“Decency Is Irrelevant”: Romney Still Palling Around With Trump
Last month, reality-television personality Donald Trump reiterated his support for a ridiculous, borderline-racist conspiracy theory, but that didn’t stop Mitt Romney from cozying up to him.
As of last night, the Republican presidential hopeful is still palling around with the guy. ABC News reported yesterday afternoon that the Romney campaign’s “Dine With the Donald” luncheon had been postponed, but a Romney/Trump dinner last night in New York was not.
Although the lunch event was rain checked, tonight’s dinner fundraiser at the private residence of Martin Zweig will go on as planned. The dinner — which is reported to have raised millions of dollars and will host more than 50 guests — starts at 6:30 p.m., at Zweig’s residence in the Pierre Hotel, touted as one of the most expensive homes in Manhattan.
“Despite the multitude of erroneous reports today, I can assure you Mr. Trump and Gov. Romney both look forward to seeing one another this evening,” Cohen added.
Of course they will.
Remember, in May, when reporters yesterday whether Trump’s ugly antics gives him pause, Romney was unconcerned. “You know, I don’t agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don’t all agree with everything I believe in,” Romney said. “But I need to get 50.1% or more and I’m appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people.”
In other words, decency is irrelevant — the Republican presidential candidate should partner with anyone, no matter how vile, so long as it furthers his ambitions and gets him more votes.
As of last night, that still appears to be the case.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 29, 2012
“Letting The Right People Vote”: Control And Power Through Voter Suppression
For some years, the Republican party has tried to convince Americans that they have put their ugly legacy on issues of race behind them, that Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Willie Horton have no relationship to the GOP of today. They call themselves the “party of Lincoln,” hoping people will forget that the Republican and Democratic parties were very different in 1864 than they are today. (Consider: If the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the leading lights of the GOP had been alive 150 years ago, which side would they have been on? The answer seems pretty obvious.) Sometimes, they may even go as far as the National Review did recently, publishing an unintentionally hilarious cover article claiming that Republicans are the real civil-rights heroes, because the Democratic party was once home to white Southern segregationists, so there! Never mind that those folks, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, eventually found their rightful home in the Republican party, as part of the realignment process that gave us the parties of today.
The protestations would be a little more convincing if every election—every election, without fail—didn’t see Republicans searching for new ways to exploit white racial animus and, more importantly, keep minorities from voting. This year’s election will be no different; Republicans are working harder than ever to make sure that if you’re not their kind of person, you will find voting as difficult as possible. That doesn’t mean that deep in their hearts Republicans are racists. It isn’t about hate. It’s about power.
This isn’t anything new. The history of voting in America is one of vicious battles over who would be able to cast ballots, battles that go well beyond the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which extended voting rights to blacks and women, respectively. For decades, dozens of states had “pauper exclusions” on their books preventing poor people from voting. In some cases that meant that only property owners were allowed to vote; in other cases, going on any form of public assistance meant giving up your franchise. Incredibly, these laws were not finally repealed in most places until the 1960s. As Alexander Keyssar detailed in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, classes of people with power have always sought to restrict the ability of those without power to vote:
They did so both to defend their own interests and because their beliefs and prejudices led them to view others as something less than responsible or worthy citizens. Most men did not want to enfranchise women until the twentieth century; most whites did not want to enfranchise blacks or other racial minorities in their own states; the native-born often were resistant to granting suffrage to immigrants; the wealthy at times sought to deny political citizenship to the poor; established community residents preferred to fence out new arrivals. There is nothing peculiarly American or particularly surprising about these patterns; those who possess political power commonly are reluctant to share it, and they have easily developed or embraced ideas that justify and legitimize that reluctance.
At various times in their histories, both political parties have sought partisan advantage in keeping certain people from the polls. But it has been some time since the Democratic party had a means by which to exclude whole classes of people from voting. The most reliable Republican voters today are groups like older white men. Even the most creative legislator would have a tough time coming up with some way to take away their voting rights.
