“Rick Scott’s Epic Blunder”: Directly Insulting The Very People Whose Support He Needs
The dust-up over Charlie Crist’s portable fan at the Florida gubernatorial debate has degenerated into a war of words over which side violated the pre-negotiated rules. The truth of who plugged in what device, and on whose authority, may forever remain lost in the murk of Sunshine State politics.
But the issue here is not who is right and who is wrong. The issue is that Governor Rick Scott, by not taking the stage for seven minutes, lost the battle. And he did it in a way that is spectacularly tone-deaf. Non-participation in a debate requires solid justification, especially once the candidates are already on-site and waiting to take part, as was the case in Florida. Whatever the particulars of Crist and his Vornado Air Circulator, the annoyance did not merit the Defcon One response that Scott and his handlers accorded it. In making the event about his own petulance, Scott created a blunder that enters the annals of what not to do in a campaign debate.
Debates are frequently won and lost on the little things. Rick Perry’s “oops” moment. Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet. Obama’s “You’re likable enough, Hillary” line. George H.W. Bush glancing at his watch. Richard Nixon’s flop sweat. Al Gore advancing inappropriately on George W. Bush and Rick Lazio invading Hillary Clinton’s space to demand that she sign a pledge. The list goes on.
Such mishaps tend to fall into three predictable categories: cosmetic problems (Nixon), strategic miscalculations (Gore, Lazio), and inadvertently self-inflicted wounds (Perry, Romney, Obama, Bush and the watch). Obviously, no candidate ever sets out to damage himself, but in the live arena of a debate, mistakes are easy to make and difficult to undo.
Rick Scott ought to have known that showing up late could only be perceived as an insult to the audience — not just those in the hall but the extended viewing audience as well. Politicians too often fail to take into account the popularity of debates among voters, and the proprietary feeling viewers bring to these programs. Debaters who show disrespect for the institution — say, by refusing to step onstage — are directly insulting the very people whose support they need.
By granting Charlie Crist several minute of valuable airtime alone on the debate set, Scott essentially handed his opponent a huge gift of free advertising. As a number of commentators have pointed out, Scott passed up a golden opportunity to upstage his rival, to use Crist’s vanity against him. Instead, Crist got to grandstand, Scott came off as pissy, and Florida politics — once again — looked nuts.
The high drama of that opening few minutes worked against Scott on a number of levels. Although the moderator backed up the Scott campaign’s point about a rules violation, he also directly attributed Scott’s absence to the fan, planting the issue front and center in the public spotlight. The catcalls of the live audience lent an air of anti-Scott sentiment to the proceedings before the debate had even started. And a cutaway shot of the fan in question, whirring innocently behind Charlie Crist’s lectern, further reinforced the absurdity of Scott’s overreaction.
The key thing about debates, and the reason politicians dread them, is that they are live. Which is to say, the participants get no do-overs. That Governor Scott could not anticipate the damaging effect of seven minutes of dead airtime speaks ill of his judgment. When the candidates reconvene for the final debate on October 21, Rick Scott had better be on time.
By: Alan Schroeder, Professor of Journalism, Northeastern University; The Huffington Post Blog, October 17, 2014
“Why The Right Loves Ben Carson”: Another In A String Of Utterly Implausible Candidates
Phil Mattingly has an excellent profile of retired surgeon Ben Carson on Bloomberg Politics today. Carson’s overt forays into Republican presidential politics are compelling for several reasons, not least that he’s another in a string of utterly implausible candidates who generate great enthusiasm among the Republican base. Carson leads Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul in the Bloomberg/Des Moines Register Iowa poll.
What exactly does the right find so appealing about Carson?
The familiar tropes are evident, including reluctant patriotism (running for high political office is “about the last thing I ever wanted to do,” Carson told Mattingly) and a double-barreled shot of crazy (“People hate each other and I am not 100% sure that it’s not planned,” he explained).
“One Nation” is the title of Carson’s autobiography. In case that’s too subtle a signal of political ambition, the subhead forges ahead: “What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future.”
