“Why The GOP Won’t Change”: A Year After Their “Autopsy”, The Recommendations Haven’t Been And Won’t Be Followed
Exactly one year ago, a committee of Republican party bigwigs issued the report of its “Growth and Opportunity Project,” better known as the “autopsy.” The idea was to figure out what the party was doing wrong, and how on earth Barack Obama had managed to get re-elected when everybody knows what a big jerk he is. There were some recommendations on things like improving the party’s use of technology and its fundraising, but the headline-grabbing message was that the party had to shed its image as a bunch of grumpy old white guys and become more welcoming to young people and racial minorities.
It was always going to be a tricky thing to accomplish, both because the GOP is, in fact, made up in large part of grumpy old white guys, and because “outreach” can only go so far if you aren’t willing to change the things you stand for. Mike Huckabee, that clever fellow, used to say, “I’m a conservative, but I’m not angry about it.” Which is all well and good, but if, for instance, you say to young people that you don’t think their gay friends ought to be allowed to get married, saying it with a smile doesn’t really help.
And a year later, it’s not just that the Republican party hasn’t changed, it’s that they don’t have much reason to change. The coming election may or may not be the GOP “tsunami” that Reince Priebus predicts, but they’re certainly going to pick up seats, just because of which seats are up in the Senate, the standard pattern of the president’s party losing seats in the 6th year of his presidency, and the fact that that president isn’t particularly popular right now. So why would a member of Congress—especially one from a conservative district or state—feel any need to undergo some kind of wholesale reinvention? Particularly when the people who put him where he is, and the people who are going to keep him where he is, aren’t the kind of people he’s being asked to “reach out” to. If your job is to get re-elected this fall, everything’s looking just fine.
And even in the upcoming presidential election, the non-old-white-guy-outreach may not look all that important. As Jamelle Bouie notes, things like the economy and President Obama’s popularity at the end of his term are going to matter much, much more than whatever outreach has been accomplished. What that means is that at the moment, no one whose name is or will be on a ballot in the near future has any particular interest in rethinking the party’s identity. The members of Congress are thinking about their next election. Those running for president in 2016 will be thinking about 2016. It’s fine for some party strategist to look 20 years down the road at the country’s inevitable demographic changes and predict doom about the party’s future. But the people who will actually implement the changes they suggest (or not) have no interest in looking that far ahead. And so they aren’t going to change.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 18, 2014
“The Missing White Poor”: Guess Who Makes Up A Plurality Of America’s Poor?
You may have heard about how last week, Paul Ryan made some unfortunate remarks about poverty, blaming it at least partly on, well, lazy black people: “We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular,” Ryan said, “of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.” The reason many people got angry about this is that when we talk about poor white people, nobody suggests that it’s a product of a pathology that lies within those particular people. Republicans may think persistent poverty in rural areas is a regrettable thing, but they aren’t delivering lectures to those people about their “culture.” It’s kind of a generalized version of the fundamental attribution error—people like me are poor because of conditions outside themselves, while people unlike me are poor because of their inherent nature.
Ryan’s words set off a predictable round of “Is Paul Ryan racist?” contemplation (see here, for example), and in response to that we have to remind ourselves that that is always the wrong question. It’s impossible to know with certainty whether anyone is racist, because that requires looking into their heart. But much more importantly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is what people say and do, not what lurks within their souls. You can say to Paul Ryan, “Here’s what’s wrong with what you said” without shouting “You’re racist!” which not only doesn’t convince anyone of anything, it only leads everyone who doesn’t already agree with you to shut down and refuse to listen to anything else you have to say. Before we get to today’s chart about race and poverty (oh yes, I do have a chart), you should play this classic from Jay Smooth every time you’re tempted to call a politician a racist.
Now, on to our chart. Everyone knows that minority populations in America, particularly blacks and Hispanics, suffer from disproportionate levels of poverty. For the moment, we don’t have to go into why that is and what can be done about it. I just want to note something that seldom gets mentioned: the actual racial makeup of America’s poor. In fact, when I tried to find a chart laying it out to paste into this post, I couldn’t find one. So I took poverty data and population data and made one myself (this is as of 2012):
The point of this chart is that even though blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, the largest group of poor people in America is … white people.
Despite that fact, when you say “the poor,” what pops into most people’s heads is an image of a black person, probably due in no small part to the fact that poverty in America is represented in the media as a largely black phenomenon (I’m not just saying that; there’s research backing that up).
