Tag Archives: Republicans

2016: Understanding the Republican Process

March 30, 2015 – 9:16 am

Four years ago, Jonathan Chait made the kind of prognosticating mistake people don’t let you forget: He picked Tim Pawlenty as the 2012 Republican nominee.

To be fair, Pawlenty wasn’t as ridiculous a choice as hindsight makes him look, and Chait wasn’t the only one forecasting great things for him: Pawlenty was Mitt Romney without the baggage of Mormonism and RomneyCare. He was conservative enough to be acceptable to the Party’s various factions, while sounding moderate enough not to scare off the national electorate.

In other words: If this were still the GOP of 1920, Pawlenty was exactly the kind of Warren-Harding-ish compromise candidate the smoke-filled room above the convention hall would have settled on after ten or twenty ballots. But since Pawlenty was nobody’s first choice in 2012, he never broke out of single digits in the polls and was out of the race before a single vote was cast.

The lesson of Chait/Pawlenty is that the modern Republican presidential process has two distinct phases: First a qualifying phase, where a few candidates break out of the pack to eliminate everyone else, and then a decision phase, where the party picks one of the qualifiers to unify around. Pawlenty is an example of a good decision-phase candidate who never made it out of the qualifying round.

To make it out of the qualifying phase, you need to be the first choice of one of the Party’s factions. But what are those factions?

The Four Factions. I still believe in the model from “The Four Flavors of Republican“, which boils down to this diagram:

GOPstructureThe four groups overlap, which is how the GOP stays together. But each speaks a subtly different language and focuses on a different set of issues. In 2012, each faction had a favorite son: Mitt Romney (Corporatist), Newt Gingrich (NeoCon), Rick Santorum (Theocrat), and Ron Paul (Libertarian). Those candidates made it through the qualifying phase, with Romney substantially in the lead. The decision-phase question was then whether Romney could convince the NeoCons, Theocrats, and Libertarians not to divide the party — and so insure Obama’s re-election — by rejecting him.

That model, I believe, will hold again in 2016. To make in through the qualifying phase, a candidate will need to convince one of the four factions that he is their guy. To survive the decision phase and get the nomination, a qualifier has to convince each of the other three factions not to veto him.

So let’s look at the factions one-by-one. Each faction has its favorite sons, and a second category I call “fluent speakers” — candidates who aren’t necessarily identified with the faction, but who can go into a room of activists and speak their language. If a faction comes to believe that its favorite sons can’t be nominated, its members might throw their early support to a fluent speaker. On the flip side, a faction might identify some candidate as an enemy: somebody whose nomination could be a reason to bolt the party. In 2012, for example, many Theocrats had a hard time stomaching the Mormon Romney.

Theocrats. If a candidate denounces gay marriage, compares abortion to the Holocaust, talks about the Constitution as if it were a scripture God revealed to the Founders, and takes seriously the idea that Christians are persecuted in this country, he’s trying to win over the Theocrats.

The favorite sons are Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum. (Sarah Palin could be favorite daughter if she actually ran and wasn’t looking increasingly loony. But I don’t think she has any interest in the hard work necessary to run a serious campaign. She floats her name to stay in the headlines, and she’ll tease her supporters as long she can. But she won’t run.) Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal are fluent speakers of the Theocrat language. Scott Walker has the background and record to be a fluent speaker, but after watching his Iowa Freedom Summit speech, I’m still not sure he can really preach in Theocrat. (Questions like that are why we have campaigns.) Chris Christie might be an enemy.

Jeb Bush can speak the language, but fails key litmus tests. Theocrats worry about government-imposed secularism, and so are suspicious of any federal role in education. Bush was an early proponent of the Common Core standard, not realizing it would turn into a “vast network of conspiracy theories“. (To a Corporatist, Common Core is not a liberal conspiracy, it’s a corporate plan to skim more profits off of public education. That kind of conspiracy is OK.) A lot of Theocrats are also Nativists, so Bush’s sympathy for Hispanic immigrants also makes him suspect. One of the key issues of the decision phase will be whether Huckabee/Santorum can paint Bush as an enemy, or whether Bush can use his mastery of the language to convince Theocrats (who liked his brother in spite of No Child Left Behind) that he’s harmless.

In recent years, Iowa has picked the Theocrat qualifier: Santorum in 2012, Huckabee in 2008. Both are interested this year. Ted Cruz’ decision to announce his candidacy at Liberty University says that he’s pitching for the Theocrat vote as well.

NeoCons. This is the John McCain/Dick Cheney wing of the party. A candidate who identifies with Israel, denounces Islam by name, hates Obama’s move to end the Cuba embargo, and views war with Iran as more-or-less inevitable is appealing to the NeoCons.

The purest NeoCon candidates are John Bolton and Lindsay Graham, but it’s not clear that either of them is ever going to be taken seriously. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry, and a lot of other people are fluent speakers. Rand Paul is an enemy, while Scott Walker’s complete lack of military or foreign-policy experience makes him suspect.

The early primary with the strongest NeoCon flavor is South Carolina, and the kingmaker of the NeoCons is billionaire Sheldon Adelson; when he starts writing big checks, we’ll know who the NeoCon candidate is.

Corporatists. Articles about the “donor class” or the “Republican establishment” focus on the Corporatists. Corporatists value managerial experience, so they favor business executives and governors. They hate unions, want to privatize anything government does,  and dislike government interference (but aren’t above taking a special tax break or a bail-out). They want to cut the taxes that affect rich people and corporations, but they also worry about “the 47%” who don’t pay federal income tax. So raising taxes on poor people is a winning issue here, if you come up with some euphemism (“broaden the tax base“) that doesn’t sound like “raising taxes”.

Moral issues are just tactical for the Corporatists; they used gay marriage to boost Republican turn-out in 2004, but are just as happy to drop it now that the wind has changed. However immigration reform works out, they don’t want to lose access to cheap labor.

Corporatists are well-connected in the media, so their candidates usually appear to be stronger than they actually are. (That’s why Romney seemed “inevitable” in the 2012 cycle, but had so much trouble nailing the nomination down.) As candidates from other factions emerge, the media will be shocked and say that they “came from nowhere”.

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and Scott Walker are the Corporatist favorite sons. Corporatists don’t usually have to accept a fluent speaker, but Rick Perry might be acceptable and most candidates speak pretty good Corporatist. Mike Huckabee is an enemy, and many Corporatists find Ted Cruz’ populist side scary.

The Koch Brothers are an interesting case. They present themselves as Libertarians, but much of their money goes to Corporatists. Koch-Corporate may just be a rival branch of the Corporatist faction, one that wants to support its own candidates rather than established ones like Bush. If so, Marco Rubio or Scott Walker might be its favorite son.

Libertarians. Libertarian Republicans are already united behind Rand Paul, just as they were behind Ron Paul in 2012. But they are probably the smallest faction of the party, and the question is whether Paul can pull support from other factions, or whether some fluent speaker might get their support if Paul embarrasses himself in the debates. (I think that’s a real possibility; Rand is just not as sharp as his Dad was.)

The key event to look for is whether Paul can get support from the Kochs. (I don’t think he will.) Paul was invited to the Koch Brothers’ candidate forum (where he clashed with Cruz and Rubio over foreign policy), but Rubio came out ahead in the straw poll.

What the numbers say. 538’s Harry Enten looked at recent nominees and came up with this theory about early polls: At this stage of the campaign, you can be on your way to the nomination if you’re known and liked by your party (as Bush was in 1999), or if you’re not liked because you’re still unknown (like Dukakis in 1987). But it’s death to be known and not liked. No recent nominee has had both high name recognition and low net favorability at this stage of the process.

If you buy that theory, then Christie and Palin are hopeless, while Perry and Bush have work to do, and Jindal is on life support. Huckabee, Paul, Carson, and Walker are about where they ought to be, with Cruz and Rubio doing OK.

Other factors. A lot of unpredictable or hard-to-measure factors will turn out to be important, including:

The Money Primary. Whoever wins the first primary gets a boost, but the first primary isn’t Iowa or New Hampshire: It’s the Money Primary, where the “electorate” are the big donors. A Corporatist almost always wins: Bush in 2000, Romney in 2012.

In a few days we’ll start hearing fund-raising totals from the first quarter, and they will make it clear that Jeb Bush is decisively winning the Money Primary. That will shape the race in three ways:

  • It anoints Bush as the Corporatist qualifier, unless and until he screws up. It all but sinks Chris Christie, and tells Scott Walker he needs a more Theocratic image.
  • It will ignite the Jeb-is-inevitable talk, which will continue until a Theocrat “comes from nowhere” and wins Iowa. (If Jeb wins Iowa, then he probably is inevitable.) That will open up the possibility of a Libertarian or NeoCon winning New Hampshire and a NeoCon winning South Carolina.
  • Money gives a candidate resilience. If you have a lot of it banked, you can absorb a loss and regroup in the next state. In 2012, Romney lost South Carolina to Gingrich, then outspent him 4-to-1 to win Florida.

