“Strength, Toughness & Resolve Is All It Takes”: On Display At CPAC; How The Presidential Primary Makes GOP Candidates Simple-Minded
The Conservative Political Action Conference is always guaranteed to produce head-shaking moments, as one future presidential candidate after another tells the crowd of activists what they want to hear, and then some. It’s a concentrated version of the long Republican primary process, with everything that characterizes contemporary American conservatism cooked down to its viscous essence over the course of a few days.
You may have already heard about Scott Walker’s comments yesterday at the conference, in which he made an analogy between his fight to crush unions in Wisconsin and the fight against ISIS and other terrorist groups. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to look at something Marco Rubio said this morning, because they go together in a way that tells us a lot about what we’re going to be hearing from these candidates for the next year and a half.
Speaking from the CPAC stage, Rubio said that “if we wanted to defeat [ISIS] militarily, we could do it.” But we haven’t done that, because President Obama “doesn’t want to upset Iran.” I’m sure many in the crowd nodded their heads. First you have the implication that despite the thousands of air strikes we’ve launched against ISIS, we’re not really trying to defeat them, and that doing so would be simple if only Obama had the backbone. But he won’t, because he’s so solicitous of another of our enemies, Iran. If you know that this president is a Muslim-coddling, terrorist-sympathizing weakling, it makes perfect sense.
But in reality, Iran, a Shiite country, despises the Sunni extremists of ISIS. ISIS threatens the government of Iraq, which is Iran’s ally (or lapdog, depending on how you look at it), which is why Iran has sent troops there to fight the terrorist group. Eliminating ISIS is exactly what Iran wants us to do.
Perhaps Marco Rubio understands that, and if given the chance he’d revise his comments. But doing so wouldn’t play too well with the people whose votes he needs, because it would be an acknowledgement that — guess what — things can get pretty complicated in the Middle East. We can be trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons yet still have shared goals with them when it comes to another issue.
That simplifying impulse is what got Walker in trouble, too. When he said yesterday in answer to a question about ISIS, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” the problem wasn’t, as many people said, that he was comparing Wisconsinites exercising their free speech rights in opposing his efforts to crush unions to brutal terrorists (he clarified later that that isn’t what he meant to say). The problem was that he was arguing that serious problems, whether it’s your own constituents who disagree with you or a terrorist organization, have essentially the same solution: strength, toughness, resolve. That’s all it takes, and he’s got it. He may not know a lot about foreign affairs, but he doesn’t need to know a lot about foreign affairs.
This is hardly new in the GOP. In 1964, Ronald Reagan said in a speech supporting Barry Goldwater, “They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right.” Republicans have seldom veered from the conviction that in foreign affairs in particular, there are nothing but simple answers.
The trouble is, we’ve seen where that gets you. George W. Bush knew in his gut that every problem had a simple answer. Just as Rubio sees Iran and ISIS in a fictional alliance, Bush thought that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda must have been working together, because they’re all Bad Guys, right? And once we show our strength and resolve, the problems will melt before us. We all know how well that worked out.
Try to imagine a Republican presidential candidate who saw the world as a complicated place where sometimes we have to choose between bad options, being strong only gets you so far, and you have to consider the possibility that your actions could have unintended consequences. Would he be willing to say that to his party’s primary voters? Or would he tell them that actually, the answers are all simple, if only we have the courage to see them clearly and act?
I think we all know the answer to that. Campaigns in both parties are seldom going to be full of nuanced exploration of policy issues. But the GOP primary campaign forces its contenders to be particularly simple-minded, whether that’s who they really are or they’re just pretending.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, The Washington Post, February 27, 2015
“The Catastrophe Bibi Is Courting”: Bolstering His Re-Election And Pushing For War, He Should Be Careful What You Wishes For
So Bibi Netanyahu did not back down, and he’s here now in the United States, and he’s giving the speech Tuesday. In doing so, he has forced a true low point in U.S.-Israel relations. As has been often observed, he’s turning Israel into a partisan issue—up to somewhere around a quarter of congressional Democrats are refusing to attend the speech. That’s a crack, a big one. If he remains prime minister after the March 17 elections, the fissures between Netanyahu’s government and Barack Obama and the Democrats will only widen.
Congressional support for Israel is due for a reconsideration. As Scott McConnell wrote last month in The American Conservative (an anti-neocon magazine), Congress “does not come close to representing the views of the American people” on Israel, either with respect to Iran or the occupation. McConnell cites all the requisite poll numbers that make the case.
