“The Nile Is Not A River In Egypt”: Republicans Can’t Face Post-Election Reality
The Nile is not a river in Egypt; it’s the post-election operating principle for Republicans and conservatives. Rather than face reality many Republicans would rather stick their heads in the sand and complain about the voters. In his political thriller Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” If Republicans want to get on track, they need to take a hard look at themselves and not blame everything on Mitt Romney.
Many conservatives and Republicans share Romney’s disdain for voters. I like to watch the Fox News Channel when things go badly for Republicans, so I’ve been watching the Fox News Channel a lot lately. I enjoy hearing the excuses that their commentators make for the GOP. The spin out of GOP-TV is that President Barack Obama won because voters are stupid, selfish, or sinful. Now, there’s a winning campaign message for you. Conservative columnist George Will said Sunday on ABC that the Republican Party must “quit despising the American people.” I knew that if I waited long enough, I would agree with Will on something.
The national GOP candidates have also put their heads deep into the sand.
Mitt Romney jumped in immediately after Election Day to remind the public of just how clueless he is. He blamed Barack Obama for his loss. Romney told big money donors that he lost because of the president’s “gifts” to young people, blacks, and Hispanics. Most people think that the things that Romney described as gifts are just basic human rights. One of these “gifts” was ending deportation for people who came to the United States as children with undocumented parents. President Obama ended the deportation because he believed the U.S. government should not punish children for their parents’ mistakes. Voters do not share the GOP’s hostility to immigrants. Data from the national Election Day exit survey indicated that two thirds (65 percent) of the voters want to create a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants while only a quarter (28 percent) of the voters felt that the government should deport them.
Romney’s running mate is just as clueless. Rep. Paul Ryan said that the election was not rejection of GOP tax policies. He was wrong. The former GOP vice presidential candidate apparently didn’t read the national exit poll that showed that almost half (47 percent) of the voters want to raise taxes on Americans who live in households where the total annual income is over $250,000. A small group (13 percent) of voters want to raise everyone’s taxes and only a third (35 percent) of the electorate oppose any tax increase.
If all else fails, blame the weather. I have seen or heard a few GOP pundits say that Hurricane Sandy blew Mitt Romney off course. If Republicans believe that it was Sandy that took the wind out of Romney’s sails, they face a long winding road back to the White House.
To be fair some conservatives got it. Both Sean Hannity and Charles Krauthammer endorsed amnesty for undocumented workers after the election results rolled in. Good for them, they are realistic enough to fear the impact that a growing Latino population will have on the future of the GOP.
But some of the solutions that conservatives have offered aren’t particularly constructive. One of our readers @MaltaSiege suggested that “all liberals should hang themselves.” I assume that includes me. Just to be sure I got the message, Mal was kind enough to include a picture of a noose. Even if we had enough rope to hang ourselves, I don’t think the 62 million Americans who voted for Barack Obama want to leave this earthly coil now that they re-elected a president who wants to eliminate tax breaks for billionaires and who will fight to allow people to marry anyone they choose without government interference.
Not all our readers appreciate my thoughts on the condition of the GOP and the conservative movement. Years ago, I told a female friend that I had finally figured out what makes women tick. My friend replied in horror, “What do you know about women, you’re a man?” I replied “We’re all people, aren’t we?” Well, some of you may resent my comments about Republicans, since I’m a Democrat. But we’re all Americans, aren’t we?
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 19, 2012
“Utterly The Same”: Change, Learn, Compromise, Grow? Not These Republicans
Hearing so much chatter about “change” in the Republican Party, the innocent voter might believe that the Republicans had learned important lessons from their stinging electoral defeat. On closer examination, however, the likelihood of real change appears nil, because the party’s leaders and thinkers can cite so many excuses to remain utterly the same.
At the Republican Governors Association conference last week, for instance, the favored explanation for the voting public’s emphatic rejection of Mitt Romney had nothing to do with issues or ideology, but only with more effective Democratic Party organizing and communicating. According to Wade Goodwyn, the National Public Radio reporter who covered the GOP governors’ meeting, their post-election mood was not one of shock, but complacency.
“It was widely agreed that nothing needed to be changed except perhaps the tone,” he found. “For example, the idea that more than 70 percent of Hispanics voted for the president because of Republican positions on illegal immigration was rejected by the Republican governors.”
That would be hard to believe if Goodwyn were not such an excellent and experienced journalist, because it is so stupid, so insulting, and makes so little sense. Could it really be true that the nation’s Republican governors — one of whom is quite likely to be the party’s next presidential nominee — are so obtuse and so obstinate that they would reject change even on immigration?
Republican leaders also seem inclined to ignore voter sentiment on the issue of taxes, despite majorities of 70 percent or better that agree the rich should pay more (including many voters who identify with the GOP). Rep. Mike Pence, who will become the governor of Indiana next January, told the Republican governors that he remains firmly opposed to any tax increase, especially on “those in the best position to put hurting Americans back to work,” which is GOP code for mega-millionaires and above.
Clearly the Republicans in Congress too feel free to ignore public opinion on this question, since Speaker John Boehner and his caucus have offered a “compromise” on fiscal policy that represents no change whatsoever from their earlier positions and the Romney platform. Government can accrue fresh revenues from growth, they say; nothing new or even meaningful there. And government can close unspecified loopholes and deductions to increase revenues, too. Where have we heard that before?
