It is usually assumed that the invisible primary ends with the Iowa Caucuses, when the party rank-and-file begin to have their say. But thanks to an exceptionally chaotic and unpredictable pre-caucus period, the central dynamic of the invisible primary–Mitt Romney’s wooing of conservatives skeptical of him–has been extended. And now it’s reached a new phase: The internal struggle among conservative opinion-leaders about when it will prove necessary to throw in the towel and settle for Romney.
The most underreported feature of the contest so far is that most conservatives have already reconciled themselves to Romney as the nominee. They may prefer someone else, and in pursuit of that preference–or to keep ideological pressure on Romney–they may continue to raise alarms about the front-runner’s record, positions, or general-election strategy. But it is exceedingly difficult to find a significant conservative figure who has not already pledged to back Mitt fully if he’s the nominee.
As a result, there will be no last-ditch rightwing crusade to deny Romney the nomination. Nor will a discouraged base threaten to throw the general election to Obama. Instead, you can expect to see an increasingly public debate on the right about the costs and benefits of further resistance, until an eventual surrender.
There are powerful arguments for throwing in the towel early, though the factor most often pointed to by the Beltway commentariat–Mitt’s superior electability–is not necessarily the strongest. Yes, some conservatives (along with most Democrats) have embraced the conventional wisdom that successful candidates must be able to move to the center to win and deemed Romney the obvious choice on electability grounds. But these are people largely already in his camp. Though it’s sometimes hard for political pros to accept, most conservatives simply don’t buy the CW. They actually believe what they have been repeatedly saying since they pulled the GOP hard right after two straight general election debacles: This is a conservative country whose electorate responds best to a clear, consistent conservative message. The 2010 results confirmed that in their minds–and neither political scientists nor polls nor pundits can persuade them otherwise.
So if electability is not a clinching argument for getting on board the Romney Express, what might be? The main temptation for conservatives to call it a day is the strong likelihood that an extended nominating contest will become so nasty, divisive, and cash-draining that it will damage the ticket far more than any “base” misgivings about Romney might. Even as Republicans celebrate the general election advantage they expect from Super-PACs, their lethal power in intra-party battles is becoming plainer every day, and now that Gingrich has foresworn positive campaigning, none of the survivors can be expected to play nice.
Just as importantly, “true conservatives” have doubts and divisions about the ideological reliability of Mitt’s surviving rivals. Santorum is regarded by some as an Washington insider and Big Government Conservative. Newt’s heresies were amply aired by those attack ads in Iowa. And Perry, the closest thing to a consensus “true conservative” candidate, greatly upset believers with his position on immigration.
And so, conservative leaders may well be asking themselves: Is the dubious value of nominating Santorum or Gingrich or even Perry instead of Romney worth the risk of creating the foundation for an Obama campaign assault on the eventual winner as a flip-flopping opportunist with the character of a feral cat?
Possibly not. Currently the most important residual reason for continuing the anti-Romney resistance is the feeling that he hasn’t yet paid sufficient deference to movement conservatives (even though, ironically, he was their candidate four years ago) or made sufficient promises to make their priorities his own. These are concerns that should be able to be finessed. There may well be furious behind-the-scene negotiations going on to ensure that Mitt doesn’t emulate his new supporter John McCain by getting all “mavericky” in the general election or implicitly triangulating against the Right. And it could culminate in a sort of political Groundhog Day, when a particularly powerful opinion leader signals the troops to shorten or extend the nominating contest (though the leader best positioned to do so, Sen. Jim DeMint, has indicated he does not intend to make an endorsement at all.)
So the fight could go on for a while, but not for an extended period (unless Romney does something uncharacteristically stupid, or Rick Perry achieves a complete resurrection). In head if not heart, conservative elites have already given their hand to Mitt, and much of what’s going on at the present is simply a matter of maintaining appearances and executing a solid pre-nup.
By: Ed Kilgore, The Democratic Strategist, January 9, 2012
January 10, 2012
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Conservatives, GOP, Jim DeMInt, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Politics, Republicans |
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Finally. After a year of artful camouflage and concealment, Republicans let us glimpse the rift between establishment pragmatists and Tea Party ideologues. There may be hope for the republic after all.
Forty Republican senators, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), joined Democrats in voting for compromise legislation providing a two-month extension of unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut. The bill passed 89 to 10, the kind of margin usually reserved for ceremonial resolutions in favor of motherhood. Senators clearly were confident that House approval would quickly follow.
