Super Bowl Players Should Stand Up For Indiana Workers
Last July, Major League Baseball blew an opportunity to make a difference. With 28 players who were either Hispanic or of Hispanic descent participating in the league’s annual All-Star Game in Phoenix, Arizona, and the eyes of the sports world watching, nary a one spoke out against the radical anti-immigration law Arizona had passed a year before, even though it could have directly affected the players and will directly affect many of their fans. “I ain’t Jackie Robinson,” David Ortiz, one of baseball’s biggest characters, said.
Over the next 10 days, the National Football League will have a similar chance to make a difference.
Just two weeks before Super Bowl XLVI kicks off at Lucas Oil Field in Indianapolis, more than 10,000 people marched through the city to protest right-to-work legislation that is being pushed through the state’s legislature. The legislation passed the state Senate this week and the state House today, and is backed by Gov. Mitch Daniels (R). Considering the NFL nearly lost its 2011 season, and Super Bowl XLVI with it, to a labor dispute, Indiana Republicans’ assault on workers is a cause the players should be familiar with.
Fortunately, there are signs that the NFL players aren’t going to repeat Major League Baseball’s mistake. Several players have spoken out against the legislation, and NFL Players Association President DeMaurice Smith said his organization is already taking action. “We’ve been on picket lines in Indianapolis already with hotel workers who were basically pushed to the point of breaking on the hotel rooms that they had to clean because they were not union workers,” Smith told the Nation. “We’ve been on picket lines in Boston and San Antonio. So, the idea of participating in a legal protest is something that we’ve done before.”
That’s a good first step. But it’s not enough. Indiana union officials are contemplating disrupting Super Bowl-related events to draw attention to their cause, clogging city streets and slowing down events around Lucas Oil Stadium (which was built and is maintained by union workers). Labor leaders are hesitant, though, fearing that such actions could give the city and their cause “a black eye” with people who think sports and politics don’t mix. If some of the league’s top players, particularly those participating in the Super Bowl, spoke in support of those efforts, however, that perception could change.
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, one of the NFL’s most recognizable players, felt strongly enough about his own rights that he signed on as a plaintiff in the players’ antitrust lawsuit against the league last year. So did Logan Mankins, Brady’s teammate, and Osi Umenyiora, a prominent defensive end for the New York Giants. Those players were willing to risk backlash from the league, public scrutiny, and their own images to fight league owners for better benefits and wages. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, they should do the same for workers who don’t have the luxury of multimillion-dollar contracts, rich endorsement deals, and the good fortune of playing a game for a living.
Sure, with Super Bowl week ahead of them, political causes may be the furthest thing from the minds of most players. But with thousands of reporters conducting hundreds of interviews before, during, and after the big game, the players will have the chance to stand up for the rights of people they should be fighting for. Unlike their counterparts in baseball, they shouldn’t blow it.
By: Travis Waldron, Think Progress, January 25, 2012
GOP: Incoherent Party, Incoherent Candidates
Republicans are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives. This week Ross Douthat wrote a column arguing that it’s no surprise the current crop of Republican presidential candidates is no great shakes since, well, great presidential candidates are pretty rare animals. He then wrote a blog post arguing that the whole problem could have been avoided if the better Republican candidates, particularly Mitch Daniels, hadn’t decided not to run this year. Daniel Larison ridicules this notion; the fantasy candidates, he says, look strong because they haven’t been subjected to the withering attacks real candidates have to face. The ones Mr Douthat touts “don’t have the qualifications that Romney has, they all have their own weaknesses with conservatives and/or with the general electorate, and all of them decided for various reasons to save themselves the trouble, toil, and humiliation that a presidential bid would have entailed.”
Jonathan Bernstein takes Mr Larison’s point a step further and imagines what it would have taken to give Republicans a candidate they could get enthusiastic about.
What Republicans could have used both this cycle and last is a candidate who raised no suspicion from any important party faction and also had conventional credentials. Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, and perhaps Fred Thompson all came close, but none of them really achieved that. Given the GOP’s wild pivots on so many issues over the last decade, perhaps no one can, and someone like Romney — who holds orthodox views on all issues right now, but hasn’t for long enough to build long-term trust — is the best they can do.
This is an extremely important point to keep in mind. Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions. The fact that they are anathema today is a legacy of the reactionary fury that has driven the party for the past three years. Conservative voters responded to their epic loss in 2008 with a partisan kulturkampf that labeled every major initiative launched by the Obama administration socialism, and declared the very existence of global warming to be some kind of Communist-scientist hoax. There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era. Mr Gingrich himself can fleetingly outrun the problem because, like most voters, he has the long-term intellectual consistency of a goldfish. But YouTube never forgets.
Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.
By: M.S., Democracy in America, The Economist, January 24, 2012
Why Swing State Republican Governors Will Get President Obama Re-Elected
The other shoe in the saga of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s union-busting crusade dropped last week, and it landed with a ton-and-a-half thud. That’s the literal weight of the more than 1 million signatures in favor of Walker’s recall that progressive activists gathered over a 60-day window.