No doubt, some Americans can best save the future by running for president. Carson casts himself not only as a brave truth teller but as a wise man above the partisan fray. “I refuse to engage in the grade-school-yard tactics of name-calling and mean-spirited comments when we have so many important issues to solve,” he wrote.
Of course, it can be tough to maintain such high-minded equanimity in the face of “secular progressives” who have no regard for fundamental principles such as freedom of speech and “distort words and meanings, and then cling to the created lies in an attempt to destroy enemies.” (Not that anybody is calling anybody names.)
Should Carson run for president, his candidacy promises to be a (traditional) marriage of Michele Bachmann’s personal loopiness and Herman Cain’s professional ignorance of public policy. In his book, Carson called the Affordable Care Act “the biggest governmental program in the history of the United States.” (So much for Social Security, Medicare, the Pentagon.) And if he can’t be bothered to learn much about government, he has an all-purpose rationale: “I would choose common sense over knowledge in almost every circumstance,” he wrote. It’s just too much to ask for both.
Carson, who is poised to be 2016’s premier novelty act, is already following the script from Cain’s 2012 Republican presidential run. He is a successful black man who tells conservative white audiences that there are no meaningful structural impediments to success: There are only character failings. That should be enough to keep him on the stage, at least until the Iowa caucuses.
By: Francis Wilkinson, Ten Miles Square, Washington Monthly, October 15, 2014
“GOP’s ‘Reparations’ Insanity”: Why Thom Tillis’ Latest Screwup Is So Important
History may ultimately remember GOP Senate candidate Thom Tillis as one of the only Republicans in North Carolina history to serve as speaker of the House. And if he manages to defeat Sen. Kay Hagan this November, history may ultimately remember Tillis as a bona fide member of the United States Senate. But while history’s verdict is still to be determined, my estimation of Thom Tillis is already set. Simply put, he’s the (despicable) gift that keeps on giving.
By the second time Tillis made news by giving voice to the base of the Republican Party’s reactionary id — first for promoting a “divide and conquer” strategy to attack recipients of government support; then for contrasting African Americans and Latinos in North Carolina with the state’s “traditional population” — I was beginning to have my suspicions. But a recent report on a 2007 statement in which Tillis claims a “subset” of the state’s Democrats ceaselessly call for “de facto reparations” is the clincher.
In this instance and others, what makes Tillis so valuable is the way his previous statements show what it sounds like when an ultra-conservative tries to reach his fellow travelers by using language intended to signal his membership within (and loyalty to) the tribe. Indeed, as was the case during both his “divide and conquer” gaffe and his “traditional population” slip, the Tillis we see attacking “de facto reparations” is on the defensive, trying to prove to his far-right audience that he’s still on their team. And everyone on that team, to state the obvious, just so happens to have white skin.
In fact, once you learn about the specific context of Tillis’s reparations remark, the connection between the U.S. far-right’s hatred for redistribution and its negative views of non-white citizens becomes even clearer. According to the report, Tillis’s statement was an attempt to persuade his most conservative supporters that the legislature’s apology would not pave the way for reparations, which was apparently their concern. “This resolution acknowledges past mistakes and frees us to move on,” Tillis assured these right-wingers, trying to spin the apology as a way to put the debate over racism and slavery’s legacy finally to rest.
Guarding against the possibility that his support for the apology be interpreted as a sign of a more fundamental disagreement with the Republican base, Tillis then endorsed the redistribution-is-reparations argument in general, claiming that a “subset” of Democrats “has never ceased to propose legislation that is de facto reparations.” All this despite the fact that, according to Tillis, “Federal and State [sic] governments have redistributed trillions of dollars of wealth over the years by funding programs that are at least in part driven by [the subset’s] belief that we should provide additional reparations.” And there you have it, according to Tillis: modern liberalism itself is little more than an elaborate excuse for giving money to blacks.
