Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal

I feel the same way about David Petraeus’ infidelities as I felt about President Clinton’s: Unless hypocrisy is involved (as when Speaker Gingrich pushed to impeach Clinton while carrying on an affair himself), I’m content to let public figures have messy private lives. As much as I love gossip, let’s not pretend it’s news.

But if the media spotlight trained on General Petraeus’ bed isn’t illuminating anything I consider important, it has cast a few interesting shadows. The Onion called attention to one: Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal. Let’s look at a few others.

The surveillance state is eating its own. In the post-privacy era of the Internet and the Patriot Act, the FBI has become the Eye of Sauron: Once its attention has been drawn to you, it will soon know your secrets and the secrets of all your associates, whether or not anyone has committed a crime.

Glenn Greenwald lays out just how much investigation resulted from just how little probable cause: A friend of an FBI agent gets some mildly disturbing anonymous emails, and before you know it (and apparently without needing any warrants), the FBI is reading personal messages of the head of the CIA and his successor four-star general in Afghanistan. And when the agent decides that his superiors aren’t doing enough with the dirt they’re turning up, he takes it to the administration’s enemies in Congress. Greenwald sums up:

Based on what is known, what is most disturbing about the whole Petraeus scandal is not the sexual activities that it revealed, but the wildly out-of-control government surveillance powers which enabled these revelations. What requires investigation here is not Petraeus and [General John] Allen and their various sexual partners but the FBI and the whole sprawling, unaccountable surveillance system that has been built.

Rachel Maddow wonders what J. Edgar Hoover could have done with this kind of power, and raises a worthy question: Once politically embarrassing dirt has been dug up, who decides who gets to see it? Congress is complaining about being uninformed, but should it have been informed?

Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer details just how unprotected anyone’s online privacy is: Whatever you store “in the cloud” — emails, drafts of documents, pictures — is available to the government with the permission of Google or Yahoo or whoever the cloud-tender happens to be.

The Constitution protects you from unreasonable search and seizure by the government. It doesn’t stop third parties from sharing personal information you willingly give them. … If you had a bunch of old letters in a worn shoebox under your bed, the FBI would need a warrant to get them. But if those same letters are online, in your password-protected email account, and they’re more than six months old, the FBI doesn’t need a warrant to take a peek.

(If you really want to get nerdy about the legal side of this, read the EFF’s email privacy primer.)

Serwer thinks the Petraeus scandal is our best chance to restore some meaningful restraints:

Being the head of the CIA or a decorated war veteran didn’t entitle Petraeus to any more privacy than the average American. But if the ruin of someone as high-ranking and well-regarded as Petraeus can’t get Congress thinking about reining in the surveillance state, it may never happen.

And Greenwald agrees:

there is some sweet justice in having the stars of America’s national security state destroyed by the very surveillance system which they implemented and over which they preside. As Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation put it this morning: “Who knew the key to stopping the Surveillance State was to just wait until it got so big that it ate itself?”

It is usually the case that abuses of state power become a source for concern and opposition only when they begin to subsume the elites who are responsible for those abuses.

The public usually accepts abusable power as long as most people can draw a bright line between themselves and the victims. As long as the abused are just Muslims or “extremists” or other stigmatized minorities, the rest of us can pretend there’s no real problem. But if David Petraeus can go down, who is safe?

Why does “morality” always mean “sex”? Americans ought to be having lots of debates over the morality of our foreign policy and the leaders who carry it out. Who they are sleeping with should be far down that list.

Esquire’s Tom Junod says that “the real Petraeus scandal” is about “transform[ing] the CIA into a paramilitary organization distinctive for its lethality and lack of accountability”.

Petraeus was the primary driver of a policy that has established killing as the option of first resort in the war against Al-Qaeda and its proxies. He did not institute the data-driven “signature strikes” that have become the CIA’s specialty, but he clashed with the State Department over them, and he was relentless in his efforts to make sure that the inherently expansive Lethal Presidency kept expanding. The revelation that President Obama managed a “kill list” from the Oval Office rightly drew a great deal of attention; but just as remarkable were the killings in which the President had no direct hand.

Atlantic’s Robert Wright raises similar questions:

What if other nations behaved as we do? What if they started firing drones into countries that house people they’d rather were dead? Couldn’t this get kind of out of control? Shouldn’t the U.S. be at least thinking about trying to establish a global norm against this sort of thing (except, conceivably, under well-defined circumstances that have a clear basis in international law)?

Yeah, I know Holly Petraeus is “furious“, as she has every right to be. But what about the Pakistani mothers whose innocent children have died in CIA drone attacks that Petraeus ordered? They’re probably pretty pissed too.

The Petraeus fog machine. Why did we have such a superhuman view of Petraeus to begin with? The Week asks: “Did the Media Fall for General Petraeus’ Hype?” and strongly implies the answer is yes. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman confessed: “How I Was Drawn Into the Cult of David Petraeus“.

Petraeus is just about the only commander who improved his image in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither war is an American success story, so any credit given to one general comes at the expense of the others, who are left holding the bag for the overall disappointment.

How did he manage that? Maybe it’s time to take another look at the rare Petraeus-criticizing articles, like Michael Hastings’ “The Legend of David Petraeus” in last January’s Rolling Stone. (“The genius of David Petraeus has always been his masterful manipulation of the media.”) Or read Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s account of a 2007 trip to Iraq where congressmen were propagandized to support the Surge.

And there is a hypocrisy angle. Petraeus was a proponent of the Pentagon’s “spiritual fitness” push, which (while carefully framed as non-religious or non-sectarian in theory) in practice means Christian evangelism in the military. (Non-Christian or insufficiently Christian soldiers are suspect, preaches one high-ranking Army chaplain, because “the unsaved have no realization of their unfortunate alliance with evil.”)

Petraeus wrote a prominent blurb for the book Under Orders: a spiritual handbook for military personnel by Army chaplain Lt. Col. William McCoy. (Order 3: “Believe in God.”) The Army’s spiritual fitness test and Under Orders both strongly imply that the non-religious can’t be a good soldiers or reliable team members of any sort.

