“In The Process Of Unifying”: Republicans Are Just Not That Into Mitt Romney
Yeeesh, what does Mitt Romney have to do to drum up a bit of enthusiasm from his party? Sure, he’s got to be feeling pretty content as each day brings another Republican casting aside the somehow-still-going campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul to accept the inevitable proposition that Romney will be the party’s nominee. Yet few can seem to offer an explanation for why they like Romney beyond the fact that they’re stuck with him. Shortly after I noted John Boehner’s lackluster endorsement yesterday, reporters asked Mitch McConnell for his take on Romney and were given the same nod-and-sigh routine:
“Yeah, I support Governor Romney for president of the United States,” Mr. McConnell said. “And he is going to be the nominee. And as you have noticed, the party is in the process of unifying behind him. And I think it’s going to be an incredibly close, hard-fought race. Everybody is banding — bandying polls around, but just look at the Gallup tracking poll yesterday actually had Governor Romney with a two-point lead. I think it’s going to be a very, very competitive election. We’re all behind him and looking forward to the fall campaign, which is actually already under way.”
It’s not like Romney’s win has come as any surprise to Republicans; it’s a reality they’ve had months to come to terms with. You’d think a few of them would have spent that time writing a rousing argument for why they look forward to campaigning for him over the next six months. It seems particularly odd that McConnell and Boehner are both so blasé. They are about as Republican establishment as it comes, and throughout the primaries, I assumed they were all secretly rooting for Romney and dreading the very thought of a Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich candidacy. But as much as they want to see Barack Obama exit the White House, they seem to share the same enthusiasm for Romney as much of the country.
By: Patrick Caldwell, The American Prospect, April 18, 2012
“Delusional And Verbally Violent”: Romney Backer And NRA Board Member Ted Nugent Loses His Mind
Mitt Romney begged NRA board member and aging rocker Ted Nugent for his endorsement last month, and the brash, verbally-violent sometimes Washington Times columnist even bragged about it. But over the weekend at the NRA’s annual fundraiser, Ted Nugent’s mouth ran wild and Mitt Romney has been nowhere to be found.
Ted Nugent said President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder “don’t believe in the Constitution,” the Obama administration is “wiping its ass with the Constitution,” called the four non-conservative Supreme Court justices “evil anti-American people,” demanded the America people “chop their heads off in November,” and suggested if Obama wins re-election he might kill him.
If you want more of those kinds of evil anti-American people in the Supreme Court, then don’t get involved and let Obama take office again. Because I’ll tell you this right now: if Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year….
But if you can’t go home and get everybody in your lives to clean house in this vile, evil, America-hating administration I don’t know what you’re made of. If you can’t galvanize and promote and recruit people to vote for Mitt Romney we’re done. We’ll be a suburb of Indonesia next year….
Our president, and attorney general, our vice president, Hillary Clinton, they’re criminals, they’re criminals. And if you take that adamant ‘we the people’ defiance, remember we’re Americans because we defied the king. We didn’t negotiate and compromise with the king, we defied the emperors. We are patriots, we are bravehearts. We need to ride into that battlefield, and chop their heads off in November.
Nugent added,
We’ve got four Supreme Court justices who don’t believe in the Constitution. Does everyone here know that four of the Supreme Court justices not only determined you don’t have the right to keep and bear arms, four Supreme Court justices signed their name to a declaration that Americans have no fundamental right to self-defense.
Of course, this rhetoric is nothing in comparison to Hilary Rosen’s statement that Mitt Romney’s wife Ann “actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never really dealt with the kinds of economic issues that a majority of the women in this country are facing in terms of how do we feed our kids, how do we send them to school and how do we — why we worry about their future.”
Right?
Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart writes today that until Mitt Romney ”condemns the rocker, we should all assume he’s fine with that kind of talk from a surrogate. After all, if then-Sen. Barack Obama had to publicly condemn his pastor who said in a 2003 sermon ’God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!’ then Romney should do the same with Nugent. That he won’t speaks ill of him and the campaign we can expect him to run in the fall.”
Media Matters today added that ”Nugent refused to back down from his recent inflammatory comments about the Obama administration in a radio interview with CNN contributor Dana Loesch on The Dana Show.”
Nugent told Loesch that “I will stand by my speech” and said that he was being attacked with the “Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals playbook.”
Speaking at the NRA’s annual meeting Nugent accused President Obama of having a “vile, evil America-hating administration” that is “wiping its ass with the Constitution.” He went on to tell a crowd that “We need to ride into that battlefield and chop their heads off in November” and said that “If Barack Obama becomes the president in November, again, I will either be dead or in jail by this time next year.” The Secret Service is reportedly reviewing Nugent’s comments.
Nugent insisted to Loesch that his message had been “100 percent positive,” and Loesch agreed that he was being used as a “scapegoat” by the Obama administration.
Later in the interview, Nugent added more derogatory comments about Democrats. He described Democratic chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as a “brain-dead, soulless, heartless idiot,” and said House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi was a “sub-human scoundrel.”
Asked about a request from the Democrats that Mitt Romney (who sought and received Nugent’s endorsement) distance himself from Nugent’s comments, Nugent claimed that “Mitt Romney knows what I’m saying is true. He puts it into words for him, I put it into words for me.”
Former Breitbart editor Dana Loesch interviewed Nugent and tweeted some of his statements, including, “I’ve never in my life threatened anyone’s life.”
We’ll let the Secret Service decide.
Obama himself and the Obama campaign were quick to denounce publicly Hilary Rosen’s comments — which, if anyone bothered to hear both sentences and not the soundbite, most Americans would have agreed with, but Mitt Romney, in his ever-cowardly, ever-flip-flopping way, won’t denounce — but won’t support, either, — Nugent’s comments.
