“A High-Falutin’ Elitist”: Jeb Bush To Continue Family Tradition Of Pretending To Be A Reg’lar Fella
It’s presidential campaign time, which means that I will have ample opportunity to fulminate against my many pet peeves of political rhetoric in the months to come. There are few higher on that list than the repeated claim politicians make that they aren’t really politicians—they don’t really think or know much about politics, and they’re both repulsed by and unfamiliar with this strange and sinister place called “Washington, D.C.” that they just happen to be so desperate to move to. Obi-Wan Kenobi may have said of Mos Eisley, “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy,” but he didn’t follow that up with, “But I don’t really know anything about the place, which is why I’m the best person to guide you through it.” Because that would have been ridiculous. Not so our politicians, however. And here’s the latest:
Jeb Bush isn’t a New York Times reader.
The former Florida governor and likely Republican presidential candidate appeared on Fox News Radio on Thursday and, when asked to respond to a quote in the paper, said he doesn’t read it.
“I don’t read The New York Times, to be honest with you,” Bush told Fox’s Brian Kilmeade.
The quote in question came from Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council, who was quoted in the Times saying that the Christian right should begin discussing which candidate to back as an alternative to Bush, because he didn’t represent their views….
Kilmeade later asked, “Would [Perkins] be somebody you’d approach. Would you say, Tony, you’re misunderstanding me. We need to talk. I read that column today in The New York Times?”
“Maybe I’ll give him a call today, I don’t know,” Bush said. “I don’t read The New York Times. But if you’re going to force me to do so….”
You’ll notice that Bush points out that he doesn’t read The New York Times not once, but twice. Can I say for sure that this is a lie, and Jeb Bush does in fact read The New York Times? Of course not. But the point is that instead of just saying, “I didn’t see that article,” he has to make a point of letting people know he doesn’t read the Times, as some high-falutin’ elitist would.
Nobody has to read The New York Times in particular. It does remain the most important news outlet in America, not because its audience is the largest but because it has more influence than any other. When a story appears in the Times, it can set the agenda for the entire news media (media scholars have actually documented this effect). Unless you’re Sarah Palin, if you’re a politician it’s part of your job to keep abreast of what’s going on, which means you’ll at least glance at the Times, The Washington Post, and probably The Wall Street Journal. I’m sure that one of Jeb Bush’s staffers assembles for him a collection of clips that he can look at every day so he knows what’s happening in the world.
But Bush feels the need to display his own (alleged) ignorance and disinterest, lest anyone believe that this guy—whose grandfather was a senator, whose father and brother were both president, who was a governor, and whose entire life has been wrapped up in American politics—might actually be so crass and cynical as to keep up with the news.
In this, Bush is following a family tradition of pretending to be “jus’ folks.” George H.W. did it in typically hamhanded fashion, by letting everyone know he loved pork rinds. George W. was far more adept at it; in 1999, in advance of his run for the White House, he bought a “ranch” to which he would go for vigorous brush-clearing sessions, conducted in the appropriate cowboy costume (boots, hat, belt-buckle). I believe that the sole agricultural product the ranch produced was brush, which Bush would “clear,” i.e., move from one place to another, so that he could be photographed in action.
There are reasons one might vote for Jeb Bush, and reasons one might vote against him. But nobody is going to be convinced that he’s an outsider who will come to Washington, shake up the system, and bring his real-world common sense to bear on all those politicians and bureaucrats. So let’s drop the Unfrozen Caveman Politician bit, shall we?
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 27, 2015
“Don’t Run, Elizabeth Warren, Don’t Run!”: She Just Might Actually Have More Leverage As A Non-Candidate
And so the ratcheting up continues: Now The Boston Globe has weighed in with not one or two or three but four pieces, one of them an in-house editorial, urging Elizabeth Warren to run for president. All right; this is the kind of thing hometown newspapers do, and it gets them attention. And it means that more people will press Warren to take The Globe’s advice when they run into her at the Star Market. But does it really raise the pressure on her in any serious way?
The arguments, by the paper’s editorial board and by contributors Bob Kuttner, Josh Green, and Anna Galland, are reasonable and sound. Warren has a huge following (true). Warren is the Democratic Party’s most articulate and high-profile crusader for the middle and working classes (true). Warren uniquely can pressure Clinton to adopt more populist positions on these issues than she has been associated with in the past (true).
But then come two arguments I find less persuasive, and I write as an admirer of Warren’s. The first is that Warren can have more influence as a candidate than not. The second is that a primary run against an opponent who’s in her political weight class (none of the other Democrats are) will toughen Clinton up in all the good ways. I think there are very good reasons to be less sure about the validity of either of those.