Chris Rodda may be a bit too gleeful in Petraeus’ downfall, but expresses a sentiment that I (as a fellow unfortunate ally of evil) can’t help but share: “Hey, General Petraeus, how’s that spiritual fitness stuff working out for you?”

November 19, 2012 – 10:35 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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How Gerrymandering Painted the House Red

The same electorate that re-elected President Obama by more than 3 million votes and chose Democrats or Democratic-leaning Independents in 25 out of 33 Senate races also re-affirmed the Republican majority in the House 234-201. That’s not much different from the 242-193 advantage the Republicans got in 2010, which was considered a Republican wave election.

So how did that happen? Do voters “prefer divided government”, as Wisconsin columnist Tom Still concludes? Did they send a mixed message that gives a mandate to neither party’s agenda, as Paul Ryan claims? Or was a Democratic-leaning electorate thwarted in its will to have a Democratic Congress?

Consider this: More people voted for Democratic congressional candidates than Republican ones. As of November 9, the WaPo’s Dan Keating calculated the Democratic advantage at 48.8%-48.47%, or 49.55%-48.54% in races where both parties ran a candidate.

So how did the People vote (narrowly) for a Democratic Congress but get a Republican one instead? That’s certainly not what the Founders intended: The reason there are more House districts than Senate seats and all congressmen have to go back to the voters every two years is that the House is supposed to closely reflect the will of the People.

Why didn’t that work? Why didn’t the House come out with a slight edge for the Democrats, or something closer to a 50-50 split reflecting a close popular vote?

Gerry’s salamander, currently the I-95 and I-495 corridors near Boston

Gerrymandering.

Every ten years (after the census), the states redraw the boundaries of their congressional districts. 2010 was a census year, but it also was a year when Republicans swept the legislatures of several big swing states like Ohio and Florida, and even states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that ordinarily lean blue. So Republicans got to redraw the districts in those states to favor their own candidates.

There’s nothing illegal about that. It’s been going on forever. (The name comes from this 1812 cartoon, in which an oddly-shaped district is portrayed as Gov. Gerry’s salamander.) And both parties do it. (Though in recent years Republicans have been more aggressive about it, as when Texas redrew its districts without a new census in 2003.)

But it’s one thing to wave your hands and say “gerrymandering” and another to see how it actually works. The basic idea is simple: You load up a few districts with as many of your opponent’s voters as possible, leaving yourself smaller (but still comfortable) advantages in the other districts.

For example, suppose your state got 3 House seats and had 300,000 voters split equally between the Purple party and the Yellow party. If the Yellows control the state legislature, they can lock in a 2-1 House majority by drawing district boundaries that divide the voters like this:

District Yellow Purple
1 0 100,000
2 75,000 25,000
3 75,000 25,000
Total 150,000 150,000

That’s the ideal case, but now look at Wisconsin. Tom Still reports:

State voters sent a Democrat back to the White House, but maintained the Republican Party’s 5-3 edge in Wisconsin’s House delegation, very much in line with the national decision to keep the House in Republican hands, which will make Obama’s second term even tougher.

Look at the vote totals in those 8 districts. (Numbers retrieved from CNN on November 14.)

District Democrat Republican margin
1 157,721 199,715 41,994 R
2 264,790 124,465 140,325 D
3 217,328 121,536 95,792 D
4 234,823 80,637 154,186 D
5 117,972 249,267 131,295 R
6 136,146 223,514 87,368 R
7 157,340 201,318 43,978 R
8 156,371 198,464 42,093 R
Total 1,442,491 1,398,916 43,575 D

So a Democratic advantage of over 40,000 votes, or 50.8%-49.2%, turns into a 5-3 Republican majority. It happens just like in the ideal Purple/Yellow example: All three Democratic wins are by at least 95,000 votes, but only one Republican victory is that big. Districts 1, 7, and 8 all provide comfortable 40,000-vote margins for the Republicans, but put together those margins don’t add up to the 140,000+ Democratic landslides in either District 2 or District 4. (BTW, District 1 is Paul Ryan’s seat.)

The bigger the state, the more room for this kind of mischief. A chart listing the 18 congressional districts of Pennsylvania would be too big to be instructive, but I’ve added up the numbers: Democrats got 2.72 million total votes compared to 2.65 million for the Republicans — yielding a 13-5 Republican advantage in House seats.

November 19, 2012 – 9:19 am Categories: Articles | Comments (22)

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Race, Sports, and a Doomed Civilization

I just watched ESPN’s Ghosts of Ole Miss about the University of Mississippi in 1962, a year when they had a great football team and the campus rioted in an unsuccessful attempt to stop integration.

“Mississippi in the fall of 1962,” the narrator says, “is a doomed civilization at its peak.”

If such rhetoric sounds overblown, look at this Sports Illustrated cover. What country is that?

The narrator is ESPN’s Wright Thompson, a Mississippi native too young to remember 1962, but embedded in the white culture that has tried to forget it, minimize it, or whitewash it. His article in ESPN: the Magazine inspired the film, which beautifully walks the line between shame and nostalgia. He never loses sight of the ugliness of racism, but also does his best to make comprehensible the white-supremacist Ole Miss of 1962.

One hundred and one years earlier, all but four students at Ole Miss dropped out of school to form Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry. The University Greys. On July 3, 1863, at Gettysburg, the unit rose from safety and made a futile rush from Seminary Ridge. Everyone was killed or injured, and history named their suicide mission Pickett’s Charge. The school’s sports teams would be called Rebels to honor their sacrifice. The young men and women in the stands today are just three generations removed from those soldiers.

When the governor won’t negotiate James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, President Kennedy sends U.S. marshals to take over the Lyceum, the building at the center of campus where students are registered. The students riot, rowdies join in from far and wide, people are killed, and the marshals can’t contain it. So the 82nd Airborne (“Union troops”) has to finish what Thompson describes as the last battle of the Civil War. (The riot was covered, coincidentally, by a very young Dan Rather.)

