Category Archives: elections

Unrepentant

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Although I don’t believe it tells us much we didn’t already know, this Vanity Fair article by Evgenia Peretz (child of Martin, but I’m trying not to hold that against her) is worth a look. Peretz looks back at the way the media covered the 2000 presidential campaigns and recalls how the press corps turned into the high school Kewl Kids Claque who treated Al Gore like the chess club nerd.

In 2000, the media seemed to focus on a personality contest between Bush, the folksy Texas rogue, and, as The New York Times referred to Gore, “Eddie Haskell,” the insincere brownnoser from Leave It to Beaver. ABC anchor Claire Shipman, who covered the 2000 campaign for NBC, says, “It was almost a drama that was cast before anyone even took a good look at who the candidates were.” …

…A study conducted by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center and the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 76 percent of stories about Gore in early 2000 focused on either the theme of his alleged lying or that he was marred by scandal, while the most common theme about Bush was that he was “a different kind of Republican.”

Peretz provides plenty of examples and names names. She also gets reaction from Al and Tipper Gore. She repeats the famous quote by Margaret Carlson: “You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get into the weeds and get out your calculator, or look at his record in Texas. But it’s really easy, and it’s fun to disprove Al Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us.” And be sure to read the section on page 5, “Running the Gauntlet.” Here’s just a taste:

The Washington Post‘s David Broder later found Gore too focused in his convention speech on what he’d do as president. “But, my, how he went on about what he wants to do as president,” wrote Broder. “I almost nodded off.” As for the environment, while Gore was persuaded by his consultants not to talk about it as much as he would have liked, whenever he did, many in the media ignored it or treated it as comedy. Dowd wrote in one column that “Al Gore is so feminized and diversified and ecologically correct, he’s practically lactating.” In another, referring to his consideration of putting a Webcam in the Oval Office, she wrote, “I have zero desire to see President Gore round the clock, putting comely interns to sleep with charts and lectures on gaseous reduction.”

Dowd’s column in the New York Times today, btw, is a catty little screed about Barack Obama called “The 46-Year-Old Virgin.” Let it stay behind the NYT subscription firewall.

Peretz doesn’t mention another New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, who wrote one column after another pointing to the big, glaring absurdities in Bush’s economic promises. Here’s one, from September 24, 2000:

George W. Bush is still using the four-dollar routine in his public appearances — the one where he pulls out four dollar bills to represent the projected budget surplus, then says that he plans to use only one of those bills, one-quarter of the surplus, for tax cuts. Anyone who has looked at his campaign’s own numbers (or who read this column a week and a half ago) knows that this isn’t right — that the tax cut would actually use up more than a third of the surplus. But most commentators seem to think that this is a minor detail — a quarter, a third, what’s the difference? (About $450 billion, but who’s counting?)

Meanwhile, Al Gore got a pummeling from some commentators — and, of course, Mr. Bush’s campaign — over the dog story, in which he told an anecdote about an expensive human drug that costs only one-third as much if prescribed by a vet. It turns out that he was looking at wholesale prices; when you look at retail prices the number is more than one-third, though less than one-half. My God! Does this man have the integrity to be president?

Although both cases involve misstated fractions, they are very different in other ways. Mr. Gore’s numbers were off, but the thrust of his story — that drug companies engage in price discrimination, charging what the traffic will bear — is true. On the other hand, the intended moral of Mr. Bush’s story — that the budget will easily accommodate his tax cut, that it leaves plenty of money with which to secure the future of retirees, rebuild the military, and all that — isn’t at all true.

I heard Paul Krugman speak a couple of years later. He said the New York Times editors wouldn’t let him use the word “lie” to explain Bush’s campaign promises. So instead of saying “Bush is lying” — which is what he wanted to say — he had to write that what Bush said “isn’t at all true.”

Krugman continued,

Just to revisit the arithmetic one more time: Let one dollar bill represent $100 billion of projected surplus. If we put Social Security and Medicare in ”lock boxes,” the remaining surplus amounts to $18 — of which $16 will be used up by Mr. Bush’s tax cut. And Mr. Bush has promised new spending that is more than twice, though less than three times — hey, I don’t want to be inaccurate! — as much as the money he actually has left.

So Mr. Gore got the details wrong but represented the basic situation correctly; Mr. Bush also got the details wrong but fundamentally misrepresented the situation. And that’s not the only difference. Mr. Gore told his story once, and didn’t repeat it after the details were questioned. Mr. Bush continues to tell his story even though it is demonstrably inconsistent with the numbers his own campaign has put out.

Alas, in mainstream media Paul Krugman was just about the lone voice crying in the wilderness in 2000. The Kewl Kids ignored him and made fun of Gore’s earth-tone suits.