Identity politics. There’s a strong I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I aspect to Republican politics. In the Obama years, that helped non-white candidates like Herman Cain, Ben Carson, and Bobby Jindal, who let Republicans say, “See, we’re not racists; you’re the racists.” But as the Democratic mantle shifts from Obama to (presumably) Hillary, I expect Republicans to lose interest in non-whites. If there were a viable woman in the race — Palin isn’t, and Carly Fiorina has yet to emerge from obscurity — she might get a similar boost. Another female VP candidate is a real possibility.

Performance. The hardest factor to predict is how well candidates will perform on the campaign trail. In 2007, who knew Obama would be that good a campaigner or a strategist? And you can never guess when somebody is going to self-destruct in a debate, like Rick Perry did in 2011. (His excuse is that he was recovering from back pain and was over-medicated then, but he’s better now. I thought his Iowa Freedom Summit performance was impressive, but we won’t know until the debates start. Certainly any little flub he makes will get a lot of coverage.)

I expect Cruz and Christie to perform well, and Jindal and Paul to perform badly. (Watch Paul’s interview with Rachel Maddow.) The big wild card is Bush, who has never campaigned for national office, or for anything at all since 2002.

I don’t think we give Mitt Romney enough credit for how good a primary campaign he ran in 2012. He was the target in every debate, and nobody wounded him. Can Bush walk that gauntlet? It’s harder than Romney made it look.

Luck. If 2008’s October surprise had been an Iranian nuclear test rather than a financial crisis, John McCain might be president. You never know when Fate will serve up some issue that lets a candidate say, “I’ve been right about this all along.” Conversely, you have to wonder if the story Rick Perry wants to tell about the Texas economy will fall apart now that oil is under $50 a barrel. All the governors are tied to the events in their states. More bond downgrades for New Jersey could sink Christie, and the sluggish economy of Wisconsin could be trouble for Walker. The outbreak of an unpopular war could turn Rand Paul into the peace candidate.

What I Expect. Paul is the only Libertarian running; unless he self-destructs, he’s a qualifier. Similarly, unless some gaffe makes him a laughing stock, Bush will be the Corporatist qualifier. Iowa will anoint the Theocrat qualfier (or eliminate Theocrats if none of them can win it). Ditto for South Carolina and the NeoCons. Then the two qualifiers who are polling best against the Democrat — Hillary unless somebody else emerges soon — will have a shot at putting a coalition together.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (15)

The Myth of Republican Governance

March 2, 2015 – 9:48 am

If your ideology says government can’t succeed, why prove yourself wrong?

Any day now, we are often assured, Republicans in Congress will start to take their jobs seriously. It hasn’t happened yet, but soon.

“I think a lot of people better get serious about governing,” Pennsylvania Republican Congressman Charlie Dent said last Friday, after the House failed to fund the Department of Homeland Security past next Friday. It’ll happen. Any day. Any minute.

Of course, they were very serious about governing during the George W. Bush administration. But nobody — not even Bush’s closest relatives — want to think too hard about those days now.

And then the Obama landslide of 2008 made Republicans almost irrelevant for two years. Suddenly there was no point trying to take responsibility for anything, and Republicans discovered the invigorating thrill of pure nihilism. They were free to propose nothing and say no to everything, even their own ideas from that era we don’t talk about any more.

So when Obama based his healthcare proposal on Romneycare, Romney opposed it. McCain turned against the McCain-Lieberman cap-and-trade plan, and voted against his own immigration reform. Republicans were all mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it any more — whatever it was.

But when the low-turnout election of 2010 made John Boehner Speaker of the House, it was time to get serious and get back to governing responsibly. Wasn’t it? [1]

Then followed four years of playing chicken with the well-being of the Republic. That series of crises culminated in the government shutdown of 2013, when the executive branch was very nearly put in the impossible situation of being obligated to carry out Congress’ appropriations bills, but forbidden to raise the money by either taxing or borrowing. Crazy ideas like the trillion-dollar coin bounced around, because they were no crazier than everything else that was happening.

At the time, Republicans’ poll numbers dropped, and there was some thought that the voters might punish the party in 2014. But in fact the exact opposite happened: The voters gave them control of the Senate too.

But now, with control of both houses, they have something to prove. Don’t they? In January as the new completely-Republican-controlled Congress opened, John McCain expressed the party line:

I think a majority [of Republicans] recognize that we have to govern responsibly. We have to show that we can be a productive party, and that, I think, will have a direct effect on whether we’re able to elect a Republican as president in 2016.

Two months later, DHS is living paycheck to paycheck, because House Republicans are mad as hell about immigration. They don’t have a coherent plan to undo President Obama’s executive actions, and they certainly don’t have an immigration plan of their own [2], but they’re mad! They have to do … something.

Meanwhile, we’re now up to 50 votes repealing ObamaCare, and not a single one on a Republican plan to replace it. Republicans nearly all acknowledge that parts of ObamaCare should be kept. (The part about pre-existing conditions, for example.) But coming up with a plan that actually does that? Making the compromises necessary to pass it into law? You’ve got to be kidding.

Discipline. In years past, the voters played the wait-til-your-father-gets-home role in American politics. A little bit of posturing and headline-grabbing was fine, even expected. But if a political temper tantrum gave the public reason to doubt the basic functions of government, somebody would pay come the next election.

Democrats, media pundits, and would-be grown-ups among the Republicans (i.e., McCain, Boehner, and McConnell) keep trying to invoke that discipline. But think about it: In 2013, for the sake of a plan that never had any chance of working, the Republican back-benchers shut down the government and very nearly broke the full faith and credit of the United States. And 13 months later, the voters gave their party more power.

We live in a new world, where Dad isn’t coming home and there’s no reason the kids should ever finish their vegetables and go to bed.

It’s time we understood how this new world works.

The difference between the parties. A cynical view of politics says that the two parties are just mirror images of each other, rival gangs competing for territory like West Side Story‘s Jets and Sharks.

But there is one key difference between the two: Democrats believe that government can change people’s lives for the better, and that we can do things together that we can’t do for ourselves. Together, we can have parks and libraries and public schools and clean air. We can soften the dog-eat-dog aspects of the capitalist system so that ordinary people have a chance. We can insure each other against disasters from hurricanes to cancer.

Republicans believe that government can only screw things up.

So when Republicans govern well, they refute themselves. If a Republican official solves a problem — like Mitt Romney did with health care in Massachusetts — it just creates an appetite for more government.

And that’s bad. To really prove the point that government can only screw things up, Republicans elected to office need to screw things up.

Turnout, not persuasion. In the old model of politics, there were “swing voters” — voters not identified with either party, who were open to persuasion. Each side had its partisans, but the one that convinced the swing voters would win.

One thing that swing voters found convincing was performance; that was where the discipline came from. If you made the United States look like a joke, they’d vote you out.

But that’s not how it works these days. Overwhelmingly, the people who care about politics enough to vote are identified with one party or the other, no matter what that party does. Today the question isn’t who you’ll vote for, it’s whether you’ll vote. (That’s how, for example, Mitt Romney got zero votes in some inner-city precincts of Philadelphia and Cleveland. Similarly, there were evangelical churches in the South where if you voted, you voted against Obama. So parties don’t bother trying to convince either set of voters, they just get their own to the polls.)

Take a look at how that works out in the vote totals for House races. (Data from Wikipedia.)

year Republican Democratic Total House split
2008 52,249,491 65,237,840 117,487,331 178-257
2010 44,827,441 38,980,192 83,807,633 242-193
2012 58,228,253 59,645,531 117,873,784 234-201
2014 40,024,866 35,626,309 75,651,175 247-188

A few things to notice:

  • Republicans got their biggest House majority in 2014, when they polled the fewest votes.
  • When there’s a big turnout, the Democrats win the popular vote, but when turnout is small, Republicans win. Another way to say the same thing is that the Republican vote is steadier than the Democratic vote. The lowest Republican vote (2014) is still more than two-thirds of the highest (2012), while the lowest Democratic vote (2014) is barely more than half the highest (2008). Conclusion: The people who might or might not vote are overwhelmingly Democrats.
  • Gerrymandering has locked in a certain amount of Republican advantage, so that winning the popular vote in 2012 didn’t get the Democrats control of the House.

Demographics. The big story after the 2012 election was that demographic trends favor the Democrats. The percentage of the country that is white shrinks every year, and Democrats are favored by non-whites. Young voters (who will be around for a while) trend Democratic, while old voters (who won’t) trend Republican. Christian voters (shrinking) trend Republican, while no-specified-religion voters (growing) trend Democratic.

Salivating over those delicious trends, Democrats started trying to predict the date when Texas turns blue. A report by College Republicans said that their party had to change: compromise on immigration and gay marriage, reach out to Hispanics, blacks, and young people.

None of those changes happened in 2014, and yet the GOP won big. How? The rising demographic groups didn’t vote.

Comparing yesterday’s exit polls to those of 2012, the first thing that jumps out at you is a big shift in age demographics: under-30 voters dropped from 19 percent of the electorate in 2012 to 13 percent in 2014, while over-65 voters climbed from 16 percent in 2012 to 22 percent in 2014. That’s quite close to the age demographics of 2010.