Inside the Democratic Party right now, Warren has as much influence as just about anybody short of the president. She has moral authority. She can move armies. But here’s the next thought in that chain, and it’s important: She can move them without much—or even any—intra-party pushback. The Clinton people know that to throw a brushback pitch at Elizabeth Warren is to risk alienating her millions of followers in a deep way.
But if Warren gets into the race, that hesitation on the part of the Clinton people ends. It would not be a gloves-off, no-holds-barred kind of combat, but combat it would be. The Clinton team would plant negative stories about her. Is there even any real dirt on Elizabeth Warren? Not that anyone knows about, now that she danced her way across Scott Brown’s “fake Cherokee” bed of hot coals. But this is politics. There’s always something. Tim Geithner at least would probably try to supply it. Jim Carville would go on the Sunday shows and start popping off about it. So suddenly, her profile would change: Right now, she’s above the fray; as a candidate, she’d be knee-deep in it, against the Clinton operation.
Even so, Warren would probably win a primary or two, or more, maybe several more. What then? It could actually get kind of ugly in a way that damages both of them. Now I suppose we’ve segued into the second argument, about how a good primary would toughen Clinton up. Maybe. But no one who is writing that sentence today can possibly know for certain that that’s how it would turn out.
People say, “Oh, but look at how the 2008 primary process helped toughen up Obama.” Did it? I’m not so sure. Or if it did, this fabled toughening-up process didn’t have much to do with Clinton. The two biggest crises Obama had to work through during the primary process were entirely self-inflicted: explaining away both a) why he spent all those years in the pews of a pastor who hated America and b) what exactly he meant when he said red-state people cling to guns and religion.
And anyway, Obama did not win the 2008 general election because a long primary season toughened him up. He won for three reasons: America was psychically ready to elect a black man, this particular black man, as its president; the financial meltdown happened on GOP watch; and John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. It had very little, or indeed arguably nothing whatsoever, to do with the primary process.
One could well argue that a long primary fight between her and Clinton would mainly work to the Republicans’ benefit. Especially with the media acting as they inevitably would with two women running against each other—that is, playing up the catfight angle as much as possible, running deep into the ground every cliché from the kingdom of nature about emasculating females.
I have speculated in the past that maybe Warren doesn’t even really want to be president (for foreign policy-related reasons). I also suspect there’s a part of her that doesn’t want to risk doing anything that might end up helping the GOP and allowing the media to indulge its Bette Davis vs. Joan Crawford fantasies at the expense of the party.
Finally I suspect Warren knows that she has a tremendous amount of power and leverage as things stand right now. She can sway Clinton’s course plenty as a non-candidate. She doesn’t even have to say or do much. She just needs, every so often, to remind Clinton that she exists, and that her army exists.
So, presidential candidate? She doesn’t need to bother. The things people say she would gain from such a candidacy she in fact has already. However…vice presidential candidate…think about it. Clinton-Warren. I’ve been chewing on this one for months. Mold-shattering. Exactly like what Clinton’s husband did in choosing Al Gore. Precisely the kind of bold play she needs to make to shed her image of caution. Two-thirds of women voters, easy. They’d be a great team on the trail. And imagine that closing-night convention visual. And in office, they could be a great governing team, too.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For now, my contention is that Warren is at a point of very high leverage as it is, and no one from anywhere inside the Democratic tent wants to lay a glove on her. That would change if she ran. I can understand why her most ardent partisans want her to run—there’s only one gold ring in American politics, and that’s the presidency. But she has been absolutely insistent that she does not want to run. At some point, people ought to accept that she means it. Besides, she’s actually in the catbird’s seat now. She has the power without having to endure the scrutiny. I don’t know many politicians who wouldn’t take that.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 25, 2015
“The Poison In Which Conservatives Marinate”: The Rancid Stew Of Fantasy, Hatred, And Yes, Racism
If you look at poll results saying that most Republicans think Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim enacting a secret plan to destroy America and think, “What the hell is wrong with these people?”, you have to understand that it gets reinforced day after day after day by media sources they believe to be lonely islands of truth amid a sea of lies. Yes, they hear it from politicians like Rudy Giuliani, who seems to be on some kind of mission to prove himself to be America’s most despicable cretin. But that only reinforces the river of political sewage that flows into their ears each and every day.
To wit, here’s Republican uber-pundit Erick Erickson, filling in for Rush Limbaugh and telling his millions of listeners what they want to hear:
“Barack Obama believes that for the world to be more safe the United States must be less safe. For the world to be more stable the United States must be less stable. Barack Obama believes the United States of America is a destabilizing, arrogant force in the world, we need our comeuppance and we need to be humbled. And so everything Barack Obama does domestically and in foreign policy is designed to humble the arrogant crackers who have always run the United States.”
