“Good Riddance”: It Wouldn’t Be A burden For The Rest Of The Country If Texas, Alabama And Florida Seceded
As the holidays approach, many of us are faced with a seasonal conundrum: the case of some annoying relative who persists in making various demands on the holiday celebrations (“I won’t come if you serve murdered meat at Thanksgiving!”‘ or “I’m not coming if you invite my ex’s new spouse; they’ve only been married 22 years”). If, as the brilliant novelist Mary Karr has observed, a dysfunctional family is a family with more than one person in it, many of us are faced with these little annual theatrics. And we wonder whether to appease—yet again—or draw the line in the mashed potatoes for once and for all.
And so perhaps it’s time to say this to those residents of (mostly southern) states filing petitions to secede from the United States: Oh, just go, then.
In Alabama, “Derrick B.” has filed papers saying that “We petition the Obama Administration to peacefully grant the State of Alabama to withdraw from the United States of America and create its own new government.” So far, the document has attracted 4,426 signatures, reports al.com. (Oh, and way to stand behind your convictions, Derrick No-Last-Name.)
Would this be such a burden for the rest of the country? It’s not like Alabama is going to be able to mount a military assault against its new foreign neighbor. They would be literally surrounded—a situation that could at once make them feel more secure and more ill at ease. One thing impoverished Alabama would lose is all that cash the federal government gives to the state in the form of Medicaid, food stamps, and other monies. But you really want to go? Godspeed, Alabama.
Then there’s Texas, which was in the news not long ago because a local judge, Tom Head, speculated that there would be civil war if President Barack Obama won re-election, and wondered if he’d have to call out the militia. Perhaps Texans think that because their state is so big, they could make it on their own. Go ahead; it will be entertaining to see Texas deal with southern border issues without federal money or guidance. And even more fun when Texans themselves will have to get passports to come to the United States. Oh—by the way, Texan secessionists, if you manage to come up north and work off the books, you won’t get Social Security or even a living wage. Good luck avoiding the immigration authorities.
And Florida, too, has its secession-minded citizens. Think we’ll miss you, do you? We’re all getting a little tired of your election dramas, made even more irritating this year when Florida wasn’t necessary to determine the winner of the presidential election. And what, exactly, do you think you can export—hurricanes? Don’t forget that international issues—such as refugees coming from Haiti and Latin America—get a little more complicated and expensive when you don’t have the political and financial weight of the United States behind you. But if Floridians can’t bear the thought of a second Obama term, buh-bye.
We live in a country with diverse political opinions, as well as a diverse racial and ethnic makeup. It’s logical that a number of people might be deeply disappointed that their candidate did not win. It is not logical to be so convinced that American civilization as we know it will dissolve that one would actually advocate dissolving the union itself. But hey, if things are that bad, take the advice of the candidate who came in second in the presidential contest. Just self-deport.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, November 12, 2012
“Politics Never Disappears”: With A Recalcitrant Congress, President Obama Shouldn’t Back Down
It is said after every election that the victors should put politics aside and work for the good of the country.
If President Obama believed this pious nonsense, he would put his second term in jeopardy. Asking politicians to ignore politics is like insisting that professional hockey players switch to basketball. In a system with national elections every two years — and in which the two parties are in relatively close balance — politics never disappears.
Fortunately, the president knows foolishness when he sees it. He has been toughened by four years of unremitting Republican opposition and has behind him both a large electoral college victory and an advantage of about 3 million popular votes. The word “mandate” is overused — just ask George W. Bush. But Obama was absolutely clear during the campaign about his insistence that taxes on better-off Americans need to rise as part of any deal on the budget deficit and “fiscal cliff.”
And so did Obama gracefully but firmly challenge Republicans on Friday to extend the Bush-era tax cuts for the middle class immediately and then begin negotiations on how to raise taxes on the well-to-do. He was asking them to give up their leverage because he knows they don’t have much leverage to begin with. Meet the newly empowered Obama.
The voters clearly heard what Obama was saying during the campaign. According to the media exit poll, only 35 percent of voters said taxes should not be increased. Fully 47 percent of all voters supported raising taxes on Americans earning $250,000 or more, including 66 percent of Obama’s voters. An additional 13 percent, of all voters and Obama’s, said taxes should go up for everyone.
If Republican leaders in Congress want to pretend that Obama’s reelection means absolutely nothing, the president seems willing to let all the Bush tax cuts expire. This is the only way to deal with recalcitrance, reflected in the fact that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t even let the president make his case on Friday before issuing a flat statement rejecting any tax increases. Obama can only hope that he can break more reasonable Senate Republicans away from their hard-line leadership.
House Speaker John Boehner has tried to sound more reasonable, and Obama took him at his word. Graciousness comes easily when you are operating from a position of strength.
