“The GOP Has Reached A New Height”: Have Republicans Ever Hated A President More Than Barack Obama?
It’s getting harder to deny.
The widespread belief on the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim is one of the stranger features of this period in history. There are some of them who know that Obama says he’s a Christian but are sure that’s all an act designed to fool people, while he secretly prays to Allah. But there are probably a greater number who haven’t given it all that much thought; they just heard somewhere that he’s a Muslim, and it made perfect sense to them—after all, he’s kinda foreign, if you know what I mean. Rather remarkably, that belief has grown over time; as the latest poll from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows, fully 30 percent of Republicans, and 34 percent of conservative Republicans, now believe Obama is Muslim. These numbers are about double what they were four years ago.
You can bet there aren’t too many who think there’s nothing wrong with it if he were. For many of them, it’s just a shorthand for Obama being alien and threatening. So it leads me to ask: Can we say, finally, that no Democratic president has ever been hated by Republicans quite as much as Barack Obama?
In the past when this question has been asked, the sensible reply is to not forget history. After all, when Bill Clinton was president, one of the Republican Party’s most respected figures distributed videotapes of a documentary alleging that Clinton was the head of a drug ring and had murdered dozens of people. And they did impeach him the first chance they got. Republicans had a visceral hatred for Franklin Roosevelt, too.
But I really think we’ve reached a new height. What makes this different isn’t just the kind of venom you see among the party’s true-believing supporters but that the hate goes so far up, all the way to the top. The party’s candidate for president literally claims that Obama hates capitalism and is not really American (Mitt Romney recently said, and not for the first time, that Obama has a “very strange, and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy”). Liberals look at conservatives claiming that Obama is a socialist or that he doesn’t really love America and think, “Those people are nuts.” But there is practically consensus in the GOP that these things are true. If a Republican candidate came out today and said, “Barack Obama is a good person who loves his country, but I just think he’s wrong about policy,” that candidate would probably get kicked out of the party.
This antipathy has multiple sources interacting together, so it’s overly simplistic to say that it’s just because of Obama’s race, or it’s just because of heightened partisanship. But it’s getting harder and harder to claim that there’s ever been a Democrat Republicans hated more.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012
“It’s Not About The Gaffes”: It’s What Mitt Romney Says When He’s Thinking
Mitt Romney’s slips of the tongue aren’t the problem: It’s what he says when he’s thinking.
Mitt Romney is getting a lot of grief for the not-so-auspicious beginning to his first overseas trip as leader of the Republican party. In case you’ve been trapped in a well for the last two days, when he was asked by Brian Williams how, in his expert opinion, he thought London was doing in preparing for the start of the Olympics, instead of offering the expected polite banality (“I’m sure it’s going to be terrific”), Romney said something a bit more honest, saying that there were “a few things that were disconcerting” about the preparations. The Brits were not amused, and he got very public pushback from both Prime Minister David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson. It’s all well and good to enjoy Romney’s misfortune on this score. But let’s not forget: The real problem with Romney isn’t what he blurts out by accident, it’s what he says when he has plenty of time to consider his words.
As I’ve written a zillion times, running for president is very difficult, and one of the hardest things is having every word that comes out of your mouth recorded, analyzed, and often twisted around and taken out of context. No one, and I mean no one, can go through that process without saying something that gets them in trouble on a fairly regular basis. Even the most talented politicians had their share of “gaffes.” Barack Obama has. Bill Clinton did. Ronald Reagan did. No matter how good you are, it’ll happen. And if you’re not very good (and even Mitt Romney’s admirers won’t say he’s a natural politician) it’s going to happen even more.
Many of Romney’s gaffes can be pretty easily forgiven. When he said “Corporations are people, my friend,” for instance, he was trying to say that corporate profits eventually find their way to humans. In the case of the Olympic gaffe, other than being undiplomatic, there wasn’t anything inherently horrible about what he said. But if you look broadly at Romney’s rhetoric, what you see is not only that he tells extemporaneous lies quite frequently, but more important, he repeats lies long after it has become clear that they are in fact wrong.
