathis and Charles Mahtesian point out, the GOP is getting crushed among urban dwellers, who are growing as a proportion of the population. Just like with Latinos, this happens because of both policy and identity. The GOP is opposed to policies that are supported by people in cities, like support for mass transit. But they also continuously tell them that they don’t like them. Every time they wax rhapsodic about the superior morality of those who live in small towns (what Sarah Palin memorably called “the pro-America areas of this great nation”), where people supposedly have “values,” while people who live in cities just have opinions, they are telling voters in cities, “We don’t like people like you.” So it’s no surprise that those voters respond, “You know what? We don’t like you either.”
If Republicans are going to solve this problem—with Latinos, with city dwellers, and with everybody else they’ve alienated—they’re going to have to it with both policy and identity. It won’t be enough to sign on to a comprehensive immigration reform. You have to convince the people at whom you’ve been sneering (or trying to stop from voting) that you don’t hate them. It’s not an easy task, but it can be done.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, November 9, 2012
“An Appeal To The GOP”: Don’t Listen To The Pundits, Stick To Your Principles
An appeal to Republicans: don’t listen to the pundits who say the lesson of 2012 is that you should change course to appeal to women and minorities in order to win elections. You should stick to your principles—and with the the old white men who provided tens of millions of votes on Election Day.
The country needs leaders who will speak from their hearts about “legitimate rape.” It’s true that 55 percent of women voted against Romney—but it’s wrong to say the Republicans don’t have women in their camp. You have that wrestling lady in Connecticut!
And it’s a lie that the white men who make up the base of the Republican party don’t like black people. Remember that your leading presidential candidate in the primaries at one point was Herman Cain.
It’s true that Latinos voted against the Republicans, 70-30 percent. But you’ve already moderated your policy where they are concerned: instead of calling for a police round-up of 10 million illegal immigrants, you favor the compassionate route: “self-deportation.” And as for those illegal kids who want to go to college under the so-called “Dream Act”—that’s just another case of the Democrats creating more people who are dependent on government (for their education).
Another thing: please keep up those attacks on Nate Silver. Yes, he did predict that the Democrats would win, but that is simply more evidence of his pro-Obama bias. He’s no more “scientific” than the people who say the climate is changing.
Twenty twelve was only one election—remember the last one, the midterms in 2010? Sticking to Republican principles there paid off handsomely. Please keep your focus on that year, not on 2012.
A choice, not an echo—that’s what America needs. Instead of becoming more “moderate,” you should be getting rid of the moderates in the Republican Party—like former Republican senator Richard Lugar of Indiana. It’s true that if he had run for re-election, he would have won with 65 percent of the vote, and the Republicans would have had a chance to gain control of the Senate. But it was more important for a Tea Party true believer to defeat him in the primary. That gave the Republicans a chance to run on the argument that conception resulting from rape is “something God intended to happen.”
The only problem with this advice to get rid of the moderate Republicans is that I don’t think there are any left. Mission accomplished!
By: Joe Wiener, The Nation, November 10, 2012
“The Emperor Has No Clothes”: Shattering The Myth Of Karl Rove
To some he’s a hero, to others a villain, but everyone — right, left, and center — seems to agree on one thing about Karl Rove: He’s really really smart. Rove is, most political observers assume, one of the savviest operators in politics today, so when he speaks, people listen. After Citizens United and the 2010 GOP wave, when Rove ruled Washington from his non-perch at American Crossroads, I saw more than one very smart liberal go from mocking Rove as a liar and hack one minute to having the blood drain from the face when he made an ominous political prediction the next. Such is the power of the Rove.
Or at least it was. Tuesday night may have shattered the Myth of Rove, just as it shattered Rove himself when he had a meltdown in front of millions on Fox News viewers after the network called Ohio for Obama. The moment, which has since gone viral, was the perfect encapsulation of Emperor Has No Clothes realization that Rove is now experiencing. Rove was proven wrong. On live TV. By Fox News. And of course, that wasn’t the only thing he got wrong. He blew the whole election, predicting Romney would win.