That’s more than 16,000 signatures collected per day. It’s nearly as many people as voted for Walker in his 2010 election (1.1 million) and roughly the same number that voted for his opponent. Roughly one in every three registered Wisconsin voters signed up. And since the threshold for a recall election is 540,000 signatures, it virtually guarantees Walker will face the voters this year.
But its significance extends beyond the fate of one right-wing zealot. Walker is the best known of a class of freshmen GOP governors whose conservative power grab might be Barack Obama’s not-so-secret re-election weapon.
Walker, you will recall, ran for governor with nary a word about breaking the backs of the state’s public unions and then made it a key part of his signature administration policy, an action he later compared to dropping “the bomb.” He sparked a backlash that initially took the form of mass protests, with tens of thousands of enraged Wisconsinites occupying the state capitol before “occupy” became a movement.
The 1 million signatures should send a chill up the back of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich or whoever the GOP taps to bear its standard. Wisconsin is a key swing state and the progressive movement just flexed some awfully strong organizational muscle there, sparked by Walker’s ham-fisted overreach. The recall election, likely to occur in the late spring or early summer, will serve as a perfect progressive dry run for the Obama re-election in the fall.
And Wisconsin is not an isolated example. The Cook Political Report lists 10 states, with 142 electoral votes, as toss-ups. In that group, with 73 total electoral votes, are four states, including Wisconsin, where first-term Republican governors are foundering in the polls after their excessive policies spurred the kind of grass-roots movements that can be a huge boon to a presidential campaign.
Take Walker’s neighboring colleague, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder. With the help of a GOP-controlled legislature, Snyder enacted a law that allows him to appoint “emergency financial managers” in financially troubled cities and school districts. These appointed individuals would have the power to fire actual elected officials, void union contracts, terminate services, sell off assets—even eliminate whole cities or school districts. And these localized tyrants could take these actions without any public input.
It’s no wonder that Michigan State University’s “State of the State” poll, released in early December, found that only 19 percent of Wolverine State residents rate Snyder’s performance as excellent or good (down from 31.5 percent in the spring). Critics of the law have already collected nearly 200,000 signatures for a November referendum on the law.
Snyder’s neighbor to the south, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, whose approval rating languishes in the mid-30s, received his stinging rebuke from the public last November. By 62 to 38 percent, voters repealed his legislative centerpiece, a Wisconsin-like law that barred public sector strikes, curtailed collective bargaining rights for public workers, and terminated binding arbitration of management-labor disputes. Opponents collected more than 1 million signatures (there’s that number again) to get the issue on the ballot, and raised $30 million in support of repeal, outspending the law’s defenders 3 to 1. It was a stunning win for labor unions, with help from Obama’s Organizing for America, a mere year after the Ohio GOP had swept every statewide office and won the legislature. “Unions and their allies have done a lot of things transferable to next year,” the University of Akron’s John Green told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “In some respects, the campaign was a trial run for the presidential.”
A bonus for the Obama campaign: When Mitt Romney made an October swing through Ohio, he unbelievably pleaded ignorance of the law, prompting speculation that he was trying to avoid endorsing it. So the next day, in Virginia, he announced his foursquare support for it, masterfully reinforcing his reputation as a political calculator even as he landed on the wrong side of the biggest issue in Ohio politics.
Rounding out the four horsemen of the GOP’s gubernatorial apocalypse is Florida Gov. Rick Scott, whom Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling declared in December to be the nation’s most disliked governor when he scored a 26 percent approval rating. That was due in part to the $1.35 billion Scott and the GOP legislature cut from education last year, as well as his push to drug-test welfare recipients. Apparently able to read the polls, Scott now wants to put $1 billion back into education funding, offsetting the spending by cutting $1.8 billion from Medicaid.
While a recent Quinnipiac poll found that Scott’s approval rating has soared to 38 percent (with 50 percent still disapproving), the same survey showed voters against cutting Medicaid to pay for education by 67 to 24 percent. Perhaps most alarming for Scott and the GOP is that independents disapprove of the governor by an even wider margin than Democrats.
After South Carolina, the Republican presidential traveling circus will move on to Florida. Watch as Mitt Romney embraces his toxic GOP colleague and listen for the sound of cheers from Obama 2012 headquarters.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, January 25, 2012
What John Boehner Considers “Almost Un-American”
Over the weekend, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) described President Obama’s State of the Union address, which he had not heard, as “pathetic.” Today, Boehner pushed the rhetorical envelope a little further.
House Speaker John Boehner Tuesday forcefully denounced the Democrats’ campaign theme that they are for the middle class and Republicans are for the wealthy — saying the policies the president is running on are “almost un-American.”
“This is a president who said I’m not going to be a divider, I’m going to be a uniter, and running on the policies of division and envy is — to me it’s almost un-American,” said Boehner.
