“The GOP Vulgarians”: On Track To Be The Crudest, Most Vulgar And Most Disgusting Campaign In Our Nation’s History
It was William J. Bennett, education secretary in the Reagan years and the Republican Party’s premier moralist, who embedded a phrase in the American consciousness when he bemoaned the fact that “our elites presided over an unprecedented coarsening of our culture.”
Well, to borrow another famous phrase, it is Bennett’s party and two of its presidential candidates in particular, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, who are merrily defining our politics, our discourse and the American presidency down. The 2016 Republican primary campaign is now on track to be the crudest, most vulgar and most thoroughly disgusting in our nation’s history.
A policy wonk who has spent nearly two decades in politics was watching Thursday’s GOP debate with his two teenage daughters and was horrified when one turned to him and asked: “Is this what you do?” The dad didn’t want to be named because he didn’t want to embarrass his daughters.
And Republican voters in Saturday’s contests sent a signal they, too, were turned off. Both Trump and Rubio underperformed, particularly in Maine’s caucuses and among voters who cast ballots on primary day in Louisiana.
In the state that’s home to Mardi Gras, Trump’s unexpectedly narrow three-point margin over Ted Cruz was built by early voters immune from any debate revulsion.
Call me old-fashioned or even a prig, but I have a rather elevated view of what politics can be and what it can achieve. For decades, in good political moments and bad, I have repaired for inspiration and comfort to the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s description of politics at its best. “When politics goes well,” he wrote, “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”
In the GOP right now, it’s not going well.
You can place a lot of the responsibility for all this on Trump and, yes, the media. As I was writing this, MSNBC (for which I’ve worked over the years) and CNN were simultaneously broadcasting live the same Trump speech. Welcome to Trump State Television. Broadcasters have reveled in the ratings to be gained from airing Trump’s stream-of-consciousness (if politically effective) rants, and the coarser the better.
We might let the blame settle there, except that Rubio got frustrated. The man the party’s leaders keep saying is the real challenger to Trump despite his early difficulties in winning actual contests decided that to beat Trump, he had to join him.
Thus began his own rants that reached a low point when he declared of Trump during a rally last month in Virginia: “I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5’2. Have you seen his hands? They’re like this.” Here, Rubio held his thumb and fingers closely together to depict something very small indeed. He added: “And you know what they say about men with small hands.”
My naivete extends to the fact that I did not know that small hands are often equated to diminutive endowments elsewhere. But Trump, obviously more worldly than I, went all defensive at the debate, held out his arms and declared: “Look at those hands, are they small hands? And he referred to my hands — ‘if they’re small, something else must be small.’ I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee.”
Now we know.
Then there was Trump’s response earlier in the day to the attack on him by Mitt Romney. Trump had a point that Romney was happy to seek his endorsement in 2012 (and to ignore Trump’s birtherism and his other racially and religiously tinged comments about President Obama). But here is how Trump put the matter: “He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, ‘Mitt, drop to your knees,’ and he would’ve dropped to his knees.”
We expect Trump to be loutish. Worse is Rubio’s refusal to take responsibility for the course he has chosen. Explaining that he would truly prefer to be talking about issues, Rubio went for the-devil-made-me-do-it defense. “But let’s be honest too about all this,” he explained. “The media has given these personal attacks that Donald Trump has made an incredible amount of coverage.”
Sure, he’s right about the media, but courageous politicians don’t blame someone else for what comes out of their own mouths.
By comparison, John Kasich and Cruz are looking almost as issue-oriented and responsible as, well, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. But the whole Republican race is now a moral and electoral wreck, a state of affairs that one conservative after another mourned during and after Thursday’s encounter.
Saturday’s voters quietly joined the chorus of dismay and rewarded Cruz and, to a lesser degree, Kasich.
Scattered primary results are almost always over-read, and Cruz’s Kansas victory was primarily a tribute to the influence of conservative evangelicals who delivered the state to Rick Santorum in 2012 and Mike Huckabee in 2008.
But the gap between early voters and the far more pro-Cruz primary day voters in Louisiana speaks to a shift in sentiments. And Kasich ran ahead of Rubio in Maine, which Cruz also won, and was behind in Kentucky by only two points, a surprisingly small deficit. Rubio’s attacks on Trump seem to have been a double-edged political sword: He wounded the front-runner but also hurt himself.