Peretz leaves out the role of right-wing media infrastructure in this mess; see, for example, Eric Boehlert on David Brock (Salon, May 11, 2004):

The right-wing media warfare naturally is most visible during presidential election years. “I’ve been saying for six months, no matter who was running for office this year, the right has a system in place to caricature that person,” says Brock. “This is what I realized after 2000 — that what happened to the Clintons during the ’90s really had very little to do with the Clintons because the same thing happened to Gore in 2000. And then it happened to [Sen. Tom] Daschle when the Senate changed hands in 2001, and it happened to the mourners of [the late Sen.] Paul Wellstone in 2002. It goes on and on.” After witnessing how this Republican “noise machine” again worked so well in shaping the caustic and undermining press coverage of Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, Brock is trying to awaken the public from slumber about these techniques. …

… Catching Rush Limbaugh or contributors to Fox News spreading misinformation may sound like “shooting fish in a barrel,” but Brock says the right-wing noise machine’s effect on the mainstream press poses a large danger to rational debate and coverage of issues. Too often, he says, what the right concocts ends up — often within hours — percolating in mainstream press outlets, which, rather than debunk the Republican spin, uncritically adopt it as their own. “If the mainstream media were doing their job, Media Matters would not have to exist,” Brock told Salon.

After this interview, the “system” successfully turned John Kerry into a cartoon. Has anything changed? Does the VRWC still have what it takes to dominate media next year? And have the Kewl Kids learned anything? I fear the answers are no, yes, and no.

Over Rove

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David Frum writes in today’s New York Times:

AS a political strategist, Karl Rove offered a brilliant answer to the wrong question.

The question he answered so successfully was a political one: How could Republicans win elections after Bill Clinton steered the Democrats to the center?

The question he unfortunately ignored was a policy question: What does the nation need — and how can conservatives achieve it?

It occurs to me that one could say something similar about the DLC. They’re still answering the question “How can Democrats win elections after Reagan and the VRWC moved the nation so far Right?” And the question they ignored was “How do we correct the nation’s political culture and move the nation back to the center?” But this is a post about Rove and his lasting impact on the Republican party.

Frum goes on to say that Rove’s polarizing tactics united the GOP base, but it also united the Democratic Party base.

Play-to-the-base politics can be a smart strategy — so long as your base is larger than your opponents’.

But it has been apparent for many years that the Democratic base is growing faster than the Republican base. The numbers of the unmarried and the non-churchgoing are growing faster than the numbers of married and church-going Americans. The nonwhite and immigrant population is growing at a faster rate than that of white native-borns. …

…Mr. Rove often reminded me of a miner extracting the last nuggets from an exhausted seam. His attempts to prospect a new motherlode have led the Republican party into the immigration debacle.

The “new motherlode” was Latino voters, of course. Rove also tried to make inroads into the African-American vote by wooing some black evangelical ministers, but that attempt was flooded out by Katrina.

Seems to me that in attempting to “mine” Latino votes, Rove stepped on a land mine planted by Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who had the brilliant idea to win white voters away from the Democrats by exploiting racism — the Southern strategy. As explained by Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips in 1970, “The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.” Reagan tapped into the same vein with his stories about welfare queens. Rove must not have noticed that the cornerstone of his base is bigotry.

Josh Marshall has a good analysis of Frum’s column. Right now I want to look at just one part of GOP base, the Christian right.

A number of Karl Rove retrospectives online today give Rove credit for cobbling together a coalition of small government conservatives and religious conservatives, but I say not all that credit is deserved. As noted here, right-wing religion and right-wing politics have been fellow travelers in America since at least the 1930s. Richard Hofstadter wrote in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962, p. 131):

Their heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag. Since the 1930’s, fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations.

Ronald Reagan is likewise given credit for bringing evangelical Christians into the conservative camp. But I think it’s more correct that many evangelicals were already there, in particular the Premillenialists. Reagan simply signaled to them that the GOP was now ready to champion their views. Gary Wills wrote in 1988,

The other sign of the End, the Antichrist, took visible shape for these Christians in the Communist empire — which is why they were so excited when Ronald Reagan referred to that as the “Evil Empire” and “the focus of all evil in the world.” A leader who would recognize that was, for them, another sign. Detail after detail could be put together. Gorbachev’s forehead birthmark became “the mark of the Beast” from Revelation (13:17). Ezekial 38 and 39 suggested that the last war would begin with an invasion from the north; Falwell sought etymological linkages between Russian and biblical names. The invaders would come for “spoil,” and all you had to do was take off that word’s first two letters to get the reason for Soviet invasion of the Middle East. [Gary Wills, reprinted in Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1990) p. 150]

But the links between the U.S.S.R. and Satan were already well established in many Christian’s heads. I well remember that illustrations in my Sunday School literature of the 1950s often portrayed Nikita Khrushchev or other Soviet leaders standing with the Devil, while Jesus hovered protectively over the United States. And this was a Lutheran Sunday School. I can’t imagine what the kids were being taught at the Assembly of God church down the street.

In other words, the connection between Satan and Communism was old news when Reagan came along. All he did was let right-wing Christians know that he “got” it.

I want to go back to Gary Wills and the 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. “Poppy” Bush.