Meanwhile, there’s a football team having the only undefeated season in Ole Miss history. When Meredith wants to be an ordinary student and go to a game, the decision goes all the way up to Attorney General Bobby Kennedy: No. The federal government isn’t willing to commit enough resources to keep him safe there.

Thompson pulls a timeless, universal theme out of his subject: If you can’t deal with the bad things in the past, the good things — like the 1962 Rebels — get lost too. And he makes personal the process of sorting the past’s relics, culling what is too ugly to be preserved from what is too beautiful to lose. The stars-and-bars, he concludes, has to go — both at Ole Miss and as the state flag. Colonel Reb as mascot — he’s out too. But what about the Rebel name and Pickett’s Charge?

And “Dixie”, which can still make Thompson cry when they play it slow. Can he keep “Dixie”?

GoOM reminded me of several other articles and books that examine the intersection of race and sports.

Blindsided By History — A 2007 Sports Illustrated article on the 50th anniversary of another undefeated football team whose achievement was overshadowed by a shameful racial controversy: the 1957 Central High Tigers of Little Rock, Arkansas. They didn’t repeat in 1958 because Governor Faubus closed the school to prevent a second year of integration.

Thornridge: the perfect season in black and white by Scott Lynn. This is the other side of the race/sports coin: How one of the greatest basketball teams in Illinois high school history helped a white suburb accept integration. (This was Quinn Buckner’s team. I was there when they beat my high school in the state finals.)

If Only You Were White: the life of Leroy Satchell Paige by Donald Spivey. Paige was the greatest player of the late Negro Leagues, and stayed good long enough to follow Jackie Robinson into the majors in his 40s. Spivey not only makes Jim Crow real for a generation that didn’t live through it, but captures the compromises successful blacks had to make. Paige could be proud and “uppity”, but he could also play to the clown/minstrel stereotype when he needed white acceptance.

Some of the issues around integrating the majors (which killed the Negro Leagues) have been forgotten. For example, the Negro Leagues provided jobs for hundreds of black athletes and opportunities for black promoters. The majors accepted a comparative handful of black players, and no owners, managers, or executives for a long, long time. Paige wanted something more like a merger, in which two or three of the best Negro League teams would be admitted to the majors intact. But that was too much to ask for in 1947.

November 19, 2012 – 8:11 am Categories: Articles | Comments (2)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

Because I want the Weekly Sift to be a counterweight to the mainstream media, I try not to pile on to stories that are already getting way too much attention. So last week, I just acknowledged the Petraeus scandal without saying anything about it. This week, it’s still making headlines and I still don’t care who slept with who.

Then I saw the Onion’s Nation Horrified To Learn About War In Afghanistan While Reading Up On Petraeus Sex Scandal and realized that while Petraeus’ sex life still isn’t news (by my lights), it does provide a good hook to start talking about some important or interesting things. So the main article this week, “Shadows Cast By the Petraeus Scandal”, will look at how easy it is for the FBI to invade an American’s privacy, the non-sexual moral issues Petraeus’ career raises, how Petraeus got such a larger-than-life image to begin with, and the “spiritual fitness” program that channels so much of the Pentagon’s money into Christian evangelism.

Last week I gave a one-word explanation of how the Republicans could hold the House of Representatives while getting fewer votes than the Democrats: gerrymandering. This week I look at how that works in theory, and then how it worked in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both of which returned Republican majorities to Congress while voting Democratic.

Finally, I review ESPN’s brilliant documentary “Ghosts of Ole Miss”, which follows the 1962 University of Mississippi football team through an undefeated season that is remembered mainly for James Meredith, the lethal riot against integration, and the 82nd Airborne’s invasion of campus. The narrator, a white Mississippi native, artfully traces the boundary between nostalgia and shame.

The articles should start coming out soon, and I’ll have everything up well before noon.

November 19, 2012 – 7:59 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Symptoms and Causes

The beating heart of modern conservatism is its visceral appeal to anxieties and fears of white Christians. … Once you understand this, you can see that the Republican Party’s problems are deeper than, say, opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. … Policy opposition is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The deeper issue is that for conservative politicians and conservative networks and conservative web sites, there is simply too much to be gained by feeding the sense of persecution and siege that many white Christians feel down to their toes.

— Chris Hayes,
Up with Chris Hayes, November 10

This week everybody was talking about the election aftermath

Democrats were happy with the election, but mostly we just got what the polls had promised us (plus toss-up senate races in North Dakota and Montana). Republicans, on the other hand, were shocked, because they had convinced themselves that the polls were biased (just like they’ve convinced themselves that climate scientists are part of some global leftist conspiracy).

So the really interesting thing to watch this week was how Republicans started dealing with this world they unexpectedly find themselves thrust into. That’s the subject of this week’s main article “W(h)ither the Republicans?“.

This week’s other article asks “Why Didn’t Money Talk?“. Citizens United was supposed to unleash an avalanche of money that would bury Democrats. It sort of did unleash that money, but Democrats won anyway. Does that mean it’s not a problem, or that Republicans just haven’t figured out how to take advantage yet?

One question lots of people have been asking: How did the Republicans hang onto the House? Answer: Gerrymandering. Democratic House candidates received more total votes than Republican House candidates, but the Republican state-legislature victories in 2010 allowed them to redraw the congressional districts to their advantage.

Incidentally, that points out how complicated it would be to make the Electoral College more fair. On the surface the Maine/Nebraska system of awarding each congressional district one electoral vote looks fairer than winner-take-all state elections. But that would raise the stakes on gerrymandering even higher. Romney might have won under such a system, even as he lost the popular vote by more than 3 million.

If you missed Karl Rove’s election-night craziness, watch Jon Stewart’s coverage of it. And if you missed President Obama’s thanks to his volunteers, watch it now:

All in all, I’m pleased with my hour-by-hour election guide. It anticipated states like Pennsylvania coming in faster than they did, but the overall story it told — Romney jumping out to an early electoral lead, but Obama pulling even around ten and winning by midnight — played out pretty well.