Rather than continue its inexorable decline, the white vote increased from 72% in 2012 to 75% in 2014.

And that’s the secret to the lasting Republican congressional majority, and maybe to electing a Republican president in 2016: Don’t try to convince swing voters that Republicans can govern better than Democrats (or even govern at all). Just keep the rising demographic groups from voting.

No hope, no change. A portion of the blame/credit for the low turnout among minorities and youth in 2014 has to go to the intentional voter suppression Republicans have been focused on since 2010. They discovered that you don’t have to formally disenfranchise people to keep them away from the polls, you just have to make voting harder and less rewarding. Make people who don’t own cars (and so have no reason to already have a photo-ID drivers license) jump through an extra hoop. Make college students vote where their parents live. Gerrymander districts so that election results are a foregone conclusion. Shorten poll hours, make sure the lines are long in Democratic precincts, and so forth.

Marginal voters tend to have less slack in their lives than the more established non-urban whites of the Republican base. Getting to the polls is tougher, and standing in line for hours might mean you get fired or the kids are left unsupervised. So sure, each new hurdle in front of the voting booth is going to discourage more Democrats than Republicans.

That all has some effect, and will probably have more and more as it becomes normal and fails to provoke the backlash that motivated blacks (in particular) in 2012. But the real secret to lasting Republican power is motivational, or rather, de-motivational: Ruin people’s hope that politics can change their lives for the better.

People get involved in politics because they believe it can stop a war, save a school, jail the bankers who wrecked the economy, open doors for their racial group, give working people a chance, or secure their future against disasters of all sorts. They run away from politics when it looks like one of those pointless internet flame wars. Life is short and energy is limited. If politics is a waste of time, people who aren’t already committed to it will stay away — especially if their lives are hard enough already.

So when the marginal voters would vote against you, dysfunction becomes a strategy. Republican ideology already says that government can’t do anything but screw up. So if Congress is seen as just a bunch of jokers, that proves their point. If even the most obvious bill becomes impossible to pass, and the federal government lurches from crisis to crisis without doing anything that helps people … what better voter suppression is there?

Democrats need hope and change to motivate people to be active and vote. Republicans need no hope and no change to keep them tuned out. And they’re getting it.

That’s how we have the perverse polling we’ve seen: Just before the 2014 election, National Journal found only 9% approved of the job Congress was doing while 80% disapproved. In a Pew Research poll, disapproval of the Republican Party has been consistently running 68/23 neighborhood, compared to Democrats’ somewhat less unfavorable 60/32 split. And that led to increasing the Republican House majority and giving them control of the Senate too.

Why? National Journal has the answer: Americans wish the parties would co-operate more, but don’t believe they will. So:

More of those surveyed looked outside the political system for changes that might improve their lives.

What next? Whether or not we stop paying FBI agents next Friday, don’t expect Republicans in Congress to stop playing games with the government. And yes, it will drive down the popularity of Congress and of the Republican Party.

But so what? That dysfunction will also convince more Americans to lose faith in politics. More and more, voting will become that pointless thing old white people do. And why would you campaign for a candidate or donate to a campaign, unless you represent a special interest that needs to buy a favor?

Winning the House in 2010 gave Republicans the power to screw things up in Washington. And marginal voters responded to the screwed-up state of politics by staying home in 2014 and giving Republicans control of the Senate as well. Maybe they now have the power to screw things up on a grand enough scale to elect a Republican president in 2016.

But, then, surely, with control of both Congress and the White House, Republicans will have to take governing seriously. Won’t they?

Don’t count on it.

[1] It’s worth giving some thought to exactly what “responsible governing” would mean, so that it isn’t just thrown around as a buzzword.

In general, responsible governing means compromising to find a way forward that can be passed into law, rather than turning everything into a test of ideological purity. Finding a workable compromise is something a politician should be proud of, not a shameful act that can only be accomplished under the threat of a dire emergency.

Responsible governing also means being for something, rather than just criticizing everybody else’s solutions. Don’t like President Obama’s immigration plan? Fine. Tell me yours.

Above all, responsible governing means an end to hostage-taking, i.e., threatening to do something that nobody wants if you don’t get your way. Compromise means weighing what I want against what you want. But when one of us starts threatening to do things that nobody wants, we’re playing a different game entirely. The debt ceiling is the clearest example of a hostage — nobody really wants to see the United States default on its legal commitments — but nobody wants to see DHS shut down either.

It’s weird that the people most committed to ideological purity and most opposed to compromise claim to be representing the point of view of the Founders. The Founders were champion compromisers. The United States wouldn’t exist at all if they weren’t.

[2] Marco Rubio had an immigration plan, but has been making what Bloomberg Politics called an “apology tour” for daring to pass it through the Senate. If it had become law, hara-kari would have been his only honorable option.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (19)

Will Republicans Ever Have a Sister Souljah Moment?

January 5, 2015 – 8:23 am

Now that he’s under duress, Steve Scalise will denounce David Duke. But when it mattered, he courted Duke’s racist voters. Will a Republican ever intentionally offend extremists in the base to gain credibility with the center?

Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise is the new member of the Republican House leadership, replacing Eric Cantor, who lost his primary to a Koch-brothers candidate. Scalise is supposed to be the link between the leadership and the GOP’s extreme right wing, a role he appears to be good at.

But a funny thing happened: A blogger* (Lamar White Jr.) did some digging and found out that in 2002, then-state-rep Scalise was “an honored guest and speaker at an international conference of white supremacist leaders.” The group was the European-American Unity and Rights Organization (EURO), a hate group established by KKK-Grand-Wizard-turned-Republican-politician David Duke.

Now Scalise says he doesn’t remember the event (which an aide said it was “highly likely” he had attended), and there’s a complicated version of the story in which it’s all a big misunderstanding; he just happened to be speaking at the same hotel at the same time to a lot of the same people. (Under further investigation, this version is falling apart.) Scalise claims he wouldn’t have spoken to EURO if he’d known what they were. He mentions giving hundreds of speeches with just one staffer, implying that the EURO gig just slipped through the cracks somehow.

But that explanation doesn’t pass the smell test. Duke was not an inconsequential figure in Louisiana politics in 2002. In 1991 he had stunned the state Republican Party by out-polling the establishment Republican candidate in the primary and winding up in a run-off for governor. (In the run-off, a national controversy in which Duke’s Klan-leader past was a major issue, he got a majority of the white vote and 39% statewide. If the Voting Rights Act of 1965 hadn’t enfranchised blacks, Duke would have become governor.)

In his early campaigns, Scalise at times consciously courted Duke voters. A Roll Call article from 1999 reported on a congressional race Duke was considering:

Another potential candidate, state Rep. Steve Scalise (R), said he embraces many of the same “conservative” views as Duke, but is far more viable. … “The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can’t get elected, and that’s the first and most important thing.”

Three years later, Scalise couldn’t have just not noticed that David Duke was leading EURO now, or not known what that meant.

The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler makes the right point: The problem this incident illustrates isn’t that Scalise himself is or was a white supremacist — he probably isn’t and wasn’t. But (especially in the South) white racists have become a key component of the Republican base, one that a canny politician has to court, even if he can’t publicly endorse their ideology.

if in 1999 you said “the first and most important thing” about Duke was merely that he couldn’t get elected, rather than his despicable racism, it says something important about the voters you were trying not to offend. Many of those voters are still alive today.

In Democratic circles, you frequently hear talk about a “Sister Souljah moment“, which has been defined as “a key moment when the candidate takes what at least appears to be a bold stand against certain extremes in their party”. The paradigmic SSM was when candidate Bill Clinton denounced statements by black rapper Sister Souljah, saying “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black,’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.”

But SSMs only happen on the Left. (The article I took that definition from discussed Mitt Romney’s missed opportunity for an SSM, when he failed to denounce Rush Limbaugh’s grotesque slut-shaming of Sandra Fluke, saying only that slut was “not the language I would have used“. The substance of Limbaugh’s comments was apparently fine with Mitt; only his language was objectionable.) When the national media gets focused on an issue like Scalise’s EURO speech, conservative politicians can be cornered into rejecting an extremist like David Duke or Cliven Bundy — and can’t be cornered into rejecting Rush Limbaugh, no matter he says or does — but no Republican creates such moments to demonstrate his or her reasonableness to the moderate voter.

So no Republican presidential candidate — not even a so-called “moderate” like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie — is going to confront conservative extremists with reasonable positions and intentionally get himself booed.** No one is going to tell CPAC that the party needs to move to the center, or endorse background checks in front of the NRA, or defend church-and-state separation at the Values Voters Summit, or confront the Energy Alliance with the facts of climate science, or tell white racists that he really isn’t interested in their support.

Instead, if candidates don’t feel comfortable endorsing extremist views outright, they will dog-whistle to these groups, as Scalise did to EURO in 2002***, or Ronald Reagan did to white racists in 1980. They’ll present their conservative bona fides to CPAC, defend “constitutional rights” to the NRA, endorse “traditional values” to the values voters, identify with “sound science” in front of the Energy Alliance, and talk to white racists about the deficiencies of “inner city culture”.

