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The Tea Party Plan To Save Scott Walker

Tea partiers are gung-ho to help the Wisconsin governor fend off a recall vote—and their fate may well be tied to his.

As soon as April, millions of Wisconsinites will vote on whether to oust Gov. Scott Walker—a rising Republican star and arguably the most polarizing governor in politics today—just two years into his first term in office. Walker’s recall election is a referendum on his hardline conservative agenda, including curbing collective bargaining rights for state workers and slashing education funding. For Walker himself it’s a pivotal moment in his young political career.

The recall fight is also a crucial test for the tea party, the populist movement that helped elect Walker in 2010, vigorously defended him during last winter’s protests over his anti-union “budget repair” bill, and has been organizing to prevent his ouster. The movement’s support is flagging, its clout dwindling, its buzz mostly gone. But now, tea partiers at the state and national levels are rallying around Walker’s recall defense, hoping a victory could bolster the movement in a critical election year. A defeat, on the other hand, would give ammo to liberals and conservatives alike who say the tea party is all but dead.

In recent months, the Tea Party Express, a national organization, and the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, a tea party-linked political action committee, have waded into the recall fight, blasting out more than a dozen emails to supporters and launching a $100,000 “money bomb” fundraiser to help defend Walker. They argue that the outcome has national implications for the 2012 presidential election; a Tea Party Express email to supporters in January announced that Wisconsin is “Ground Zero for the Battle Against Obama’s Liberal Agenda.”

The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama says it has raked in small  donations from supporters throughout the country, from Napa, California, to  Nashua, New Hampshire. The group’s director of grassroots outreach, Donald La  Combe, wrote in an email to supporters that funds would go toward TV and  radio ad campaigns as well as “war rooms” throughout Wisconsin to  bolster Walker’s support among voters. “We’re going to win this fight,  we’re going to DEFEAT the RECALL, and we’re going to stop Barack Obama  from getting Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral Votes,” La Combe wrote. (Neither  of the above groups responded to requests for comment.)

Two Wisconsin tea party groups, We the People of the Republic and the Wisconsin Grandsons of Liberty, claim to have signed up  11,000 volunteers and trained 4,000 of them to scrutinize the estimated 1  million signatures gathered by Walker foes. That signature total was  nearly two times the 540,208 needed to launch the recall process;  nonetheless, the two groups’ vetting operation, VerifyTheRecall.com,  was created to root out duplicate signatures and “downright fraud”  found in recall petitions for Walker and Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch,  their website says. Meanwhile, the Wisconsin branch of Americans for  Prosperity, the Koch-funded group that helped train and grow the tea party, held a town hall earlier this month touting the budget reforms enacted by Walker and state Republicans.

It’s not hard to see why the tea partiers would go all-in to defend Walker. There is no clear tea party favorite left to rally behind in the 2012 GOP presidential nomination fight with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain  all out of the race. Walker, on the other hand, is right in the tea  party’s sweet spot: He battles unions, axes state spending, rejects federal funding, and is rigidly pro-life and pro-gun rights.

The tea party also has a lot of political capital invested in Walker.  When intense anger over Walker’s anti-union “budget repair” bill  spilled into the streets of the state capital of Madison last February,  Americans for Prosperity swooped in to hold a counter-protest defending Walker. Other tea party groups also rushed to the aid of Walker and ripped his critics.

“Walker is a central figure to them, their Sir Galahad battling the  evil unions,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociology professor and coauthor of The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism. Walker ultimately signed the bill into law in March, and it later survived multiple legal challenges.

Last summer, Tea Party Express and Tea Party Nation, two national  groups, launched a four-day bus tour across Wisconsin defending six  Republicans facing recall elections for their roles in the battle over  Walker’s anti-union bill. (Republicans lost two recall races, but clung  to a narrow, one-seat majority in the state Senate—a “victory” the tea  party claimed credit for.) Tea Party Express also ran TV ads defending Walker’s agenda on the economy.

How much influence does the tea party have at this point? An analysis  last July by the liberal blog Think Progress found that the number of  events held each month by the Tea Party Patriots, a national group, had  dropped by half in the first seven months of 2011 compared with the  same period in 2010. Harvard’s Skocpol affirms that tea party events  “are falling off some, but there is not a collapse.”

A Pew Research Center analysis published in November  found that 23 percent of people in the 60 districts represented nationwide by  House Tea Party Caucus members disagreed with the tea party, up from 18  percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, 25 percent of respondents in those  districts agreed with the tea party, an 8 percent drop. And a Rasmussen poll  this month reported that dislike of the tea party was at an all-time  high—and that 46 percent of respondents said the tea party would hurt  the GOP in the 2012 elections.

A recent Marquette University poll  (PDF) found similarly lackluster support for the tea party in  Wisconsin. Forty one percent of respondents thought poorly of the tea  party while 33 percent viewed it favorably.

