“An Unpredictable Slow-Motion Riot”: Republicans Who Want To Be President Just Can’t Behave
Despite the supposed lessons of 2012, and the palpable desire of the donor class, and “reforms” initiated from on high to make the nominating process shorter and less messy, it’s increasingly obvious the 2016 Republican presidential contest could be an unpredictable slow-motion riot. As Politico‘s Haberman and Sherman report today, GOP elites are watching the field form with a sense of horror, but don’t know what to do about it:
The message from Republican officials has been crystal clear for two years: The 2016 Republican primary cannot be another prolonged pummeling of the eventual nominee. Only one person ultimately benefited from that last time — Barack Obama — and Republicans know they can’t afford to send a hobbled nominee up against Hillary Clinton.
Yet interviews with more than a dozen party strategists, elected officials and potential candidates a month out from the unofficial start of the 2016 election lay bare a stark reality: Despite the national party’s best efforts, the likelihood of a bloody primary process remains as strong as ever.
The absence of any front-runner increases the incentives for others to at least give it a try. “Reforms” like the (probable) elimination of the Ames Straw Poll mean less opportunity for winnowing the field before the real contests begin, and the shorter track of the contests themselves makes the sort of serial disposal of unelectable rivals Mitt Romney conducted in 2012 will be harder. Meanwhile, even if the elites used to a disproportionate role in the process can reach agreement on a champion (Jebbie or Mitt), it’s unclear he’ll run, or that the rank-and-file will go along.
There’s a lot of pious talk in the Politico piece about the 2016 candidates agreeing not to attack each other, and to save their fire for the dreaded Hillary, but nobody is likely to forget from 2012 how easy it was for the candidates to remain relatively sunny while their Super-PACs ran ads attacking rivals as instruments of Satan.
If Republicans have as good a midterm election as they expect, the temptation to think of 2016 as the year the conservative-movement-dominated GOP finally consolidates power will be very strong. Which potential candidates will want to pass up the opportunity to get in on that, particularly if a failed run sets ’em up for the future? I don’t know, but I do know this could be the cycle when the cliches about the Republican Party being “disciplined” and “hierarchical” finally get retired once and for all.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Editor, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 7, 2014
“A Bomb In The Middle Of The Presidential Campaign”: How Gay Marriage Could Cause The GOP Major Headaches In 2016
After yesterday’s dramatic ruling from the Supreme Court effectively legalizing same-sex marriage in 11 more states (that now makes 30, plus DC), you would have thought conservatives would be expressing their outrage to anyone who would listen. But their reaction was remarkably muted. “None of the top House GOP leaders (Speaker John Boehner or Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy) issued statements. Ditto the RNC,” reported NBC News. “And most strikingly, we didn’t hear a peep about the Supreme Court’s (non)-decision on the 2014 campaign trail, including in the red-state battlegrounds.” The only one who issued a thundering denunciation was Ted Cruz.
Even though the GOP’s discomfort with this issue has been evident for a while, with the unofficial start of the 2016 presidential campaign just a month away (after the midterm elections are done), the issue of marriage equality is going to become positively excruciating for them. Many people saw the Court’s denial of cert in the five cases they confronted yesterday as a prelude to the case they’ll eventually take, the one that will probably strike down all the state bans on same-sex marriage and make marriage equality the law of the land. That could happen in the Court’s current term, which runs from now until next summer. But it’s even more likely that it would come in their next term, the one going between October 2015 and the summer of 2016. If that happened, it would land like a bomb in the middle of the presidential campaign.
In a certain way, the GOP’s current dilemma is reminiscent of where Democratic presidential candidates were during the 2004 race, when the marriage issue burst into national attention after the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared in November 2003 that the state had to allow gay people to marry. Most of the candidates were unsure of what their position was or should be, trapped between the primary and general electorates. Howard Dean had been considered by many a wild-eyed liberal in no small part because as governor of Vermont he had signed a civil unions bill, even though he opposed full marriage rights. Before long, most of the Democrats running settled on that as their position too — civil unions yes, marriage no (the exceptions were Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton, and Carol Moseley Braun, all of whom supported marriage equality). None of them seemed to want to talk about it, and they were pulled one way by the general electorate, and another by the principle involved, and a party base that was moving to the left.