Everyone in the room will know what those words mean. The extremists will come out feeling that the candidate agrees with them in his heart, but his agreement will be deniable in front of the general public.

Maybe someday there will be Sister Souljah moment on the Right. But not yet. The crazies are too important a constituency, so all serious Republican candidates have to pander to them.

* Can we finally put to bed the canard popular among mainstream journalists that they do all the investigative reporting, while bloggers just bloviate based on mainstream journalists’ discoveries? Bloggers may not have access to anonymous “highly placed sources” and can’t score interviews with Dick Cheney, but collectively we plow through a lot of original source documents. White apparently rummaged through the online archives of the white-supremacist Stormfront group. I doubt he had to elbow any Washington Post reporters out of the way.

** Romney did construct a reverse-SSM when he intentionally evoked boos from an NAACP gathering, thereby proving to extremists in his own party that he would stand up to black leaders.

*** According to a contemporary Stormfront account, Scalise didn’t directly endorse white supremacy at the EURO meeting. (But if Scalise thought he was speaking to some other group, that distinction apparently was lost on the Stormfront commenter, whose subject-line says “EURO/New Orleans 2002”.) Instead, he spoke about a topic white supremacists would appreciate: government favoritism to blacks.

Representative Scalise brought into sharp focus the dire circumstances pervasive in many important, under-funded needs of the community at the expense of graft within the Housing and Urban Development Fund, an apparent give-away to a selective group based on race.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (1)

Vote. It’s not nearly enough, but it’s something.

November 3, 2014 – 7:22 am

If you’ve got friends who think they’re “protesting” by not voting, send them this from the Young Turks:

And while we’re on the subject, let’s address the “Both parties are owned by Wall Street” or “neither party represents me” argument: It’s true. There’s lots of stuff I want out of government that neither party is even proposing: single-payer health care, ending the perpetual war, reining in the NSA, enforcing the antitrust laws,  … I could go on.

What that proves isn’t that voting doesn’t matter, but that voting is not enough. In addition to voting, we need to be educating ourselves and our friends, challenging cultural assumptions, mobilizing support around an agenda for more radical change, launching primary challenges to get better Democrats on the ballot, pushing better forms of voting (like instant runoff) and more.

We need to use the political process, and we need a movement like Occupy … plus whatever else you can think of. Not one or the other. Both.

Not voting isn’t a protest, it’s a retreat. Not voting means abandoning the small amount of power the system allots you.

You have a choice tomorrow. There’s one party with a way-too-small response to global warming, and another that that says climate scientists are part of a global conspiracy; one party that keeps the perpetual war simmering reluctantly, and another that would eagerly boil it over; one party that sells out to Wall Street on certain key issues, and another that is 100% owned and operated by Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry; one party with a half-hearted response to economic inequality, and another working to increase inequality; one party that won’t stand up to the theocrats, and another that stands with them. In the near term, one or the other is going to control the government. Which should it be?

Would I like a different choice? Sure I would. But in the meantime I’m going to make the choice I have. Because this one’s simple: Do you want more Ruth Bader Ginsburgs on the Supreme Court or more Anthony Scalias? That decision is going to be made by voters. So don’t you want to be a voter?

Vote. It’s not nearly enough. But it’s something.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (14)

A Conservative Lexicon With English Translation

September 29, 2014 – 10:03 am

Yes, you can understand what conservatives are saying.

Liberals and moderates often find statements by conservatives to be nonsensical or even incomprehensible. Sarah Palin, just to name one example, is frequently accused of speaking in “word salad“, a style in which terms are thrown together without apparent attention to syntax or meaning.

I have come to believe that this view does conservatives an injustice. What has actually happened is that conservatives, like tribes marooned on inaccessible islands, have developed what is essentially a new language. While language-drift in the wild may take generations or even longer, conservative word use has diverged from English far more quickly due to (1) the speed of modern communication, (2) the very tight circles of conservative discourse (sometimes described as an “echo chamber”) in which outside input is discounted or viewed as sinister, and (3) the neologisms of conservative candidates facing election, who often need to seem to be saying something different than they actually are.

Consequently, the new Conservative language outwardly resembles English, but its terms have been redefined and repurposed in ways that create the seeming unintelligibility. For example, statements like “Voter ID laws are necessary to reduce voter fraud” may seem delusional to someone who interprets voter fraud in the standard English sense of “votes cast by people legally ineligible to vote”, since this very rarely happens, and (when it does) happens in ways voter-ID laws would not affect (i.e., absentee ballot fraud or hacking vote-counting machines). But once you understand the true conservative meaning of voter fraud (“votes cast by people whose demographic profile makes them likely to vote Democratic”), the statement makes perfect sense.

In a similar way, seemingly bizarre utterances like “Obama is a Marxist” or “Fox News is fair and balanced” are perfectly coherent, understandable, and even true once you have access to the proper definitions.

Previous lexicons have been attempted (here, for example), but I don’t think they have captured the systemic nature of Conservative, i.e., the way its terms interact to describe a complete worldview.

And so, in hope that Americans of all political persuasions will better understand what conservatives are really saying (rather than write off their statements as harmless nonsense), I present this incomplete Conservative-to-English lexicon.

American exceptionalism. The belief that the United States is exempt from all legal and moral standards. Example: Waterboarding is a capital crime when done to Americans, but legally and morally acceptable when practiced by Americans.

Appeasement. Hesitating before attacking or overthrowing the unfriendly government of an oil-rich nation.

Balance. 1. Providing Democrats as well as Republicans the opportunity to criticize President Obama. 2. Providing blacks as well as whites the opportunity to indict black culture. Usage: “Fox News is fair and balanced.”

Color-blindness. Fighting racial injustice by refusing to see it, much as an ostrich avoids danger by sticking its head into the sand.

Confederacy. An early attempt to restore the freedom envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Still an object of nostalgia in the GOP’s southern base.

Constitution. A holy scripture written by the Founding Fathers. Like the Bible, it means whatever conservatives want it to mean, regardless of its actual text. The Constitution, for example, protects corporate personhood, and the near-infinite powers it assigns to Republican presidents vanish when a Democrat takes office. Unlike the real-life Constitution, the Constitution includes the Declaration of Independence, and so really does mention God.

Controversial. An adjective applying to any fact or set of facts that conservatives don’t want to believe. Examples: evolution and climate change. Once facts have been labeled controversial, stating them as facts is evidence of liberal bias.

Dependent on government. Anyone receiving welfare, encompassing retirees, students, and the disabled. Usage: “there are 47 percent … who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”

Europe. A hellish dystopia governed by liberals, where people belong to unions, have guaranteed health care, and earn high wages with long vacations. Soon to be overrun by Muslims. Usage: “I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become.”

Fair. Favoring the wealthy. Usage: “A true free market is always fair.”

Fascism. An insult with no meaningful content, similar to “bastard” or “asshole”. The previously well established Mussolini/Hitler sense of the term —  a militarist, nativist, corporatist style of totalitarianism claiming to restore a nation to the greatness of its mythic past — is now archaic, having been successfully jammed by tangential usages like Islamo-fascism and oxymorons like liberal fascism.

Founding Fathers. Loosely based on the American generational cohort that fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution, the conservative Founding Fathers are heroes of a great mythic past constructed by pseudo-historians like David Barton. Divinely inspired, the Founding Fathers intended to create a non-denominational Christian theocracy, but inexplicably failed to mention God in the Constitution. They were implacably opposed to Big Government, even as they were writing a constitution that vastly extended the powers of the national government beyond those laid out in the previous Articles of Confederation. They “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, while owning hundreds of slaves themselves, and without actually ending slavery until long after they were all dead.

Free market. A system of decision-making based on the only fair principle: one dollar, one vote.

Freedom. 1. The ineffable quality that exempts the United States from all moral standards. (See American exceptionalism). Usage: “They hate our freedom.” 2. The right of the powerful to use their power as they see fit. Usage: “The minimum wage is a freedom killer.” 3. The right of job creators to use public infrastructure without paying taxes, or to exploit common resources (like air, water, or public land) without regulation. Example: Cliven Bundy.

Freedom of religion. The right of conservative Christians to shape society and define social acceptability. Intended by the Founding Fathers only to protect expressions of religion, not atheism or Islam.

Freedom of speech. 1. The right of a conservative to speak and write publicly without criticism. (See persecution.) Example: Sarah Palin’s objection in 2008 to the characterization of her charge that Barack Obama was “paling around with terrorists” as “negative campaigning”. “If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.” While no one had disputed Palin’s right to say what she said, the fact that she faced criticism for it violated her freedom of speech. 2. In election campaigns, the right of the rich to drown out all competing voices.

God. Jehovah, the father of Jesus, as revealed by a literal reading of the Bible. Non-Christians do not believe in God, but in other supernatural beings like Allah. Some liberals claim to believe in God, but they use the word incorrectly.

Hate. Criticism of conservative ideas or disputation of facts alleged by conservatives. See persecution.