… and the fiscal cliff

Obama and Boehner fired their opening shots, but I’m not paying too much attention yet, because this is bound to stay unsettled for a month or more. Both sides want to sound reasonable while using codewords to reassure their supporters that they really aren’t compromising. It’s hard to tell what it all means or where it’s headed.

The liberal pundits and blogs are urging President Obama to call the Republicans’ bluff and let January 1 pass without a deal.

The Republican spin is that raising taxes for those making more than $250K will affect half of small business income. But on Face the Nation John Boehner had to admit that this comes from only 3% of “small” businessmen. In other words, they’ve miscategorized some big businessmen as small businessmen, and their income swamps the statistics. Your local florist or barber shop is not making its owner $250K.

Whenever conservatives defend low taxes for rich people, they always invoke the icon of small business, even though the real beneficiaries of their policies are the very, very wealthy.

I’m waiting for liberals to counter: The dire threat to small business isn’t government, it’s big business. It’s WalMart and Amazon crushing the shops on Main Street. It’s the giant seed corporations putting the squeeze on family farmers. It’s monopolized supply chains that give small businesses take-it-or-leave-it prices. It’s Apple and Microsoft defining a marketplace that funnels most of the profits on software to them. It’s a venture capital system that ends up owning 90% of any new idea before it gets to market.

To the extent that government is the problem, it’s government as manipulated by big business. I don’t care what their PR says, big business loves complicated regulations that you need a team of lawyers to understand. They already have a team of lawyers; small businesses don’t.

If Democrats come up with a program that favors real small businesses over big business, Republicans will block it.

… and General Petraeus

But I don’t know any more than you do about that.

… and you might find this interesting

So, Senate Republicans doing Wall Street’s bidding, you kept Elizabeth Warren from running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. How’d that work out for you?

Voter suppression hasn’t worked for Republicans, so it must be time for the Supreme Court to undo the Voting Rights Act.

National Organization for Marriage on its four losses: “We are not defeated.” Yes, you are. I stand by my long-term prediction.

Best web site I found this week: We Occupy Jesus.

November 12, 2012 – 10:27 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Post a comment

Why Didn’t Money Talk?

When a series of Supreme Court decisions dismantled campaign finance laws, many of us viewed the future with a glum certainty: Vast amounts of anonymous money were going to pour into political campaigns, most of it was going to pool up behind Republican candidates, and the dams that had so imperfectly preserved democracy until now would finally break altogether, sweeping in a more-or-less permanent Republican majority.

Some of that happened. The Republican presidential primaries, for example, often seemed more like a struggle between billionaire backers than between candidates. Sheldon Adelson kept Newt Gingrich in the race more-or-less single-handedly. Foster Friess did the same for Rick Santorum. Mitt Romney may not have relied on a single billionaire, but his campaign purse seemed bottomless as he overwhelmed one challenger after another with negative ads.

Vast amounts were spent in the general election, and Romney did have the advantage, but the totals weren’t lopsided. Open Secrets estimated that (as of October 17), largely unaccountable outside pro-Romney groups had spent three times as much as comparable pro-Obama groups, but that Obama’s campaign had raised almost enough in the old-fashioned way to make up the difference.

Source of Funds Obama Romney
Candidate $540,812,931 $336,399,297
Party $263,223,785 $284,156,290
Outside groups $128,056,615 $409,597,799
Total $932,093,331 $1,030,153,386

(It’s possible that Romney’s edge increased in the last 3 weeks of the campaign, but — speaking as a swing-state voter — I didn’t notice it.) What’s more, since networks sell airtime to candidates at a lower rate than they charge outside groups, and because the Obama campaign got bargains by committing money early, Obama may actually have been able to air more commercials than Romney did. Ad Age concludes: “Obama’s campaign ultimately won the air war.”

Similar things happened in the Senate races. Outside groups spent $15 million in Ohio attacking Sherrod Brown, but the Brown campaign managed to raise enough to maintain a rough parity. The truly crazy election was Jon Tester’s win in Montana, where outside groups spent $25 million and the campaigns themselves another $20 million, totaling about $100 per vote. But again, Tester stayed competitive.

In general, the Democrats had an advantage in small contributions, but they also raised some big money. (Who knows what price we’ll pay for that in the long run?) And they won even when they were outspent, as long as they weren’t outspent by much.

So it’s tempting to say that the whole money issue was overblown. My conclusion is a little less optimistic: I think the Republicans haven’t figured out what to do with their advantage yet. Karl Rove took his $400 million and did the same things he used to do with $40 million, just ten times more of it. That didn’t work.

And despite Romney’s image as a great salesman and a business genius, he just got outplayed. Obama’s early-summer ads had a clear goal: Make Bain Capital a negative for Romney. Probably that was the most effective advertising of the whole campaign. By contrast Romney’s ads lacked strategy. What product was he selling? Moderate Massachusetts Mitt? Severely conservative Mitt? Big business Mitt? The Great White Hope? Even his negative ads lacked coherence. He seemed to be throwing everything at Obama to see what would stick.

So at one level, the campaign just reinforces what any marketing professor will tell you: A big advertising budget isn’t enough. You need a product and a message that sells the product. You need to know who you’re selling to and why they should want to buy.

But Romney’s failure, like the Edsel and New Coke, doesn’t imply that advertising doesn’t work. Money in politics is like height in basketball. Sure, occasionally you run into a 7-foot stiff and a Spud Webb who can run rings around him. Height isn’t decisive that way, but it matters. You can’t ignore height and imagine that you’re going to assemble a championship basketball team.

Similarly, the fact that big money couldn’t buy Republicans the White House or the Senate in 2012 doesn’t mean that they can’t be bought. The fact that the corporations and the billionaires didn’t get everything they wanted this time doesn’t mean that they won’t next time.

In politics, money talks in stages. The first stage is just to get your name known. The second gets your name identified with some issue or slogan or proposal. Third, you can attach some negative image to your opponent and fend off the image he tries to attach to you. In all of those stages, there’s a ceiling — after you spend a certain amount, the message has been delivered, and the advantage in delivering it over and over diminishes.