Still, even in his conciliatory mode, Boehner made clear that preserving low tax rates for the rich remains the GOP’s single highest priority. The speaker said he might support new revenue but only through some vague “tax reform.” But that’s what Mitt Romney offered during the campaign. Boehner is saying he will make a deal with the victorious candidate only on the basis of the program of the defeated candidate. Here’s hoping this is just a bargaining position.
By emphasizing Obama’s victory as a demographic and organizational triumph, conservatives have been laying the groundwork for renewing their sotto voce campaign suggesting that Obama is somehow “illegitimate” or not “one of us.”
Yet the exit poll found that those who rallied to Obama represent a broad coalition of all of us. Yes, he won African-Americans, Latinos and Asian-Americans overwhelmingly. But the exit poll also shows that 32 percent of Obama’s voters were white women and 24 percent of them were white men, while 23 percent were African-American men and women, and 14 percent were Latinos. This is a genuinely diverse alliance.
Obama’s victory was also plainly a triumph for the center-left: 46 percent of Obama’s voters called themselves moderates, 42 percent called themselves liberals and 12 percent said they were conservatives. Judging by its attitudes toward unfairness in the economy, this is far more a populist coalition than an establishment center. Obama’s voters are invested in growth, raising incomes and reducing unemployment, not austerity and budget balancing.
And this may have been the most important aspect of Obama’s first post-election policy statement. He did not lead with balancing the budget. “Our top priority,” he said right at the start, “has to be jobs and growth,” and then listed his proposals to expand opportunities.
Obama seems to understand that the interests of the coalition that elected him overlap with the national interest. And the politics of the moment reinforce the balanced approach he is advancing now. You get the sense that Republicans understand this and will eventually act accordingly.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, November 11, @012
“Election Data Dive”: Now Go Forth And Spout The Facts
Since this may be my last column about the 2012 elections, let’s have some fun. Allow me to arm you with a collection of facts and data about the election results that you can use at your next cocktail party, during your next coffee break or during your next P.T.A. meeting.
First, a comment about the exit polls from which most of these data are drawn: They were conducted only in 30 states. And, unfortunately, the balance of states polled tilted heavily toward those won by President Obama. Of the 25 states Obama won, exit polls were conducted in all but three. Obama also won the District of Columbia, which had no exit polls. Of the 24 states Mitt Romney won, exit polls were conducted only in eight.
(Obama is leading in Florida, which would be a 26th state won by Obama and a state for which there are exit polls. However, The New York Times had not yet called the state at the time of publication.)
With those caveats, let’s dive in:
• My analysis of the 2008 election found that even if every black person in America had stayed home on Election Day, Obama would still have won the presidency. That’s because the white vote and Hispanic vote were strong enough to push him over the needed 270 votes to win the Electoral College.
This year is a different story. This year, his path to victory required a broader coalition.
Without the Democratic black vote joining with that of liberal whites and Hispanics on Tuesday, Obama would likely have lost half the states that he won. This fact may embolden those who say that the president should more directly address issues facing the African-American community.
• There may have been a backlash against voter suppression laws, bringing more minorities to the polls, not fewer. The share of Hispanic voters rose in many states won by Obama. That can be attributed both to the surging Hispanic population in the country and to the Obama campaign’s incredible get-out-the-vote operation. It is less clear why the black vote held steady or grew in many of those states. In Ohio, for example, blacks jumped from being 11 percent of the voters in 2008 to 15 percent this year. Threaten to steal something, and its owner’s grip grows tighter.
• Romney won nine of the 11 states that were once in the Confederacy.
• Romney also won eight of the 10 states with the lowest population density: Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Nebraska and Utah. Obama won New Mexico and Nevada. (Hello. Hello. Hello. Is there an echo in here?)
• Romney’s biggest margin of victory came in Utah, home of the Mormon Church. Utah was one of three states in which Romney won every county. The other two were West Virginia and Oklahoma. Obama won every county in four states: Hawaii, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont.
• This year was the first presidential election in which there were more Asian-American voters (11 percent) in California than African-American ones (8 percent). In 2008, 6 percent were Asian-American and 10 percent were African-American. In fact, there were more Asian-American voters than African-American voters in Washington and Oregon, the other two Pacific Coast states, this year, too.
• Among the states in which exit polls were conducted, Obama won the lowest percentage of the white vote in the state with the highest percentage of black voters. That state was the ever-reliable Mississippi, where Romney made his famous “I like grits” comment. Thirty-six percent of the voters in Mississippi are black. Obama won a mere 10 percent of the white vote there.
Conversely, Obama won one of his highest percentages of white voters in the state with the fewest minority voters: Maine. Ninety-five percent of Maine’s voters were white, and 57 percent of them voted for Obama. That ties with one other state for the highest percent of whites voting for Obama: Massachusetts, where 86 percent of the voters are white.
