“The Decline Of Conservative Publishing”: The Days Of Two-Bit Hacks With Anti-Liberal Screeds Getting On Bestseller Lists Are Over
As a liberal who has written a few books whose sales were, well let’s just say “modest” and leave it at that, I’ve always looked with envy at the system that helps conservatives sell lots and lots of books. The way it worked was that you wrote a book, and then you got immediately plugged into a promotion machine that all but guaranteed healthy sales. You’d go on a zillion conservative talk shows, be put in heavy rotation on Fox News, get featured by conservative book clubs, and even have conservative organizations buy thousands of copies of your books in bulk. If you were really lucky, that last item would push the book onto the bestseller lists, getting you even more attention.
It worked great, for the last 15 years or so. But McKay Coppins reports that the success of conservative publishing led to its own decline. As mainstream publishers saw the money being made by conservative houses like Regnery and the occasional breakthrough of books by people like Allan Bloom and Charles Murray, they decided to get into the act with right-leaning imprints of their own. But now, “Many of the same conservatives who cheered this strategy at the start now complain that it has isolated their movement’s writers from the mainstream marketplace of ideas, wreaked havoc on the economics of the industry, and diminished the overall quality of the work.”
I find that last part puzzling; it isn’t as though the anti-Clinton screeds of the 1990s were carefully researched and written with style, but that didn’t stop them from selling well. It seems as though this is mostly a reflection of the problems in the publishing industry as a whole. But one sub-niche that is definitely suffering is the pre-presidential-campaign book. Bizarrely, publishers still compete fervently to sign every last senator running a quixotic presidential campaign, on the off-chance that he might become president and then his book would sell spectacularly. But all but one of the candidates fails, and then the publishers have wasted their money. Just look at the pathetic sales some of these guys have generated:
For example, Tim Pawlenty, a short-lived presidential candidate in 2012, received an advance of around $340,000 for his 2010 book Courage to Stand. But the book went on to sell only 11,689 copies, according to Nielsen Bookscan, which tracks most, but not all, bookstore sales. What’s more, Pawlenty’s political action committee bought at least 5,000 of those copies itself in a failed attempt to get it on the New York Times best-seller list, according to one person with knowledge of the strategy.
This pattern continues as you scan the works of recent and prospective Republican presidential candidates. According to one knowledgeable source, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker received an even larger advance than Pawlenty’s, and Bookscan has his 2013 book Unintimidated selling around 16,000 copies. Sen. Rand Paul’s latest, Government Bullies, has barely cracked 10,000 sold; and despite spending months in the 2012 GOP primaries, Rick Santorum’s book about the founding fathers, American Patriots, sold just 6,538 copies. Perhaps most surprising, Immigration Wars, co-authored by Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who consistently polls in the top tier of the Republican 2016 field, sold just 4,599 copies.
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio’s 2012 autobiography, American Son, has sold around 36,000 copies — a figure one conservative agent described as “respectable,” before pointing out that Rubio received an astounding $800,000 advance, according to a financial disclosure. The publisher’s bet, he speculated, was that Rubio was going to be selected as Mitt Romney’s running mate. He wasn’t.
Frankly, I have trouble seeing why anyone would want to drop $26 on one of these books, because they’re uniformly awful, even if you really like the guy who “wrote” it. Yet when one after another of these books sells terribly, the publishers keep buying them. This is yet more evidence, in case anyone needed any, that publishers are terrible businesspeople.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 20, 2014
“McConnell’s Tea Party Nightmare”: He Can’t Kill Them Because They Run His Party
OK, Sen. Mitch McConnell wasn’t brandishing a rifle at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday in order to shoot Tea Party marauders. The unpopular Senate Minority Leader was just trying to avoid being booed by the crowd, using the most reliable prop on the far right, a gun (President Obama in handcuffs would probably work well too). But the embattled leader did go ballistic this weekend, figuratively, on his party’s restive far-right activists. The Tea Party is not going to be able to knock off GOP senators in red states, McConnell warned.
“I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell told the New York Times. “I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”
Not surprisingly, McConnell is starting with his own Tea Party challenger, Matt Bevin. He released a new ad trashing not only Bevin but the Senate Conservatives Fund that’s backing him, charging the group “solicits money under the guise of advocating for conservative principles but then spends it on a $1.4 million luxury townhouse with a wine cellar and hot tub in Washington, D.C.” Wine and hot tubs, you know what that means – these folks are probably just uppity liberal hypocrites in conservative clothing!
