Category Archives: Republican Party

Mark Steyn Hates America

Posted on by

Highlights of Mark Steyn’s latest column:

  • He wants us all to get syphilis. The BooMan explains.
  • He repeats a much-debunked Republican lie that the Obama stimulus package contains $4.2 billion for ACORN. In fact, the bill does not mention ACORN. But you know righties — once they get a story in their heads that reinforces their opinions, you can debunk it from now until doomsday and they’ll keep repeating it anyway. Years from now, when both the stimulus package and ACORN have faded into history, they will still believe ACORN got $4.2 billion.

Other stuff to read:

“The Nativists Are Restless” — The GOP continues to shoot itself in the foot over the immigration issue.

Frank Rich notes that the GOP keeps promising us “new ideas” but so far haven’t produced any. However, they (although not the Democrats) live in fear of the wrath of Rushbo.

This Is Rich

Posted on by

Headline from The Hill: “GOP losing patience with Obama, Dem leaders.”

Some things snark themselves. As Steve Benen says, “I wonder what the weather’s like in Republicans’ reality.”

But now they’ve got a new party chair, Michael Steele. I hope our dear Steve Gilliard is watching from blogger heaven and laughing his ass off.

For more interesting reading, see Publius and Colbert King.

Update: “GOP governors press Congress to pass stimulus bill.”

Most Republican governors have broken with their GOP colleagues in Congress and are pushing for passage of President Barack Obama’s economic aid plan that would send billions to states for education, public works and health care.

Right-wing ideology is one thing, but some people actually have to govern.

Tone Deaf

Posted on by

The disconnect is everywhere now. Republicans and right-wing bloggers think they’ve shown the Obama Administration what’s what. For example, Kathleen Parker seems to think President Obama has been bested by Rush Limbaugh —

Obama was cool even when, at that same GOP meeting, he urged Republicans to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. No anger, just angst. “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’ve been baited by none other than the Master Fisherman. Limbaugh tossed you a lure and you chomped. … the backfire Obama felt in West Virginia was a gentle zephyr compared to the blowback that can be bellowed by El Rushbo.

Sure he can bellow, but does anyone care? In the past several months we’ve seen over and over again that what Rush bellows does not move public opinion by so much as a hair. Steve Elman and Alan Tolz wrote in the Boston Globe (November 8, 2008),

Consider some of the major stumbles this year by the medium’s 800-pound gorilla. Rush Limbaugh vigorously promoted three separate political objectives over the past year, all of which failed: derailing John McCain’s quest for the Republican nomination, sabotaging Barack Obama’s drive for the Democratic nomination by fomenting Republican crossover votes for Hillary Clinton, and ultimately stopping Obama’s march to victory in the general election. …

…New ears – even middle-aged or senior ears – are vital to talk radio’s influence because they are attached to brains that are available for persuasion, rather than brains that have already made a choice. In other words, if Limbaugh and Michael Savage (not to mention Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, and other more recent adventurers in talk) fail to attract many new listeners, they end up talking only to those who agree with their opinions, and thus have a smaller chance to affect the ideas of the electorate in general.

The “no new ears” syndrome is haunting the entire Republican Party these days. They are busily congratulating each other for sticking it to the Obama Administration this week. As Nate Silver says, House Republicans in particular seem to be saying no just to say no. I mean, what’s with blocking a delay in the changeover to digital television?

(BTW, the federal program set up by the previous administration to provide coupons for purchasing digital-to-analog converter boxes ran out of money several months ago.)

Eugene Robinson writes in the Washington Post that Republicans not only have no new ears; the ears they have aren’t hearing much.

When not one single, solitary Republican vote can be found in the House of Representatives to support the president’s $819 billion stimulus package, it’s pretty clear that the GOP caucus has been meeting in a soundproof room.

See also Michael Tomasky, “They Actually Think This” and “Boy, it’s fun to kick these people while they’re down!”

There has been criticism of Obama from the Left from people who think he should not have even attempted to negotiate with Republicans on the stimulus package. But I think he was right to make a public show of meeting with them and offering concessions. I think many people would like to see an end to petty partisan bickering. So Obama reached out a hand and the Republicans bit it. Did you catch that, America? Do you see who’s at fault here?

Kathleen Parker (you really ought to read this column all the way through; it’s pathological) tries to make the case that Obama is showing the same “arrogance” that Dubya showed early in his administration. Parker actually writes,

If Obama had a mandate at all, it was to heal the divisions that have plagued politics for so long. No more partisan bickering, he promised, though there’s only about a smirk’s difference between Obama and Bush, stylistically. While one is bring-’em-on confrontational and the other a passive-aggressive Mr. Cool, both reveal a staggering sense of personal empowerment.

Ms. Parker, dear, what Obama is showing is voter empowerment, not personal empowerment. Your side lost. The American people want change, and your side is standing in the way. Exactly what entitles you to do that?

Regarding the family planning provision dropped from the stimulus bill — Katha Politt thinks Obama has betrayed women. However, Steve Benen writes that the Obama Administration is committed to the family planning funds and intends to put the provision in another bill.

There was an impression in some circles that Obama’s willingness to scuttle the family-planning funds was evidence of a lack of commitment on the issue. For the president, however, it seems this was about when to advance funding on the issue, not whether. Obama wasn’t giving up on access to Medicaid-covered family planning services, he was just delaying it a little to help advance the stimulus plan.

Now that the House Republicans have demonstrated they want to be marginalized, I say they can be politely ignored from now on.

Bleatings

Posted on by

Now some movement conservatives are angry with their former champion, Rick Santorum, because he said of Sarah Palin, “She doesn’t have a well-informed worldview.” The tribe is eating its own.