In fact, Obama won the white vote only in states with small minority voting populations. The others Obama won were Iowa (93 percent white), New Hampshire (93 percent white), Oregon (88 percent white), Connecticut (79 percent white) and Washington State (76 percent white).
This is quite a curious phenomenon.
• Obama won all four states that begin with “New” (New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York), but he lost all five that begin with a direction (North Carolina, South Carolina, North Dakota, South Dakota and West Virginia). O.K., I threw that one in for fun.
Now, political junkies, go forth and spout facts!
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, November 9, 2012
“A Whale Of A Failure”: The Romney Campaign Sure Had Some Bad Smartphone Apps
The Romney campaign was so very ambitious with its smart phone apps, and so very bad at them. The latest and most epic failure was the so-called Orca app the campaign had built to count people who had voted, which crashed repeatedly throughout Election Day and even when it was working, didn’t really do its job. Politico and Ace of Spades both have in-depth reports on how poorly the thing performed, but regardless of the technical failings, the baffling thing is that they didn’t test it. Politico’s Maggie Haberman and Alexander Burns reported: “Among other issues, the system was never beta-tested or checked for functionality without going live before Election Day, two sources said. It went live that morning but was never checked for bugs or efficiencies internally.” With a record of electronic gaffes as bad as the Romney campaign’s that just seems insane.
The campaign really should have known better than to not test. It had already made at least two disastrous attempts at making a killer app that would get all the smart-phone types chattering. First, there was the campaign’s official app, which became a literal gaffe machine when it prominently misspelled America on its welcome screen, promising users “a better Amercia.” Then, of course, there was the vice-presidential choice app, which promised users they would “be the first to find out” when Romney finally tapped his running mate. The app got scooped by about seven hours. Romney can, of course, do whatever he wants now that he’s not campaigning. But we’d humbly suggest he choose a field other than app development.
By: Adam Martin, Daily Intel, November 9, 2012
“Scorched Earth Extremisim”: The Voters Said No To The “Politics Of Pitchforks”
Thank goodness that’s over.
The presidential campaign of 2012 did not in fact last long enough to be measured in geologic time, but poll-scarred and ad-weary voters can, perhaps, be forgiven for feeling as if it did.
Barack Obama and his supporters will, understandably, be jubilant that his lease on that Pennsylvania Avenue mansion has been extended for four more years. But Tuesday night’s vote is also noteworthy for a reason only tangentially related to the fortunes of the incumbent president. One can argue — or maybe the better word is “hope” — that voters did more than re-elect Obama on Tuesday night. They also repudiated the scorched-earth extremism and acute cognitive dissonance that have come to characterize the Republican Party in recent years.
Rush Limbaugh recently said something interesting (will wonders never cease?) on his radio show. As reported by Politico, he told listeners, “There’s not a whole lot of love for conservatives in the Republican Party. Except now, where the party will take anything they can get to win.” As he sees it, the GOP prefers to woo independents to prove “that they win without the base of the party. Now, the Democrats are not embarrassed of their base. The Republicans, in large part, are.”
The GOP is embarrassed by its base? One is by no means sanguine that this is true, but one can’t help but hope, fervently, that it is. It would be a welcome sign that Republicans are not, in fact, committed to a policy of electoral suicide and a future of ballot box irrelevance.
It is hard not to believe they are, given the way the party has stubbornly relied on an ever-narrowing slice of the American demographic for victory. They have either lost, or are at significant disadvantage with, a wide array of Americans: blacks, women, gays, Muslims, Hispanics and more. The people whose votes the party commands tend to be older, white, evangelical, and male. And as that cohort of the electorate fades in prominence, the danger is that it will take the GOP with it.
And yet, rather than seeking to expand its outreach and broaden its appeal, the party has inexplicably chosen to double down on its shrinking base. Worse, it has chosen to appeal to that base with a platform of fearmongering, xenophobia, demagoguery and inchoate anger so extreme as to make Ronald Reagan seem almost a hippie by comparison.
It has embraced the politics of pitchforks and bomb-throwing wherein candidates must compete with one another to see who can say the most bizarre and outrageous thing — and where moderation is a sin against orthodoxy.
It should have told us something when the previously moderate Mitt Romney pronounced himself “severely conservative” on the way to winning the GOP primary. One does not use that word to modify things one approves or is comfortable with. When have you ever heard someone describe themselves as “severely happy” or “severely content”?
His use of that word strongly suggests Romney’s discomfort with the pose he was required to take, and the fact that he was required to take it. Now as Romney fades into the rearview mirror, one can only hope his party takes the right lesson from this defeat, that it transforms itself into a party with some appeal to the rest of us as opposed to one that demonizes the rest of us to appeal to a very few.
Tuesday night, the nation did not just choose a president. It chose a future. And “severe” conservatism does not seem to be a part of it.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., The National Memo, November 7, 2012
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