But McConnell’s crusade comes a few years too late. Clearly the Tea Party is already the mainstream of his party. Just last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll showed that Republican voters say a candidate’s Tea Party ties make it more likely they’ll support them, by a margin of nearly 2-1. Unfortunately for the GOP, Tea Party affiliation makes the broader electorate less likely to vote for a candidate by about the same margin.
Even some Republicans who the media oddly place in the “moderate” or pragmatic camp don’t belong there. Wisconsin’s scandal-challenged Gov. Scott Walker has bragged about being “the original Tea Party in Wisconsin.” In a popular CPAC session using Wisconsin as “the model” for union-busting and right-wing coalition politics, the RNC’s Reince Priebus credited “total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The [Glenn Beck-instigated] 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that …everyone was going to run down the tracks together.”
And while it’s true that Congressman Paul Ryan, endorsed in 2012 by the Tea Party Express as “the strong Tea Party candidate for Vice President,” has had tension with Tea Partiers since he partnered with Democratic Sen. Patty Murray to pass a budget, at CPAC Ryan downplayed the notion of a rift between himself and the party’s right, comparing intra-party debates to a “family reunion” among Irish-Americans. (Actually, nobody in my family wants to take lunches away from poor children, not even the Republicans among us.)
Now it is true that Tea Party challengers in three red states – Kentucky, Mississippi and Kansas – are having a hard time getting traction against reliably conservative GOP senate incumbents. One poll has McConnell up 42 points over Bevin; another has his lead at 26 points. Thad Cochran and Pat Roberts are likewise leading their Tea Party challengers.
But oddly, McConnell – and the Times – don’t even mention Georgia, where five extremists have been virtually tied for the lead in the GOP senate primary to succeed retiring Saxby Chambliss, competing for the opportunity to run against Michelle Nunn. The most extreme of the five, U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, just pulled ahead in the last PPP poll. Broun would abolish the IRS, the EPA and the Department of Education, and wants the U.S. to pull out of the United Nations. He’s called evolution and the big bang theory “lies from the pit of hell.” Interestingly though, Broun is the only GOP candidate with a (slight) lead over Nunn in an early head to head match up; the others trail her. Presumably, in a one on one race, Nunn and the Democrats would have a lot to work with battling Broun. He is an early contender to be the Todd Akin of the 2014 cycle.
“I know this: Politics doesn’t like losers,” McConnell told the Times, suggesting defeats in primaries in places like Kentucky and Mississippi would discourage Tea Party insurgents. “If you don’t have anything to point to, it is kind of hard to keep it going.”
But while McConnell has a big lead over Bevin, he’s trailing his Democratic challenger, secretary of state Alison Lundergan Grimes. It’s far too early to count McConnell out, but it’s worth asking whether the far-right’s animus towards McConnell will make him the ultimate loser in November.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 10, 2014
“Full Stomach, Lying Mouth”: Paul Ryan’s CPAC Speech Was Based On A Lie
Paul Ryan’s CPAC speech yesterday was almost comically offensive even before it became clear that it was based on a lie.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the speech itself, in which Ryan denounced the left for offering people “a full stomach— and an empty soul.” Discussing the moral squalor of free school lunch programs, Ryan retold a story he heard from Eloise Anderson, a former single mother on assistance who became a hero to the right by calling for the abolishment of welfare (She’s now a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet). It was about a boy Anderson had ostensibly met who didn’t want a free government lunch. “He wanted his own lunch—one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’,” said Ryan. “He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.”
Ryan’s words would have been nasty even if the underlying story were true. Do parents whose kids get subsidized school lunches not care for them? Does Ryan really think their souls are empty? Last night, however, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that the anecdote Ryan used was actually ripped out of context from the bestselling book “An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny.” The book is about the friendship between author Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck, whom Schroff met when he was begging on the street. At one point, she made him school lunches every day and left them with her doorman to pick up on the way to school. In a heartbreaking passage, Mazyck asked her to put them in a brown paper bag like the ones all the other kids had.
Anderson’s communication’s director now admits that she never actually spoke to Mazyck, though she appropriated his story when she testified last year at a congressional hearing chaired by Ryan. As it happens, Schroff and Mazyck have partnered with an organization called No Kid Hungry that, among other things, works to connect poor children to free school meals. “[A] simple inquiry would have determined that the person telling the story actually is an advocate for the federal programs that Ryan now claims leaves people with ‘a full stomach and an empty soul,’” writes Kessler, describing it as a story “too good to check.”