Bush was paying court to evangelists Jim and Tammy Bakker in that same period, hoping for an endorsement from them while they were still in their glory days of running Heritage USA, the patriotic theme park. Reagan had won evangelicals away from Jimmy Carter, one of their own, in 1980, capturing the electorally important South. That region stayed with him in 1984, though he had not pushed very hard for causes like prayer in school. Now the evangelicals, feeling powerful, were ready to make harder demands — even, in 1988, to run one of their own. It was time for Reagan’s party to deliver. [Wills, ibid., p. 79]

Poppy actually went further to court the religious Right than Reagan did. Bush publicly declared that Jesus was his “personal savior,” which is not something one normally hears from a High Church WASP like #41. Reagan, Wills said, had deftly side-stepped personal confessions of faith, but Bush needed to go the extra mile, so to speak, to win them over. Further, running mate Dan Quayle was a disciple of a Dispensationalist named Robert Thieme, which may have been a factor in his being chosen for the ticket. Wills wrote (op cit., p. 80) that Bush “had finally got religion by the balls.” Perhaps, but the evangelical vote didn’t seem much of a factor when Poppy lost to Bill Clinton in 1992. Poppy really wasn’t one of them.

Now let’s pick up what Lou Dubose writes in Salon about Karl Rove:

In Texas, we saw this modern iteration of the Republican Party come together in the summer or 1994, as Bush kicked off his first successful run for public office. (He had lost a congressional race in West Texas in 1978, in which Rove was only marginally involved.) Social conservatives had already joined together with economic conservatives when Ronald Reagan got into bed with the Rev. Jerry Falwell. But it was Rove who consecrated the union. A nominal Christian and Episcopalian, Rove had little regard for the evangelical extremists who have become essential to the success of the modern Republican Party, even cracking the occasional joke about his own lack of faith.

Then the Christian right showed up at the Republicans’ state convention in Fort Worth, in 1994, with enough delegates to seize control of the party. The dominant Christian faction tossed George H.W. Bush’s handpicked state chairman and longtime friend, Fred Meyer, out of office and replaced him with a charismatic Catholic lawyer from Dallas. It banned liquor from convention hotels and replaced hospitality-room bars with “ice cream sundae bars,” where chefs prepared designer confections. It summoned delegates to Grand Old Prayer Sessions, required Christian fealty oaths of candidates for party leadership, and made opposition to abortion the brand by which Texas Republicans would be defined.

This political great awakening was not unique to Texas. But it occurred in a context in which a brilliant, Pygmalion political consultant saw in George W. Bush a malleable idol who could be fashioned into a governor and ultimately a president. And Bush was a candidate whose genuine evangelical faith was an asset rather than a liability. After initially fighting the dominant evangelical delegation at the state convention — proposing Texas Rep. Joe Barton as a compromise candidate for state party chairman — Rove joined them.

By all accounts not religious himself, Rove masterfully exploited religion as a campaign resource. To cement the relationship, right-wing Christians were given places of honor both in the campaigns and in the Bush Administration. But neither Rove nor Bush seem to have given enough thought to the long-term consequences of turning the Republican Party — never mind the government — over to fanatics and absolutists.

First, says Dubose, “the larger public — and even the Republican Party, if the candidacy of Rudy Giuliani means anything — has grown weary of the Christian right.” Remember, the “Christian right” represents a minority of Christians. The large majority of Christians do not believe in the Rapture and are not keen on starting Armageddon anytime soon. I’ve heard much anecdotal evidence recently that even many Southern, socially conservative Christians are tired of politicians who ceaselessly harp on guns, God, gays, and abortion, but have little to say about kitchen-table issues — jobs, pensions, health care, gas prices. Not to mention Iraq.

Second, you can’t very well maintain a governing coalition with people who won’t compromise and who do not even tolerate, much less respect, opposing opinions. (Disagreement with them is not just disagreement; it is Evil.) As I wrote here, Rove’s biggest blind spot is his failure to see that campaigning is not governing. Making promises and smearing opponents only takes an office holder so far. At some point he needs to follow up on promises and see to it that his policies are working. Rove and Bush seem to have plenty of the vision thing; what they don’t have is the accomplishment thing.

And third, now that the Christian right owns the Republican Party, it remains to be seen if the GOP can nominate someone moderate enough to win the general election.

Deb Reichmann of the Associated Press reported recently that President Bush still has majority support of only three demographic groups:

The only subgroups where a majority of people give Bush the nod are Republicans (67 percent), conservatives (53 percent) and white evangelicals who attend religious services at least once a week (56 percent).

These are the same three subsets of voters who support Bush on Iraq.

White evangelicals as an entire bloc – regardless of how often they report going to church – have been a reliable support group for Bush since he first set foot in the Oval Office. But even their overall approval of the president declined to 44 percent last month from 57 percent in May – a decline driven partly by bad news from the battlefield in Iraq and conservatives’ opposition to Bush’s ideas on immigration.

Of course, there are plenty of people who have soured on Bush but who are still inclined to vote for Republicans. But in a close election, can a GOP candidate afford to distance himself from the Christian right base? I doubt it. But can a presidential candidate packaged to appeal to the Christian right win a general election? I doubt it. What’s a Republican party to do?