But it didn’t, because Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) couldn’t get his Tea Party freshmen to go along. The result was a kind of intramural sniping among Republicans that we haven’t seen in years.
“It angers me that House Republicans would rather continue playing politics than find solutions,” said Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts.
The stalemate “is harming the Republican Party,” said Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
“Are Republicans getting killed now in public opinion? There’s no question,” said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who urged House Republicans to just “get it over with.”
But Boehner hung tough, not out of principle but because he had no palatable choice. He didn’t dare bring the Senate bill to the floor for a vote, fearing that non-Tea Party members of the GOP caucus might defect. So he did nothing for four long days — and let the Republican Party be portrayed as so out-to-lunch that it would blithely raise taxes on 160 million Americans. The week before Christmas. As we roll into an election year.
The thing is, this portrayal is quite accurate, at least as it pertains to the Tea Party faction. More sensible Republicans have been so eager to take advantage of the Tea Party’s energy and emotion that they have essentially allowed the inmates to run the asylum. You will recall that it was the GOP, led by the Tea Party types, that threatened to send the Treasury into default last summer rather than approve a routine and necessary increase in the debt ceiling.
In the current imbroglio, nothing resembling a principle was involved. Boehner said that House Republicans wanted to extend the payroll tax cut for an entire year, rather than just two months. But even if you accept his claim at face value, it ignores the fact that the two-month deal was approved by the Senate for one reason only: to allow time for negotiation of a one-year extension.
In other words, the measure that House Republicans were so reluctant to pass, or even vote on, was crafted as a step toward the specific outcome that House Republicans claimed was their goal.
Boehner’s calls for compromise were absurd. The Senate bill was itself a bipartisan compromise, reached after tough bargaining and many concessions. Democrats abandoned their proposal for an income tax surcharge on those earning more than $1 million a year. President Obama accepted a rider forcing him to make a decision on the controversial Keystone XL pipeline project before the November election. Republicans had already won the negotiation — until zealots in the House threatened to scuttle the whole thing.
McConnell maintained a steely silence until Thursday, then built a ladder for Boehner to climb down. He proposed that the House promptly enact a “short-term” extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance while working on a one-year measure. Within hours, the House caved.
This glimpse of honest debate among Republicans won’t last long, I predict. They’ll try their best to resume the practice of absolute anti-Obama unity, which has worked quite well for them. But no one can erase what voters have seen this week, and it wasn’t pretty.
There are only two possible reasons for House Republicans to behave the way they did. Maybe they are so blinded by ideology that they no longer care about the impact their actions might have on struggling American families. Or maybe their only guiding principle is that anything Obama supports, they oppose.
The week’s events offer a lesson for Obama, too. One reason for all the Republican angst was that public opinion has become more sensitive to issues of economic justice. This may be partly due to the Occupy protests. But I’m convinced that Obama’s fiery barnstorming in favor of his American Jobs Act has played a big role. People are hearing his message.
The president has been on the offensive. It’s no coincidence that, for the first time in quite a while, Republicans are backing up.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post,December 22, 2011
December 24, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP | House Republicans, John Boehner, John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Payroll Tax Cuts, Politics, Republicans, Teaparty |
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With the U.S. war in Iraq coming to its overdue end, it’s worth noting those who got the policy wrong — and continue to ignore the error of their ways.
This week, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), arguably Congress’ biggest cheerleader of this tragedy, delivered a lengthy tirade condemning President Obama for ending the conflict and bringing U.S. troops home, arguing, among other things, “All I will say is that, for three years, the president has been harvesting the successes of the very strategy that he consistently dismissed as a failure.”
That’s actually backwards. Obama didn’t dismiss the Status of Forces Agreement reached between the Bush administration and Iraqi officials in 2008; the Status of Forces Agreement reflected exactly what Obama was proposing at the time. Officials in both countries completely rejected the course McCain recommended at the time, and as we now know, that was the right move. It’s curious that McCain would forget this relevant detail.*
In any case, the bitter Republican senator added, “I believe history will judge this president’s leadership with the scorn and disdain it deserves.”
It’s not exactly surprising that good news and the end of a war would leave McCain in such a sour mood. In August, when Obama helped topple the Gadhafi regime in Libya, McCain thanked the British and French, but ignored the role of U.S. troops, and whined about Obama’s “failure” to run the mission the way McCain wanted.