But the reliably Democratic groups—blacks, Hispanics, poor people, young people—are easier to go after. You don’t have to stop all of them from voting, just enough to make a difference. And few things work better than voter ID laws, since those who don’t have such an ID are so much more likely to be the kind of people who vote Democratic. The fact that people impersonating other people at the polls is so rare as to be almost non-existent matters not at all. Write a voter ID law, and the cruder methods of keeping minorities from voting become less necessary. You don’t have to spend as much time distributing flyers in black neighborhoods threatening people with prosecution if they go to the wrong polling place, or mailing notices to voters claiming that if they have any unpaid parking tickets they won’t be allowed to vote, or posting signs around the neighborhood saying that the election has been moved to Wednesday.
All those things have happened may times before. But after their success in taking control of state legislatures in 2010, Republicans decided that kind of thing was for amateurs. You don’t need election day shenanigans if you’ve passed a law disenfranchising the right people. Minorities may be at the core of these efforts, but it isn’t just about them. Young people, college students, ex-felons, anyone who might be more likely to vote Democratic has been targeted by eager Republican legislators elected in the 2010 sweep. A dozen states with Republican legislatures have erected new barriers to voting since 2010. These barriers include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and laws barring all ex-felons from voting. And no state’s Republicans have moved as aggressively as Florida, which has a bit of a history with this sort of thing.
You may have forgotten it by now, but the razor-thin margin of the 2000 presidential race there had its roots well before election day, when governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris assembled a list of people who were allegedly ex-felons and should therefore lose their voting rights. It turned out that thousands of them weren’t ex-felons at all, but just had names that resembled someone who had committed a felony. But too bad – they lost the right to vote anyway. In the last few years, Florida has passed an ID law, and passed a law imposing absurdly onerous requirements on those who register voters (voter registration is always a part of liberal and Democratic organizing campaigns). They also restricted early voting, most importantly by eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the election. Why that Sunday? Well, many black churches were organizing “Souls to the Polls” voting drives after church on that day. The Republicans solved that problem. And most recently, the government of Republican governor Rick Scott told local boards of elections to purge tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls, on the grounds that they might not be citizens. Many Florida citizens have already gotten threatening letters from the government, telling them they had 30 days to prove their citizenship or lose the right to vote.
Many of these plainly partisan moves are under legal challenge, but our system unfortunately allows much of what Republicans are trying to do. For instance, when the 2000 election controversy revealed the miasma of corruption and incompetence that was the Florida election system, many people were amazed that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of running the election, could be allowed to serve as state co-chair of one of the competing presidential campaigns. The idea that Bush co-chair Katherine Harris was an objective arbiter of election rules and processes was beyond absurd; it was like going to a Yankees-Red Sox game and learning that the home-plate umpire was also the Yankees’ batting coach. But that’s perfectly fine in America; you might remember that four years later, the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell (the state co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign) responded to a successful Democratic registration campaign by issuing a decree that any registration form not printed on heavy card stock would be declared invalid (his order was overturned by a court). And just recently the Arizona Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, declared that he might not allow Barack Obama on the state’s ballot, since he wasn’t convinced Obama was actually born in the United States. Bennett, who eventually backed off his birtherism, is–you guessed it–the state co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Few things are more absurd than to hear Republicans claim that in enacting restrictive voting laws, they are motivated not a whit by partisanship, but only by their deep and abiding concern for the integrity of the ballot. The Republicans who swept into office at all levels in 2010 had a policy agenda, to do things like restrict reproductive rights, roll back environmental and consumer regulations, and cut taxes. But their political agenda, designed to increase the chances that they will retain power, got nearly as much of their attention. And few things can more effectively ensure that you’ll retain power than making it harder for the wrong kind of people to vote.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
“Sewing Together Disparate Data Points”: Conservative Media Try to Reverse Racial Reality
Conservatives must be feeling regretful. After nearly fifty years of using appeals to white racial resentment to take over the South, win presidential elections and control of Congress, conservatives are realizing this might come back to bite them in the ass. As the right wing has become xenophobic and anti-Latino, conservatives have watched young Latinos and young Asian Americans join young African-Americans in being overwhelmingly Democratic. The greater diversity of this younger generation has in turn meant that Democrats, especially Barack Obama, have won handily among young voters in recent elections. All of a sudden, conservatives see being the party of angry white males as a potential liability, and they want to change their image.