And might I point out that the GOP didn’t have this problem back in Dwight Eisenhower’s day. But that was a long time ago.

A Hit for Huckabee

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Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s second-place showing in the Iowa straw poll was unexpected, which means it will be spun as a win for Huckabee. Whether the straw poll means anything at all is debatable. Three candidates — Giuliani, Thompson, and McCain — did not participate. As I understand it the straw poll is as much a fund-raiser and pep rally as anything else, and candidates may hand out the $35 tickets for free and bus in supporters. This tends to tilt the playing field in favor of candidates with money and good organizations. Both Mitt Romney — who won — and Sam Brownback dropped a lot of money on a lot of attendees. Apparently Romney and Brownback handed out more tickets than they got votes, however, meaning that some of the people accepting their free tickets voted for someone else.

Mike Huckabee has about as perfect a record on social conservatism as is humanly possible. Plus, he is a Southern Baptist, which gives him a built-in edge with evangelicals over the Mormon Romney and the Catholic Brownback. If the straw poll performance gives Huckabee some fundraising momentum, it could move him into the first tier of Republican candidates.

Plus, as Noam Scheiber wrote at The New Republic:

The political press is absolutely head over heels for Huckabee. (There were high-fives all around when it became clear he’d finish second.) He’s a genuinely endearing guy who can banter with the best of them–watching him with reporters brings to mind the old black and white footage of Babe Ruth jawboning with sportswriters. When you add that to the political media’s general affinity for underdogs, you can see how Huckabee’s about to enjoy some serious media afterglow, which will only further boost his profile. With Romney suddenly vulnerable among conservatives and McCain and Giuliani both languishing here–last Sunday’s Washington Post poll had McCain at 8 percent and Giuliani at 14, compared with Romney’s 26–you may well have just met your 2008 Iowa caucus winner.

I second BooMan’s question:

I would really like it if Noam Scheiber would name names. Which reporters were exchanging high-fives over Mike Huckabee’s success? Who are these people and what the hell is wrong with them?

Huckabee may be a nice fella, but he is waaaaaay right wing. On any social issue you can name — abortion, embryonic stem cell research, gay marriage, gay adoption, gun control — he is as firmly right wing as a person can be without falling off the planet. Would the press soft-pedal his extremism just because they think he’s a nice fella? You bet they would. Plus, he’s a governor, which the CW says is better than being a senator — or former mayor of New York City — if you want a presidential nomination. This means that if he begins to get some media attention, he could be a real contender for the Republican nomination.

Somehow, I’m not worried. Notice, for example, that 23,000 Iowans voted in the 1999 straw poll, compared to 14,302 this year. Can we say “disinterested”? Maybe more Iowa Republicans would have turned out had Thompson for Giuliani been campaigning, but loyal Thompson or Giuliani supporters could still vote for their guy; Thompson came in seventh and Giuliani came in eighth.

And Ron Paul was fifth, after Tancredo, which probably has Paul supporters planning their trips to Washington for the inauguration.

In 2000, when conservatism was riding as high as it ever was, Bush ran as something of a “stealth” conservative. A compassionate conservative. A conservative who wouldn’t rip benefit checks away from widows and orphans and who really wasn’t against abortion (wink wink) as much as he said he was. Remember that? So if the GOP couldn’t run a pure wingnut then, what makes them think they can get away with it in 2008?

* * *

Ron Brownstein has an interesting op ed in the Los Angeles Times about the demise of moderate Republicans.

Shays and Graham embody the two forms of dissent from the dominant conservative orthodoxy in the modern Republican Party. In one category are traditional moderates like Shays, who pursue a centrist course, especially on social and foreign policy issues, but whose numbers have relentlessly declined for decades. In the second are maverick figures like Graham or Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who are too conservative to be considered moderates but too eclectic and unpredictable to be considered reliable allies by the right. Both of these groups — moderates and mavericks — are under siege at a moment when Republicans are struggling to reach independent and swing voters disillusioned by Bush and the war.

In the coming election, moderate and maverick Republicans face mirror-image risks. Because the maverick conservatives tend to represent more solidly Republican areas (like Graham in South Carolina or Hagel in Nebraska), they face relatively less danger of losing to Democrats in a general election next fall. But precisely because they represent conservative regions where demands for ideological purity are more intense, the mavericks are confronting an elevated risk of challenges in party primaries. …

… The question for Republicans, as they try to dig out from the collapse of Bush’s second term, is whether they can rebuild a majority coalition without tolerating more dissent and diversity as well.

I doubt that they can. The Republican Party has been feasting on ideological red meat for so long I can’t see them taking a sudden interest in a balanced diet. It’s going to take an even bigger humiliation than last year’s midterms for them to be willing to repackage themselves.

Unsafe in Any Election

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Ralph Nader is thinking about running for president again. Whoop dee doo.

Ralph Nader says he is seriously considering running for president in 2008 because he foresees another Tweedledum-Tweedledee election that offers little real choice to voters.