But when it comes to Iraq in particular, it’s rather amazing McCain feels comfortable addressing the subject at all. I’m reminded of a Frank Rich column from a while back, noting McCain’s record of being consistently wrong about what’s alleged to be his signature issue.
To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.
What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
The smart move for McCain would be to quietly slink away, hoping desperately that Americans forget how spectacularly wrong he was about a bloody, brutal war. The fact that this guy instead has the temerity to pop off publicly about how outraged he is that U.S. troops are coming home is nothing short of pathetic.
Someone in this debate deserves scorn and disdain, but it’s not the president.
By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 18, 2011
December 21, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Foreign Policy, Neo-Cons | Barack Obama, Iraq War, John McCain, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Politics, Status of Forces Agreement |
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Sometime in the next 15 days, the last American troops will leave Iraq — and the War that began almost nine years ago will finally come to an end.
Today, President Obama addresses some of those returning troops at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The big difference between those troops and many others who have returned from the War in Iraq, is that none of them will be deployed on yet another tour to Mosul or Kirkuk or Baghdad — or any of the other Iraqi cities that became so familiar to Americans over the last decade.
The end of the War in Iraq is a major event in American history, since in many ways, that War was the defining historic event for an entire generation of Americans.
There are those who would minimize the importance of the final withdrawal of our troops from Iraq by pointing to the unfinished business of the War in Afghanistan, or the use of civilian contractors. Those are important issues, but they should not diminish the extraordinary significance of the fact that the Iraq War has come to an end.
Most importantly, Progressives — and all of those who fought for a decade to prevent and then to end the Iraq War — should take a moment to celebrate the fact that they have won a critical, historic battle.
There is a lot of cynicism in America — a sense that it doesn’t matter what you do — that ordinary people can’t really have an impact on the big decisions and big institutions of our society. The end of the War in Iraq shows that the cynics are wrong.
What began in 2002 as an effort to avert the war in Iraq, grew to a chorus of millions who changed the political landscape and who kept fighting until all of our troops came home. That movement elected a president who promised to end the war — a president who this week has kept that promise.
In September 2002 — a year after 9/11 — President George Bush began what he and his aides called a “marketing program” to convince Americans that our country should invade Iraq. That campaign ultimately included some of the most egregious lies ever told by an American president.
Bush told Americans that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. His Secretary of State warned that we could not wait for a “smoking gun” to prove these allegations, because it might prove to be a “mushroom cloud.”
Bush and his vice president, Dick Cheney, argued that Iraq was the central front in the “War on Terror” — even though there was never one shred of evidence that Iraq supported the 9/11 terrorists or had anything whatsoever to do with Al Qaeda. Bush and Cheney actually said — with a straight face — that “If we weren’t fighting them in Iraq, we could be fighting them in the United States.”
Much of the nation — newly traumatized by the 9/11 attacks — supported the president. And of course, who could imagine that a president would simply fabricate the rationale for a war?
Just a month after Bush launched his campaign to get support for war with Iraq, State Senator Barack Obama was invited to speak to a rally in Chicago’s Federal Building Plaza. There he stated firmly and unequivocally his opposition to the invasion of Iraq. At the time, that position was unpopular — particularly for a politician with ambitions for higher office. But the organizers of the rally did not have to coax Obama to take his tough stand. Obama was eager to be part of the nascent movement that opposed the potential War in Iraq.
When he ran for United States Senate two years later, Obama continued his strong opposition to the Iraq War. And there can be little doubt that he became the Democratic nominee for President in 2008 in large measure because of his consistent, principled opposition to the War.
In his campaign for president, Barack Obama promised to end the War in Iraq. Now he has kept that promise.
When he took office there were nearly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. Within the next two weeks there will be none.
The Republicans that started the War — Neo-cons like Dick Cheney, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — as well as the major Republican Presidential candidates — have all spoken out against the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. They have made clear that they would never have signed the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government that set up a time-table for withdrawal, had they not intended to change it. Obama’s Republican opponent, John McCain, has been particularly outspoken in his opposition. McCain, after all, once said that he had no objection to American troops remaining in Iraq for a hundred years.
It is virtually certain that had John McCain become president, our War in Iraq would have continued for years to come. After all, one of the major Neo-Con goals for the war was a permanent base of operations in Iraq.