I wonder why?
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, April 17, 2012
“Demagogic Paranoids”: Communism’s Collapse Leaves GOP Far Right Without A Real Foe
When Allen West, the Republican congressman from Florida, said he had “heard” that up to 80 members of Congress were members of the Communist Party, but refused to say who they were, I began once again to worry about the declining standards of excellence in American life. Once upon a time, Joe McCarthy (eventually) named names.
Oh, what a falling off was there! To see figures like West stumbling around and accusing liberals of communism, the Democratic Party of socialism, Obama of militant Islamic sympathies is like watching a Broadway revival of Oklahoma! performed by tone-deaf weightlifters from Bulgaria. There were once high standards for rabble-rousing. Think Father Coughlin. Think Joe McCarthy. Think Pat Buchanan. They played on American paranoia as if on a violin. (OK, fiddle.) They had a unified vision of conspiracy that encompassed Jews, blacks, Zionist bankers, greedy plutocrats, and Bolsheviks. The problem with today’s demagogic paranoids is that they are struggling with the same relativistic, politically correct universe as everyone else.
Consider the Jews. Completely off limits. Partly this is because of the presence of Jews in every dimension of American life, but it’s also because Jews are spread across the political spectrum. Back in Father Coughlin’s time, finding a Jewish Republican was something like searching for the afikomen on Passover. Even during McCarthy’s heyday, right-wing Jews were still a rarity, despite the Jewish Roy Cohn at McCarthy’s side. But since the rise of the Jewish neoconservatives in the 1980s, there have been a substantial number of Jews on the right. If you had had Sheldon Adelson in 1950, you might never have had the Hollywood 10.
The same goes for Zionist bankers, a staple of right-wing conspiracy-mongering rhetoric. You can’t use “Zionist” as a slur because Israel is that holy ally who is constantly being betrayed by Obama and his ilk. Then, too, it’s hard to go after bankers when your entire political agenda revolves around ensuring that the wealthiest people in the country—i.e., bankers—pay as little in taxes as possible. As for greedy plutocrats, goodbye also—and hello!
That leaves blacks, who gradually usurped Jews as the right’s favorite national specter. But just as Jews became “normalized” throughout American life since Father Coughlin’s tirades in the ’30s, so have blacks followed, though more slowly and painfully, a similar process since Reagan’s welfare queens. It’s hard as well to get the rising numbers of prominent blacks in the GOP to reliably pursue the subtle context of racial politics. West himself denounced George Zimmerman after the killing of Trayvon Martin.
But the most important element of right-wing demagogic populism is the most impossible to retrieve: Soviet communism. Commentators and pundits love to draw tiresome analogies between today’s Tea Partying radical right and the rise of the radical right in the Goldwater, John Bircher, National Review ’60s, but there is simply no basis for comparison without the Cold War. Bolshevism was the linchpin that held all the other facets of conspiracy together. Jews, unions, Zionists, even plutocratic bankers somehow all comprised a tainted trail that always led back to Moscow.
The effect on the radical right of the loss of communism is incalculable. The right wing is like a vulnerable adolescent who has suddenly been jilted. Hatelorn, you might say, the right is on the rebound from one substitute bête noire to another, but nothing sticks because there is no unifying adhesive on the order of the menace from the Kremlin. This is why you get the utter weirdness of the right talking about Obama’s Washington as if it were actually Soviet Moscow: a totalizing, centralizing monster out to collectivize American life and crush personal freedom and individual rights. There was a time when Stalin’s murder of tens of millions haunted the American imagination. Now it’s the possibility that everyone can have his tonsils out for free.
From hipsters to Mad Men to A Streetcar Named Desire to pompadours and victory rolls, nostalgic revivals are everywhere. In the political realm, expect the next six months to be full of retro-red menace, as the GOP searches desperately to recapture the love of its life.
By: Lee Siegel, The Daily Beast, April 12, 2012
“Fear Is Good”: Romney’s Pivot To The Center Postponed Indefinitely
In a new tactic that TPM appropriately called the “I’m rubber, you’re glue” strategy, Mitt Romney has decided to accuse President Obama of being too vague in his plans for a second term. Once you get past the absurdity, there’s something meaningful going on. But first, to Mitt’s charges: “Nancy Pelosi famously said that we would have to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it. President Obama has turned that advice into a campaign strategy: He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do. With all the challenges the nation faces, this is not the time for President Obama’s hide and seek campaign.” Riiiiight.
This probably seems to you like a weird accusation to make. After all, Obama’s plans for a second term seem pretty clear: more of the same! You may think that’d be great, or you may think that’d be a hellish nightmare, but either way it’s not like it’s some big mystery. It isn’t as though he’s going to come out and really shock us with some new policy turn that is totally different from the kind of things he’s been doing for the past three years. But that’s what you think only if you don’t reside deep in the heart of the Republican base, which is where the key to this appeal lies.
You see, as far as base Republicans are concerned, there are two kinds of Obama policies. The first kind is the freedom-destroying, Constitution-desecrating, pulling-us-toward-socialist-dystopia awfulness. Like health care reform, or repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” The second kind is the long con, the things he has done to lull the American people into a false sense of security before the second term comes and he unveils the horror of his true agenda. Like the way he has done nothing to restrict gun purchases, which only proves just how diabolical his plan to take away every American’s guns really is.
When Romney says that Obama is hiding his true intentions from us, he knows that your average voter isn’t going to be persuaded. And that’s what’s so notable about this. At a moment when he’s got the nomination pretty well locked up, Romney is still trying to assure conservatives that he’s one of them, that he hates who they hate and fears what they fear. That “pivot to the center” could be a while in coming.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, April 5, 2012
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