For decades, conservatives have done a great business assailing liberals for promoting cultural decay. Sorry, guys, but in this campaign, you have kicked away the franchise.
By: E. J. Dionne Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 8, 2016
“The Consequences Of Republican Obstruction”: We Need To Be Clear About Why Our Politics Is Broken Right Now
One of my favorite writers – Leonard Pitts – has weighed in on the topic du jour these days for pundits: what led to the rise of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential primary. He starts off with a quote from former Republican Senator George Voinovich: “If he was for it, we had to be against it.” That was the beginning of the Republican strategy against the newly elected President back in 2009.
The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done. What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided upon a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph…
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.
And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama. But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.
Of course I agree with Pitts because I wrote basically the same thing recently. Just as it is critical for a doctor to accurately diagnose a disease in order to effectively treat it, we need to be clear about why our politics is broken right now in order to craft effective solutions.
One way to test the diagnosis Pitts has articulated is to think about what happened prior to the 2010 midterm elections – when Democrats had control of both houses of Congress – and afterwards. In the first 2 years of the Obama presidency, he and the Democrats managed to pass:
1. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
2. The Affordable Care Act
3. The Dodd-Frank Act
4. Repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
5. The Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act
6. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
7. The Fair Sentencing Act
8. The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act
9. The Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act
10. The Hate Crimes Prevention Act
That’s a pretty impressive list for just two years, isn’t it? When you compare it to how little has been accomplished in the last 5 1/2 years, the contrast is astounding. The comparison is even more stark when you look at what the two Parties have been doing over those years. While the Republicans have spent most of their time trying to repeal Obamacare and threatening to blow up the economy if they don’t get their way, President Obama and the Democrats have put forward a list of policy proposals that have been either ignored or actively obstructed by the Republicans.
1. Comprehensive immigration reform
2. The American Jobs Act
3. Universal pre-K
4. Raise the minimum wage
5. Paid family/sick leave
6. Free community college
7. Gun background checks
8. Criminal justice reform
9. Restoration of the Voting Rights Act
As a thought experiment, it’s interesting to contemplate what might have happened over these last few years if either the Democrats had maintained their majorities in Congress and/or if the Republicans had taken the advice of people like David Frum and actually attempted to negotiate solutions.
There are voices out there who diagnose our political situation differently than the analysis above from Leonard Pitts. Some in the media are particularly fond of the “both sides do it” mythology. As we’ve seen, Bernie Sanders comes close to embracing that idea with his analysis that the entire political process is rigged by big money – both Republicans and Democrats. While money in politics plays a role, it is clear that Democrats have an agenda to address the challenges we face and Republicans have cast their lot with fanning the flames of fear/anger in order to obstruct progress. The consequences of that decision by the GOP are that: progress has been halted, the stage was set for a Donald Trump candidacy and our political system has been gravely wounded.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 8, 2916
“Trump Panders To Forces Of Backlash And Bigotry”: Our Exceptionalism Depends On Our Making Righteous Choices
Donald Trump may well be the most polarizing figure to come along in American politics for several generations. Still, he has managed to unite David Duke and Louis Farrakhan, men whose cultural and political profiles suggest they’d find it hard to agree on anything.
Duke is a former Ku Klux Klan leader who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives before losing several races for higher office. A white nationalist, Duke has traded not only in a frank and forthright bigotry against black people but also in anti-Semitism.
Farrakhan is the leader of the Nation of Islam, a cultish religious organization that claims roots in Islam but is more closely connected to black nationalism. He, too, has a long history of anti-Semitism, as well as reckless and unhinged attacks on white people in general.
Whatever their serious and searing disagreements, both men are attracted to Trump’s presidential candidacy. You probably know by now that Duke has spoken fondly of Trump, telling his presumably white radio audience recently that voting for anyone else is “really treason to your heritage.”
Farrakhan, for his part, has stopped short of an outright endorsement. But he did tell his followers that “I like what I’m looking at” in Trump because the real estate mogul “has stood in front of (the) Jewish community and said, ‘I don’t want your money.’”
If you’ve somehow managed to miss the rise of Trumpism in this most peculiar campaign season, the fawning of Duke and Farrakhan provides a quick guide to the roiling resentments and bitter antagonisms that undergird Trump’s popularity: He hasn’t just attracted bigots, but he has also urged them on. He was slow to repudiate David Duke’s enthusiastic support; he has engaged in a cheap and hateful xenophobia, smearing Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists”; he has vowed to close the United States to all Muslim immigrants.