Meanwhile, the consulting geniuses who predicted a Romney victory — a landslide, even! — are peddling alibis about why their party lost despite billions spent. Fox News expert Dick Morris says it is because their voter machinery failed, the Romney campaign didn’t fight back, and Hurricane Sandy persuaded all of the undecided voters to back Barack Obama.
By the way, Morris now predicts that the economy will suffer a ruinous decline over the coming year or two, so Republicans can just sit back and watch the Democrats sink with it. Which is another way of saying no need for change on any front. Given his record as an oracle, both Democrats and Americans more generally now have great reasons for optimism.
Karl Rove, who squandered vast sums of his generous donors’ money, has lots of explaining to do. But he always has lots of explanations. This time, having reluctantly acknowledged electoral reality, Rove agrees with Morris that the Romney campaign’s failures were mostly to blame. He is full of advice for the party leaders, urging them to change the date of the convention, try to avoid “sounding judgmental and callous” on social issues, and “do better — much better” with Hispanics, younger voters, women, and middle-class families.
How should Republicans “do better” with those voter groups? On that question, Rove resorts to clichés about “reframing” messages and “re-engineering” voter turnout efforts, as though issues and policies have nothing to do with motivating actual voters.
Finally, Rove insists that his donors will continue to pour good money after bad into the coffers of American Crossroads, his SuperPAC. His current bleating sounds nothing like his confident bluster a decade ago, when he looked forward to a Republican realignment and unchecked power for decades to come.
Reality has changed, but Republicans won’t. They insist on creating their own reality, like Rove and his friends at Fox News always did — but fewer and fewer Americans will still pretend to live there.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, November 18, 2012
“The Inconvenient Truths Of 2012”: A Party That Wants To Govern Has To Do More Than Run Against Government
Human nature and politics being what they are, Republicans will underestimate the trouble they’re in and Democrats will be eager to overestimate the strength of their post-2012 position.
Begin with the GOP: As Republicans dig out from a defeat that their poll-deniers said was impossible, they need to acknowledge many large failures.
Their attempts to demonize President Obama and undercut him by obstructing his agenda didn’t work. Their assumption that the conservative side would vote in larger numbers than Democrats was wrong. The tea party was less the wave of the future than a remnant of the past. Blocking immigration reform and standing by silently while nativist voices offered nasty thoughts about newcomers were bad ideas. Latino voters heard it all and drew the sensible electoral conclusion.
Democrats are entitled to a few weeks of reveling because their victory really was substantial. Obama won all but one of the swing states and a clear popular-vote majority. The Democrats added to their Senate majority in a year that began with almost everyone predicting they’d lose seats. They even won a plurality of the vote in House races; Republicans held on because of gerrymandering.
Just as important, the voters repudiated the very worst aspects of post-Bush conservatism: its harsh tone toward those in need, its doctrinaire inflexibility on taxes, its inclination toward extreme pronouncements on social issues, and its hard anti-government rhetoric that ignored the pragmatic attitude of the electorate’s great middle about what the public sector can and can’t do. If conservatives are at all reflective, we should be in for a slightly less rancid and divisive debate over the next couple of years.
Yet Obama and his party need to understand that running a majority coalition is difficult. It involves dealing with tensions that inevitably arise in a broad alliance. Democrats won because of huge margins among African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans, but also because of a solid white working-class vote in states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, particularly from union members. Obama needs to think about economic policies that deliver benefits across this wide spectrum of less well-to-do Americans. A longing for balanced budgets is not what drove these voters to the polls.
At the same time, there was a substantial middle- and upper-middle-class suburban component of the Democratic coalition that is moderate or liberal on social issues and sees the GOP as backward-looking. Many voters in this group bridle at sweeping anti-government bromides because they care about essential government functions, notably education. But they are certainly not classic New Deal or Great Society Democrats.
Such voters are central to what has become known as the “Colorado strategy.” It’s a view that the Democrats’ long-term future depends on moderate, younger and suburban voters, especially women, combined with the growing Latino electorate. And in Colorado itself, this strategy worked exactly as advertised.
As Curtis Hubbard, the Denver Post’s editorial page editor, noted, Obama won big in the party’s bastions in Denver and Boulder. But he also won Jefferson and Arapahoe counties, key Denver-area swing suburbs, and, a bit farther away, in Larimer County around Fort Collins. The Democrats’ victory here had depth: The party recaptured the state House of Representatives while holding the state Senate.
Managing a coalition that includes African Americans, Latinos, white working-class voters and suburbanites in the new and growing metro areas will take skill and subtlety. And Democrats need to recognize that some of their core constituencies — young people, African Americans and Latinos — typically vote in lower numbers in off-year elections. The party requires a strategy for 2014.
But these are happy problems compared with what the GOP and the conservative movement confront. They need to rethink their approach all the way down.
Many conservatives seem to hope that a more open attitude toward immigration will solve the Republicans’ Latino problem and make everything else better. It’s not that simple. For one thing, a more moderate stand on immigration could create new divisions in the party. And its weaknesses among both Latinos and women owe not simply to immigration or to social issues, respectively, but also to the fact that both groups are more sympathetic to government’s role in the economy and in promoting upward mobility than current conservative doctrine allows.
A party that wants to govern has to do more than run against government. For the right, this is the inconvenient truth of 2012.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 14, 2012
“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
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