You can see this concern in Mitt Romney’s recent campaign events touting his substantively thin but rhetorically compassionate education reform agenda. As the Washington Post reported on Romney’s visit to a school in West Philadelphia on Thursday, his first campaign event in a majority black neighborhood: “Mitt Romney’s campaign team has been quietly laying plans for an outreach effort to President Obama’s most loyal supporters—black voters—not just to chip away at the huge Democratic margins but also as a way to reassure independent swing voters that Romney can be inclusive and tolerant in his thinking and approach.” Romney’s campaign insists they are sincere, but they never made any such outreach during the primaries, when they were competing against Newt Gingrich’s successful efforts to appeal to racism in his campaign in South Carolina.
The conservative media are happy to help burnish both white racial anxieties and the official story line that Republicans are the friends of minorities by trying to tell an oddly inverted story of race relations in America. According to National Review’s current cover story by Kevin Williamson, it is the Republican Party which has consistently supported civil rights and Democrats who have opposed it. Meanwhile, conservative blogs, talk radio and Fox News hype random stories of anti-white violence, creating the false impression that whites are more often the victims of hate crimes by blacks than the reverse.
The National Review argument has been thoroughly debunked in many outlets. Over at Democracy Journal, Clay Risen demonstrates “Williamson’s embarrassingly basic misunderstanding of American history.” There used to be liberal pro–civil rights wings and conservative anti–civil rights wings in both parties, hence the misleading factoid commonly cited by conservative pundits that a higher proportion of Republicans than Democrats in Congress voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, especially Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, who pushed the issue and got the law passed. Republicans nominated anti–civil rights conservative extremist Barry Goldwater in 1964 and thus began their conversion of the South. Goldwater carried five Southern states despite losing in a landslide. “For a variety of reasons—including, but not only, racial politics—both parties went through ideological realignments in the postwar decades, so that today we speak of Republicans as almost uniformly conservative and Democrats as almost uniformly liberal,” notes Risen. “The GOP of today is simply not the GOP of 1963.” That’s why anti–civil rights Southern conservatives such as Trent Lott, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms became Republicans. Williamson is simply lying when he writes, “those southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era.”
Most embarrassingly, Williamson starts his story by proudly proclaiming National Review’s history of debunking pernicious myths. (In this case, the myth is that Democrats supported civil rights more than Republicans.) But he makes no mention of National Review’s own history of opposing civil rights. As Jonathan Chait writes in New York, “conservative Republicans—those represented politically by Goldwater, and intellectually by William F. Buckley and National Review—did oppose the civil rights movement. Buckley wrote frankly about his endorsement of white supremacy: “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”
Critics of Williamson’s piece were generous enough not to mention that National Review’s tendencies towards racism and opposition to civil rights continue today. National Review recently let go of longtime contributor John Derbyshire for penning a shockingly bigoted rant in another publication, although as NR editor Rich Lowry, admitted, “Derb has long danced around the line on these issues.” Derbyshire has since continued to write for the racist conservative Website VDARE, which is run by fellow National Review exile Peter Brimelo. Regarding the proper name for VDARE’s corner of the right, Derbyshire wrote on May 10, “The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. ‘White Supremacist’ seems to be their current favorite…. Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think ‘White Supremacist’ is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.”
NR also had to drop another contributor, Robert Weissberg, shortly thereafter for having, in Lowry’s words, “delivered a noxious talk about the future of white nationalism.” Meanwhile NR defends voting laws that would disenfranchise minorities through onerous requirements such as presenting government-issued photo identification. And it argues that the Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary.
That last part speaks to the other half of the conservative misinformation campaign about race. In order to simultaneously pretend to support civil rights in principle and oppose it now in practice, you must make the claim that the movement was so successful it has, if anything gone too far.