He said the same thing in 2000, when the choices were Al Gore and George W. Bush. Some people were dumb enough to believe him then, and some will believe him now. I have little to add to what this fella says, except to advise people to watch Ralph’s modus operandi. He’ll say something about how one party is as bad as the other and then spend the rest of the evening bashing Democrats. Republicans, as a rule, get a pass from Ralph.

One wonders what his motivation is. If he’s trying to reform the Dems — and Lord knows they could use it — this is not the way to go about it. Personally, I think he just wants the attention.

The Puppet Vote

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Just to show I don’t always know what I’m talking about, Rudy Giuliani remains firmly in first place for the Republican presidential nomination. Recent polls show that about a third of Republican voters say he is their first choice among the many contenders. The only other two candidates with double-digit support right now are John McCain and Fred Thompson. Mitt Romney, who is still being treated as a front runner in news stories, is running behind Newt Gringrich in most polls.

What’s remarkable to me is that none of the current top three — Giuliani, McCain, and Thompson — would seem to be a “social conservative” candidate. Thompson is on record as supporting legal elective abortion in the first trimester, although he’s being touted as a pro-life purist by news media. (On the other hand, as a senator Thompson “registered a zero rating from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America and a rating of 100 percent from the National Right to Life Committee,” according to this article. So maybe he is a purist.) Mitt Romney also was for legal abortion before he was against it. Meanwhile, the candidates with the purest social conservative credentials — e.g., Duncan Hunter, Jim Gilmore, Sam Brownback — are bouncing along the bottom of the pond with 1 and 2 percent support.

But the continued support for Giuliani surprises me. I assumed that once the Republican base found out about Rudy’s pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro-gay rights, pro-sequin and lipstick past, they’d drop him like a hot tiara. All of these issues have received considerable national media attention, yet there Giuliani still is, at the top of the heap. He’s down a bit from where he was in February, but he’s still way ahead of McCain, his nearest rival.

It’s way too early to assume this will be the order of finish when the candidates hit the nomination wire. About 60 percent of Republican voters say they are not satisfied with the choices. This suggests to me that support for all these candidates, including Rudy, is soft.

Also, as demonstrated in the last post, social conservatives have a remarkable proclivity for being oblivious. It’s entirely possible a large percentage of social conservatives still haven’t heard about Rudy’s liberal stand on values issues. If it isn’t being hammered to death in the Limbaugh-O’Reilly-Hannity echo chamber, it’s off the rightie viewscreen.

However, it’s also possible that a whole lot of conservative voters do know where Rudy stands on abortion et al., yet they have made a decision to overlook this for the sake of an “electable” Republican candidate. Rightie pundit Martin Frost speculates this is the case; he compares Rudy’s GOP support to the way Dems settled on John Kerry as the “electable” candidate in 2004.

George Will seems to be leaning in that direction as well:

Rudy Giuliani is crosswise with social conservatives, especially concerning abortion. Yet one reason he is in the top tier of the Republican field is that, according to Pew Research Center polling, he is supported by nearly 30 percent of social conservatives, who are 42 percent of the Republican vote. Perhaps some opponents of abortion are coming to terms with the fact that the party has written itself into a corner regarding that issue.

The corner that Will thinks the GOP painted (“written,” George?) itself into exists mostly in his own head. He thinks the GOP is losing traction on abortion because the GOP has been talking about a “right to life” amendment since the 1970s but at the same time says the life of embryos is already protected under the due process clause Fourteenth Amendment. Will must not have noticed that the same amendment defines citizens as “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

But I think the GOP has painted itself into a corner on abortion, which is the same corner it has painted itself into on a lot of other issues. The GOP base is way to the right of mainstream opinion. Thus, a candidate who perfectly reflects the values of the base would be toxic in a general election. The Republican leadership must realize this, which probably has a lot to do with why the leadership is sending signals to the base (through tools like George Will) that they’re supposed to be pragmatic and choose the “electable” candidate.

Much has already been written about the Republican hope for the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan. Brendan Spiegel says they are really looking for another Dubya.

Of course, they don’t want the 2007 model W — the post-Hurricane Katrina and civil war in Iraq version. They want vintage 2000 W — a man adherent to the religious right’s social views, yet blessed with enough “regular guy” appeal for the political center. In two successive elections, Bush completely dominated the growing evangelical vote without alienating centrist voters. Bush built a unique political coalition that may never again be duplicated, and he has left his party scrambling for a candidate with similar potential. The problem is, this candidate doesn’t exist.

I think it can be argued that many thought Dubya was the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan, and only after Dubya’s poll numbers slipped under 50 percent did they realize he wasn’t. The first-term Dubya had St. Ronald’s genius for being all things to all (conservative) people. The Religious Right saw him as God’s representative on earth — if not Jesus himself, at least Jesus Lite. Corporatist conservatives knew he and Dick the Dick were in their corner, and of course they were right about that. To neocons and other jingoists, Dubya was their middle finger by proxy extended to the rest of the world. It doesn’t matter to them that Iraq is a quagmire and international terrorism is growing in leaps and bounds; as long as Dubya is telling the rest of the planet to kiss his ass, he’s their guy. That he actually shows a little compassion toward illegal immigrants — albeit if only so he and his friends can hire cheap household help — is an unfathomable betrayal to them.