Innocent human life. The unborn, who possess souls of infinite worth. At birth, a child inherits the soul-value of his parents, which — if they are black or poor — does not amount to much. Consequently, abortion in the United States is a moral crisis equivalent to the Holocaust, while our third-worldish infant mortality rate (34th in the world, just behind Cuba) is no big deal.

Job creator. A wealthy person, who may or may not be an employer, and who may even have become wealthy by firing people or shipping jobs overseas. Usage: “Let’s cut taxes for job creators.” Does not apply to public works, public schools, or any other government program, no matter how many Americans such a program might productively employ.

Judicial activism. When judges rule against corporate interests or white supremacy, or in favor of separating Church from State.

Liberal media bias. The fading tendency of certain portions of the journalistic establishment to require supporting facts before promoting a conspiracy theory. For an example of the frustration this causes conservatives, consider the following quote from Jonah Goldberg shortly before the 2012 election: “If you want to understand why conservatives have lost faith in the so-called mainstream media, you need to ponder the question: Where is the Benghazi feeding frenzy?”

Marxist. One who regrets the increasing concentration of wealth. Unrelated to any theories contained in the writings of Karl Marx. Usage: “Elizabeth Warrren, who has almost confessed to her Marxist views”. (Synonyms: communist, socialist, liberal.)

Persecution. (1) Denying conservatives the special rights they believe they are entitled to. Example: The War on Christmas, in which conservative Christians are persecuted if they are not allowed to dominate all public space for the month of December. (2) Criticism directed at conservatives. Example: If a conservative says something racist and you point that out, you are persecuting him. (See freedom of speech.) (3) Enforcing laws broken by conservatives. Example: Dinesh D’Souza.

Political correctness. The bizarre liberal belief that whites, men, straights, Christians, the rich, and other Americans in positions of privilege should treat less privileged people with respect, even though such people have no power to force them to.

Poor. Lacking in gumption or virtue, undeserving, black.

Racism. Calling attention to racial injustice with an intention to rectify it. Also called “playing the race card”. (See color-blindness.) Example: the Fox News commentator who said, “You know who talks about race? Racists.”

Religion. Christianity, not including degraded liberal variants that accept evolution or gay rights.

Second Amendment rights. The right of whites, Christians, the wealthy, and other traditionally privileged groups to commit violence when their privileges are threatened by democratic processes. (People not from privileged groups may be gunned down by police — with full conservative support — if they are even suspected of being armed.) Best expressed by Sharron Angle in her 2010 Senate campaign: “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.” Also by Virginia Republican Catherine Crabill: “We have a chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box. But that’s the beauty of our Second Amendment right. I am glad for all of us who enjoy the use of firearms for hunting. But make no mistake. That was not the intent of the Founding Fathers. Our Second Amendment right was to guard against tyranny.”

Taxes. A method of stealing money from job creators and giving it to poor people. Unrelated to Social Security, Medicare, roads, schools, lowering the deficit, or any other useful goal.

Terrorist. 1. A Muslim. 2. Any violent person conservatives don’t like. Cannot be applied to violent anti-abortionists, white supremacists, or tax resisters. (See Second Amendment rights.)

Tyranny. When a Marxist gets elected and then tries to carry out the platform the people voted for. Example: ObamaCare.

Values. Beliefs that condemn gays or promiscuous women. Usage: the Values Voters Summit.

Voter fraud. Any votes cast by people whose demographic profile makes them likely to vote Democratic, i.e., blacks, Hispanics, or students. Alternate form: election fraud. Usage: “Obama likely won re-election through election fraud.”

Welfare. Any payment from the government, including (when convenient) Social Security, unemployment compensation, or student loans. Usage: “Unemployment compensation is just another welfare program.”

While far from complete — please suggest additional entries in the comments — I hope this lexicon will make conservative speech more comprehensible to the general public, and persuade voters that the apparent gibberish spoken by conservative candidates actually expresses a unified worldview that should be taken more seriously.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (41)

There’s Something About Todd

July 21, 2014 – 7:49 am

I strongly advise you not to read this post. Your browser has a Back button. Use it.

I don’t know what it is about Todd Akin.

The whole point of the Weekly Sift is to filter the junk and hype out of the news so that you only read stuff that is worth your attention. But success in that venture depends on my ability to leave something alone once I’ve determined that it’s not worth either your time or mine.

Todd Akin is not worth your time or mine. So you shouldn’t read this post and I certainly shouldn’t be writing it. And yet, I can’t seem to ignore him. I suppose it’s that infuriating combination of ignorance, self-righteousness, and self-assurance. So many intelligent, thoughtful people could be interviewed on TV, but aren’t. And yet, there’s Todd Akin, displayed in my living room! And why am I writing about him? I’m just making it worse.

But I can’t stop myself, so let’s get this over with: In interviews promoting his new book — which I refuse to link to; I still have that much control — he says he knows what he did wrong in his “legitimate rape” interview: It was just a bad choice of words. He should have said “legitimate case of rape” instead, because then the liberal media couldn’t have slandered him by making it sound like he thought a rape could be legitimate.

Let’s plug that into the transcript and see how it plays:

CHARLES JACO: So if an abortion can be considered in the case of, say, a tubal pregnancy or something like that, what about in the case of rape? Should it be legal or not?

REP. TODD AKIN: Well, you know, people always want to try and make that as one of those things: “Well, how do you—how do you slice this particularly tough sort of ethical question?” It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate [case of] rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Well, the insensitivity is unchanged: Raped women aren’t real people who deserve our compassion, they’re just a “tough sort of ethical question” that tricky interviewers use to try to trip Akin up — like “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?” or something. And after this tough question gets sorted out by the higher mind, it really just comes down to who to punish — the rapist or the fetus. The woman is a bystander.

The junk science about female physiology is still there; two years later, and he still hasn’t educated himself. And he’s still implying that only violent rape really counts. (What about roofies? Even in Akin’s alternate universe, would an unconscious woman’s body “shut that whole thing down”?)

Most importantly, he’s still saying that women who claim they got pregnant from a rape are probably lying, because “that’s really rare” in “a legitimate [case of] rape”.

So no, I don’t think he fixed anything.

Here’s what’s reprehensible about Todd Akin, and it’s got nothing to do with his choice of words: Even given two years to think about it, he still believes in a legal system in which rape is a viable male reproductive strategy. (They’ll put you in jail if they catch you — and if the woman can prove she didn’t consent — but the law will force your victims to bear your children, so your genes will live on.) He believes in that system so strongly that he’s willing to seek out junk science to justify it.

I’m going to stop writing now. To everyone who made it this far: I’m sorry. I really am. Try to do something more worthwhile with the rest of your day.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , | Comments (4)

Boehner’s Lawsuit and Palin’s “25 Impeachable Offenses”

July 14, 2014 – 10:01 am

I could almost feel sorry for John Boehner, if he hadn’t played such a big role in creating his own problems. As Speaker of the House, he is simultaneously

  • one of the most powerful figures in the United States government, answerable to History and to Peter Parker’s uncle: “With great power comes great responsibility.”
  • leader of a majority caucus that wants the United States to become ungovernable, believing that the American people will blame the ensuing chaos on a president the caucus hates.
  • responsible for keeping that caucus in the majority, while knowing that they are delusional and the American people will blame them if they cause disasters too obviously.

To succeed, he needs his caucus to stay in the majority, continue as leader of that caucus, and not sink the country. It’s an impossible job, and it can’t end well for him. But for some reason he loves it and wants to hang on to it. So he is constantly running out in front of the mob so that he can claim to be leading it, hoping that he can divert it from its most destructive (and self-destructive) goals.

That’s why he has to pretend to believe in hare-brained schemes like the government shutdown, so that he’ll be in a position raise the debt ceiling at the last minute and avoid an international economic disaster. He has to tolerate obstruction of government programs the country wants — the Highway Trust Fund is about to run out of money, a threat that combines job destruction with potholes and unsafe bridges; tens of thousands of refugee kids are piling up at the border unprocessed, the Senate worked out a bipartisan immigration compromise Boehner can’t even bring to a vote; and couldn’t the minimum wage go up just a little? — so that he can maybe save a few of them eventually.

The lawsuit. And now he has to sue the President, because otherwise the lunatics he leads will start an impeachment process that will probably be even less popular and less grounded in reality than their last presidential impeachment. They’ll do it right before an election, focusing the public’s attention on what a bad idea it was to give the Republican Party any role in governing the country.

He has to sue the President, even though Obama is begging him to do it. Obama is going all over the country, cracking jokes at Boehner’s expense. He just went to Texas, and said:

You hear some of them … “Sue him! Impeach him!” Really? Really? For what? You’re going to sue me for doing my job?”

Obama loved it. The crowd loved it. It looked great on TV. Every presidential action the House Republicans want to sue or impeach Obama for points to an issue where the real problem is inaction by the Republican House. And Obama’s not up for re-election; they are. No wonder he loves to talk about it.

Now, I don’t know which things they find most offensive — me helping to create jobs, or me raising wages, or me easing the student loan burdens, or me making sure women can find out whether they’re getting paid the same as men for doing the same job. I don’t know which of these actions really bug them.