But President Obama and the movement against the Iraq War have decisively won the battle for public opinion. Last month’s ABC/Washington Post poll found that 78% of Americans support Obama’s decision to leave Iraq at the end of the year.
In the end, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stieglitz believes the War will have cost America over $3 trillion — including the cost of rehabilitation and care for the tens of thousands of soldiers who were wounded in Iraq.
Whatever the final figure, most Americans have a profound belief that it is time to use the funds we save by ending the Iraq War to rebuild America and the American economy.
Every dollar that went to fight the Iraq War was a dollar that did not go to repair a highway, build a mass transit system, educate a child or invest in new sources of energy.
Everyday Americans, and economists of every stripe, understand clearly that one of the principal forces that converted the budget surpluses of the Clinton Administration into the largest deficit in American history was Bush’s decision to launch extravagantly expensive wars at the same time he cut taxes for the wealthy.
And everyday people understand that the end of the War in Iraq — and ultimately the end of our engagement in Afghanistan — will, contrary to Republican doctrine, strengthen America.
The War in Iraq was used by terrorists worldwide to stoke hatred for our country and to recruit young people to their ranks. It sapped our country of trillions of dollars, stretched our military to the breaking point, caused popular support for America to plummet around the globe and dealt a powerful blow to America’s moral authority.
Most Americans realize that the decision to launch the War in Iraq was one of the biggest foreign policy disasters in modern American history.
But there is also a deep well of respect and support for the million men and women — both military and civilian — whose sacrifice allowed a hopeful outcome to be salvaged from a disastrous series of decisions by the Bush Administration.
Progressives must be resolute in preventing Republicans from using cuts in the benefits or care for returning warriors to pay for their tax breaks for millionaires.
And Progressives should do something else as well. While we recognize there is much to be done — let’s take a moment to celebrate an historic success. The end of the Iraq War demonstrates that “Yes We Can!” is more than a campaign slogan. It reminds us once again that everyday people can successfully organize to change history.
By: Robert Creamer, Published in The Huffingto Post, December 14, 2011
December 14, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Foreign Policy | Barack Obama, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Iraq War, John McCain, Neo-Cons, Politics |
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As anyone who pays much attention to politics or watches late night TV or reads the Fact Checker portion of the paper knows, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is getting blasted for an ad that uses a quote from Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign (“If we keep talking about the economy we are going to lose”) and attributes it to President Obama.
The original ad has become a several-day news story, resulting in dueling TV spots, and numerous punch/counter-punch action from the campaigns and party committees.
It plays into the narrative that Romney is prepared to say anything or do anything to become president. Flip flops have become one big character flop, as have misleading ads.
But here’s the question: is Romney willing to do anything he can right now to engage Obama in a one-on-one confrontation, even if he gets criticized by the mainstream media? Is he sacrificing his rook to get a chance at the king?
Here is the cynical view: the Romney campaign knew exactly what it was doing with this ad. It focused on the one issue where Romney seems to have an advantage with Republican primary voters, the economy, and it took on the person they hate the most, Obama. But they needed something extra to see to it that the ad went viral and became controversial.
Without this quote taken out of context, edited and made to sound as though it was an Obama statement, the ad probably would have gone nowhere. Ho-hum.
In my many years in campaigns I have seen the tactic over and over again. A candidate and his or her consultants deliberately mislead to get the opponent to take the bait. For example, one cynical tactic is to misrepresent the facts deliberately. You accuse candidate X, who was a prosecutor, of “plea bargaining” over 200 cases and letting criminals go free. So, the number may be 120—your hope is to have an argument over the number, thereby “winning” the message debate. Pretty horrendous.
My guess is that the Romney campaign knew they were going to get attacked for butchering the quote (they even had the full quote mentioning McCain in their material) but figured that they would rather create the firestorm with Obama and the Democrats. It was a gamble, to be sure.
The problem is that the DNC is staying on this and feeding it into the narrative of Romney’s character (along with the flip flops) and this is probably hurting Romney even among Republicans. So, in the end, the ad is a gamble that may not pay off, especially if former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich begins to suck the oxygen out of the room in debates and taps into the demise of Herman Cain and Gov. Rick Perry.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 29, 2011
November 30, 2011
Posted by raemd95 |
Election 2012 | Barack Obama, False Advertising, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Politics |
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