For people inclined to see most of U.S. politics as heavily influenced by the country’s shameful history on race — a group amongst which I count myself — Tillis’s argument, his conflation of redistribution and race, couldn’t have been more revealing. Yet for those who are not conservative but are still sometimes uncomfortable ascribing so much of our politics to the consequences of race, there may be a temptation to assume Tillis’s argument, while undeniably racialized, has more to do with the ways Republicans have gone backwards on race during the Obama era. But let’s remember: Tillis’s comments came in 2007, before there was a President Obama, before there was Obamacare and before conservative media began talking about reparations as a matter of course.
So Tillis’s latest flub isn’t about Obama, specifically. Instead, it tells us something essential about the conservative movement today as a whole. Namely, that despite what self-styled centrist pundits and Republican Party leadership may tell you, the debate over the welfare state and redistribution — which has once again come to dominate American politics, and is likely to continue to do so into the foreseeable future — is, especially for hardcore conservatives, a debate about tribal belonging and race. Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said that all politics is local; if I could tweak the phrase for the current era, I’d say that when it comes to American politics, all redistribution is racial.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, October 14, 2014
“Outsiders Coordinating With The Insiders”: ‘Citizens United’ Is Turning More Americans Into Bystanders
Are we spending our democracy into oblivion?
This is the time of year when media scribblers bemoan how nasty political campaigns have become. The complainers are accused of a dainty form of historical ignorance by defenders of mud-slinging who drag out Finley Peter Dunne’s 1895 assertion that “politics ain’t beanbag.” Politics has always been nasty, the argument goes, so we should get over it.
In fact, structural changes in our politics are making campaigns more mean and personal than ever. Even Dunne might be surprised. Outside groups empowered by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision are using mass media in ways that turn off Americans to democracy, aggravate divisions between the political parties and heighten animosities among citizens of differing views.
Studies of this year’s political advertising show that outside groups are blanketing the airwaves with messages far more negative than those purveyed by the candidates themselves. That shouldn’t surprise us in the least. “Candidates can be held accountable for their ads,” says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, a consumer organization that is trying to encourage candidates to disown “dark money.” “The outside groups are unknown, and have confusing names.”
No one is advertising under the moniker “Influence Peddlers for Crummy Politics.”
There is far too much complacency about big money’s role in this year’s campaigns, on the grounds that both sides have plenty of it. This misses the point. “It doesn’t balance it out if you have billionaire Republicans battling billionaire Democrats,” says Weissman. “You still have billionaires setting the agenda for the election.”
Moreover, a focus just on this year’s competitive Senate and House races misses the enormous impact a handful of very wealthy people can have on state and local campaigns. A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice details how, at a relatively modest cost to themselves, a privileged few can change how government that is supposed to be nearest to the people is actually carried out.
“At this scale, you don’t have to be a Koch brother to be a kingmaker,” the report informs us. Worse, the supposedly “independent” spending of the super-rich kingmakers isn’t independent at all. The report documents how closely the activities of supposedly outside groups are coordinated with insiders and the candidates themselves.
Like everything else in our politics these days, Citizens United is usually debated along ideological lines. Progressives typically hate it. Conservatives usually defend it. But citizens of every persuasion should be worried about what this precedent-shattering decision has unleashed. More than ever, politics is the only profession that regularly advertises against itself. If voters feel cynical, the outside groups — on both sides — are doing all they can to encourage their disenchantment.
A study by the Wesleyan Media Project of ads aired between Aug. 29 and Sept. 11 found that 55 percent of ads in U.S. Senate elections were negative, up from 43.7 percent over the same period in 2010. Wesleyan found that 91.4 percent of the ads run by outside groups in support of Democrats were negative, compared with 41.9 percent of those run by Democratic candidates themselves. For Republicans, 77.9 percent of the group ads were negative, compared with only 12.3 percent of the candidate ads. Negative ads were down slightly in the next two-week period, but there were still more negative commercials run this year than in the comparable period in 2010.