But Boehner has to do it, because this is where the rhetoric that bounces around in the right-wing echo chamber leads. For five years, Republicans have been telling their base that Obama is “lawless” and his rule is “tyranny“. He “ignores the Constitution” and “makes up his own laws“.

The importance of vagueness. Like most extreme rhetoric, this talk works best when it’s vague, a lesson Republicans keep learning (and forgetting) when it comes to spending: Railing about “government waste” and promising to cut “trillions” from the budget are great applause lines. But when you have to make those cuts specific, hungry people don’t eat, old people pay more for medical care, construction workers lose their jobs, contaminated food gets past the inspectors … and it all becomes a lot less popular. That’s because the notion that we spend trillions building bridges to nowhere, feeding able-bodied people who could easily get jobs, and dishing out foreign aid to countries that hate us is a delusion. If you take big whacks at the federal budget, you’re going to end up making life considerably harder for people a lot like yourself.

But Boehner can’t stay vague forever. When Republican leaders encourage delusional rhetoric about the horrible things Obama and his government have done, eventually the people who believe them are going to ask what they’re doing about it. And the true answer, “I’m raising a bunch of money from suckers like you” is not going to cut it. Sadly, though, actually doing something will force Obama’s critics to be embarrassingly specific. They can’t just sue or impeach Obama for “Benghazi” or “making a mockery of the Constitution”; they’ll have to point to actual events that break actual laws. And then there will be a public hearing where they’ll be expected to offer evidence that these events happened somewhere other than in their fevered imaginations.

What’s worse, everybody will be watching, not just the Republican base. It has all the makings of an embarrassing disaster.

Boehner, naturally, wants to put that off as long as possible. That’s why he floated the lawsuit idea and let it hang in the air for two weeks before saying what it would be about. It’s like walking into a lawyer’s office and announcing, “I’m going to sue that guy!” and when the lawyer asks “For what?” you answer “Give me two weeks and I’ll think of something.”

Eventually he had to announce something, so Thursday he did (though there’s still no text of the proposed complaint). The draft resolution authorizing the suit says

[T]he Speaker may initiate or intervene in one or more civil actions on behalf of the House of Representatives … with respect to implementation of (including a failure to implement) any provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act

That’s still pretty vague, but in a statement Boehner fleshed it out a little:

In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it.

So that’s the President’s foremost tyrannical act: He delayed implementation of the employer mandate, one of the provisions of the ACA Republicans hate most. The New Republic‘s Brian Beutler described Boehner’s announcement as “a faceplant”:

Today’s story is that the GOP has spent weeks and weeks accusing Obama of unbridled lawlessness, when they didn’t really have the goods.

MaddowBlog‘s Steve Benen goes into more detail: Almost certainly, a federal judge will rule that the House doesn’t have standing to sue. (They’re not the ones being hurt, if anybody is. And if they’re serious, they have the impeachment power and don’t need the courts.) If the merits of the suit are heard and Boehner would happen to win, “the result might very well be the implementation of a policy Republicans don’t like”, unless the case lasted long enough that it had been implemented by then anyway. And implementation would be good for House Republicans because …

Remember, for GOP lawmakers, effective public policy wasn’t part of the equation. The GOP’s priority was failure – they wanted the system not to work. If the employer mandate would have made life difficult for the private sector, then Republicans desperately wanted it to happen so that it would hurt the economy, anger the public, and make the ACA more unpopular, causing a political nightmare for the president.

It’s part of that break-the-country-so-the-president-gets-blamed strategy, which worked so well during the government shutdown. And it makes such a good talking point: I’m suing to force the President to do something I think is bad for the country, because the way that he did what I think is good for the country was tyrannical. Voters love inside-the-Beltway process arguments like that.

Impeachment. But at least Boehner is heading off talk about impeachment. Or is he? Tuesday, Sarah Palin went to the heart of the echo chamber, Breitbart.com, and wrote “It’s time to impeach President Obama“. Impeach him because “Opening our borders to a flood of illegal immigrants is deliberate.” (Picture turning that conspiracy theory into an Article of Impeachment and offering evidence to support it on national TV.) But that’s not all Palin has:

President Obama’s rewarding of lawlessness, including his own, is the foundational problem here. It’s not going to get better, and in fact irreparable harm can be done in this lame-duck term as he continues to make up his own laws as he goes along, and, mark my words, will next meddle in the U.S. Court System with appointments that will forever change the basic interpretation of our Constitution’s role in protecting our rights.

Unless impeached immediately, Obama will “meddle in the U. S. Court System” by doing his job under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution to “appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for”. No wonder she concludes:

The many impeachable offenses of Barack Obama can no longer be ignored. If after all this he’s not impeachable, then no one is.

Thursday, she elaborated on Sean Hannity’s show and wrote a second column for Fox.

A little less talk, a lot more action. When we see even GOP lawmakers who are recognizing and proclaiming Obama’s violation of the Constitution and then ignoring that Constitution and the power they have to impeach — it gets kind of frustrating for the American people.

Or at least for the segment of the American people who aren’t in on the scam and take yakkers like Palin seriously. But let’s talk more about impeachable offenses:

He has allowed his subordinates and he himself to fraud the American people on these programs, these policies, that he has promised will work or not impact debt or deficit. These have been lies by our president. Yes, those are impeachable offenses.

Remember, the Constitution defines impeachable offenses as “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”, not “being too optimistic about your proposals”. But don’t worry, Palin has consulted “experts”.

Experts, attorneys, they have a list of at least 25 impeachable offenses.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Surely, every web site that mentions Palin’s call for impeachment (especially her own web site or her Fox or Breitbart columns) will link to that list so we can examine it. Because nobody would just throw a number out there to make herself sound smart, or to create the vague idea that there are specifics somewhere, even though I don’t have time to go into them right now. Otherwise, the 25 impeachable offenses would be like Senator Joe McCarthy’s famous list of Communists in the State Department, which started out at 205 and at various other times was 57 or 81 or ten names long. As history.com reports: “In fact, McCarthy never produced any solid evidence that there was even one communist in the State Department.”

25 “impeachable” offenses. It wasn’t on SarahPAC.com or Foxsnews.com or any other obvious place, but eventually I found the list. It seems to come from a report by the Committee for Justice, which in turn relies on a memo written by nine Republican state attorneys general in 2010. The CFJ was originally an astroturf organization created to support President Bush’s most conservative judicial nominees, though apparently it has found new justifications for its existence over the last five years.

I can see why nobody links to the list: It’s rhetoric, not law, and many of its points depend on “facts” that only exist in the conservative echo chamber.* Like #1:

Obama Administration uses IRS to target conservative, Christian and pro-Israel organizations, donors, and citizens.

Darrell Issa has been investigating this to death for more than a year and so far has come up with exactly nothing: no conservative groups were harmed, no IRS political motives have been found, and no communication channel with the White House has been identified. #5 is about Obama’s

21 separate Executive Orders that attack and undermine your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

You can contemplate these nefarious orders in all their bureaucratic horror here. In #7:

Obama forced ObamaCare on an unwilling public through bribery and lying about its cost.

and also by passing it through the independently elected Congress, which did its own cost estimates. And apparently no one has ever before added a special provision to a bill to get a key senator’s vote. (The allegedly suspect provision didn’t survive into the final bill.)

#8 goes all the way back to Operation Fast & Furious.

Investigators suspect that Fast & Furious was an effort by the Obama Administration to discredit lawful gun ownership in America by purposefully creating gun crimes, thus inducing public outcry for gun control.

“Investigators” like Rush Limbaugh and the NRA, but nobody remotely knowledgeable or reputable. And notice, they don’t even claim to have evidence, they just “suspect”. Congress should impeach Obama because the NRA suspects he did something wrong.

It goes on like that. These are the “expert” specifics behind Palin’s vague impeachment rhetoric. No wonder the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee said this Sunday:

The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States. He has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that.

Other lists of offenses. South Dakota’s GOP convention passed an impeachment resolution that listed other things, like Obama trading Guantanamo detainees to get Sergeant Bergdahl back from the Taliban or allowing the EPA regulating carbon emissions as the Supreme Court has ruled that the Clean Air Act instructs it to do.

Ted Cruz has put out his own list. He doesn’t mention impeachment, but simply points to “abuses of power”. Cruz’ list has more than 40 entries of similar quality to other lists. For example, President Obama has

Extended federal marriage benefits by recognizing, under federal law, same-sex marriages created in a state that allows same-sex marriage even if the couple is living in a state that doesn’t recognize same-sex marriage.

In other words, Obama is obeying the Constitution’s requirement to give full faith and credit to the”public acts, records, and judicial proceedings” of the states, even ones that allow same-sex marriage. He

Ordered Boeing to fire 1,000 employees in South Carolina and shut down a new factory because it was non-union.

Actually the NLRB did that — because Boeing was breaking the labor laws the NLRB is supposed to enforce — as Cruz’ own reference says. Obama appoints members to the Board, but doesn’t control it.