But I suspect there are stages we have not yet dreamed of, in which large amounts of money, creatively spent, can change the public’s perception of reality.

The 2012 billion-dollar campaigns were horseless carriages. But by 2016, someone may have designed a genuine roadster. Then we’ll be in trouble.

November 12, 2012 – 10:03 am Categories: Articles | Comments (6)

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W(h)ither the Republicans?

Aron Nimzowitch, the greatest chess master of his era, once ungraciously berated himself: “That I should lose to this idiot!”

I’m guessing that’s how Republicans felt Wednesday morning. They’ve never respected Barack Obama, and many never admitted that he’s really president. To them, he’s a Kenyan usurper, a vacuous celebrity, the “affirmative action president” for whom whites voted just “to prove that they weren’t racists“, a puppet reading from a teleprompter, the “food stamp president“, a “racist” who “has a deep-seated hatred for white people”, and an “anti-American leftist” who needs to “learn how to be an American” because was mentored by Communists and had been “palling around with terrorists” most of his life.

As for Obama’s policies since usurping the presidency, conservatives were convinced (falsely) that the stimulus was an enormous waste of money. ObamaCare is a “government takeover” that will soon put “death panels” in charge of grandma’s treatment plan. Obama raised taxes and spent wildly, but slashed defense. He threw Israel under the bus, and let Iran get “four years closer to a bomb“. (Picture how imminent the Iranian bomb must be: Hawks like Michael Eisenstadt were telling us in 2005 that “within a few years at most, Iran will be a de facto nuclear weapons state”. Those “few years” had passed already when Obama took office. And now the Iranian bomb is even four years closer than that.)

Now Republicans are supposed to accept that the un-American socialist failure just kicked their butts. And you know who else did? Girls. Elizabeth Warren, Tammy Baldwin, Heidi Heitkamp, and Mazie Hirono didn’t just keep the Senate Democratic, they increased Harry Reid’s majority.

The bubble popped. The Right totally didn’t see it coming. All year and right up to the end, Dick Morris had been assuring them that a Romney landslide was brewing. The polls said otherwise, but pollsters belonged to the lamestream media that was in the bag for Obama, like that “effeminate” Nate Silver. If you used the internal data to “unskew” the Democratic sampling bias, then the polls also predicted a Romney landslide! With a week to go, Newt Gingrich foresaw more than 300 electoral votes for Romney, plus a Republican Senate. The Romney campaign claimed it could take Pennsylvania! George Will saw them capturing Minnesota!

Even Mitt Romney believed it.

I’m belaboring this point for a reason: Sure, we liberals had our own how-could-they-re-elect-that-guy moment in 2004. But most of us had been dreading that outcome for a long time. Even in 2008, when all the signs pointed in our favor, we kept looking up to see if the sky had started falling yet.

Conservatives aren’t like that. They believe (and constantly tell each other) that they are the majority. They are the People. They are the real Americans. In 2008, some kind of affirmative-action Hollywood smoke-and-mirrors made Obama president (if he really is president), but by 2012 America had seen the horrible consequences of his Marxist ideas, and they were ready for a real alpha male like Mitt Romney and his iron-pumping VP.

That fantasy world came crashing down Tuesday night in just a few hours. They lost the White House and the Senate. They lost congressional heroes like Alan West. Joe Walsh got whipped by a girl with no legs. (Check that: an Army helicopter pilot with no legs.) Michele Bachmann barely escaped. Gay marriage won in four states. Marijuana in two.

Not just a bad day. Worse, Republicans lost for an obvious reason that’s only going to get worse: demographics. Only 72% of the electorate was white this year — compared to 74% in 2008 and 77% in 2004. If you lose 93% of blacks, 72% of Hispanics, and 73% of Asians, even 59% of the white vote won’t save you any more.

Only 78% of voters are Protestant or Catholic, and that number is also going down. If you lose 70% of everybody else, that’s a big hill to climb.

If you depend so totally on white Christians, and if they’re less than 60% of the electorate, then you can’t afford to write off any subgroup of them, like single women (67% for Obama altogether — some of them had to be white Christians) or the young (60% of the under-30 vote) or low-to-middling-income workers (60% of those making under $50K).

Ruy Teixeira saw this coming ten years ago. Jon Chait said this was the watershed year in his February article “2012 or Never“:

The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests.

Republican responses. Several people have observed the resemblance between Republican responses and the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. To me it has sounded more like stuff I remember from the playground.

They cheated. Thank God no major voice in the Republican Party is pushing this line, but it shows up often in comment threads: Nate Silver predicted the election so well because he must have figured in the Democratic vote fraud. There’s zero evidence for this, especially compared to the unmistakeable Republican voter-suppression effort, but no matter.

Fox News’ line has been similar, but less extreme: Obama was mean; he ran a negative campaign. (Ignore the fact that Romney’s campaign was more negative and lied constantly.)

Or the media cheated: The fact-checkers were biased when they correctly reported that Romney was lying about Jeep moving American jobs to China or Obama gutting the welfare work requirement. The “liberal” media wouldn’t help Republicans spin “you didn’t build that” into a gaffe, but they did cover Romney’s 47% tape as the disaster it very definitely was.

Yes, the mainstream media presented a different world than the conservative media. That’s because the conservative media was delusional, as Tuesday demonstrated.

It was luck. Both Haley Barbour and Karl Rove blamed Hurricane Sandy. A related theory is that Chris Christie pulled a dolchstoss, stabbing Romney in the back by embracing Obama after the storm.

But how did Sandy help Democrats win senate races in hurricane-free Montana and North Dakota? And what about the gay marriage initiatives? Seriously, did Maryland voters see Christie embrace Obama and think, “They should get married”? Is that what happened?

It doesn’t count. At least it doesn’t count against conservatism, because Romney wasn’t a true conservative.