Even for Boehner, this kind of rhetoric is cheap and inappropriate.
At a certain level, it’s tempting to think the Speaker doesn’t even believe his own nonsense. What is it, exactly, that Boehner finds so offensive about President Obama’s message? The notion of a Democratic president championing the interests of the middle class isn’t exactly unusual, neither is the prospect of asking the very wealthy to pay a little more to help guarantee opportunities for all.
Indeed, there’s nothing in the White House’s agenda that wouldn’t have generated significant support from Democrats and moderate Republicans for the better part of the 20th century. Obama’s economic vision is, at a fundamental level, about as mainstream as you can get.
It makes sense for Boehner to attack this, to the extent that he sees it as his job to reflexively oppose everything the president is for. But officials, especially those in key positions of authority, really ought to avoid words like “un-American.” Just because the House elected an oft-confused Speaker, who lacks a cursory understanding of public policy and history, is no excuse for American leaders questioning other American leaders’ patriotism.
I’m reminded of a recent piece from Tim Dickinson:
The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation’s balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, “sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary — and that’s crazy.”
Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. “Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver,” he demands, “or less?”
The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: “MORE!”
The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Today’s Republican Party may revere Reagan as the patron saint of low taxation. But the party of Reagan — which understood that higher taxes on the rich are sometimes required to cure ruinous deficits — is dead and gone. Instead, the modern GOP has undergone a radical transformation, reorganizing itself around a grotesque proposition: that the wealthy should grow wealthier still, whatever the consequences for the rest of us.
I suppose the follow-up question for Boehner is, was Reagan “almost un-American,” too? Were the lawmakers from both parties who approved tax reform in the mid-80s a bunch of socialist sell-outs?
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 24, 2012
Why The Tea Party Is Responsible For Newt Gingrich
We may not be attributing Newt Gingrich’s rise to the tea party. But maybe we should.
Even as the movement’s influence in the GOP appears to have waned over the past year, there remains one major remnant of what happened in 2010: anti-establishment fervor.
The tea party spurred momentum and turnout for the GOP two years ago, but it also caused it some headaches in the primaries, turning aside candidates who were clearly favored by the party establishment in favor of conservative wild cards that went on to mixed results in November.
Sound familiar?
That very same anti-establishment mentality has spurred any number of anti-Mitt Romney candidates to frontrunner status in the 2012 GOP presidential race. And when it finally looked like Romney was the presumptive nominee before South Carolina, the base recoiled in much the same way it did in a series of 2010 Senate races, delivering a huge win for Gingrich.
And in doing so, the tea party movement served notice that it’s still very much alive, albeit not as cohesive or well-branded.
In recent days, some smart political analysts have begun to question the theory that the major party elites have overwhelming influence when it comes to picking their nominees.
The New York Times’s Nate Silver wrote about this at length on Sunday, referring to political scientist Marty Cohen’s book “The Party Decides.”
Cohen’s theory states that, while candidates and voter preferences matter, nominees are almost always chosen in a sort of long-running negotiation among party elites, who effectively pave the way for voters to make the most logical choice and/or pick the most electable candidate. In other words, voters have a choice, but it’s heavily influenced by party bigwigs.
That theory, according to some, simply doesn’t apply to the 2012 GOP presidential race.
“The competing paradigm might be called ‘This Time Is Different,’” Silver writes. “Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage.”
This makes a lot of sense — particularly when it comes to Gingrich — but there seems to be more to it.
Namely, the tea party.
After all, exit polls from Saturday’s South Carolina primary showed 64 percent of voters identified as tea party supporters, and Gingrich won nearly half of their votes — almost twice as many as Romney. Indeed, the fact that nearly two-thirds of voters in any primary say they support a certain political movement shows what kind of influence it has.
But even if you look beyond the exit poll, it’s pretty clear that the tea party mentality is very much a part of what Gingrich has been able to accomplish. The same tea party mentality that was responsible for Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul is now helping Gingrich.
In most of those cases, there was another GOP candidate who was favored by the GOP establishment but didn’t light any fires among the conservative base. So the base chose somebody else.
That’s not to say that Gingrich hasn’t been a capable candidate who was able to swing a state by 25 points in a week’s time. In fact, it’s just saying that his stealth maneuvering has more impact today, because voters are acting more independently of party leaders.
For some reason, political observers have stopped attributing this to the tea party. But it’s very much a lingering effect of what the tea party did in 2010 or, at the very least, is a result of the same set of circumstances that gave rise to the tea party.
The question now is whether it’s enough, as it was in 2010 Senate races, to push a supposedly less-electable wild card candidate to a major party’s presidential nomination.
As we have written before, that is a much steeper hill to climb, and we remain skeptical that the tea party will actually pick the GOP nominee.
But the influence of the tea party lives on in today’s Republican Party.
By: Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, January 24, 2012
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