But if you take a look at Rove’s record of prognostications, this should be no big surprise. Before Tuesday, Rove’s most famous wiff came in 2000, when he predicted that George W. Bush would beat Al Gore in a landslide. Rove predicted Bush would get “in the vicinity of 320 electoral votes” and even suggested that Bush had a shot at deep blue California. “I mean, the governor is going to start off in New Mexico, spend a day and a half in California, go to Oregon and Washington, go to Minnesota, go to Iowa,” Rove told CBS News host Bob Schieffer. Of course, 2000 came down to nail biter, with Bush winning 271 votes — just 1 more than necessary to win — and losing the popular vote (later, it turned out that Gore probably actually won).
He was so chastened by the blown call that when reporters asked him to make a prediction the night before the 2004 election, he refused. “Rub my nose in it,” Rove snapped at a reporter who brought up the 2000 prediction. “With a circle of tape recorders humming, Rove said he was making no such predictions this time around,” the New York Times reported on November 1, 2004.
After the election, Andrew Sullivan was actually prescient about this on CNN: “He didn’t get a majority of the popular vote in 2000, he squeezed a 51 percent victory in 2004. He’s been teetering on the brink ever since, and the base strategy now shows him not to be a genius but to be a real failure.”
But two years later, Rove was back to wildly miscalculating results. “Look, I’m looking at all these Robert and adding them up. And I add up to a Republican Senate and a Republican House. You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to ‘the’ math,” Rove said in a testy exchange with NPR host Robert Siegel the week before the 2006 election. Democrats ended up winning a huge wave that gave them control of both the House and Senate.
In 2008 Rove, who wasn’t involved in John McCain’s campaign, correctly predicted that Obama would win (but how you could you not that year?), though he was too bearish. In 2010, he correctly predicted that Republicans would take the House and make gains in the Senate (but how you could you not that year?), though he was overly bullish.
For conservative donors who entrusted millions with Rove and his American Crossroads groups, only to see a 1 percent success rate, the Rove bubble is bursting. “There is some holy hell to pay. Karl Rove has a lot of explaining to do … I don’t know how you tell your donors that we spent $390 million and got nothing,” a donor told John Ward. “The billionaire donors I hear are livid.”
If Rove needs something to do, perhaps he could join his former boss George W. Bush — in obscurity.
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, November 8, 2012
“It’s Time To Grow Up Now”: An Idea For Our Conservative Friends
First, in 2008, back at the Guardian, you told me what an inexperienced loser Obama was, in addition to all the more nefarious things, and how there was no chance on earth he’d ever beat Hillary.
Then he did, and you said well, those Democrats are insane anyway, but now it’s a general, and that man will never be elected president.
After he won, you said that was a fluke and aberration, and he was doomed to be a failure and a one-termer, and I was in dreamland if I even began to think otherwise.
And now here we are, the morning after quite frankly an easy reelection. The race wasn’t always easy, of course, but the margin was. Eight of nine battleground states. Won the popular vote by nearly two percent. Won. Going. Away.
And now I’m sure you’ll have a list of other excuses. I’m sure Fox and Friends is providing a list of them now.
Here’s an idea. Why don’t you consider accepting the notions that: he is legitimately the president; that your party is right now, for whatever reason, a minority party (actually, I’d be interested in seeing you all debate the whys and wherefores of that, and by “debate” I don’t mean deciding whether it’s the media’s fault or Nate Silver’s); that the economy is in fact improving, and you might as well now cheer for it to improve, cheer every job; and that your party has some soul-searching to do, and that does mean just nominating a “true conservative” next time.
It’d be nice to hear sincere, self-critical reflections from you instead of the usual bombast. America rejects you, rejects your view of Obama, rejects your policies. Are you ready to grow up now and have real conversations about the substance of things?
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, November 7, 2012
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