That in itself is telling, since even in it’s apocryphal version, it’s not that good of a story. After all, it’s not as if liberals think that free school lunches are better than homemade ones. The argument for free school lunches are that they are better than no lunch at all. The implication of Ryan’s “full stomach…empty soul” line is that he disagrees. He just knows better than to say so outright, and so he needs to hide behind an imaginary poor child.
By: Michelle Goldberg, The Nation, March 7, 2014
“Christie And The 7 Dwarves”: On The B-List Now, Not Remotely The Candidate He Was Two Months Ago
Is Chris Christie out of the running? This is the question everyone is asking. But it’s not the most important question. The most important question is a different and more subtle one: How, specifically and exactly, is Bridgegate hurting his presidential ambitions right now?
The way to answer this question is to begin by imagining a Christie to whom Bridgegate didn’t happen. He was overwhelmingly reelected. Half the Latino vote. Approval ratings near 70 percent. Media swooning. Speeches all over the country as head of the Republican Governors’ Association, with audiences treating him like the rock star he was instead of the potential felon he is.
You’ve thought of all that. But here’s what you may not have thought of. That Chris Christie could have spent the next six months meeting with every single big-money Republican in the country; every head of every important super PAC; every state chairman; and so on. He could have shown all of these people what the polling suggested—that he could beat Hillary Clinton. They all wouldn’t have backed him, of course. But a lot of them would have. Barring some strange development, he could have effectively ended the nomination fight before it even started.
Enter that stranger development, and poof! All gone. The Bridgegate Christie can’t do any of that stuff. He can still try. But with a federal investigation hanging over him, he’s not going to be able to lock money people down. Super PACs and state chairs aren’t going to touch him. He still might have to resign, or be impeached. There’s an off chance he could be…indicted!
So the race is on hold. And Christie, even if he is completely exonerated however many months from now, will still be hurt by it and have lost months of momentum.
So who, in the interim, gains momentum? That’s hard to say. Everyone seems to think Jeb Bush. But I don’t know. Bush has the liabilities everyone knows—his last name, mostly, and that fire-in-the-belly business. But he has some other ones as well. It’s been a while now since he was in office—eight years. That’s a pretty long time. Especially when, in that time, conservatism and the Republican Party have undergone the radical transformations they have. He did some things as governor that conservatives like, particularly on school choice and other education questions, and they must have seemed pioneering to people on the right at the time; but now, after everything’s shifted so far rightward? Plus, there’s just something about having been out of the game for that long that makes you less interesting.
Scott Walker may gain some speed. For one thing, he has to run for reelection this fall, which means he has to spend the next few months talking like a governor, not like a presidential candidate. He leads his potential Democratic opponents, but only by margins in the 47-42 range. That means, in a blue state, he can’t go around saying the crazy stuff that Republicans jockeying for presidential advantage are given to say. “He gets the big advantage, more than Bush, because he needs the race to start later,” says Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. So if Walker wins reelection, and Christie can’t string up commitments, then Walker may be looking strong by the end of the year.
Who else? Of the Tea Party Troika here inside the Beltway—Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul—it’s starting to look clearer and clearer as if Paul is the most serious one. He has his dad’s national network, and while that didn’t exactly win Pops a ton of votes, it’s an infrastructure to build on. Rubio blew it with immigration, and as for Cruz, I think even most Republicans see that that would be a kamikaze mission.
There are other governors besides Walker. Mike Pence of Indiana, Sam Brownback of Kansas. And don’t forget Rick Perry! And Mike Huckabee, too.
But honestly, who are these people, in national terms? Pence and Brownback are really right wing, and the charisma isn’t exactly shooting out of them. Maybe Perry will speak something more closely to resembling English now that he’s off the pain pills, but he’s way out there ideologically, too. Walker a little less so. But he’s dull. They couldn’t recall him that time because most apolitical people decided a man that boring couldn’t have done something so controversial.
Their problem, which I report to you with no sadness whatsoever, is that as the Republican Party has become more Southern and prairie and more and more right wing, it’s just quit producing plausible presidential candidates. Right-wing Texas may want someone like Rick Perry. Moderate America doesn’t. It’s telling in this regard what’s gone on in Jeb’s own Florida, a state that’s gone from Bush, who could conceivably win a national election under the right circumstances, to hard-right Rick Scott, who couldn’t win 200 Electoral Votes.