Now, Congress can go a long time without representing American public opinion. On certain big-money issues like banking, that’s all Congress does. But on most issues, Congress at least has to act like it’s listening to the American people, and on foreign policy questions in particular, Congress, and for that matter the president, can’t usually go where the American people don’t want to go. Obama probably wanted to drop a smattering of bombs on Syria in 2013, but public opinion was dead set against it. And remember how the Bush administration had to work public opinion in 2002 and 2003 to make sure the lies about Saddam Husssein’s nuclear ambitions got support levels up to 60 percent or so before it launched the war.
So one of these days, in two years or five or six, congressional fealty to Israel will cease being so bipartisan and reflexive—and that will be entirely an outcome of Netanyahu (and John Boehner’s and Ron Dermer’s and AIPAC’s) making.
But all that is just politics. Netanyahu is creating a much bigger problem here. Ultimately, he wants war with Iran. And American neoconservatives want it, too. Few of them will say so (although some do—see below). But that’s what they want, and we need to be clear about it.
Think about it. What is the alternative to negotiating with Iran? Well, there is only one: not negotiating with Iran. And what are the possible courses of action under that option? At the end of the day, there are two. Number one, let Iran do what it wants. Number two, ultimately, be willing to start a war to block Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Knowing the neocons’ world view as I’m sure you do, how willing do you think they’d be to let Iran do what it wants? Correct. Not very. That leaves war. There is the step of tougher sanctions as a middle course, but sanctions, even crippling ones, don’t usually change a regime’s behavior. So the clear implication of the anti-negotiation position is war—with a country of 77 million people, a huge army, and formidable wealth. As a point of comparison, Iraq in 2003 had about a third of Iran’s population.
As noted above, not many on the right are going to be honest enough to speak openly of war. The Republican presidential candidates, for example, don’t want the American public to think they’re crazy, so they won’t admit this—although interestingly, Rick Santorum became, I believe, the first Republican candidate to call for up to 10,000 U.S. combat troops on the ground to fight the so-called Islamic State.
With regard to Iran, the candidates hide behind the usual euphemisms. But a few war-makers are coming out of the closet. Matt Welch of Reason noted last week that on a panel at CPAC, both John Bolton and new Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton spoke openly of the desire for regime change in Iran. Bolton said U.S. policy toward Iran should be “overthrow of the ayatollahs.” Cotton added that we need regime change and “replacement with a pro-Western regime.”
Where is Netanyahu on this? Every indication he’s given us is that he’s on the Bolton-Cotton team. I don’t doubt that the prime minister sincerely believes that a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic would be catastrophic for Israel, and we should not dismiss that concern. No opponent of the neoconservative approach should be foolish enough to think that we can trust Iran. Israel has good reason to be worried. (I will, however, mention here Israel’s own 100-odd nuclear warheads, just on principle, because they always go unmentioned in columns like these.)
So Netanyahu wants, at the very least, a bombing campaign. But you know as well as I do that most of the leading experts say Iran’s centrifuge capacities are now too numerous and too geographically disparate for a bombing campaign of the usual scope to be very effective. That means a bombing campaign of unusual scope.
Do Netanyahu and Bolton really expect that Iran would not retaliate in such a case? Of course it would retaliate. And far more likely against Israel than against the United States. But the United States would be dragged into it, which is exactly what Bolton and Cotton told CPAC we should all want.
It seems to be what Netanyahu wants, too. It’s what he wanted back in 2002, when—then as a private citizen—he went to Congress and made the case for war against Iraq. As Josh Marshall noted last week, some of his words from back then are enough to make you shudder: “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”
It had the opposite effect, of course. It strengthened Iran and gave us ISIS. And now we’re supposed to make up for that huge mistake by trusting Netanyahu and the neocons again?
I’m sure Netanyahu’s words will be measured Tuesday. He wants Israel’s levels of support in America to be high, and he wants to win re-election. But don’t be fooled. He and his Republican backers are leading us down a potentially catastrophic path. And catastrophic not least for Israel itself: If this path someday reaches its logical end point, it won’t be only liberal Democrats in America who’ll conclude that we should just let Israel fight its own battles.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, March 2, 2015
“Viva La Incompétence!”: Boehner’s and Bibi’s Blunders ‘Liberate’ U.S. Foreign Policy From NeoCons
It’s all happening because I am completely ignoring every urge towards common sense and good judgment I’ve ever had–George Costanza, “Seinfeld”.