Spiegel continues,

The fruitless search for a successor to W is not a new development. Since Bush took office in 2001, several men have temporarily held the title of next great conservative hope, yet no one has held on to it for very long. Rick Santorum was once touted as the next presidential candidate of the religious right, but Americans found him way too creepy and Pennsylvania voters booted him from the Senate. Then there was Bill Frist, who quickly rose to Senate Majority Leader and just as quickly proved his irrelevance. There was also George Allen, whose presidential prospects unraveled the most dramatically when even voters in red state Virginia didn’t want him in Washington anymore. One after another, W’s would-be successors have burned out. The void in the Republican primary is so gaping that a large segment of the party has pinned their hopes on TV actor Fred Thompson, over-hyping the former Senator to ridiculous proportions, despite the fact that most Americans don’t even know who he is.

Those waiting for an electable, evangelical-approved candidate to materialize fail to realize how unique Bush’s political skills are (or were, at one point). Bush’s ability to convince religious fundamentalists he was one of them, yet appear acceptable to centrist voters was an unprecedented feat. An unlikely feat too, when you consider the very positions that allowed him to win a whopping 79 percent of the evangelical vote — complete opposition to abortion rights, intolerance of gay rights, denial of evolution and refusal to support stem cell research — are not values shared by a majority of Americans.

Republican politicians were in a better position to pander to right-wing voters without scaring away moderates in those long-ago times when a right-wing government was unimaginable. For example, in the 1990s abortion rights seemed nearly unassailable. Even when candidates made pro-life extremist noises, moderates assumed it was just talk and voted for them anyway. (Do you remember the way moderate Republican women in 2000 winked at us and claimed that Bush wasn’t really against abortion? It was just something he had to say to get elected, they told us.) Voters are finally waking up to the realization that if we keep electing whackjobs, we end up with whackjob government.

But if the New Conventional Wisdom among Republicans is that a candidate’s stand on abortion doesn’t matter, where does that leave the “right to life” movement? The old CW was that, somehow, being opposed to abortion gave Republicans an advantage because they would gain the loyalty and support of the “pro-life” crowd without paying a penalty from the moderate majority, who had other issues on their minds. It also gave the GOP “moral clarity,” in that they had a simple, easy-to-explain position (“I’m agin’ it”). Dems, on the other hand, had to be nuanced, since being enthusiastically for abortion is unacceptable and might give poor Wolf Blitzer the vapors. So Dems fell back on “I don’t like abortion personally but I think it should be a woman’s choice.” But any position that can’t fit on a standard bumper sticker is not “clear” in Mass Media Pundit Land and is held against Dem candidates even when it reflects a mainstream point of view.

Now that the front-running GOP candidate is making the “I don’t like it personally, but …” argument, expect the pundits to suddenly shut up about moral clarity and discover the virtues of nuance. And if the “pro life” movement loses its kingmaker power, expect the leadership of the GOP to stop taking its calls.

The Inevitable Candidate

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Last night I endured considerable babbling from the television pundits about Barack Obama’s first quarter fundraising results. Consensus among the bobbleheads is that all those little people who gave nickles and dimes to Sen. Obama instead of Sen. Clinton must be (a) angry with her because of the war, or (b) still suffering Clinton fatigue. Or both.

I think both are a factor, but I think there’s another factor the bobbleheads are missing.

For the past few bleeping years the pundits have been telling us that Sen. Hillary Clinton will be the 2008 presidential nominee for the Democratic Party. No doubt about it. She’s got all this money, all these connections, a killer political organization — nay, a machine — behind her. Whether the Democratic Party base wanted her to be the candidate was never questioned. She was who we were going to get, like it or not.

After a while, Sen. Clinton started to sound like the Borg. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Frankly, this attitude has been pissing me off.

What’s worse, the Inevitable Candidate talk seemed symptomatic of what’s been wrong with the national Democratic Party for years — their insulation. For a lot of reasons — not all of them the fault of the politicians — the Dems haven’t had anything like a national progressive coalition behind them for about thirty years now. That means leadership positions in the party are entirely filled by people who are accustomed to running (and, occasionally, winning) election campaigns without thinking much about what a progressive base might want. Worse, many Dems have treated us progressives and liberals like disreputable relations; they don’t mind if we donate money and turn out to vote for them, but they’d rather not be seen with us in public.

So, instead of being active participants in the political process, we’re supposed to be the passive consumers of whatever product the party chooses to market. Bleep that, I say.

I’ve asked myself if I would feel the same way about an Inevitable Candidate if the I.C. were someone whose stand on the Iraq War and other issues were closer to my own opinions than Sen. Clinton’s are. Yes, I believe I would. I might support an I.C., but only if the candidate were someone capable of winning my support anyway. In other words, I’d support the I.C. in spite of his being the I.C., not because of it.