I’m not saying there aren’t different kinds of poverty that might demand different solutions, given the particular economic challenges that characterize particular areas where certain people are concentrated. Though it’s worth noting that many of the states with the highest poverty rates among whites also have the highest poverty rates among blacks. These are largely in the South, where Republican economic policies of low taxes and light regulation have, weirdly enough, not resulted in economic nirvana for all. But the point is that when we talk about “the poor,” the image of a white person should be just as likely to come to your mind as the image of a black or Hispanic person. But I’ll bet it isn’t.
Finally, a programming note. All this week I’ll be guest-blogging for Greg Sargent at the Washington Post, so my posting here will be somewhat lighter. Be sure to check both places!
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect, March 17, 2014
“That Old-Time Whistle”: The Kind Of Things Conservatives Say To Each Other All The Time
There are many negative things you can say about Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee and the G.O.P.’s de facto intellectual leader. But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about.
So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.
Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.
Indeed, race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics.
We are told, for example, that conservatives are against big government and high spending. Yet even as Republican governors and state legislatures block the expansion of Medicaid, the G.O.P. angrily denounces modest cost-saving measures for Medicare. How can this contradiction be explained? Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like — and I’m talking about the color of their skin, not the content of their character — and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved.
Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions. Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees. Instead, all the movement’s passion, starting with Rick Santelli’s famous rant on CNBC, has been directed against any hint of financial relief for low-income borrowers. And what is it about these borrowers that makes them such targets of ire? You know the answer.
One odd consequence of our still-racialized politics is that conservatives are still, in effect, mobilizing against the bums on welfare even though both the bums and the welfare are long gone or never existed. Mr. Santelli’s fury was directed against mortgage relief that never actually happened. Right-wingers rage against tales of food stamp abuse that almost always turn out to be false or at least greatly exaggerated. And Mr. Ryan’s black-men-don’t-want-to-work theory of poverty is decades out of date.
In the 1970s it was still possible to claim in good faith that there was plenty of opportunity in America, and that poverty persisted only because of cultural breakdown among African-Americans. Back then, after all, blue-collar jobs still paid well, and unemployment was low. The reality was that opportunity was much more limited than affluent Americans imagined; as the sociologist William Julius Wilson has documented, the flight of industry from urban centers meant that minority workers literally couldn’t get to those good jobs, and the supposed cultural causes of poverty were actually effects of that lack of opportunity. Still, you could understand why many observers failed to see this.
But over the past 40 years good jobs for ordinary workers have disappeared, not just from inner cities but everywhere: adjusted for inflation, wages have fallen for 60 percent of working American men. And as economic opportunity has shriveled for half the population, many behaviors that used to be held up as demonstrations of black cultural breakdown — the breakdown of marriage, drug abuse, and so on — have spread among working-class whites too.
These awkward facts have not, however, penetrated the world of conservative ideology. Earlier this month the House Budget Committee, under Mr. Ryan’s direction, released a 205-page report on the alleged failure of the War on Poverty. What does the report have to say about the impact of falling real wages? It never mentions the subject at all.
And since conservatives can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of what’s happening to opportunity in America, they’re left with nothing but that old-time dog whistle. Mr. Ryan wasn’t being inarticulate — he said what he said because it’s all that he’s got.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 16, 2014
“Demographic Death Spiral”: 2014 May Be White Enough For The GOP, But What Comes Next?
Overshadowed amid Sarah Palin’s unique interpretation of Dr. Seuss, Wayne LaPierre’s overheated vision of America’s apocalyptic decline, and all of the other craziness at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican pollster Whit Ayres gave a fact-based presentation to the gathering of right-wing activists. What he said should terrify the GOP.
Ayres, whose firm counts the RNC, NRSC, NRCC, and several influential Republican politicians among its clients, appeared on a panel on Saturday to discuss electoral trends and the future of the GOP.
The slides from Ayres’ presentation, which are available on his firm’s website, reiterate something that many Republicans have long warned: America’s changing demographics leave the increasingly white GOP at risk of entering what Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) memorably described as a “demographic death spiral.”
In short, as the Republican pollster explained, the white proportion of the American electorate is declining at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, Republicans are performing much worse among non-white voter groups. If the party doesn’t change something — Ayres suggests immigration reform as a good place to start — it will cease to be viable in national elections.