There are plenty of examples; one of my favorites is how for years, Romney has been saying that Barack Obama “went around the world apologizing for America,” a claim that is just false. And the latest example is how Romney has dishonestly ripped from context an Obama quote about how businesses benefit from the collective effort of other citizens and from government. It would be one thing if Romney used his distortion of Obama’s words to needle him in a couple of speeches. But Romney has practically decided to base his entire campaign on it, from making ads about it to printing signs about it, to organizing events around it. And I promise you, neither Mitt Romney nor any sane person who works for him actually believes that what Obama meant to say was that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. They know what he said and they know what he meant, but they decided that they don’t really give a crap.
And this tendency, far more than all of Romney’s “gaffes,” is what really gives us insight into who he is. Perhaps as president Romney would only lie about unimportant things, and to no greater degree than the average president. But his performance so far suggests otherwise.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012
“Where’s The Outrage”: This Election Might Not Just Be Won Or Lost, It Could Be Bought Or Stolen
Are too many Democratic voters sleepwalking away from our democracy this election cycle, not nearly outraged enough about Big Money’s undue influence and Republican state legislatures changing the voting rules?
It seems so.
A Gallup poll released this week found that: “Democrats are significantly less likely now (39 percent) than they were in the summers of 2004 and 2008 to say they are ‘more enthusiastic about voting than usual’ in the coming presidential election.” Republicans are more enthusiastic than they were before the last election.
Some of that may be the effect of having a Democratic president in office; it’s sometimes easier to marshal anger against an incumbent than excitement for him. Whatever the reason, this lack of enthusiasm at this critical juncture in the election is disturbing for Democrats.
First, there’s the specter of the oligarchy lingering over this election, which disproportionately benefits Republicans. According to a report by Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, “So far this year, 26 billionaires have donated more than $61 million to super PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And that’s only what has been publicly disclosed.” That didn’t include “about $100 million that Sheldon Adelson has said that he is willing to spend to defeat President Obama; or the $400 million that the Koch brothers have pledged to spend during the 2012 election season.”
During a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday, Sanders put it this way: “What the Supreme Court did in Citizens United is to say to these same billionaires and the corporations they control: ‘You own and control the economy; you own Wall Street; you own the coal companies; you own the oil companies. Now, for a very small percentage of your wealth, we’re going to give you the opportunity to own the United States government.’ ”
Then, of course, there’s the widespread voter suppression mostly enacted by Republican-led legislatures.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, at least 180 restrictive voting bills were introduced since the beginning of 2011 in 41 states, and “16 states have passed restrictive voting laws that have the potential to impact the 2012 election” because they “account for 214 electoral votes, or nearly 79 percent of the total needed to win the presidency.”
A provision most likely to disenfranchise voters is a requirement that people show photo identification to vote. Millions of Americans don’t have these forms of ID, and many can’t easily obtain them, even when states say they’ll offer them free, because getting the documentation to obtain the “free” ID takes time and money.
This is a solution in search of a problem. The in-person voter ID requirements only prevent someone from impersonating another voter at the polls, an occurrence that the Brennan Center points out is “more rare than being struck by lightning.”
The voting rights advocates I’ve talked to don’t resist all ID requirements (though they don’t say they are all necessary, either). They simply say that multiple forms of identification like student ID and Social Security cards should also be accepted, and that alternate ways for people without IDs to vote should be included. Many of these laws don’t allow for such flexibility.
Make no mistake about it, these requirements are not about the integrity of the vote but rather the disenfranchisement of voters. This is about tilting the table so that more of the marbles roll to the Republican corner.
Look at it this way: We have been moving toward wider voter participation for a century. States began to issue driver’s licenses more than a century ago and began to include photos on those licenses decades ago. Yet, as the Brennan Center points out, “prior to the 2006 election, no state required its voters to show government-issued photo ID at the polls (or elsewhere) in order to vote.”