President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the growing power of the military-industrial complex, but even the former 5-star general Supreme Allied Commander in World War II couldn’t do it. The quagmire of Vietnam couldn’t do it. The quicksand of Iraq couldn’t do it. The killing fields of Cambodia couldn’t do it. The Bush/Cheney failure on 9/11 couldn’t do it. Allowing bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora, and then failing to find and capture him, couldn’t do it. Allowing Pakistan to develop the “Islamic bomb” couldn’t do it.
Even the election of the Iraq invasion’s opponent as president couldn’t do it.
But, John Boehner (R-OH) has done it.
He cannot do much else, but he has achieved what no other politician could do for half a century: expose the entire Republican national security “brand” as a fraud.
Remember the pious platitudes about the first function of government to be protecting the American people? Remember the decades of demagoguery skewering Democrats as being lax on security issues, the disgusting draft-dodging Saxby Chambliss leveling that accusation on war hero and triple amputee Max Cleland (D-GA) in the waning days of a senate campaign? Recall the Bush/Cheney 2004 ads showing snarling wolves that would be unleashed against the American people if John Kerry were elected?
Now, thanks to Speaker Boehner, the Republicans have no credibility or standing on national security. None, zero, zorch, nada. The next time you hear a Republican bleating about national security, you can have a good laugh.
They were willing to leave us vulnerable, and took their threats to the brink.
A minimally competent Democratic party should be and would be screaming bloody murder. After all, Republicans are playing political games with our lives and our families’ security. Democrats would be filling the airwaves and the (now-neutral!) net non-stop, spreading the alarm to “every town, middlesex, village and farm” that Republicans will sacrifice our nation’s safety, and raise legitimate issues about their love of country.
[Not hearing that? Well, do not ignore the qualifier “minimally competent”.]
Not to be outdone, however, Bibi’s blunder is even worse for the neoconistas. At least since the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and perhaps earlier as well, it has been virtually impossible for US foreign policy to diverge in meaningful ways (i.e., those that might actually lead to peace) from Israel’s as defined by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Any president, member of Congress, or candidate who criticized Israeli policy, who even spoke about pressuring Israel was immediately pounced upon by AIPAC, carrying with it the threat of political oblivion.
Until Bibi’s blunder, support for Israel was considered to be 100% support for whatever the government of Israel du jour decided to do.
The political price to be paid for deviating from that support was always more of the myth than reality. American Jews, although backing Israel, nevertheless vote more on economic and social issues than they do on competing claims of which candidates are helping Israel more.
Now, that myth is exposed. President Obama and many Democrats are shunning Bibi, but not wavering in their support of Israel. They refuse to be pawns in his political games to win the Israeli election. They refuse to scuttle prematurely the opportunity of avoiding another major armed conflict. They refuse to compromise the moral authority the US will have achieved by going the last mile with Iran if the negotiations fail.
From this day forth, presidents and members of Congress can oppose new settlements on the West Bank as impediments to peace without waiting until their retirements. They can let the Israelis know that our support is strong, but that we have expectations of them, too, that need to be honored.
Thanks to John Boehner (R-OH), Republicans have relinquished their (specious) claim to caring more and fighting harder to perform government’s primary mission, safety and security. Fearmongering 101 is not only no longer available to them, it will be fodder for mockery.
And, thanks to Bibi, liberated from the need to express support for everything any Israeli government does as a measure of how much they support Israel, the US will now become a more effective partner to bring peace and security to Israel and dignity to Palestinians.
Bibi has neglected to realize that Americans, like other people, do not appreciate a foreign leader who deliberately tries to embarrass the President, just like foreign countries tend not to enjoy being invaded and occupied.
There has always been a segment of the population who cannot abide a black man in the White House, especially exercising the powers of his office. The visual images rankle. [Obama is not just the first person of color to be president, he is the first black man ever to rule a white majority nation]. Some of that same segment, however, may find themselves for the first time siding emotionally with him as President when an Israeli (yes, Jewish) leader tries to embarrass him.
By asserting American priorities and not being cowed by Bibi’s influence in the US, the President will gain support among the American people, not just from his own base, but from die-hard opponents as well, exactly the opposite of what Bibi wanted.
Achieving the precise opposite of one’s intended outcome is one definition of incompetence. The US adventures in Vietnam and Iraq spring immediately to mind.