Still, even if the tea party suffers a major defeat with Walker’s  recall, their influence will be felt for years to come given the  hardline agendas promoted by state and federal lawmakers swept into  office in 2010. And Skocpol says the recall election could be a  galvanizing event for the movement. “Because all of the tea party forces  have not been able to unite on a GOP candidate for president, they’re  going to redouble on things like the Wisconsin crusade,” she says.  “Grassroots tea partiers everywhere will be be following and  contributing to the Walker campaign.”

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

The Winds Of Racism On The GOP Campaign Trail

Here are some things you could learn about black Americans from the recent statements and insinuations of Republican presidential candidates, Republican congressmen and Republican-friendly radio personalities:

Black people have lost the desire to perform a day’s work. Black people rely on food stamps provided to them by white taxpayers. Black people, including Barack and Michelle Obama, believe that the U.S. owes them somethingbecause they are black. Black children should work as janitors in their high schools as a way to keep them from becoming pimps. And the pathologies afflicting black Americans are caused partly by the Democratic Party, which has created in them a dependency on government not dissimilar to the forced dependency of slaves on their owners.

Judging by these claims, all of which have actually been put forward recently, here is a modest prediction: This presidential election will be one of the most race-soaked in recent history. It is already more race-soaked than the 2008 election, which, of course, marked the first time that a black man became a major-party candidate.

I don’t know why this is. Perhaps because Senator John McCain, the Republican contender in 2008, generally and admirably refused to race-bait. But the Republican candidates in today’s contest aren’t so meticulous about avoiding the temptation to dog-whistle their way to the nomination.

A Dark Art

Dog-whistling — the use of coded, ambiguous language to appeal to the prejudices of certain subsets of voters –is one of the darkest political arts. In this race, Newt Gingrich is streets ahead of his nearest competitor in its use. In addition to his comments about black children working as janitors, he has repeatedly referred to Obama as the country’s “food-stamp president.”

Food stamps have been fixed in the minds of many white voters as a government subsidy misused by blacks at leastsince 1976, when Ronald Reagan complained of “strapping young bucks” who used public assistance to buy “T-bone steaks.” (It is distressing to remember, in light of Reagan’s subsequent beatification, that he was to racial dog-whistling what Pat Buchanan has been to Jew-baiting; it was Reagan who also introduced the “welfare queen” into public discourse.)

The genius of dog-whistling is its deniability. It would be difficult for a figure such as Rush Limbaugh to run for public office, given his record of fairly straightforward race-baiting. (Limbaugh, who in the words of Harvard Law School’s Randall Kennedy is an “excellent entrepreneur of racial resentment,” has been on a tear lately. He has accused Obama — who he says “talks honky”around white people — and the first lady of abusing public funds as payback for the ill-treatment afforded their ancestors.)

But “food-stamp president” is just indirect enough that Gingrich is protected from detrimental blowback, at least during the largely white Republican primaries.

Kennedy, who studies the role of race in national elections, told me last week of a rule he uses to measure whether a candidate’s appeal to prejudice will succeed: If it takes more than two sentences for a critic to explain why a dog-whistle is a dog-whistle, the whistler wins. Gingrich seems to understand this, and so, despite criticism from blacks, has made the term “food-stamppresident” a staple of his stump speeches.

New Realization

Kennedy offers the theory that this campaign’s dog-whistling may be prompted by a realization by right-leaning provocateurs that voters have become inured to charges of racism. I suspect another phenomenon has hastened this realization: A handful of black Republicans have abetted dog-whistling by making their own bombastic statements about the degraded moral health of the black community, the putative foreignness of the Obamas and the Democratic Party’s plantation-like qualities.

The former presidential candidate Herman Cain, who last week endorsed Gingrich, told me in an interview last year that Obama was more “international” than American. He also said that, unlike Obama, he rejects the label“African-American” because he feels “more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa.”

Representative Allen West of Florida, one of two black Republican House members, recently called the Democratic Party a “21st-century plantation” and compared himself to Harriet Tubman. In August, he said, “Today in the black community, we see individuals who are either wedded to a subsistence check or an employment check. Democrat physical enslavement has now become liberal economic enslavement, which is just as horrible.”

How far in intent is West’s message from this one, recently delivered by Rick Santorum in Sioux City, Iowa: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money.” (Santorum laterdenied that he said the word “black,” arguing that what he actually said was “blah.” The denial is not credible.)

The writer Gary Younge has noted that in Woodbury County, which includes Sioux City, nine times more whites use food stamps than blacks do. But it doesn’t matter: Santorum wasn’t driven from the race for making such a blatant appeal to white resentment — instead, he won the Iowa caucus.