There a couple of things I suspect but can’t prove. One, I suspect much of the aura of Inevitable Candidate was wrapped about Sen. Clinton by the Right, because she’s the candidate they most want to run against in 2008. Two, I think Barack Obama is benefiting from some backlash against the I.C. I think a lot of the people who donated nickles and dimes to Barack Obama did so because he’s the only candidate other than Hillary Clinton the pundits take seriously these days.

There’s no one Dem officially running that I support 100 percent for the presidential nomination. It’s a strong field, but no one really stands out for me yet. But it’s 19 months until the election. In theory, we ought to have a lot of time yet to make up our minds. It used to be that presidential nominees were chosen by the party conventions three or four months before the elections. Now, we’re going to have a nominee chosen many months before most people are paying attention to presidential politics. And if the prime criterion for winning the nomination is collecting more donations than the other guys — how does that give us a good president, exactly?

Along these lines — there’s a good editorial called “Running for Dollars” in today’s New York Times.

Muck and Mire

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Some people don’t learn. After suffering six years of an incompetent and corrupt administration, the nation is about to plunge into another content-free, all-smears-all-the-time presidential election campaign cycle.

I blame two parties: The candidates and the news media.

Paul Krugman writes that we know next to nothing about the Democratic candidates’ stands on several major issues (he promises to call out the Republicans in a later column).

First, what do they propose doing about the health care crisis? All the leading Democratic candidates say they’re for universal care, but only John Edwards has come out with a specific proposal. The others have offered only vague generalities — wonderfully uplifting generalities, in Mr. Obama’s case — with no real substance.

Second, what do they propose doing about the budget deficit? There’s a serious debate within the Democratic Party between deficit hawks, who point out how well the economy did in the Clinton years, and those who, having watched Republicans squander Bill Clinton’s hard-won surplus on tax cuts for the wealthy and a feckless war, would give other things — such as universal health care — higher priority than deficit reduction.

Mr. Edwards has come down on the anti-hawk side. But which side are Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama on? I have no idea.

Third, what will candidates do about taxes? Many of the Bush tax cuts are scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. Should they be extended, in whole or in part? And what do candidates propose doing about the alternative minimum tax, which will hit tens of millions of middle-class Americans unless something is done?

Fourth, how do the candidates propose getting America’s position in the world out of the hole the Bush administration has dug? All the Democrats seem to be more or less in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. But what do they think we should do about Al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan? And what will they do if the lame-duck administration starts bombing Iran?

The “pundits” have already made me tired talking about the horse race. The newsies cover the campaigns but tell us nothing about the candidates. Example: Check out the exchange between Chris Matthews and Brian Williams in this Hardball transcript. A snip:

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC ANCHOR: It‘s hot and it‘s early, Chris, but I harbor this theory that about a dozen Democrats, all of them already in politics, really care about this fight.

My theory goes further. As you know, I don‘t do opinions, but I read a whole lot of people‘s opinions every day on both sides. One of them I consumed today is that Hillary Clinton was so hurt at not being the cool kid at Malibu High School, in effect, that they could not believe—put another way, a funny thing happened on their way to the presumptive Democratic nomination.

Here comes Barack Obama, who, for set of reasons and a set of new beliefs about Hillary Rodham Clinton and her electability, comes in and sweeps in. And these stars, who they could always count on, fell head over hills in love with him. And this is what we are watching happen.

You combine that with the pros working for this Clinton campaign, and this is what we are looking at on page one of the tabloids.

MATTHEWS: Were you surprised at the swift reaction from Howard Wolfson for Hillary Clinton, to come out on this show last night and basically accuse the other candidate, Barack Obama, himself, of putting Geffen up to this attack on Hillary and her husband?

WILLIAMS: It was out of “The Godfather”: “Michael, do you renounce Satan?”

I am not surprised, Chris, only because the Clinton team, say what you will—and people will anyway—politically about them in the White House, in the prime of their years, what did we know about them? They were pros politically. They were good leakers. They were good attackers, and they were good defenders.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has some pros working for her. We have had some experience with them, all of us in this business have. And, so, I was not surprised. They are going to try to give rapid reaction an entirely new name.

MATTHEWS: The question is, can they set the rules? They have set a couple of rules in the last go-round here. One rule is, you can‘t attack Hillary in any fashion, or that‘s dirty politics.

Do you think they did that against—Howard Wolfson, also speaking for Hillary, her communications director, a couple of weeks ago, did it to John Edwards for a rather general comment that he made about the Congress not fighting the war, or opposing the war, and now doing it again the other day. Can Hillary say, no attacks on me, period, and get away with it?

I hadn’t noticed there was any kind of rule about not attacking Senator Clinton, but perhaps there is. Bob Herbert writes about the Obama-Clinton-Geffen flap:

Most of the analyses after last week’s dust-up over David Geffen’s comments to Maureen Dowd have focused on whether the Clintons succeeded in tarnishing the junior senator from Illinois. What I found interesting was that no one questioned whether the Clintons would be willing to get down in the muck and start flinging it around. That was a given.