There is a corollary to this logic holding that it is blacks that oppress whites, rather than the reverse. This is, of course, a regular feature in arguments against affirmative action. Similarly, McKay Coppins recently reported in BuzzFeed on the odd conservative media fixation with occasional crimes that happen to be perpetrated against a white victim by a group of black aggressors. Coppins writes:
If you’ve spent much time consuming conservative media lately, you’ve probably learned about a slow-burning “race war” going on in America today. Sewing together disparate data points and compelling anecdotes like the attack in Norfolk, conservative bloggers and opinion-makers are driving the narrative with increasing frequency. Their message: Black-on-white violence is spiking—and the mainstream media is trying to cover it up.
This notion isn’t necessarily new to the right, which has long complained about stifling political correctness in the media and the rising tide of “reverse racism….
The irony of the race war narrative’s latest flare-up is that it comes at a time when national crime rates have reached historic lows—including reported hate crimes against whites. According to a report released by the FBI, there were 575 anti-white bias crimes reported in 2010—up slightly from the 545 reported in 2009, but distinctly lower than the 716 reported in 2008. Overall, the past decade has seen a downward trend in anti-white bias crime. What’s more, hate crimes against blacks have continued to outstrip those against whites by about four-to-one: In 2010 alone, there were 2,201 reported. Violent crimes across the spectrum reached a four-decade low in 2010.
Conservative media have been especially eager to smear Trayon Martin, the young black victim of a shooting for which the perpetrator was initially not arrested. They are also getting on the wrong side of modern civil rights struggles, by opposing gay rights and fanning the flames of Islamophobia. And as is especially the case with Fox News, their biggest sin of all may be simple inaccuracy.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, May 28, 2012
“Bracketing Racism”: White Resentment, President Obama, And Appalachia
Steve Kornacki tries to do the math on Obama’s unpopularity throughout Appalachia:
A majority of Kentucky’s 120 counties voted against Obama in the state’s Democratic presidential primary, opting instead for “uncommitted.” Big margins in Louisville and Lexington saved the president from the supreme embarrassment of actually losing the state, not that his overall 57.9 to 42.1 percent victory is anything to write home about…
Chalking this up only to race may be an oversimplification, although there was exit poll data in 2008 that indicated it was an explicit factor for a sizable chunk of voters. Perhaps Obama’s race is one of several markers (along with his name, his background, and the never-ending Muslim rumors, his status as the “liberal” candidate in 2008) that low-income white rural voters use to associate him with a national Democratic Party that they believe has been overrun by affluent liberals, feminists, minorities, secularists and gays – people and groups whose interests are being serviced at the expense of their own.
I think that “Chalking this up only to race” is a strawman, and its one that I often see writers invoke when talking about white resentment and Obama. Here’s another example from Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake:
But although no one doubts that race may be a factor, exit polling suggests that the opposition to Obama goes beyond it. And seasoned political observers who have studied the politics of these areas say race may be less of a problem for Obama than the broader cultural disconnect that many of these voters feel with the Democratic Party.
“Race is definitely a factor for some Texans but not the majority,” said former congressman Charles W. Stenholm (D-Tex.). “The most significant factor is the perception/reality that the Obama administration has leaned toward the ultra-left viewpoint on almost all issues.”
The presumption here is that race can somehow be bracketed off from the perception that Obama is “ultra-left.” Thus unlike other shameful acts of racism, opposition to Obama race as a possible “factor” but goes “beyond it.” Or in Kornacki’s formulation Obama, presumably unlike past victims, is facing a complicated opposition which can’t be reduced to raw hatred of blacks.
The problem with these formulations is that they are utterly ahistorical. There is no history of racism in this country that chalked “up only to race.” You can’t really talk about stereotypes of, say, black laziness unless you understand stereotypes of the poor stretching back to 17th century Great Britain (Edmund Morgan again.) You can’t really talk about the Southern slave society without grappling with the relationship between the demand for arable land and the demand for labor. You can’t understand the racial pogroms at the turn of the century without understanding the increasing mobility of American women. (Philip Dray At The Hands Of Persons Unknown.)