There’s a different quandary for today’s Republican presidential contenders. You have a general electorate supporting change, and a Republican base committed to the rapidly eroding status quo. And consider that the first three Republican contests are in Iowa, relatively moderate New Hampshire, and extremely conservative South Carolina, which happens to be one of the states affected by yesterday’s ruling. Ed Kilgore suggests that Iowa in particular is going to pose a challenge:
But the Iowa problem is real for Republicans: it became, because of a relatively early state judicial ruling allowing same-sex marriage, Ground Zero for conservative resistance to marriage equality. As recently as two years ago, I attended an Iowa political event, along with four or five former (and possibly future) presidential candidates, that was heavily focused on removing the judges responsible. I don’t think the majordomo of that event, Bob Vander Plaats (often called a “kingmaker” thanks to his timely support for the last two Iowa Caucus winners), is about to cave anytime soon. And so long as there is an opportunist or two in the presidential field who’s frantic for right-wing support (I’m looking at you, Bobby Jindal!), the odds of this issue being “off the table” in Iowa are very low.
Ed’s last point is critical. If all the candidates had a tacit agreement not to make too much of it, the issue might not be that big a deal. But all it takes is one who won’t go along to force all the other candidates to talk about it. And we already know that Ted Cruz, who will be bidding to be the choice of social conservatives, isn’t going to let it go.
Now put that in the context of the long-running conflict within the GOP between the Tea Party base and the more practical-minded establishment. When the party bigwigs are saying, “We really need to talk about something else,” the base is going to conclude that they are once again being betrayed by a bunch of elite Washington Republicans who are perfectly happy consorting with the sodomites who inhabit their metropolis of depravity.
Which, to a certain degree, is true. Many of those elite Washington Republicans may still write columns in support of “traditional marriage,” but they also regularly interact with gay people. They’ll come around before long, which will only make the base angrier.
The 2016 Republican primary was already shaping up to be a hugely entertaining bloodbath. This only makes it more exciting.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, October 7, 2014
“The Fire Next Time”: Why Threats Against Obama Speak Volumes On Race In America
Reading details of the Secret Service’s failure to protect the president, I was jolted by a sudden premonition. Our country is once again risking “the fire next time.” James Baldwin’s dreadful prophecy—a phrase he borrowed from an old Negro spiritual—was published in 1963 when the civil rights movement was approaching its climactic triumph. Yet the novelist’s resonant warning came true a few years later. Cities across America were in flames. This is not a prediction of what is coming, but my fear. We should talk candidly about this risk before it is too late.
Let me be explicit about what I imagine might occur. If something bad should happen to hurt President Obama or his family, the “fire” could be ignited again by people’s rage and sorrow. Some will object that my warning is inflammatory, but I see silence as a greater danger.
The basic fact is this: there are demented Americans who do want to harm the president and have repeatedly threatened his life. Nobody knows how many or how dangerous they might be. Threats are a standard circumstance for the presidency, but the alarming difference is that threats against Barack Obama have been three times higher than for his predecessors, according to The Washington Post, which first revealed the Secret Service lapses. The explanation is obvious. This president is black, so is his family.
“Michelle Obama has spoken publicly about fearing for her family’s safety since her husband became the nation’s first black president,” Post reporter Carol Leonnig wrote. “Her concerns are well-founded. President Obama has faced three times as many threats as his predecessors, according to people briefed on the Secret Service’s threat assessment.”
After the Post reported this elevated risk assessment, The New York Times was told by a Secret Service spokesman that the threats against Obama have subsequently subsided to more typical levels. Given recent episodes in which the agency withheld embarrassing facts, even from the president, it is hard to judge which estimate to trust.
My larger point is this: the country is again becoming a racial tinderbox. We have witnessed many warning signs in places like Ferguson, Missouri, where another white cop shot an unarmed black teenager. Politicians mostly look the other way, perhaps fearful of provoking stronger emotions. But some politicians have actively encouraged racist resentments. The political system is implicated in stoking social discontents, white and black, because it has been unwilling (or unable) to do anything about the economic distress. It feels as though the society is stymied too, people waiting sullenly for some triggering event that might express their pain and anger.