Yeah, like Rick Santorum or Herman Cain would have done better. Exit polls say 35% of the electorate calls itself conservative, compared to 25% liberal. But moderates preferred Obama 56%-41%. How many moderates would have voted for Michele Bachmann?

On election night, conservatives argued that Romney’s moderation hurt their turnout, and claimed that Romney got 3 million fewer votes than McCain did in 2008. However, that argument is fading as the absentee ballots and other late reports get tabulated. As of this morning, the McCain-Romney gap was down to 1 million and will probably go away completely in the final totals.

Romney tacked to the center in October because he was losing as a conservative. True conservatives lost senate seats in red states like Missouri and Indiana, and got soundly thwacked in swing states like Ohio and Florida. Obama would have beaten a true conservative in a landslide, but Romney’s “tax cut? what tax cut?” act in the first debate made things competitive for a while.

It’s not fair. Non-whites shouldn’t have voted against Republicans, because Republicans have trophy non-whites. Listen to Rush Limbaugh:

Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Condoleezza Rice? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Marco Rubio? Why doesn’t the Republican Party get credit for Suzanne Martinez? … The Allen Wests … Clarence Thomas. Herman Cain. None of it counts.

Even Republicans who notice the demographics still misdiagnose the problem as identity politics. But Marco Rubio won’t get them the Hispanic vote any more than Sarah Palin or Linda McMahon or Carly Fiorina captured the women’s vote. The problem is policy. As one Hispanic activist put it: “The face of who delivers bad news does not change bad news.”

Rush sort of gets this, but he doesn’t like it:

But what are we supposed to do now?  In order to get the Hispanic or Latino vote, does that mean open the borders and embrace the illegals? … If we’re not getting the female vote, do we become pro-choice?  Do we start passing out birth control pills? Is that what we have to do?

Here’s a start: The next Republican nominee needs to tell Rush to go to Hell when he calls Sandra Fluke a “slut” or says Cubans aren’t like other Hispanics because “they’re oriented toward work“. As long as the Party tolerates racism and sexism, it’s going to have trouble with non-whites and women, no matter who’s on the podium.

Your loss, America. Listen to Ann Coulter:

If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers, and it’s over. … [America is] no longer interested in conservative ideas. It’s interested in handouts.

The “tipping point” — when lazy people who want government handouts become the majority — is something conservatives have been talking about for a long time. And how did we get there? Bill O’Reilly explained.

It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama. … The white establishment is now the minority.

So: Democracy has failed in America because we’ve let in too many lazy brown people and let the lazy black people reproduce faster than the hard-working white people. Maybe that message will sound more inclusive when Marco Rubio or Bobby Jindal says it, but the Economist’s Lexington column thinks it’s a problem:

Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike.

I’m going home now. Citizens of 15 states have posted online petitions calling for their states to secede.

You wanna fight me? I’ll fight you. Watch this video from Heritage Action.

I know, they appear to mean “We are in a war to save this nation” and “We will take the fight for freedom to the halls of Congress” and “This is the last stand on Earth” metaphorically. But not everybody in their audience will see it that way.

What’s a sensible response? When defeated, we all fantasize vindication and revenge. But you can’t let yourself carry out the ideas you generate just to make yourself feel better. Eventually you need to look objectively at why you lost and what you can do about it.

I agree with Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh this far: The problem is not conservatism per se. America needs a sound conservative party.

One of the major parties should be skeptical of government, and should look for market-based and private-sector ways to solve problems. Much of Obama’s “socialist” agenda originated with the kind of problem-solving conservatives used to do: Cap-and-trade was a conservative idea for controlling pollution through markets. ObamaCare came from RomneyCare, a conservative plan for achieving universal coverage without nationalizing the insurance companies. Whether you like those ideas or not, they (and more like them) should be part of the discussion.

But America doesn’t need an arrogant delusional conservative party.

When the new Tea Party congressmen took office in 2011, they had a mandate to push for spending cuts, but not to take the United States to the edge of bankruptcy, as they did in the debt-ceiling fiasco. Religious-right politicians may get a mandate to make abortion laws stricter, but not to humiliate abortion-seeking women, or force raped women to carry their rapists’ children.

Conservatives need to recognize that they are only about 1/3 of the country. To stay in office, they need to please someone other than themselves — to compromise, in other words. That requires a humility that at the moment seems alien to them. But if they force a series of absolutist us-against-them decisions on the voters, they will keep losing.

Conservatives need to grapple with the real problems of America, and stop shadow-boxing with imaginary problems. Fifty million Americans without health insurance is a real problem. Income inequality is a real problem. So are global warming, gun violence, and an election system where people have to wait five hours to vote. Feel free to start offering market-based, private-sector solutions at any time.

But voter fraud is not a real problem. Sharia law is not a real problem. Obama’s birth certificate is not a real problem. See the difference?

Come back to reality: Tax cuts do not increase revenue. Spending cuts don’t create jobs. Rape causes pregnancy. People die for lack of health insurance. Foreigners don’t want us to bomb or invade them. There’s no reasonable way to deport 12 million Hispanics.

Stop pretending otherwise.

Be as conservative as you want. But face reality, offer solutions, and give a little to get a little.

Don’t go back into the bubble. It may not feel like it now, but the American people did conservatives a favor last Tuesday.  For just a few hours the bubble popped, and it became painfully clear that the conservative media had been lying to its viewers and readers about the election.

What else have they been lying about?

Here’s my best, most honest advice to conservatives: Go cold turkey on propaganda. It kills the pain temporarily, but in the long run it makes your problems worse. Fox News, the Weekly Standard, talk radio, the Washington Times — they haven’t been serving you, they’ve been pandering to you and taking you for a ride.

America needs a conservative party. But it needs a conservative party that faces reality.

November 12, 2012 – 7:38 am Categories: Articles | Comments (13)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

No surprise, this week’s Sift focuses on the election aftermath, and in particular where the Republicans go now.