Furthermore, most voter laws have emerged in the last two years. What is the difference between previous decades and today? The election of Barack Obama. It is no coincidence that some of the people least likely to have proper IDs to vote are the ones that generally vote Democratic and were strong supporters of Obama last election: young people, the poor and minorities.
Republicans are leveraging the deep pockets of anti-Obama billionaires and sinister voter suppression tactics that harken back to Jim Crow to wrest power from the hands of docile Democrats.
There is little likely to be done about the Big Money before the election, and, although some of the voter suppression laws are being challenged in court, the outcome of those cases is uncertain.
These elements are not within voters’ control, but two things are: energy and alertness.
If Democrats don’t wake up soon, this election might not just be won or lost, it could be bought or stolen.
By: Charles M. Blow, )p-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 27, 2012
“It’s Not Just Freaks”: Who’s Affected By Pennsylvania’s Voter-ID Law?
The ACLU’s smart lawsuit shows it’s not just freaks who don’t have government-issued identification.
As the first big lawsuit against the Pennsylvania’s voter-ID law starts its third day at trial, arguments about the legality of the law have focused largely on who’s impacted by it. First, the secretary of the commonwealth estimated as many as 758,000 Pennsylvanians lacked the most common form of ID—those issued by the state Department of Transportation. A political scientist’s study showed that number to be around a million. Either way, it’s a lot of people, and we know a disproportionate number of them are poor, nonwhite, and elderly.
Still, those supporting strict voter-ID laws, which require citizens to show government-issued identification before voting, often cast suspicion on anyone without an ID. They argue that you need photo identification for pretty much anything these days, and people without them must be freaks or criminals—people we don’t want voting anyway. Republican Texas state Representative Jose Aliseda exemplifies this position; he recently said that anyone lacking a photo ID is probably in the country illegally or a recluse like the Unabomber.
In response, the ACLU, along with the other groups involved, made a brilliant move to publicize the stories of the ten plaintiffs. They’ve written up summaries of each person’s plight, made videos, and pushed the stories in the press. Those wondering just who these strange people without ID are getting an answer: Quite a few are little old ladies.
Of the ten people in the lawsuit, five are over 80. The chief plaintiff, Viviette Applewhite, is 93, and arrived in court in a wheelchair wearing “a gray sweater and a white lace hat,” according to Reuters. She was a civil-rights activist who marched in Macon, Georgia, with Martin Luther King, but even with all the time between now and the election, she’s probably not going to be able to get the necessary ID. Applewhite, who does not drive, took her husband’s name. That is the name she had on her Social Security card. But when her purse was stolen, the only document that she could get was a birth certificate—with her maiden name. Applewhite had a common-law marriage, so there’s no document to account for the mismatched name.
Applewhite isn’t the only elderly woman on the plaintiff list. There’s also Joyce Block, a spring chicken at 89, whose Social Security card and birth certificate were in her maiden name while her voter registration was in her married name. Block’s marriage certificate is in Hebrew and apparently the the clerks at the DMV were a little rusty in their ancient languages—they said the certificate could not be used as a proof of name change. Several of the other octogenarians in the case could not get copies of their birth certificates (necessary to get the IDs) because the state where they were born does not issue them.
Of course, older ladies aren’t the only ones in the lawsuit or the only ones with powerful stories. There’s Grover Freeland, a veteran whose only photo ID is his veteran’s card, issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. But that card is not an acceptable form of ID under the Pennsylvania law. The ten plaintiffs all have different reasons why they cannot get an ID, but almost all of them are regular voters who now stand to lose their ability to cast a ballot.
Voting is a citizen’s fundamental duty and right, and those who fall outside of the mainstream have just as much of a right to vote as the mainstream. However, for the purposes of winning public support in this case, the ACLU was smart to choose and highlight relatable people who are impacted by the law. As with Republicans’ claims that voter ID laws were motivated purely by the need to cut down on voter fraud (which is virtually nonexistent), their claim that there’s something downright weird about people who lack photo IDs is now being exploded.
By: Abby Rapoport, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012
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