An Odd Video

Recently, I watched an educational children’s video produced by a company part-owned by Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and current Fox News host). The video series, called “Learn Our History,” is meant as a corrective to a left-wing interpretation of the American story.

In one episode, a group of children are transported to Washington, in the late 1970s, a time when, we are told,“people are out of work and some of their morals are just gone.” The group, walking down a cartoon version of a street from “The Wire,” is confronted by a black mugger in a tank-top emblazoned with the word “Disco.” (Yes,“Disco.”) The mugger says to the time-travelers, “Gimme yo money!”

I asked Huckabee why the video advanced this particular stereotype. We had been speaking about the rationale for the video series, and he had just finished telling me that the project was meant to encourage moral leadership. Then he told me he had nothing to do with writing the show’s scripts, but it was his impression that the mugger wasn’t meant to be black. In any case, we were talking about a cartoon, he said, and cartoons traffic in“caricature.”

This is something cartoons share with many of today’s leading Republicans.

 

By: Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic, January 31, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates, Racism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Art Of Insincerity”: Mitt Romney, Like Father, Like Son?

In conservative political folklore, the 1964 election was a crushing defeat that laid the philosophical groundwork that ultimately led to Ronald Reagan’s triumph.

No one likes to talk as proudly about 1968’s razor-thin election of  Richard Nixon. It’s much more sanitary to take Sen. Barry Goldwater and  skip straight to Reagan. But ’68 was at least as important as ’64, and  maybe more so; it was that campaign that yielded the potent Southern strategy;  the counter-counterculture; the full-throated resentment toward coastal  elites. If ’64 was aimed at the conservative mind, ’68 was aimed at the  conservative viscera.

The late Gov. George Romney, of course, was a minor figure in the  drama of ’68. A moderate Rockefeller Republican, he would lose soundly  to Nixon, the former vice president and California senator.

With all this in mind, I looked up one of my favorite modern political histories, Garry Wills’s Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man.

Here’s what Wills had to say about that era’s candidate Romney:

Romney built up a belief in his “nonpolitical”  background: here was a man (men thought) who worked his way up in the  business world and then—sincere novice amid deal-fettered pros—entered  politics with the innocence of an outsider. The truth is that Romney  began his career in politics, after three unsuccessful attempts (at  three different schools) to get a college education. He went to  Washington, in pursuit of his childhood sweetheart, the intense Lenore,  and got a job as an aide to Senator David Walsh of Massachusetts. He did  work on tariff bills that equipped him for a new career—a lobbyist for  Alcoa, he spent nine years as a Washington glad-hander around Burning  Tree Country Club and the National Press Club. Then he became an  automobile lobbyist (on the carmakers’ Trade Advisory Commission),  dealing with the National Recovery Administration. From this post he  rose to become manager of the AMA (American Manufacturers  Association)—an office that made him, in wartime, managing director of  the Automotive Council for War Production. He had now spent nineteen  years fronting for big business among politicians.

Hmph. This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn’t it? To be fair, former  Gov. Mitt Romney succeeded in business before failing at politics, and  he never was a lobbyist. But there’s still the same “pious baloney” about a private-sector white knight riding in to save government.

Yet here are a couple of key differences between Romney pere and  fils. According to Wills, George Romney wasn’t known for smarts: “Robert  McNamara, who urged Romney to get into politics when they were both  auto men around Detroit, later came to know him better: Romney’s  trouble, he concluded, is that the man ‘has no brains.’ ”

Even more interesting, there’s this. Romney’s presidential ambitions  were significantly thwarted by his change of heart over the Vietnam  War. He’d gone from supporting it as “morally right and necessary” to  calling for peace “at an early time.” He compared a briefing he’d  received in November 1965 to “brainwashing.”

This was no convenient flip-flop, however. Wills notes:

His greatest gift had been mesmeric power to convince  others because he so convinced himself. The blue eyes burn toward you  under that low white cap of hair; the block of athletic face is rigid  with fresh seizures of sincerity. He has a fanatic’s belief in  everything he says or does, and a prophet’s fierce anger if anyone  questions him. A desire to keep his burning conviction unsullied by  earthly ties explains his later aloofness from politics and politicians.  … He went down, thrashing ridiculously, in 1968; yet he maintained to  the end that it was a public service for him to call his briefing a  case of successful brainwashing.

In this, the son is strikingly unlike the father. It’s clear that,  whatever else Mitt Romney gleaned from the experience of ’68, he learned  about the sometimes necessary art of insincerity. Everything about  Mitt’s political career to this point suggests that he’s not content to  go down in honorable defeat, as Goldwater did. He will not be undone by  “seizures of sincerity” or a “prophet’s anger.” He is smarter, more  devious, and more contemptuous than his father.

If he could speak to his father on the other side, he might say, “You  tried your way, Dad. Now I’m trying mine. This is how a Rockefeller  Republican overcomes the ‘muttonheads’ who fell for Goldwater and  Nixon.”