Yes, that’s right, “arrogant crackers.” How on earth anyone could get the idea that the attacks on Obama by people like Erickson are meant to stoke their audience’s racial resentments, I have no idea.
As a general rule, whenever you hear a conservative pundit start a sentence with “Barack Obama believes…” you’re about to hear something that not only bears no plausible relationship to reality but is also meant to play on the worst instincts of his or her audience. And it is simply impossible to overstate the ubiquity of this particular theme in conservative media: Barack Obama hates not just America but white people in general, and all of his policies are meant to exact racial vengeance upon them. This is the rancid stew of fantasy, hatred, and yes, racism in which millions upon millions of conservatives have spent the last six years marinating.
To my conservative friends: I know that you are obsessed with the idea that conservatives are constantly being unfairly accused of racism. And there are certainly times when some liberals are too quick to see racist intent in a comment that may be innocuous or at worst unintentionally provocative. But you make heroes out of people like Giuliani, Limbaugh, and Erickson. You applaud them, honor them, extol them, and when other people occasionally notice the caustic hairballs of bile they spit onto waiting microphones, the most you can say is, “Well, I wouldn’t go that far.” So you have nothing to complain about.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 13, 2015
“Era Of Party Polarization”: GOP’s “Constitution” Confusion; Why Tom Cotton’s Silly Iran Letter Matters
As readers of my colleague Jim Newell know by now, Tom Cotton, Arkansas’ new GOP senator, is already establishing himself as one of the leading doomsayers and fearmongers in Congress, which is no small feat. Indeed, by acting as the driving force behind a provocative open letter to the leaders of Iran and helpfully informing them that any deal reached with the Obama administration over their nuclear program will ultimately be subject to the Senate’s review, Cotton has already made himself a hero to the neoconservative right. In fairness, though, that wasn’t the hardest thing to do: Cotton’s earlier warnings of a (completely fictional) alliance between Mexico’s drug cartels and ISIS, as well as his rant in defense of Guantánamo Bay, had endeared them to him already.
But while Cotton is making the media rounds and hoovering-up donations from Bill Kristol and the military industrial complex, I think it’s worthwhile to revisit a discussion that was bouncing around the left-wing corners of the Internet last week. The topic was the inherent, structural flaws of the U.S.’s presidential system — which is rickety and slow in the best of times and downright unstable in the worst — and how they were becoming increasingly hard to ignore in our era of party discipline and polarization. Because even though I don’t believe Cotton and his letter represent a constitutional crisis as some of President Obama’s allies have suggested (and is certainly not an act of treason), I do consider the freshman senator’s recent behavior to be a good window into how the presidential system’s flaws can manifest in the real world.
However, before we look at Cotton more closely, let’s do a quick and dirty recap of one of the presidential system’s more common critiques. As readers of the late political scientist Juan Linz (or Vox’s Matt Yglesias) remember, one of the issues that can arise when a presidential system features disciplined and ideological parties is a crisis of sovereignty. That’s a fancy way of describing an argument between the executive and the legislative branches over which one is really in charge. Since they exist independently, and were empowered by voters through separate elections, both can claim to represent the will of the people. And if the two branches find themselves on opposite sides of a major dispute, push can come to shove — and worse.
Applying this model to the current foofaraw over Cotton’s letter isn’t a slam-dunk, but it is still edifying. In this case, the problem is that Cotton and his fellow signatories are mucking-up the conduct of President Obama’s foreign policy, which has traditionally been seen as constitutionally (and normatively) protected. Congress always has a role in foreign policy, of course — even if recent history indicates it to be shrinking. Usually, a president is left to negotiate a deal that he then presents to Congress for approval. But Cotton and his Republican allies in the Senate are so dead-set against an agreement of any kind with Iran that they’re trying to squash the deal upfront instead.
The end result seems to be the further dissolution of what was once an unwritten rule — “politics stops at the water’s edge” — in the name of some greater good. And this is where ideology comes in. Because it’s hardly as if Congress has never disagreed with a president’s foreign policy this strongly before. They have, as the representatives and senators elected during the worst days of the Vietnam War can attest. What is different, though, is the tenor of their arguments, as well as the dispute’s supposed stakes. Hysterical warmongers like Cotton have always been with us — but rarely before have people with such radical views held so much power within either party’s caucus.