Boehner’s and Bibi’s blunders have liberated US foreign policy from the iron grip of the neoconistas.
Viva la incompétence!
By: Paul Abrams, The Blog, The Hufington Post, February 28, 2015
“CPAC’s Bleeding-Heart Conservative”: A Misleading Appearance Of A Movement Crackling With Spirited Intellectual Frisson
Conservatives who hope to distance themselves from the whackadoodlier elements of CPAC often refer to the conference as a sideshow.
But this year, the sideshow has a sideshow: not a more extreme iteration, but an ideological double negative.
Down the hall from the main stage, there’s a three-day 9-to-5 “activist bootcamp” going on. Coordinator Matt Robbins considers it the first “comprehensive, timely, practical” attempt to turn CPAC’s unkempt exuberance into strategic, ground-game-winning competence.
If CPAC seems crazy to outsiders, it has something to do with the conference’s fundamentally incompatible aims: You can’t both serve as a training ground for future leaders and have speakers on the main stage regularly rattle off the reasons why civilization is doomed.
The conference’s young attendees, largely libertarian-leaning and not worldly enough to think that compromise is necessary, are presented with a slate of panels that give the misleading appearance of a movement crackling with spirited intellectual frisson.
At the same time, would-be presidential candidates deliver the same calculated one-liners designed to elicit hoots of agreement but are largely devoid of substance. No wonder it’s failed to produce an actual youth movement.
In the cocoon of CPAC, the next generation of leaders hears no good argument to change anything about the last generation’s approach.
They are New Coke (if you’ll pardon the pun) distributors at a New Coke conference where the liveliest debate has to do with why more people don’t like New Coke, and the loudest cheers are for the insults heaped upon those who refuse to drink it.
Robbins is here to tell them that some people do not like New Coke.
He is president of American Majority, a nonprofit [501c4] founded in 2010 to focus exclusively on state-level races and below. They say they have 2,700 trainees go on to run for office and 300 in office today—almost all of them at the county or even school board level.
CPAC has featured career fairs and activist workshops in the past, but, says Robbins, “those were mainly about how to get jobs in the movement. I don’t care about that. I want to get people elected.”
The solutions are, admittedly, mostly cosmetic and familiar to anyone that’s been around organizing of any kind—database building, coalition management, social media-tending.
But Robbins also wants to deliver a sharp message to a soft audience completely unprepared for criticism.
“This conference hasn’t been about actually winning for years.”
He gives only one workshop personally, “7 Grassroots Cheats Never Heard Of,” and it is less Alinsky than Oprah. He stresses making voters feel good about their choices. It is aggressively non-party-specific. Do listen to people you don’t agree with! Don’t manage your own social media!
His advice for a candidate posed the “gotcha” question as to whether Obama loves America is to take the political rhetoric out of the issue.
“Every president loves his country,” he says. “Every executive loves their country,” should be the response. “You may disagree, but that has to be the message.”
Toward the end, one audience member seems put off by the lack of red meat and asks, pointedly, why do conservative candidates need to do all this image-management stuff.
“If we can get the message out past the mainstream media,” he says, “the ideas can sell themselves.”
Robbins looks tired and amused.
“Can I be honest with you?” he says, not waiting for an answer: “No one cares. No one cares about our economic policy. No one cares about small-government federalism. No one cares about white papers.”
He returns to teaching mode and asks the audience, “You’re a candidate and you knock on someone’s door, what’s the first thing they want to know?”
“Who are you?” shouts someone. Robbins shakes his head.
After a few more guesses, Robbins interrupts.
“No, not ‘Who are you and what can you do for me,’ but, ‘Are you authentic, and do you care about me?’”
Voters want to know that the candidate is looking out for them, he explains. They will let the details slide.
This is clearly a sore spot. For another 10 minutes, Robbins harps on the GOP’s empathy gap almost exclusively.
It’s his theory for what’s behind the GOP’s slow-motion demographic implosion: Not enough candidates that seem genuinely interested in the problems of voters, whereas Obama definitely projects concern and Bill Clinton “was like a puppy dog in his enthusiasm for people.”
This seems, at first read, like an elegant way to get around the real problem: not the lack of empathic Republican politicians, but the lack of empathy that’s built into Republican policies.
This thought occurs to me after Robbins’ workshop, and I admit I am delighted, because it means I will get to ask someone my very own “gotcha” question.