Specifically, I accuse the Republican Party of adroitly exploiting racial tensions in the age of Obama in order to mobilize its electoral base and gain political advantage. Black Americans know what I mean. They have endured such political tactics for many generations. Indeed, as black leaders told Peter Baker of The New York Times, many African-American citizens are suspicious of the Secret Service failures that exposed the black president to danger.
When Barack Obama was elected six years ago, I wrote a short editorial for The Nation, “This Proud Moment,” that celebrated his historic achievement and the country’s. “Racism will not disappear entirely,” it said, “but the Republican “Southern Strategy’ that marketed racism has been smashed.” That seemed true at the time, but now sounds foolishly premature.
The Republican Party has not given up on racism. It has developed new ways to play the “race card” without ever mentioning race. With Obama in the White House, the GOP does not need to run TV ads featuring “black hands” taking jobs from “white hands” or the one that shows Willie Horton, the black rapist. Obama’s own face on television is sufficient. It reminds hard-core supporters why they hate the man.
Instead of obvious race-baiting, the GOP plan was to demonize Barack Obama right from the start. He was portrayed as an alien being, a strange character and not truly an American. Maybe he was African like his absent Kenyan father. Where is the birth certificate? And he’s a socialist like those foreigners in Europe. Iowa Senator Charles Grassley revealed that Obama’s health care reform includes “death panels” that will decide when old people must die. The half-baked Donald Trump was invited to Republican forums to mock the black guy.
When the “birther” movement ran out of steam, the ideological accusations hardened in its place. Fox News and other TV talkers upped the ante. Obama wasn’t just a political issue. The black guy was a threat to America’s survival as a nation of free people. The “takers” were the lazy Americans (read: blacks on welfare) who lived off virtuous Republicans who are the “makers.”
Barack Obama was uniquely prepared to liberate politics from its racial taboos, and he had the courage to try. He had grown up biracial and at home in both cultures. He understood that he could not prevail if he became the “black candidate,” since that would inflame some voters and make the election about race. Obama adroitly avoided that pit—but perhaps did not anticipate that white Republicans would find ways to demonize anyway. He kept searching sincerely for compromise. They kept pinning inflammatory labels on him.
The clearest evidence that agitating racial malice was the Republican subtext for brutally disparaging Obama’s intelligence, character and loyalty was reflected in the behavior of their Senate leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. On the eve of Obama’s first inauguration, McConnell informed fellow Republican senaors that there would be no working relationship with the Democratic president—none. The GOP would oppose everything and block every measure the White House proposed.
“If he was for it, we had to be against it,” said Senator George Voinivich of Ohio. “All he cared about was making sure Obama could never have a clean victory.” Vice President Joe Biden, who presided in the Senate, was taken aback by McConnell’s hard line. It crippled the Obama presidency, but also did great damage to the country. Biden heard from seven Republican senators who told him the same thing. They said, “Joe, I’m not going to be able to help you on anything. We can’t let you succeed.”
This take-no-prisoners strategy does not by itself prove that McConnell was purposely agitating racial resentments but the fact that his leadership style was so stubborn and single-minded suggests that Republicans had committed to a strategy that would exploit the racial memory of white Southerners and other conservatives. McConnell was not himself racist when I knew him slightly in the early 1970s, when he was then a young staffer on Capitol Hill and an upfront liberal Republican, especially on civil rights. I expect his views on race are not changed.
But as a white Southerner, he cannot claim to be ignorant of what he was doing. With his hard-nosed strategy, McConnell was shamefully agitating old racial stereotypes, hoping to make the black guy a one-term president. He failed at that, but he still poisoned the political atmosphere for the country. I am not accusing the Republican Party and its leaders of plotting to harm the president physically. I am accusing them of deliberately inflaming racist attitudes that might inspire others to commit malicious acts by others. They deserve shame, however the elections turn out.
Even more shameful in my book, the Supreme Court and its right-wing majority have collaborated in this partisan effort, aiding and abetting the Republican party’s racial politics. The Justices Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito are, measure by measure, destroying rights that citizens won in years of hard struggle. In the process, they are also destroying the Court’s honorable reputation.
The party of Lincoln moved south forty years ago and embraced the die-hard remnants of white supremacy. The country will not restore two-party representative democracy until the southern segs are once again overcome.