And this works the other way too. If you’re trying to understand the nature of American patriotism without thinking about anti-black racism, you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the New Deal, without thinking about Southern segregationist senators you will miss a lot. If you’re trying to understand the very nature of American democracy itself, and not grappling with black, you will miss almost all of it.
In sum, there is very little about racism that can be chalked “only up to race.” Chalking up slavery, itself, only to race is a deeply distorting oversimplification. The profiling that young black males endure can’t be chalked up “only to race” either. It’s also their youth and their gender. Complicating racism with other factors doesn’t make it any better. It just makes it racism. Again.
I don’t mean to come down on Kornacki or Cillizza. But I think this sort of writing about race–and really about American politics–as though history doesn’t exist is a problem. Specifically, journalists are fond of saying “racism is only one factor” without realizing that any racism is unacceptable. It is wrong to believe Barack Obama shouldn’t be president because he’s black. That you have other reasons along with those–even ones that rank higher–doesn’t make it excusable. Likely those other reasons are themselves tied to Obama being black.
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Senior Editor, The Atlantic, May 23, 2012
“Only A Suggestion”: Joe Ricketts Demands Massive Taxpayer Subsidies For Baseball Stadium
This week, the New York Times reported that Joe Ricketts, a right-wing billionaire and founder of TD Ameritrade, is soliciting multi-million dollar ad proposals to attack President Obama. One such proposal, leaked to the paper, was a $10 million, racially-charged campaign entitled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End his Spending for Good.” The proposal, which center on Rev. Jeremiah Wright, suggests hiring an “extremely literate conservative African-American” to break down Obama’s image as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”
Ricketts moved quickly to publicly reject the plan after it leaked. His spokesman said it “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion.” (The statement seems somewhat disingenuous as the Ricketts had already given “preliminary approval” for the $10 million concept after seeing a separate ad about Jeremiah Wright.) Nevertheless, Ricketts’ spokesman confirmed his intention spend money attacking Obama through an organization he controls called “Ending Spending Political Action Fund.”
There is one area, however, where Ricketts is much more open to government spending. He’s seeking a massive government subsidy for the Chicago Cubs, which he owns with his family, to renovate Wrigley Field. Here is the deal the Ricketts family is seeking, via Crain’s Chicago Business:
That means $300 million is needed for the ballpark proper.
Half would come from the team, presumably in increased revenue from more signage inside Wrigley and retail and other entertainment in what amounts to a game-day carnival on Waveland Avenue on Wrigley’s north side and Sheffield Avenue to the east.
And half would come from $150 million or so in bonds to be retired with increased revenue from the existing city and Cook County amusement taxes on ticket sales. Specifically, debt service would get the first 6 percent in growth above a base level of around $15 million a year now.
But it’s a little more complicated than that.
The team also wants a 50 percent cut of any increase in amusement tax revenue growth above 6 percent. And unlike the bonds, which would be retired in 30 or 35 years, that would be forever.
So Joe Ricketts and his family not only want a $150 million subsidy directly from taxpayers but also a large chunk of tax revenue from the city in perpetuity. In other words, taxes from the City of Chicago would no longer go to roads, schools and police officers but also into Joe Ricketts pocket. Without this taxpayer welfare, the family will presumably let Cubs, which they acquired in a highly competitive bidding process in 2009, play in a stadium that is falling into disrepair.
Ricketts negotiating position seems completely at odds with his public stated political views. In a video posted by another organization he controls, Taxpayers Against Earmarks, Ricketts says “I think it’s a crime for our elected officials to borrow money today, to spend money today and push the repayment of that loan out into the future on people who are not even born yet.” Of course, that’s what he is attempting force the taxpayers of Chicago to do for the benefit of his team and his family.
At the same time, Joe Ricketts has plenty of disposable income available to attack Obama. A Ricketts spokesperson said future attacks on Obama would “be focused entirely on questions of fiscal policy.” Joe Ricketts, however, may want to focus on the fiscal policy of his baseball team. In 2011, the Cubs were “one of nine franchises in violation of MLB’s debt service rules.”
By: Judd Legum and Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 19, 2012
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