They’ve lost the popular vote in five out of six presidential election now, and seem to have alienated Hispanics as a voting bloc. (Asians too — which gets much less attention and points to a larger problem than just immigration policy.) White identity politics motivates the base, but the price may be too high. Evangelicals demand purity on gay rights and abortion, but those positions push away young voters.

So this week’s main article “W(h)ither the Republicans?” examines their reactions to a sweeping loss and gives my own suggestion: Keep a small-government, private-sector approach to problems, but come back to reality. Start proposing solutions to real problems like climate change, rather than imaginary ones like voter fraud or Sharia law. And recognize that conservatives are only 1/3 of the electorate, so you need to compromise.

The second article “Why Didn’t Money Talk?” discusses why the doomsday predictions many of us made after Citizens United didn’t pan out. The money showed up, but the results didn’t. Why not?

I’m trying to get both out before noon.

November 12, 2012 – 7:02 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Tomorrow Night

Everyone’s a libertarian until their state is under 10 feet of water.

— Top Conservative Cat

This week everyone was talking about the weather, but no one was doing anything about it

Maybe Hurricane Sandy will finally blow all the climate-change deniers to Crankland, and we can start talking seriously about what to do. In this election, Democrats found the courage to talk about abortion, but climate change has still been off the agenda.

It’s one of those focus-group feedback loops: If neither party pushes an issue, the public either loses interest in it or thinks that nothing can be done. Then focus groups don’t react to it, so candidates are afraid to mention it. But nobody knows whether the issue would catch fire if somebody fanned it.

This never happens to conservatives. There’s always one billionaire or corporation ready to push an issue even if the voters seem not to care.

Remember how the Republican Convention laughed when Mitt Romney reminded them that Obama wanted to do something about rising oceans? That’s just hilarious now if you’re from Atlantic City or Staten Island.

And we’ve all been fixated on tomorrow’s election

Up until now, I’ve been trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to focus on issues and themes, and to avoid letting the pure horserace aspect of the election overwhelm its content. The mainstream media already offers way too much coverage like: “Scores of people are dead in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. How do you think this affects President Obama’s chances?”

But the election is tomorrow. You can’t ignore it any more than you can avert your eyes from the boxes under the tree on Christmas Eve. Are we going to get that cool RC helicopter, lumps of coal, or a very practical package of socks?

I did so well forecasting the 2008 election that I ought to quit while I’m ahead. I had three advantages then: I was one of the early people to realize how good Nate Silver is at analyzing polls, the message Nate divined from the polls was clear, and I discounted my fear that whites might make a voting-booth decision to screw the black guy. So when the Pacific-coast states put Obama over the top at precisely 11 p.m. eastern time, I looked like Nostradamus.

This year everybody reads Nate in the NYT and the message of the polls is far less clear. Last time, the states that teetered on the knife-edge were long-time red states like Indiana and North Carolina, which only affected the magnitude of the Obama landslide.

This year, the polls say Obama kinda-sorta. If Romney wins, well, stranger things have happened. Ditto for Congress: Probably Democrats keep the Senate and Republicans keep the House, but neither is a sure thing. As for when we can go to bed tomorrow night, who knows? I’m guessing it’s not going to cliff-hang on one too-close-to-call state, which probably means it’ll be decided by, say, midnight.

As in 2008, I’m splitting my election-night predictions into two parts: the result (for the Senate as well as the presidency), and how it’s going to play out hour-by-hour as the night rolls on.

… and you might also find this interesting

In addition to the races for office, there are also some important ballot initiatives. Same-sex marriage is on the ballot in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington. In Maryland and Washington, the legislature has already approved same-sex marriage, but the initiative would veto the law before it takes effect. A similar veto-initiative passed in Maine in 2009, and this vote would reverse that one. The Minnesota proposal would codify opposite-sex-only marriage in the constitution.

Polls are close, but generally favor same-sex marriage — which has never won at the ballot-box before. Recent polls have same-sex marriage proposals ahead 52%-42% in Washington, 57%-36% in Maine, and 52%-43% in Maryland. The Minnesota constitutional amendment is too close to call.

Ballot proposals in Colorado, Oregon, and Washington would legalize recreational marijuana use. That gives a whole new meaning to “high turnout”.

The amazing Rick Perlstein (of Nixonland fame) describes a little-explored region: The relationship between the content of conservative publications and the ads that sustain them. Liberals often refer to right-wing liars as “snake-oil salemen”. But the goldbugs and multi-level marketers and direct-mail advertisers that prey on the conservative rank-and-file are real snake-oil salesmen.

the con selling 23-cent miracle cures for heart disease inches inexorably into the one selling miniscule marginal tax rates as the miracle cure for the nation itself

Have trouble believing that tax cuts create jobs? Well, the Congressional Research Service doesn’t believe it either. So Republicans pressured them to withdraw their report.

Some parodies are so good that they ought to be true. Here, Brad Hicks explains that Atlas Shrugged is just the first volume in a trilogy that would have ended with Anthem, if Ayn had just gotten around to writing the middle volume.

If you vote for Obama, Mike Huckabee says you won’t get to spend eternity where he’s going. You know, I might agree with that.

There’s got to be a Romney: The Musical coming.

November 5, 2012 – 1:33 pm Categories: Short Notes, Weekly summaries | Comments (4)

Election Night Hour By Hour

Election night in a presidential year is the greatest show politics offers. Countless characters have been spinning their individual stories for months or even years, and now all their separate yarns meet here to end in victory or defeat.

Even if you think your candidate is going to win, you worry like a fan watching the football arc downfield towards a wide-open receiver in the end zone. Just yesterday, you overheard strangers having the most bizarre conversation about the election, full of misinformation and craziness. Your aunt thinks like that, but you believed she was the only one. What if people everywhere are changing their minds in some insane way, at the last minute, too late for the polls to pick up?

Information comes in little by little through the evening, as each state closes its polls and then the precincts report whenever they get done counting. I’ve already given you my best guesses about how the presidency and the Senate are going to go, and it makes no difference if you spend Tuesday night at the movies and then pull the bedcovers over your head until it’s all decided Wednesday morning. But that’s like skipping to the last page of a suspense novel. How is it going to play out?