By: William Greider, The Nation, October 6, 2014
“An Intra-Republican Bloodbath”: The 2016 Presidential Race And The Coming Death Struggle Within The GOP
There’s an interesting article in The Hill today about some early 2016 jockeying, and it shines a light on just how important this presidential campaign will be to the ongoing struggle within the GOP. Once next month’s elections are over, things are going to get very intense. Here’s an excerpt:
For the past year, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has been wooing his longtime friend Jeb Bush to jump into the 2016 presidential race, even as he has shunned potential Tea Party rivals like Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Boehner stepped up his lobbying efforts this week, singing the former Florida governor’s praises in a pair of media interviews.
The Speaker’s preference for yet another Bush White House run is partly political, partly personal. He sees Bush as undeniably the strongest, most viable candidate who could pull the party together after a bruising primary and take on a formidable Hillary Clinton, sources said. And the two men are aligned politically, hailing from the same centrist strand of the GOP.
The next presidential campaign will shape how we all understand the eight-year intra-Republican bloodbath that will have lasted through the Obama presidency, in a way that the 2012 election didn’t. While most of the candidates in 2012 spent plenty of time pandering to the Tea Party, none of them were birthed by the movement. All of the real contenders had been around for a long time, some for decades.
In contrast, 2016 will be the first presidential election in which some of the GOP candidates rose to prominence after Barack Obama’s election. Three potential candidates (Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Scott Walker) first got elected to their current positions during the revolution of 2010, and one other (Ted Cruz) two years later. Even if only Cruz among them is still considered a 100 percent pure Tea Partier, this is going to be a primary race defined by a generational split between those who rode the Tea Party to prominence and those who came to public attention before.
If you’re John Boehner, somebody like Ted Cruz getting the Republican nomination would be a terrible rebuke, not just because Cruz has personally been such a pain in Boehner’s behind (constantly encouraging conservative House members to turn against the Speaker), but also because of what it would say about this period in Republican history. If a real Tea Partier were elected, Boehner’s entire Speakership would look like nothing more than roadkill along the way — the “GOP establishment” had done nothing but resist the inevitable, by trying to keep the Tea Party in check, for too long. On the other hand, someone like Jeb Bush becoming president would mean that all the aggravation Boehner endured wasn’t futile; he held the barbarians back, prevented them from ruining the GOP, and the party came through on the other side by taking back the White House.
On the other hand, nothing would be worse for Boehner and other establishment figures than somebody like Bush getting the GOP nomination but then losing to Hillary Clinton — and short of a Tea Partier winning the presidency, nothing would be better for the base conservatives. Those conservatives could say: Look, we’ve tried nominating old, familiar, establishment Republicans three times in a row now, and all it got us was President Obama and now President Clinton. We can’t repeat the same mistake in 2020. It’ll be an awfully compelling argument to those in the party, even if the counter-argument — that nominating someone like Cruz would be a complete disaster — might be true.
It’s possible that a candidate who successfully bridges the two sides could emerge (for instance, Indiana governor Mike Pence could be that candidate). And the establishment folks are going to try to play down the idea that there’s any “battle for the soul of the Republican party” going on at all, since that’s a battle they aren’t sure they can win. But the battle is real, and its outcome, at least for the next decade or two, could be determined by what kind of Republican gets the 2016 nomination, whether he wins or loses, and more broadly, what kind of GOP we have in coming years.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; The Plum Line, The Washington Post, October 2, 2014
“The South’s Victim Complex”: How Right-Wing Paranoia Is Driving New Wave Of Radicals
Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.
The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level. It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.
A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.
Since Reagan, then, conservatism’s principal issues cannot be extricated from what animated them in the Southern milieu of their birth. The North, if now only a phantom, prefigured the foreign other always at work in the modern conservatism borrowed from the South. Every major issue is argued in terms of persecution and attack. The racial minority is not the oppressed subaltern but a threat, whether physical or fiscal. Liberatory advances for women and LGBT Americans are assaults upon the family. Religious pluralism and fortifications of the wall between church and state evoke biblical accounts of Christian persecution. Deviations from increasingly neoliberal capitalism are described as authoritarian socialism. Relaxation of military aggression, especially under Obama, is even seen as collusion with the enemy.