There’s a lot of stuff like that. It will stir your blood if you’re a Fox-News-watching conservative. But the two-thirds of the country that doesn’t identify as conservative is going to wonder what the fuss is about and why Congress is doing this rather than raising the minimum wage or creating jobs or passing immigration reform or doing something about those refugee kids on our doorstep.

President Obama would love to see those baseless impeachment hearings happen before the fall election. John Boehner would hate it.

* I sympathize with one point: #21, the “kill list” of American citizens who can be targeted by drones or military raids. It actually exists and violates those citizens’ due process rights. But impeachment is a premature remedy, because Congress has done absolutely nothing to protest — and it probably can’t, given that the kill list is one of those War on Terror programs many Republicans like. Impeachment shouldn’t be Congress’ first option; first they could try a joint resolution denouncing the kill list, or a law specifically making it illegal. If they can’t pass that much, they’ve got no business proceeding to impeachment.

 

 

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (6)

Actually, David IS Goliath

June 16, 2014 – 11:11 am

Powerful forces aligned behind Dave Brat and against Eric Cantor

When previously unknown Dave Brat beat House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary Tuesday, pundits struggled in vain to find appropriate historical parallels. In America, majority leaders just do not lose primaries … until now.

Since then, the conventional-wisdom storyline has been David vs. Goliath: A grass-roots candidate with virtually no resources overthrew one of the most powerful insiders in the country. But that’s not exactly true; the more accurate story is that one branch of the Billionaire Party had an unexpected victory over the other branch.

Let’s start with the David. The quick description says Brat is an economics professor from Randolph Macon College in Ashland, VA. That’s true, but there’s more to that story. Brat is director of the BB&T Moral Foundations of Capitalism Program at RMC, one of those ethically suspect programs where billionaires pay a university to teach a particular point of view; in this case, that free-market capitalism is morally superior to all other systems.

Probably, Brat genuinely believes this Randish philosophy. And propagandizing students with his personal opinions makes Brat no worse than professors of many other viewpoints. But unlike those other professors, Brat is paid not to change his mind. He may be a genuine proselyte, but he’s also a hired shill.

Other shills hired by the same people are the stars of right-wing talk radio. As Politico has reported, talk radio runs on a political version of payola:

A POLITICO review of filings with the Internal Revenue Service and Federal Election Commission, as well as interviews and reviews of radio shows, found that conservative groups spent nearly $22 million to broker and pay for involved advertising relationships known as sponsorships with a handful of influential talkers including [Glenn] Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh between the first talk radio deals in 2008 and the end of 2012. Since then, the sponsorship deals have grown more lucrative and tea party-oriented, with legacy groups like The Heritage Foundation ending their sponsorships and groups like the Tea Party Patriots placing big ad buys.

Dick Armey has described the system — known as “embedded media”– more bluntly:

The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air.

Brat spent only $200K or so on his campaign (compared with $5 million by Cantor). But (in what the NYT calls “a unique and potent alignment of influential voices in conservative media”) he got the kind of support money supposedly can’t buy from talk-radio personalities like Ingraham and Levin. Not only did they talk him up regularly on their shows (and dis Cantor), but Ingraham lent her star-power to a Brat rally. Thom Hartmann refers to this arrangement as a “dark money machine” and says:

Once you’ve realized that David Brat wasn’t just some random college professor but was actually the hand-picked candidate of the libertarian billionaire class and its army of talk radio hosts, it’s easy to see another one of the major reasons Eric Cantor lost. We’re living in a brave new world of dark money politics, and in this day and age, doing what Eric Cantor did – hanging out with the Chamber of Commerce, K Street, and Wall Street – only gets you so far. If you want to win these days, you need to win the support of the Kochs, their libertarian billionaire friends, and their allies in the talk radio world.

So while Cantor spent more-or-less transparently — receiving contributions and then buying ads — money got spent invisibly around Brat: The Koch-supported candidate got pushed by talk radio personalities who have sweetheart deals with Koch-funded groups.

That’s not exactly grass roots.

The other misperception about the Brat/Cantor race is that it was all about immigration, where (despite blocking House consideration of the bipartisan Senate immigration bill) Cantor was painted as pro-amnesty. That dynamic was certainly part of the campaign, but if you have a half-hour to burn, it’s worth listening to Brat’s stump speech.

Immigration certainly comes up, along with the I-can’t-believe-he’s-an-economist explanation that cheap labor from immigrants is to blame for the slow growth in jobs. (Cheap unskilled immigrant labor might lower the wages of unskilled jobs, but basic supply-and-demand says that lowering wages would increase the number of such jobs. Since the number of people employed only recently got back to pre-recession levels, immigrant competition can’t be the main reason the job market is so tough.) But Brat’s indictment of Cantor runs much deeper: He’s the Chamber-of-Commerce candidate, while Brat is running against TARP and bailouts and all the other ways that government fixes the game in favor of big business.

If he’s elected, we’ll see if anything comes from that populist rhetoric, or if Brat only implements the cut-spending-on-the-poor and let-corporations-pollute aspects of Randism.

Thomas Frank, whose What’s the Matter With Kansas? detailed the conservative bait-and-switch between populist social-issue rhetoric and cut-taxes-on-the-rich votes in Congress, is skeptical. Yesterday in Salon, he wrote:

The clash of idealism and sellout are how conservatives always perceive their movement, and what happened to Eric Cantor is a slightly more spectacular version of what often happens to GOP brass. That right-wing leaders are seduced by Washington D.C., and that they will inevitably betray the market-minded rank-and-file, are fixed ideas in the Republican mind, certainties as definite as are its convictions that tax cuts will cure any economic problem and that liberals are soft on whoever the national enemy happens to be.

Which is not to say that such betrayals don’t really happen. But Frank finds their inevitability not in universal human corruptibility, but in the fundamental tenets of conservatism itself: Anyone who believes the free market should control all aspects of life will eventually sell his vote to the highest bidder.

So the cycle goes on, uprising after uprising, an eternal populist revolt against leaders who never produce and problems that never get solved. Somehow, the free-market utopia that all the primary voters believe in never arrives, no matter how many privatizations and tax cuts the Republicans try. And so they seek out someone even purer, someone even more fanatical. They drag the country into another debt-ceiling fight, and this time, they say, they really mean it! But what never occurs to them is that maybe it’s their ideals themselves that are the problem.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (5)

Subtext in the State of the Union (and its responses)

February 3, 2014 – 11:08 am

You can learn a lot about how our leaders (in both parties) view us by observing how they try to manipulate us.

Once upon a time, state of the union addresses contained major policy initiatives, like when President Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964. But nobody does that any more, especially not in a gridlocked era where nothing is going to get through Congress anyway. 21st-century state of the union speeches (and opposing-party responses) are about politics rather than policy. They’re about moving public opinion, not moving the country.

So you might ask, “Why watch?” And there’s an answer: You can learn a lot about how our leaders (in both parties) view us by observing how they try to manipulate us. When they try to scare us, they reveal what they think we’re afraid of. When they reassure us, they reveal what they think we’re insecure about. When they try to be likeable, they reveal what they think we like. They emphasize issues where they feel strong and avoid issues they have no answers for.

They have spent months polling and testing in front of focus groups. Each has carefully crafted the message it believes will best appeal to its part of the public. Listen hard, and you can tell what part of the public they see as their own.

President Obama. The best way to watch the SOTU is via the White House’s enhanced video. (Here’s their transcript.) You get the same video everyone else uses, plus elucidating slides.

President Obama focused on two themes: inequality (which I explore in “Occupying the State of the Union“) and the dysfunctionality of Congress. Clearly he thinks Congress’ unpopularity works to his advantage:

For several years now, this town has been consumed by a rancorous argument over the proper size of the federal government. It’s an important debate – one that dates back to our very founding. But when that debate prevents us from carrying out even the most basic functions of our democracy – when our differences shut down government or threaten the full faith and credit of the United States – then we are not doing right by the American people.

I know Ted Cruz comes from an alternate timeline in which Obama and Harry Reid shut down the government and provoked the debt-ceiling crisis, but here’s all you need to know about that: Democrats applauded the President at this point, while Republicans sat on their hands. They all knew who he was calling to account.

The two themes came together in Obama’s executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal contractors, something he can do as federal CEO without congressional action. I hadn’t realized the full political import of this until Rachel Maddow pointed it out: Obama has put every executive in the country on the spot. Are governors going to raise the minimum wage for state contractors? Mayors for city contractors? (Yes in St. Louis.) I’ll bet the sound bite (at the 33-minute mark) tested really well:

No one who works full time should ever have to raise a family in poverty.

Any time the words Obama and executive order appear in the same news story, Republicans start yelling “tyranny”, as if no previous president issued executive orders. (Sunday Paul Ryan described the Obama administration as “increasingly lawless“.)

Clearly, they have identified a set of voters ready to believe this. In reality, though, Obama has been relatively hesitant about executive orders, issuing fewer of them than other recent presidents. He also has put forward no new theories of executive power, such as President Bush’s sweeping notion of the unitary executive.

Republican response. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington gave the official Republican SOTU response (text & video).