Before the polls close. The most accurate polls are exit polls, put together by interviewing folks right after they vote. Exit pollsters don’t have to make guesses about who’s going to vote, there are no undecideds, and intensity no longer matters. They voted, and a vote is a vote.

Exit poll results start coming in around noon, but news organizations have pledged not to release them until poll-closing time. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get some information out of them.

First, turnout. There’s no embargo against reporting turnout, and a big vote is good for the Democrats — especially big turnout of non-white voters, who often are more erratic in their voting habits. (That’s why Republicans have tried so hard to make voting difficult in swing states like Florida and Ohio.) The two big demographic questions in the election are whether blacks are as motivated to vote for Obama as they were in 2008, and whether the Hispanic vote is going to keep increasing.

All day, reporters will be saying whether turnout is light or heavy and maybe a little about who’s voting. Those are your first clues about what kind of night it will be.

Second, maybe the TV talking heads can’t tell you the exit poll results, but they’ve seen them, and they’re not obliged to make fools of themselves. So if conservative or liberal pundits start laying the groundwork for the what-went-wrong spin they’ll want to elaborate later, you can guess they know something.

7 p.m. The first real results come in, as polls close in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont,  and Virginia. Obama is immediately projected as the winner in Vermont (3), and Romney quickly grabs Georgia (16), Indiana (11), Kentucky (8), and South Carolina (9).

But Virginia is the one to watch, because it’s Obama’s first chance at a knock-out punch. Romney can’t win without Virginia, and polling guru Nate Silver gives Obama a 73% chance of taking it. Mostly likely, Virginia won’t be called for a few hours, but if it is called for Romney quickly, that’s a very good sign for him.

Also watch for more detailed information about the turnout in these states and the race/gender composition of the electorate. Exit polls of Indiana in particular will assess what price Richard Mourdock paid for his outrageous statements about rape. That could signal whether the Democratic war-on-women message is working nationally.

Other than Indiana’s Donnelly/Mourdock Senate race, also watch Kaine/Allen in Virginia, which is supposed to be close, but Nate Silver expects Kaine to win. Sanders should win easily in Vermont.

Likely running total: Romney 44, Obama 3 with Virginia still out. This is a pattern that will continue for several hours: Obama is counting on west-coast states like California to put him over the top, so his electoral vote totals will run behind Romney’s most of the night even if he’s doing well. For example, Obama has essentially won already if Virginia gets called for him, but at this point he’d still be behind 44-16.

7:30. Polls close in North Carolina (15), Ohio (18), and West Virginia (5). Romney takes West Virginia. North Carolina is another possible Obama knock-out punch, but probably it’s a bridge too far. Ohio is the state everything hangs on, so I’d be amazed if it were called early.

The Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia should go to the Democrats, probably fairly quickly

Running total: Romney 49, Obama 3 with Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio still out.

8:00. Major results start coming in. (You might even want to save yourself some aggravation by eating dinner peacefully and not turning on the TV until 8.) Alabama (9), Connecticut (7), Delaware (3), District of Columbia (3), Florida (29), Illinois (20), Maine (4), Maryland (10), Massachusetts (11), Mississippi (6), Missouri (10), New Hampshire (4), New Jersey (14), Oklahoma (7), Pennsylvania (20), Rhode Island (4), and Tennessee (11) start reporting results.

Easy wins for Romney in Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Tennessee, and for Obama in Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

Pennsylvania is Romney’s first shot at a knock-out; it’s hard to see Obama winning without it. But probably Obama carries it in another hour. New Jersey might have some vote-counting delays due to the storm. New Hampshire and Florida are honest-to-God toss-ups that should take a while to call. Florida is another potential knock-out; Romney can’t win without it.

The first clear sign of a good night for the Democrats in the Senate will come when Warren beats Brown in Massachusetts. It will take a little longer for Murphy to beat McMahon in Connecticut, but that will happen too.

Running total: Romney 92, Obama 82 with Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania out.

8:30. Arkansas (6) goes to Romney. 98-79.

9:00. Another big moment. First results from Arizona (11), Colorado (9), Louisiana (8), Michigan (16), Minnesota (10), Nebraska (5), New Mexico (5), New York (29), South Dakota (3), Texas (38), Wisconsin (10), and Wyoming (3).

Romney quickly takes Arizona, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming. Obama gets Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, and New York.

Also, Pennsylvania comes in for Obama and North Carolina for Romney. It might also be time to call Virginia or New Hampshire, probably for Obama, but I’m not counting on them.

The interesting Senate race is Baldwin/Thompson in Wisconsin. Democrats want to believe that Kerry in Nebraska and Carmona in Arizona have a chance, but they really don’t.

Running total: Romney 181, Obama 159. Ohio, Florida, Colorado, and Wisconsin out. New Hampshire and Virginia in, but unpredictable.

10:00. New results in Iowa (6), Kansas (6), Montana (3), Nevada (6), and Utah (6). Of all Romney’s home states, Utah is the only one that likes him. He also picks up Kansas and Montana.

Between 10 and 11 is when it will become clear that the Obama firewall is holding. Ohio will turn blue, and they’ll call Nevada and Wisconsin by the end of the hour. Florida might come in, but who knows?

The Montana Senate race is a real cliff-hanger.

Running total: Romney 196, Obama 193. Florida, Colorado, and Iowa out. New Hampshire and Virginia in, but unpredictable.

11:00. California (55), Hawaii (4), Idaho (4), North Dakota (3), Oregon (7), and Washington (12) are all called immediately. Obama takes all of them but Idaho and North Dakota. Iowa also comes in for Obama. Florida is definitely in, but I can’t predict for who.

Running total: Obama 277, Romney 203. New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida in but unpredictable. Colorado still out. Obama is over the top.

1:00. Alaska (3) goes for Romney and they call Colorado, but no one cares. Obama 277, Romney 206. Unpredictable: 55.

So Obama wins by midnight.

November 5, 2012 – 12:19 pm Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

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