When Senator Obama talks about bringing a new kind of politics to the national scene, he’s talking about something that would differ radically from the relentlessly vicious, sleazy, mendacious politics that have plagued the country throughout the Bush-Clinton years. Whether he can pull that off is an open question. But there’s no doubt the Clintons want to stop him from succeeding. …

… We’ll have to wait and see whether Senator Obama is really offering a new, more hopeful brand of national politics. But here’s a bit of unsolicited advice for a candidate making his first foray into the crucible of presidential politics:

Don’t listen to those who tell you not to fight back against the Clintons. You will not become president if you allow yourself to become their punching bag. Keep in mind the Swift-boating of John Kerry. Raising politics to a higher level does not mean leaving oneself defenseless.

Along the same lines, here’s a column in today’s Boston Globe about Hillary Clinton’s use of her first name on her campaign buttons. Please.

The fluff piece about Al Gore in yesterdays Washington Post contained more information on Gore’s actual accomplishments (that he made a documentary) than most campaign reporting contains about the candidates.

Intimidation

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A few days ago the John Edwards campaign announced the hiring of two of my favorite sister bloggers, Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare’s Sister. And of course I was insanely jealous, because I want to be a campaign blogger, too. (Wes Clark? Are you reading this?)

Of course, as soon as anyone on the leftie blogosphere gets a little mainstream media attention, the hate squads of the right form a line and start shooting. This is to be expected. They’re pretty well conditioned to shoot anything on our side that moves. Here is a typically thoughtful criticism of Amanda from the Right.

So far, blogging as usual. But today I see the mainstream media is picking up the “controversy.” The Washington Post is running a Nedra Pickler/AP story headlined “Catholics Slam Bloggers Hired by Edwards.” Wow, that sounds bad. But as the article progressed, “Catholics” was quickly downgraded to “a Catholic group,” which turned out to be Bill Donohue.

How is this news? Donohue hates everybody who isn’t the Pope.

Nedra Pickler writes,

Donohue cited posts that the women made on blogs in the past several months in which they criticized the pope and the church for its opposition to homosexuality, abortion and contraception, sometimes using profanity.

Re the profanity: Apparently rightie bloggers are quivering with outrage because the two ladies occasionally use the “F” word, which rightie bloggers never do.

“The Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics,” Marcotte wrote on the blog Pandagon on Dec. 26, in an excerpt cited by Donohue.

I agree that Amanda is not being fair to single out the Catholic Church for its policy on reproduction rights. It’s not just the Catholic Church, but the entire Christian Right, that considers women to be brood animals.

Among the McEwan posts that Donohue listed was one she posted on Feb. 21, 2006, on her site, Shakespeare’s Sister. She questioned what religious conservatives don’t understand about “keeping your noses out of our britches, our beds and our families?”

Hey, Bill, if the truth hurts …

Amanda is also getting slammed for allegedly deleting some posts about last year’s Duke University rape allegations. Via email, Amanda says the “deletions” occurred accidentally last year when Pandagon archives were imported to WordPress from Moveable Type. Lots of posts about other issues were “deleted” as well.

James Joyner points out that campaigns on both sides are hiring bloggers —

As more campaigns (and corporations and PR firms) get aboard the “blogger relations” bandwagon, the natural impulse is to hire established bloggers. Hillary Clinton has hired Peter Daou, John McCain has Patrick Hynes, Rudy Giuliani has Patrick Ruffini, and the Senate Republicans have hired Jon Henke, who was also brought on too late to do George Allen much good.

[Update: Glenn Greenwald takes a stroll through the Patrick Hynes archives.]

I figured out yesterday that Ruffini was working for Giuliani, because the two Giuliani posts I wrote yesterday were getting hits from Ruffini’s news aggregate site. Apparently the site had picked up the posts without paying much attention to what I actually wrote. Sharp lad, that Patrick Ruffini.

But this made me stop and think. It’s clear that as soon as the Edwards campaign announced the hiring of Amanda and Melissa, elements of the Right began combing through their old posts for anything they could turn into a scandal. Nobody on the Left appears to have done the same to Hynes, Ruffini, or Henke. Anyone who has been blogging very long at all is bound to have written a few things that come across badly or turned out to be wrong. Yet we don’t bother to do to them what they do to us. Why is that?

(Note to Wes Clark campaign: I assure you that I don’t ever use the “F” word on Mahablog. I rarely use any profanity stronger than “whackjob” or “Michelle Malkin.”)

Speaking of Michelle — I’m trying to import a couple of YouTube classics of Michelle for your enjoyment to include in this post, but they are slow to come up. They’ll probably pop up on the blog later today when I’m not looking. Well, fudge. Until then, you can see one of them here.

Anyway, I called this post “Intimidation” because I see in the New York Times that the Edwards campaign is “weighing the fate” of the two bloggers. Which, of course, is the point of the rightie slime campaign — to intimidate lefties into backing down. I urge the Edwards campaign not to back down.