I thought Rodgers’ put forward a likeable image. (The conservative American Spectator protested that her “real message” was “PLEASE LIKE ME”.)  She expressed admirable sympathies, but presented little of substance to back up her good intentions. She talked about working to “empower people … to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be”, but the policies behind those words implement the same old Republican wealth-trickles-down-from-the-rich ideas.

A larger question was: Why her? She’s not a major player in the Republican leadership. She’s not a rising star they’re grooming for bigger things. Nothing about her record in Congress picks her out as the ideal person to speak to these particular issues. But she’s a woman and Republicans want to put a token female face on camera to counter the war-on-women meme.

As Ian Haney Lopez says in Dog Whistle Politics:

The right slams affirmative action for making distinctions on the basis of race, even as it has developed its own perverse form of affirmative action, consciously selecting nonwhite faces to front its agenda.

Rodgers is the female version of Bobby Jindal or Marco Rubio, but without the presidential speculation: Republicans can’t possibly be sexist. Look! They have a woman speaking for them.

But the war on women rages on, no matter who’s in front of the camera. The House Republican majority passed the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, whose purpose is to get private health insurance plans to drop abortion coverage. Last week I pointed to its draconian limitations on rape exceptions.

Rodgers’ talk was also noteworthy for invoking yet another bogus ObamaCare horror story. As Paul Krugman put it:

So was this the best story Ms. McMorris Rodgers could come up with? The answer, probably, is yes, since just about every tale of health reform horror the G.O.P. has tried to peddle has similarly fallen apart once the details were revealed.

Tea Party response. Mike Lee (text, video) did a good job countering the Tea Party’s image as the dangerous lunatics who almost pushed the United States into default last October. The over-arching metaphor of his talk was the journey from Boston (the Boston Tea Party in 1773) to Philadelphia (the Constitution in 1787).

Now, as in 1773, Americans have had it with our out-of-touch national government. But if all we do is protest, our Boston Tea Party moment will occupy little more than a footnote in our history. Hopefully our leaders, reformers and citizens will join the journey from Boston to Philadelphia – from protest to progress. Together we can march forward and take the road that leads to the kind of government we do want.

He mentioned several positive Tea Party proposals in Congress without detailing what they would do. But the mere possibility of “the kind of government we do want” is a significant shift in Tea Party rhetoric. I’ll be interested to see if it catches on inside the Tea Party, or if it’s just for export.

Rand Paul’s response. Rand Paul’s talk was mostly a collection of offensive stereotypes and right-wing fantasies. He used the story of black conservative columnist Star Parker to smear welfare recipients:

She was 23 when she quit her job at the L.A. Times so she could go on welfare. By collecting $465 a month, plus Food Stamps, and by getting a part-time that paid cash under the table, she could rent a nice apartment and earn far more money than working an honest 40-hour week. Later, she said, she had no trouble dropping her daughter off at a government-funded day-care center, selling some free medical vouchers to buy drugs, and hanging out at the beach all afternoon.

It’s Ronald Reagan’s Cadillac-driving welfare queen all over again, or Fox News’ lobster-loving Food Stamp surfer. Are those stories supposed to be typical of the people helped by government anti-poverty programs? Paul seems to think so. After putting a happy ending on Parker’s story — she could only get a real job and climb out of poverty after she gave up her “dependence” on government assistance — Paul says:

I want Star Parker’s story to be the rule, not the exception.

But how is that even possible unless her original situation is the rule? Unless welfare recipients in general are lying, cheating, drug-using, child-neglecting blacks who can get honest jobs whenever they want? I’m sure that’s exactly what Paul’s target audience wants to believe, but is it true? Like Reagan, Paul presents no evidence beyond the anecdote.

Another taffy-pull stretching of the truth was Paul’s claim that Obama has “spent more than a trillion dollars on make-work government jobs”. Actually, that number is somewhere close to zero. For example, a big chunk of the $800 billion stimulus was tax cuts. Some of the stimulus’ other big-ticket items sent money to the states so that revenue shortfalls wouldn’t force them to lay off teachers, and paid for repairs to roads and bridges.

So the next time you drop your kid off at public school or drive across an old bridge, remember that Rand Paul thinks teaching or keeping bridges from falling down are “make-work government jobs”.

Thuggery. The weirdest story of the night was New York Republican Rep. Michael Grimm threatening to throw a reporter “off this fucking balcony” (i.e., the Capitol balcony) for asking a question he didn’t want to answer. “I’ll break you in half,” Grimm warned.

Rudeness to the President. Well, at least this year nobody yelled “You lie!” during the speech, as Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina did in 2009. However, Texas Congressman Randy Webber tweeted:

On floor of house waitin on “Kommandant-In-Chef”… the Socialistic dictator who’s been feeding US a line or is it “A-Lying?”

Another Texas congressman, Steve Stockman (who is Senator Cornyn’s Tea Party challenger in the upcoming primary) walked out of the speech.

Isn’t it an amazing coincidence how Southern Republican Congressmen lost their sense of decorum and their respect for the office of the presidency at the precise moment when a black man was sworn in? Did a memo go out, or did they just know what to do by intuition?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , | Comments (3)

The Fall of Governor Ultrasound

January 27, 2014 – 9:20 am

The indictment, I now realize, is an under-exploited narrative form. Novels have been written in the form of diaries, case notes, and exchanges of letters, but I can’t remember seeing a novel written as an indictment.

It’s got to be an oversight, because the indictment of former Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen makes the potential clear: Within the constraints of the genre’s just-the-facts style, it still manages to build a sense of character and theme.

As the story begins, Bob and Maureen have risen to a new level, and can see yet another level beckoning, but don’t realize yet that they’re already in over their heads. Bob is the handsome, articulate new governor of what has recently become a swing state, Virginia. The Republican Party chooses him to respond to the 2010 State of the Union. He’s elected chair of the Republican Governor’s Association. He’s even being talked about as a likely running mate for Mitt Romney, who needs to reach out to the Christian Right without alienating the mainstream. And if Bob performs well on that national stage, who knows? He could be president himself someday. (If only he hadn’t backed that forced-transvaginal-ultrasound bill just as the war-on-women meme was starting to take off. Rick Perry did the same thing a year before, and nobody called him “Governor Ultrasound“. Bad timing!)

The big stage is full of important people to impress. But there’s a problem: money. The McDonnells were never rich, and then Bob bought property at the peak of the housing boom. (Bad timing again!) It’s so hard to cast the right image when your investments cost you more in mortgage interest than they generate in rent, and you can’t sell without revealing a huge loss. Where is Maureen going to get the designer gowns she needs for the Inaugural Ball and future formal events? How is Bob going to sport a Rolex or tool around in a Ferrari? How is the McDonnell daughter going to get the kind of wedding that an up-and-coming governor ought to be able to give her?

Enter the rich founder of a dietary-supplement company that (like Bob) seems right on the verge of bigger things. Bob and Maureen didn’t meet him until after Bob became governor, but he instantly becomes such a good friend to them — so nice, so generous; all they have to do is ask, and he provides whatever they need. And he asks so little: if the First Couple could only lend his company their names and images and the backdrop of the Governor’s Mansion, if they could lean on the state universities to do some legitimizing research.

Once the wrongdoing begins, the McDonnells are such clumsy criminals that you may end up feeling sorry for them. (Sometimes a lie can be so obvious that it’s almost honest.) They conspire in email and text messages. They know their stock holdings look suspicious, so they sell in December, fill out the year-end form, and then buy the shares back in January. Who could possibly see through such clever subterfuge?

But don’t worry, Bob and Maureen, a happy ending is on its way. The indictment ends with 14 reasons you should be admitted to a special federal academy, where experienced criminals can teach you how it’s really done.

Is he the right comparison?

Having looked at the indictment, you should also consider the McDonnell’s defense, which claims this is all politics. Some outside observers also say the case “is no slam dunk” because of “the fine line between what is illegal versus what is unseemly”. The point here is that McDonnell made no specific official action as governor to benefit his “friend”: McDonnell didn’t veto a law or appoint somebody to a state office in direct response to a gift. He sold the trappings and influence of the governorship rather than its constitutional powers.

In MSNBC reports on the case, you’re likely to see comparisons to a Democratic governor in jail: Rob Blagojevich, who famously tried to sell the Senate seat Barack Obama left to become president. But a comparison friendlier to McDonnell would be Don Siegelman, former Democratic governor of Alabama, also now in prison.

Or is he?

Like McDonnell’s defenders, Siegelman’s (including 60 Minutes) point out that some elements of the classic bribery story are missing: Siegelman did take an official action (re-appointing to a state board someone who had already served on that board under previous governors), but received no personal benefit (the appointee made a contribution to a fund campaigning to bring a state lottery to Alabama, a policy Siegelman favored).

In essence, both Siegelman and McDonnell claim that they didn’t cross the line between the man and the governor: Siegelman used his powers as governor to pursue his policies as governor, perhaps in an unseemly way. McDonnell used his prestige as a man (who happened to be governor) to reward someone who gave him personal gifts. In each case, the question is whether the law is being enforced in a politically biased way: How many other politicians could we send to jail under the same standards? And is there a partisan reason why we don’t?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (5)