They were so lucky to have Christie. He was an anomaly in so many ways. He represents the GOP of about 25 years ago, when it was clearly the dominant electoral party, back when the Reagan Democrats were reliably voting Republican (a lot of them have switched back) and Reagan and G.H.W. Bush were winning states like New Jersey. He’s from the Northeast. He’s got that Reagan Democrat aura. Appeal outside of the usual GOP area codes. Ability to talk to moderates and sound persuasive and common-sensical. Most of all, he’s got the ability to go toe-to-toe with Hillary C.
The angels may come down and declare him innocent. But it doesn’t seem likely, and even if it does happen, he still won’t remotely be the candidate he was two months ago. He’s on the B-list now.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, February 5, 2014
“So Much For Republican Rebranding”: The Mike Huckabee Boomlet Betrays The GOP’s Lack Of Seriousness
Since Mike Huckabee delivered his anti-contraception “Uncle Sugar” speech to the RNC two weeks ago, he has catapulted to the top of two GOP presidential primary polls.
Yes, that is what it takes to become the Republican frontrunner these days. Not innovative policy solutions. Not an impressive legislative record. No, what you need is to let loose a politically incorrect swipe at a liberal caricature, stir up a bunch of media outrage, and Republican primary voters will want to give you the nuclear codes.
The Republican Party is suffering record low favorability and struggling to be seen as capable of governing. And the Huckabee boomlet provides the latest evidence that the party’s rank-and-file are still allergic to seriousness.
With the first 2016 primary contests two years away, Republicans have already begun replicating the dynamic of the 2012 primaries. Last time around, primary voters fleetingly embraced anyone, regardless of their plausibility, so long as they tossed out fresh “cable catnip” to make liberal heads explode. Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum… The revolving door of unpresidential wingnuts reduced the Republican primary to a traveling circus, hamstringing eventual nominee Mitt Romney as he struggled to keep up in the pander parade.
Another circus is not what party poo-bahs have in mind. Indeed, they’re already moving to condense the primary schedule and wrest some control of the debates away from the media in hopes of dialing down the nuttiness.
Wipe the dust off of the RNC’s year-old “autopsy” of its 2012 debacle, and you’ll find a forgotten plan to “Promote Our Governors” because they “have campaigned and governed in a manner that is inclusive and appealing. They point the way forward … working successfully with their legislatures to enact meaningful changes in people’s lives.” In other words, the governors were supposed to be the ones with the ideas to make the party look serious again.
But over the course of 2013, the only governor that got widely promoted — or, more accurately, promoted himself — was New Jersey’s Chris Christie, and we know how that turned out. Other governors touted in the autopsy have had their own struggles, be it Virginia’s Bob McDonnell, who was recently indicted for corruption, Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal ,who flopped trying scrap his state’s income tax, or Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, who is polling below 50 percent in his re-election campaign this year.
There are other low-key Republican governors who are doing just fine. In particular, Nevada’s Brian Sandoval is hugely popular, and is a swing state Latino to boot. Unlike the controversial Walker, Sandoval doesn’t even have a serious opponent to his re-election this year. But he’s popular because he is governing pragmatically, implementing ObamaCare in good faith and forging budget compromises that raise some tax revenue. And so he is completely ignored by Republican primary voters.
The upshot is this: No Republican governor begins the race as a top-tier presidential candidate. No Republican governor’s ideas are reshaping and rebranding the party. And a joke candidate like Huckabee can waltz into the lead, however briefly, with a low-rent crack.
Why are Republicans insistent on setting themselves up for more mockery? Because conservative obsession with fighting political correctness clouds their political thinking, compelling them to repeatedly alienate the moderate voters they need to get back in the game.
Many conservative Republicans seem to believe that political correctness is such a societal scourge, silencing ideas and warping debate, that it must be fought at all costs — even at the cost of forgoing new ideas.
This is why RNC Chair Reince Priebus was engaging in folly last week when he dropped everything to demand MSNBC apologize for a tweet suggesting the “right wing” is racist (after the network had already apologized). He was scratching the Republicans’ politically incorrect itch, instead of finding the ointment.
Priebus can cram the primary schedule down to two weeks and turn every debate into an infomercial. But until he can clamp down on the victimhood and crank up the idea machine, 2016 will be another cacophonous GOP circus.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, February 4, 2014
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