Keep this in mind about Cotton: Unless he’s an actor of Daniel Day Lewis-like talents, he sincerely believes that the consequences of a nuclear Iran would be apocalyptic. He’s said dozens of times that the only deal with Iran he’d accept is one that resulted in complete nuclear disarmament — which, as Think Progress’s Igor Volsky noted, is a demand that even the George W. Bush administration considered ridiculous. He also seems to be under the impression that Iran is even more dangerous than it is, agreeing as he does with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim that Iran is on the verge of going nuclear. The fact that Netanyahu’s been saying this for more than a decade, and that his own country’s leading intelligence agency disagrees, has apparently not made much of an impression.
Regardless of how broken Cotton’s assessment of the Iranian threat may be, though, he’s still a U.S. senator. And as his letter notes with a characteristic lack of subtlety, Cotton and his fellow members of the Senate are quite likely to stick around (for “perhaps decades”) while the term-limited President Obama isn’t. Which means that so long as Cotton and his allies believe a deal with Iran over its nuclear program will lead to a second Holocaust, or will strengthen Iran’s hand in its “war” with “the West,” then the kind of norms of conduct he’s breaking — like not trying to sabotage a sitting president’s foreign policy — will continue to fade into irrelevance. And so long as right-wing donors and the voters in Arkansas reward him for challenging the president’s sovereignty, while the media allows him and his allies to muddy the waters with specious claims that Obama is the one breaking protocol, he’ll have no reason to act any other way.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, March 11, 2014
“Sedition In The Name Of Patriotism”: Cynical Opportunists In League With Sectarian Fanatics
On many occasions during the last few years, as I heard talk of secession and nullification, and of defiance of the courts, and of duly enacted statutes representing slavery and tyranny, and of Higher Laws and a Right to Revolution, and most recently, of allegiance to a foreign government–all more or less countenanced by one of our two major political parties–I’ve thought of a historical parallel, as described in one of my favorite books, George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England.
The period in question was just prior to World War I when a Liberal majority government committed by mandate and party alliance to Home Rule for Ireland was obstructed by a Tory minority in alliance with Ulster Unionists which explicitly and implicitly threatened civil war. Here’s how Dangerfield describes a crucial lurch into sedition, when Tory leader Bonar Law traveled to Belfast to pledge allegiance to Ulster and its political leader, Sir Edward Carson, at a huge rally:
At this historical gathering the sedition being preached by Mr. Bonar Law, who led off with a scholarly appeal to Ulster’s worst fighting instincts, was nearly surpassed by Mr. Walter Long. “If they put Lord Londonderry and Sir Edward Carson in the dock,” roared Mr. Long, “they will have to find one large enough for the whole Unionist Party.” Whereat Mr. Bonar Law and Sir Edward Carson turned toward each other, clasped hands, and maintained this affecting attitude long enough for the whole assembly to realize that they were doing their level best to look like generals on the eve of battle. And then, while everyone stood with bared heads, Sir Edward released Mr. Law, and strode to the front of the speakers’ stand. “Raise you hands,” he shouted. “Repeat after me–never under any circumstances will we submit to Home Rule.” In the centre of the show grounds there was a signalling tower, with a flagstaff ninety feet tall, and while the audience, and the Marquess of Londonderry, and the Protestant Primate, and the Presbyterian Moderator, with obedient thunder intoned those words after Sir Edward, a Union Jack was broken from the flagstaff. It measured forty-eight feet by twenty-five. It was the largest ever woven. Patriotism could do no more.
Sedition in the name of patriotism should sound familiar today. Just over a century ago in England, the seditionists–aptly described by Dangerfield as cynical opportunists in league with sectarian fanatics–won. The country recovered, but was never quite the same. Are we headed in that same direction?
You have to wonder, as does Paul Waldman today at the Plum Line:
The American political system runs according to a whole series of norms, many of which we don’t notice until they’re violated. For instance, the Speaker of the House can invite a foreign leader to address Congress for the sole purpose of criticizing the administration, and he can even do it without letting the White House know in advance. There’s no law against it. But doing so violates a norm not only of simple respect and courtesy, but one that says that the exercise of foreign policy belongs to the administration. Congress can advise, criticize, and legislate to shape it, but if they simply take it upon themselves to make their own foreign policy, they’ve gone too far.
But as has happened so many times before, Republicans seem to have concluded that there is one set of rules and norms that apply in ordinary times, and an entirely different set that applies when Barack Obama is the president. You no longer need to show the president even a modicum of respect. You can tell states to ignore the law. You can sabotage delicate negotiations with a hostile foreign power by communicating directly with that power.
I wonder what they’d say if you asked them whether it would be acceptable for Democrats to treat the next Republican president that way. My guess is that the question wouldn’t even make sense to them. After all, that person would be a Republican. So how could anyone even think of such a thing?
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, March 10, 2015
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