Defenders of massive spending on advertising, positive or negative, will make the case that at least the ads engage voters. Not necessarily, and certainly not this year. Indeed, the Pew Research Center found in early October that only 15 percent of Americans are following the elections “very closely.” Interest in the campaign, says Scott Keeter, director of survey research at Pew, “is the lowest it has been at this point in an off-year election in at least two decades.”
Hardly a day goes by without someone lamenting how polarized our politics has become. Can anyone seriously contend that the current way of running and financing elections is disconnected from the difficulty politicians have in working together? “How are they supposed to get along with the other side the day after the election?” Weissman asks. Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, the sometimes dissident conservative writer David Frum argues that “the radicalization of the party’s donor base has led Republicans in Congress to try tactics they would never have dared use before.”
Thus the tragic irony: Citizens United is deepening our divisions and turning more citizens into bystanders. Our republic can do better.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 12, 2014
“The Elephant In The Room With Leon Panetta”: A Political Actor Working For Someone Else’s Electoral Gain?
In his widely read blog of Beltway goings-on, Chris Cillizza made the following fairly obvious point about former defense Ssecretary Leon Panetta’s Obama-bashing media tour:
What’s fascinating about this gripe with Obama is how much it plays into a) the argument that Hillary Clinton made against him in the 2008 presidential primary and b) the argument Hillary Clinton will likely make when (sorry, if) she runs for president in 2016. That argument, in short: I have been there and done that. I know what it takes to move the levers of power in Washington—and I am willing to do whatever it takes to make them move.
In addition, Panetta’s criticisms mainly involve Obama’s reluctance to use military force—also a fault line between Clinton and Obama, particularly on the matter of arming the Syrian rebels.
But the Beltway press shouldn’t be afraid to explicitly ask if Panetta is serving as an agent of Clinton’s official-but-not-yet-official presidential campaign. It’s not just that his criticisms dovetail with Clinton’s and are no doubt politically convenient for her as she attempts to draw a difference with the Obama administration—there are explicit ties to the shadow Clinton campaign that should make this question fair game.
Panetta has taken up residence at Beacon Global Strategies, where he is a senior counselor. He has deep ties to the group’s leaders; Jeremy Bash, Beacon’s founder and managing director, was Panetta’s chief of staff at both the CIA and the Pentagon. Another founder and managing director is Philippe Reines—one of Hillary’s closest allies and someone widely understood to still be managing her public profile.
Reines helped found Beacon after years spent with Hillary. He joined her Senate office in 2002 and later moved to the State Department when she became secretary. He is Clinton’s “chief personal defender,” in the words of New York magazine, who reported in a profile earlier this year that in addition to running Beacon, Reines’s “second full-time job” is working for Hillary. When she decides to run, Reines will be part of the campaign. In many ways, he already is.
So Panetta’s very close ties to Clinton’s non-campaign campaign should naturally raise the question if he, too, is an explicit part of it.
Note that Panetta first made a splash with his tough criticisms of Obama during a September 21 interview with 60 Minutes, in which he blasted the president for not arming the Syrian opposition sooner. “I think that would’ve helped,” he said. “And I think in part, we pay the price for not doing that in what we see happening with ISIS.” The “paying the price” line made headlines around the country the next day.
That very same Sunday, Bill Clinton appeared on CNN—and made the exact same point, and made it clear that Panetta and his wife were on the same page. “I supported two years ago the proposal that Hillary and Secretary Panetta and then–CIA director General Petraeus made to give more robust armed support to the Syrians,” he told Fareed Zakaria.
With Reines managing Hillary’s public image, and Panetta and Bill Clinton making the same point on the same day, the question of coordination is unavoidable.
That’s not to say Panetta’s criticisms shouldn’t be considered on their merits, nor that there’s anything wrong with this coordination. But it’s crucial context in which to understand his position—that perhaps he’s not just a reluctant critic trying to call out policy failures, but also a political actor working for someone else’s electoral gain.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, October 9, 2014
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