Broun, a skilled purveyor of a Southern politics of persecution, was an early alarmist, predicting a violently oppressive, explicitly Hitlerian regime just days after President Obama’s election in 2008. Broun’s repeated evocation of Hitler and Stalin would later find its way into the crass iconography of Tea Party protests. The stakes have always been existential to Broun. In an almost mystical ritual, Broun, a born-again Christian, snuck onto the inaugural stage in 2009 to anoint the door through which Obama would pass with holy oil, entreating God to come to the aid of His besieged and cleanse the new president of his tyrannical evil. Broun’s persecution narrative, dismissed by many at the time as hayseed hyperbole, now forms the basis of conservative arguments on nearly every issue. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, likely 2016 presidential candidate whose star is still rising, adopts the “we want our country back” language and eschatological stakes of the Tea Party. Cruz is joined by newcomer Sens. Ron Johnson, Mike Lee and Rand Paul to form a conservative insurgency in a chamber historically governed by staid and statesmanlike members.
There is a problem, though, for the GOP in the 2014 and subsequent elections: Once the Fort Sumter-like salvo of superlatives and hyperbole is launched, it is likely impossible to quiet the fear and anger of the party’s base. Broun’s successor to represent the shamed land of Sherman’s path brings his own scorched earth rhetoric, sounding more 1860 than 2014. The presumptive successor, Rev. Jody Hice, whose primary win makes November’s general little more than a formality in the heavily conservative district, speaks uniformly in the language of persecution and insurrection. Like, actual insurrection. Hice regularly demands that Americans be permitted the full means of war — e.g., rockets, missiles, etc. — in order to prepare for an eventual armed conflict with the “secular,” “socialist” state. Hice, an evangelical pastor, is an unapologetic theocrat whose persecution complex pervades the entirety of his apocalyptic politics. Hice makes Broun look cuddly by comparison.
The GOP suffers through an internecine fight that shows little sign of slowing. The party’s internal conflict reached its latest peak in primary battles in two prominent Confederate locales: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s historic loss in the old capital of the Confederacy and Sen. Thad Cochran’s controversial victory in Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi, a state whose flag still bears the Confederate battle emblem. Cantor’s primary defeat would have been inconceivable just a few years ago, but the very fervor stoked by Cantor for what many saw as an eventual run at the speakership metastasized further into an implacable anti-establishment impulse from which even Cantor was not exempt. Cochran, targeted as an establishment senator, had to resort to DEFCON 1 tactics and openly beseech Mississippi’s black Democrats to lift him over Tea Party candidate Chris McDaniel, a move that became something of a right-wing Alamo. In a late primary strategy, Jody Hice went public with the assertion that his opponent, a pro-business, establishment candidate, was courting the enemy in what the Hice campaign called a “Mississippi Strategy.”
A sort of Mason-Dixon line has begun to trace its way along the GOP’s internal fissures, threatening the coalition solidified by Reagan and sustained through the Bush presidency. After more than a generation of cultivating a narrative founded on persecution and insurrection, the GOP runs the risk of falling victim to a Maslow’s hammer-type predicament. If all you have is victimhood, all disagreement starts to look like oppression, even within your own party. The more Southern, rural, Tea Party wing of the GOP is beginning to resemble the People’s Front of Judea from Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” whose antipathy toward their Roman oppressors was exceeded only by their hatred for the Judean People’s Front.
Big business and national security Republicans of the party establishment, having benefited from the zeal brought by the martial politics of Southerners, can no longer control the emboldened rogues. The debt ceiling and shutdown episodes, pursued with crusade-like passion by conservative zealots, now frighten big business. Speaker John Boehner revealed the growing rift in a frank press conference after the 2013 shutdown, saying that Tea Party-affiliated groups have “lost all credibility.” Similarly, the intensifying isolationism of politicians like Sen. Rand Paul threatens Republican hawks’ long-standing hold on foreign policy matters.
When he reaches Congress, Rev. Hice will likely be laughed at, just as Broun was. But the politics Broun brought to Washington in 2007 is no longer a joke. The anger in the South is real. Voters along Sherman’s route have their own torches now. Hice’s theocratic, paranoiac and insurrectionist politics should not be scoffed at, if the trajectory charted by Southern politicians like Broun will be bent further with a new wave of radicals and a purging of moderates. The South is finally rising.
By: Matthew Pulver, Salon, September 30, 2014
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