One particular point in the presentation stood out, however. Turning to the midterm elections, Ayres declared to hearty applause that “we’ve got some good news: We’re going to have a great 2014. We’re going to hold the House, we’re going to pick up the Senate, it’s going to be a great 2014.”
“One of the reasons why,” he explained, “is that the percentage of whites in the electorate is about five points higher in the off-year elections.”
Perhaps Ayres — who, like most pollsters, does not have a spotless record when it comes to predicting elections — should remember what he said in 2012 before asserting that the whiteness of the midterm electorate will bring his party certain success in 2014. Back then, he explained his party’s failure to elect Mitt Romney as president by noting that “it is a mistake to place rosy assumptions on a likely electorate that are at variance — and substantial variance — with recent history.”
Democrats immediately called foul on the crowd’s warm reception to Ayres’ assertion.
“It says a lot that top Republicans believe that lower minority participation in the electoral process is something to celebrate. They know that when the electorate represents more Americans and more voices, they lose,” DNC Director of Voter Expansion Pratt Wiley said in a statement.
In fairness to Ayres, he made it perfectly clear that Republicans need to diversify their party, instead of relying on shrinking the electorate.
“Some people see it as a problem,” he said of America’s demographic shift. “I see it as a real opportunity.”
“Conservative values of free markets, and limited government, and low taxes, and good education, and reward for hard work appeal across all boundaries regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin,” Ayres argued. “Conservatives can be very successful in the new America if we reach out and adopt an inclusive tone, bring people into our coalition, and aggressively campaign in their communities.”
That theory sounds very good on paper — and very familiar. That’s because it’s almost identical to the RNC’s post-election “autopsy report,” which was released almost exactly one year ago. Back then, the RNC suggested that “if we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity.”
Indeed, one has to wonder whom Whit Ayres thought he could convince that America’s ascendant minority populations could be a positive development. Certainly not the white nationalist-led group manning an English-only booth at the conference. Or racial provocateur Ann Coulter, who used her CPAC speech to decry the “browning of America,” and warned that if immigration reform passes, “then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Or the CPAC attendees who delivered a resounding victory in the conference’s presidential straw poll to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spoken out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Ultimately, Ayres may be right, and the combination of a whiter electorate and a friendly electoral map could deliver a big win for the Republican Party in 2014. But it couldn’t be clearer that the GOP’s broader demographic problem hasn’t been solved — and in fact, it’s actually getting worse.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 11, 2014. Graph via Northstaropinion.com
“Discriminator-In-Chief”: CPAC Presidential Straw Poll Picks Guy Who Thinks Whites-Only Lunch Counters Should Be Legal
With 31 percent of the vote, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) won the closely watched Conservative Political Action Conference presidential straw poll this weekend, dwarfing second place finisher Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) 11 percent of the vote.
The son of libertarian icon and former Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX), Rand Paul has emerged as the nation’s leading spokesperson for an anti-government philosophy that would undo nearly all the accomplishments of the New Deal and the Civil Rights Era. As a Senate candidate in 2010, Paul came out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964′s bans on private discrimination — including the bans on employment discrimination and whites-only lunch counters — claiming that the right of “private ownership” should trump African Americans’ and other minorities’ right to be free from invidious discrimination. Permitting private discrimination, according to Paul, is “the hard part about believing in freedom.”
Nor are Paul’s libertarian views limited to his skepticism towards civil rights protections. In 2013, Paul endorsed a long-ago overruled Supreme Court decision called Lochner v. New York. The Court’s Lochner opinion relied on a fabricated “right to contract” that it and subsequent cases used to strike down various laws protecting workers from exploitative employers — on the idea that if a worker signs a contract that forces them to work 16 hours a day for barely subsistence wages then it would somehow violate the worker’s rights to pay them more money for fewer hours work.
Lochner was overruled in 1937, after the Great Depression discredited the largely libertarian economic policy that had been imposed upon the country by the Supreme Court. And it was, until very recently, viewed as a disastrous opinion even among leading conservatives. Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Senate that deemed him too conservative, labeled Lochner as “the quintessence of judicial usurpation of power.”
Yet, if Rand Paul were elected president, he would have the power to nominate potential Supreme Court justices who would restore Lochner and who would potentially strike down the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters to boot. And this is the man that one of the nation’s top conservative gatherings selected as their first choice to be the next President of the United States.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, March 8, 2014
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