 

By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, January 31, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Agony Of Suppressed Contempt”: Why Mitt Romney Hates Republicans

The Republican primary campaign has highlighted the barely concealed contempt in which Mitt Romney holds the electorate, especially the Republican electorate. One adviser has expressed his astonishment that GOP voters fall for clowns like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich:

“They like preachers,” the adviser said of the tea party demographic. “If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.”

That is an insult putatively directed at Romney’s rivals, but which reflects heavily on the voters themselves. Another fresh insult comes today, by way of John Dickerson, who reports that Gingrich’s assault on Juan Williams worked because “‘Williams was a stand-in for Barack Obama in people’s minds,’ said one Romney adviser.”

Gee, whatever could Williams and Obama have in common? Can this be interpreted as meaning anything other than that South Carolina Republicans are a pack of racist buffoons?

Romney’s disdain for the electorate is one of his more deeply rooted traits. During his father’s 1968 presidential campaign, Romney wrote, “how can the American public like such muttonheads?”

I find that contempt pretty well-founded, and it is a relief that Romney does not believe the nonsense he spouts during the campaign. But the persistent awkwardness of Romney’s campaign style reflects this basic tension. It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.

 

By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 1, 2012

February 1, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Hallucinations” And “Requisite Experience”: Why Does Mitt Romney Want To Be President?

When the empire strikes back, it hits hard. The Republican establishment is deploying every weapon and every soldier — even Bob Dole — in an increasingly desperate attempt to pulverize the Newt Gingrich rebellion. Eventually, the shock-and-awe campaign may work.

But then what? In the establishment’s best-case scenario, the party is left with Mitt Romney, a candidate whose core message, as far as I can tell, seems to be: “Yes, I made a ton of money. You got a problem with that?”

It is remarkable that the well-orchestrated blitzkrieg to save Florida for Romney was designed solely to raise doubts about Gingrich’s character and electability — rather than convince voters that Romney, on the merits, should be president. It makes you wonder whether the GOP luminaries supporting this guy really believe in him.

A statement issued last week by elder statesman Dole began by arguing that “if Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.” Dole went on to criticize Gingrich as highhanded and erratic, before ending his brief missive with another dose of realpolitik.

“In my opinion if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer,” Dole wrote. “He has the requisite experience in the public and private sectors. He would be a president we could have confidence in.”

“Requisite experience” isn’t much of a hallelujah, yet it’s typical of the pro-Romney chorus that has been singing so loudly since Gingrich won the South Carolina primary. Meanwhile, the voices of some key potential choristers haven’t been heard at all: Two of the most prominent Republicans in Florida, former governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, have declined to endorse anyone for the nomination.

But what has Romney given his supporters to work with? Yes, he served as governor of Massachusetts and implemented health insurance reforms that became the model for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act. Yes, he earned a quarter of a billion dollars as a private-equity mogul. These résuméitems are supposed to be a compelling reason to send him to the White House?

Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul have all laid out bold visions — more properly, hallucinations — of where they would take the country. But where is Romney’s shining city on a hill? What’s his “compassionate conservatism,” his “hope and change”? What is it that Mitt Romney, deep in his heart or down in his gut, really believes in?

“Free enterprise” seems to be what he’s most passionate about, but that’s not really an answer to the question of core beliefs. Who doesn’t believe in free enterprise? Obama would advocate a bit more regulation of markets than Romney would; Santorum and Paul, less. Gingrich, of course, wants free-market spaceships to fly us to the moon.

Obama wants to rearrange our priorities to make the nation more prosperous, competitive and humane. Gingrich basically has the same goal, except he would do it in a completely different way — and there would be a much bigger role for space travel. Santorum’s policy positions add up to a return to “compassionate conservatism” and, perhaps, a war with Iran. Paul wants to decimate the federal government and force the few remaining workers to surrender their computers and use quill pens.

And Romney? Well, he has a 160-page economic plan. What he doesn’t seem to have is a compelling narrative about the kind of America he envisions and the road he will take to get us there.

This is not to say that he is necessarily incapable of developing such a narrative — or, for that matter, that he is incapable of beating Obama. The president and his advisers have at times done a mediocre job of telling the administration’s story. They need to better explain how individual decisions, such as delaying the controversial Keystone pipeline, fit into a coherent Big Picture of where the country needs to go.

Romney has become a very good debater, and his attack lines about Obama are honed and barbed. The only reason he still has a fight on his hands for the nomination, really, is that he let his opponents reduce his argument for the presidency to a defense of how he earned and manages his great wealth.

No matter how much he claims otherwise, the fact is that few people are envious of Romney’s business success. We just want to know if that’s all he has to offer.

 

By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 30, 2012

January 31, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012, GOP Presidential Candidates | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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