Though the Republican establishment is belatedly in full-out panic over Trump’s rise, his dominance in the GOP presidential primaries isn’t the most worrisome thing about his campaign. Whatever happens to his candidacy, his voters aren’t going away — and neither are their dangerous passions. Their anger will not be easily placated.
How did we come to this? Isn’t the United States supposed to be the “shining city on a hill,” the exemplar of racial diversity and religious pluralism, the exceptional nation that respects human rights and practices tolerance?
In truth, we’ve never been as exceptional as we claim. Our history shows a faltering and hesitant path toward the practice of our stated ideals, a twisting, wrenching journey toward full equality for all. But either through divine inspiration or sheer luck, the nation has had the right people at the right time, whether Abraham Lincoln or Eleanor Roosevelt or Martin Luther King.
Still, there have always been forces of backlash and bigotry among us. Those forces are most powerful during times of economic dislocation and rapid social change, when ordinary citizens grow anxious about their jobs and fearful about their place in the social order. And we are living through just such a moment: The population is becoming more diverse just as the crosswinds of globalization and technological change have buffeted the economy. It is only too easy for some people to blame the “other,” to find scapegoats in those people who don’t look or sound like them.
Perhaps the nation might have avoided the rise of Donald Trump and his odious politics if more of our political and business leaders had avoided the impulse to pander to hate and to profit from fear. Instead, there has been pandering aplenty. Politicians have played to the peanut gallery, exploiting racial, ethnic and religious fault lines for advantage. Meanwhile, media moguls interested less in policy than in money have found it lucrative to exploit divisions with tendentious news-talk shows that foster fear and cultivate anxiety.
If the nation survives this crazy season — and I still don’t believe we will swear in a President Trump next January — perhaps our leaders will learn an important lesson: This democracy is a delicate matter, a fragile proposition, and it must be nurtured and protected. Our exceptionalism depends on our making righteous choices.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, March 5, 2016
“The GOP, An Incoherent Mess”: The Left Was Right About The Right All These Years
“If he was for it, we had to be against it.”
— Former U.S. Sen. George Voinovich quoted in “The New New Deal” by Michael Grunwald
The “he” is President Obama. The “we” is the Republican Party. And it is not coincidental that as the former pushes toward the end of his second term, the latter is coming apart.
The GOP is an incoherent mess. Republican-on-Republican rhetorical violence has become commonplace. Party members find themselves mulling whether to break away and form a third party or unite behind a coarse, blustering bigot whose scapegoating and strongman rhetoric has Holocaust survivors comparing him to Hitler.
The situation is so objectively and transparently grim that many on the right no longer even bother to spin it. “I’m a lifelong Republican,” tweeted historian Max Boot last week, “but (the) Trump surge proves that every bad thing Democrats have ever said about GOP is basically true.”
“It would be terrible,” wrote Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens last week, “to think that the left was right about the right all these years.”
But it can be argued that Trump is less the cause than an inevitable effect of the party’s looming disintegration. It can be argued that what’s really destroying the Republican Party is the Republican Party.
The popular storyline goes that voters are seeking political outsiders this year in their frustration over a government where the legislative gears are frozen and nothing gets done. What that storyline forgets is that this gridlock was by design, that GOP leaders held a meeting on the very evening of the president’s first inauguration and explicitly decided upon a policy of non-cooperation to deny him anything approaching a bipartisan triumph.
The party followed this tactic with such lockstep discipline and cynical disregard for the national welfare that in 2010, seven Republican co-sponsors of a resolution to create a deficit reduction task force voted against their own bill because Obama came out for it. They feared its passage might make him look good.
In the book quoted above, Michael Grunwald distilled the GOP’s thinking as follows: “As long as Republicans refused to follow his lead, Americans would see partisan food fights and conclude that Obama had failed to produce change.”
Republicans and their media accomplices buttressed that strategy with a campaign of insult and disrespect designed to delegitimize Obama. With their endless birther stupidity, their death panels idiocy, their constant budget brinksmanship and their cries of, “I want my country back!” they stoked in the public nothing less than hatred for the interloper in the White House who’d had the nerve to be elected president.
And the strategy worked, hobbling and frustrating Obama. But as a bullet doesn’t care who it hits and a fire doesn’t care who it burns, the forces of ignorance and unreason, grievance and fear the Republicans calculatedly unleashed have not only wounded the president. No, it becomes more apparent every day that those forces have gravely wounded politics itself, meaning the idea that we can — or even should — reason together, compromise, form consensus.