When I follow up with him later, I deliver as rehearsed: “Do you think the fact that you have trouble recruiting empathetic candidates might have to do with how conservative policies themselves don’t appeal to people that have a lot of empathy?” Pencil poised, I await stammering. I am not rewarded. Or, rather, I am, but not by telltale hemming and hawing, but a simple, “You have point.”
“If you’re a small government-minded conservative, and you enact those policies, someone is going to lose. Something is going to get cut,” he admits, and people attracted to that philosophy have to be OK with that.
He suggests that perhaps such surety is the luxury of those who have never met those on the receiving end. Robbins worked in the Virginia statehouse and recalls being floored by the constant roll call of emergency requests: “There were tens of thousands of Virginians without running water… people going hungry…with mental health problems out on the street…These are people with real needs and there’s no homeschool association to take care of them, no church that can take care of them, no neighborhood group—it’s a situation where government does seem like the answer.”
“I am not sure most conservatives believe that world exists,” he says. “Or, they do, but since they think those problems exist because of Democrats’ policies, those problems SHOULDN’T exist, and then their brains lock up and start to smoke when you ask for a solution.”
So, how do you fix that? I ask.
“If I had my way, every candidate would go on a ride-along with police on the coldest night of the year, when they pick people up because they literally won’t survive otherwise.”
And, he said, there needs to be more conservative candidates and fewer movement activists, period—more people faced with the task of looking in the eyes of those on the other end of an philosophically unpalatable policy “and trying to thread that needle.”
“You know it only costs, on average, $2,000 to $4,000 to run for school board? How many people here do you think could afford that? Stop watching Fox News and go run.”
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, February 27, 2015
“Don’t Blame Liberal Media For Giuliani Gaffe”: The Go-To Explanation Among Conservatives For Almost Everything That Happens
We’ve had a terrific demonstration over the last week or so of why the belief in liberal media bias is so strong.
It isn’t because of actual liberal media bias. Academic research finds plenty of ways the press gets things wrong, but an ideological slant isn’t one of them.
Most bias has to do with the industry’s norms (stories involving the president get more play than articles about governors, and so on). In some cases, the self-interest of the media plays a role, whether it’s promoting freedom of the press, for example, or building up anyone who might take on Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination as a way to build interest in that snooze fest.
What sustains the belief in liberal bias? It’s the go-to explanation among conservatives for almost everything that happens, and has been for at least four decades. Repeat something long enough, without strong opposition, and people will accept it.
So the reaction to the Rudy Giuliani story, in which the former New York mayor claimed Barack Obama didn’t “love” America, invoked howls of media bias from conservatives. Some said it wasn’t a story at all — Giuliani hasn’t been in office for years, so who cares what he says? Isn’t there real news out there? Others were upset that Republican candidates were pressed to agree or disagree with Giuliani — look, the liberal media is trying to make conservative politicians look stupid!
But we had an almost perfect parallel in the coverage of Howard Dean’s complaint that Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin shouldn’t be president because he didn’t graduate from college.
Giuliani left office in 2001, ran for president in 2008, has since been out of active politics but shows up on TV all the time. Dean left office a year after Giuliani did, ran for president in 2004, was Democratic National Committee chairman through 2008, has since been out of active politics but shows up on TV all the time.
Republicans were forced to take a stand on whether Obama loves America; Democrats were pressed to say if they thought a college dropout was unqualified to be president.
The Giuliani story was bigger only because attacking the president is a bigger deal than attacking one of many Republican presidential candidates, and New York (where much of the national media is based) trumps Vermont.
Both accusations were pretty much denounced by everyone; both sparked predictable partisan bashing and a few interesting reflections.
But liberals didn’t go crying about conservative media bias in the Dean-Walker case because they don’t see every news story as an example of prejudice against them. Conservatives do.
For example, they screamed that the media ignored the scandal ending the career of Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber of Oregon, but as Philip Bump explained, this too was caused by ordinary press norms, not ideological bias. Kitzhaber’s scandals were undercovered (at least in the national media) compared with those of Republican Chris Christie because Christie is running for president and he’s a governor in the New York area. Think about it. The press hardly ignored scandals costing Democratic Governors Rod Blagojevich or Eliot Spitzer their jobs. It’s just that Democrats never interpreted those firestorms as examples of Republican media bias.
There’s nothing wrong with pointing out when news coverage is wrong or wrong-headed. But ideology isn’t at the root of those mistakes and biases.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Columnist for Bloomberg View; The National Memo, February 25, 2015
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