There is a sense of just deserts in watching panicked Republicans try to stop Trump as he goose-steps toward coronation, but it is tempered by the realization that there’s far more at stake here than the GOP’s comeuppance.
This is our country we’re talking about. This is its future we choose in November. And any future presided over by “President Trump” is too apocalyptic to contemplate. Yet, the possibility is there, and that’s sobering.
It is bad enough the Republicans may have destroyed themselves. One wonders whether they will take America with them.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 3, 2016
“Republicans Could Not Have Done Anything Wrong”: Rubio Inexplicably Applauds Snyder’s Handling Of Flint Scandal
In recent months, the Republican presidential field hasn’t paid a whole of attention to the crisis in Flint, Michigan. In mid-January, with the national spotlight shining on the man-made disaster, Marco Rubio was asked for his perspective – and he had no idea what the reporter was talking about.
Six weeks later, the topic came up in last night’s debate, held in Detroit, where Fox News’ Bret Baier reminded the GOP candidates that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton “have both been to Flint. They are both running ads in this state focusing on that, focusing on supporting Flint and fixing the problems, showing images of people in Flint thankful that they’re there.”
The co-moderator asked Rubio, “Without getting into the political blame game here, where are the national Republicans’ plans on infrastructure and solving problems like this? If you talk to people in this state, they are really concerned about Flint on both sides of the aisle. So why haven’t GOP candidates done more or talked more about this?”
The Florida senator’s response was one of the evening’s more unsettling answers. Here’s his answer in its entirety.
“Well, I know I’ve talked about it, and others in our campaign have talked about it, and other candidates have talked about it, as well. What happened in Flint was a terrible thing. It was systemic breakdown at every level of government, at both the federal and partially the – both the state and partially at the federal level, as well.
“And by the way, the politicizing of it I think is unfair, because I don’t think that someone woke up one morning and said, ‘Let’s figure out how to poison the water system to hurt someone.’
“But accountability is important. I will say, I give the governor credit. He took responsibility for what happened. And he’s talked about people being held accountable and the need for change, with Governor Snyder.
“But here’s the point: This should not be a partisan issue. The way the Democrats have tried to turn this into a partisan issue, that somehow Republicans woke up in the morning and decided, ‘Oh, it’s a good idea to poison some kids with lead.’ It’s absurd. It’s outrageous. It isn’t true. All of us are outraged by what happened. And we should work together to solve it. And there is a proper role for the government to play at the federal level, in helping local communities to respond to a catastrophe of this kind, not just to deal with the people that have been impacted by it, but to ensure that something like this never happens again.”
Hmm. So, Flint was an accident; Rick Snyder deserves credit for his handling of the crisis; let’s be sure to blame the feds; and Democratic rhetoric is even more upsetting than the disaster itself. Got it.
New York’s Jon Chait wrote an important rejoinder: “Asked to avoid the blame game and offer specific solutions to urban-infrastructure problems, Rubio is unable. He conceives of the question entirely in partisan terms. He attacks the notion that Republicans consciously decided to poison children, thereby ruling out any possibility of government negligence as self-evidently preposterous. He has nothing resembling a specific idea on the issue, only the firm conviction that Republicans could not have done anything wrong.”
As unsettling as the debate exchange was, it offered real insights into how Rubio sees the world. Six weeks ago, the senator couldn’t be bothered to know what the Flint scandal was. Last night, he recognized the crisis, but only through an electoral prism. Rubio starts with the premise he finds ideologically satisfying – Republicans are correct and free of wrongdoing – and then works backwards … until he can find a way to condemn Democrats.
Rubio simply cannot stop thinking in partisan political terms. By all appearance, he doesn’t even know how. For all of the media’s assurances about Rubio being “whip smart,” the young senator simply lacks the wherewithal to consider policy questions in substantive ways.
The Republican was asked, “[W]here are the national Republicans’ plans on infrastructure and solving problems like this?” This prompts Rubio to reference the agreed-upon talking points; (1) Flint, sad; (2) Snyder, good; (3) Democrats, bad. The growing evidence of neglect, incompetence, and possibly criminal misdeeds surrounding the governor’s office? For Rubio, none of this matters.
The assembled audience applauded, but given the reality, they should have cringed.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 4, 2016
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