Writing about Palin’s most recent interview, David Frum said,

However nastily and treacherously Palin’s media handlers may have behaved after the election, their only error during the election was to offer too much access to Palin, not too little. Those handlers faced a daunting problem: Their party’s nominee for vice president could not respond to questions without embarrassing herself. The handlers who kept Pain under wraps knew what they were doing. Had Palin refused all interviews during the campaign, there would have been some criticism, but it would have been forgotten by now – and the Gibson and Couric interviews would not be filling YouTube, ready to be rebroadcast in 2012.

Frum was criticizing Palin’s media handlers, not the McCain campaign itself, but what does it say when the veep candidate has to be kept out of sight because she’s too much of a dolt to be let out in public? And, frankly, I don’t think the McCain campaign would have done any better if they’d kept Moosewoman in a closet.

Frum continues,

She tells us she was a victim of sexism. She tells us she was a victim of class prejudice. She complains about her media treatment – then insists she never watched any of it. She deplores the unpleasant personal comments directed against herself, while offering up some equally unpleasant personal comments of her own. She repeatedly shades the truth in order to escape blame for her own mistakes. (She won’t for example let go of our claim that there was some insult to Alaska embedded in Katie Couric’s simple question: “What do you read?”)

Frum says Palin needs to learn to let go of her grievances if she’s going to be a viable presidential candidate in the future. But Frum misunderstands his own people. Righties love her because she embodies grievance, because she gives voice to their Inner Victim. If she ever started to sound unselfish and mature, her fans would lose interest.

Republicans Hate the Middle Class

Posted on by

Kevin Drum explains what has to happen to restore the economy:

One way or another, there’s really no way for the economy to grow strongly and consistently unless middle-class consumers spend more, and they can’t spend more unless they make more. This was masked for a few years by the dotcom bubble, followed by the housing bubble, all propped on top of a continuing increase in consumer debt. None of those things are sustainable, though. The only sustainable source of consistent growth is rising median wages. The rich just don’t spend enough all by themselves.

The flip side of this, of course, is that rich people are going to have to accept the fact that they don’t get all the money anymore. Their incomes will still grow, but no faster than anyone else’s. …

But … but … but … that’s class warfare! (To be fair, so far I haven’t seen any right-wing reactions to this post.)

How do we make this happen, though? I’m not sure. Stronger unions are a part of it. Maybe a higher minimum wage. Stronger immigration controls. More progressive taxation. National healthcare. Education reforms. Maybe it’s just a gigantic cultural adjustment. Add your own favorite policy prescription here.

This isn’t just a matter of social justice. It’s a matter of facing reality. If we want a strong economy, we can only get it over the long term if we figure out a way for the benefits of economic growth to flow to everyone, not just the rich.

In other words, “spread the wealth around.” See also Paul Krugman and Tim F. at Balloon Juice.

To get the economy moving again, we need to find ways to get more cash into more hands, so that more people go out and buy stuff, which increases demand for goods and services, thereby creating more jobs and growing the economy. This is so obvious one would think even Jonah Goldberg could figure it out. Yet, even as I keyboard, no doubt conservative think tanks are cranking out somber-sounding white papers presenting tortured and historically revisionist arguments that paying workers more money is bad for workers (see, for example, George Will, no doubt working off notes he got from the Heritage Foundation).

At the Washington Post, Harold Meyerson sings the praises of the UAW and discusses their role in elevating the middle class —

… by the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations — annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance — that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez’s fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early ’60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther’s death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care — a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

That last part is concrete proof that Ayn Rand was an idiot.

Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that the Republican right hates the UAW so much that it would prefer to plunge the nation into a depression rather than craft a bridge loan that doesn’t single out the auto industry’s unionized workers for punishment. …

…In a narrow sense, what the Republicans are proposing would gut the benefits of roughly a million retirees. In a broad sense, they want to destroy the institution that did more than any other to raise American living standards, and they want to do it by using the power of government to lower American living standards — in the middle of the most severe recession since the 1930s.

As they say, hammer, nail, head.

Exactly how much of this the average worker understands I do not know. I think a lot of people who are opposed to the auto industry “bailout” don’t understand how their own jobs and incomes might be affected if Chrysler or GM disappear.

But see “The case of the vanishing GOP voter” in today’s Boston Globe. At the very least, the Right is no longer connecting with people the way it used to.

Republicans Hate Workers

Posted on by

It really is all about union busting for righties. Yesterday the UAW refused to agree to steep wage cuts for auto workers, so Senate Republicans killed the Big Three bailout package.

Congressional Republicans have been in open revolt against Bush over the auto bailout. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky joined other GOP lawmakers Thursday in announcing his opposition to the White House-backed bill, which passed the House on Wednesday. He and other Republicans insisted that the carmakers restructure their debt and bring wages and benefits in line with those paid by Toyota, Honda and Nissan in the United States.

Here’s the catch — wages, although not benefits, for Toyota workers in Kentucky are somewhat higher than wages paid to Michigan auto workers.

Hourly wages for UAW workers at GM factories are about equal to those paid by Toyota Motor Corp. at its older U.S. factories, according to the companies. GM says the average UAW laborer makes $29.78 per hour, while Toyota says it pays about $30 per hour.

The Big Three have bigger benefit costs, but not all because GM workers get “gold-plated” health care. It’s because the old U.S. automakers have huge numbers of retirees drawing pensions and benefits, while Toyota of Kentucky does not.

GM says its total hourly labor costs are now $69, including wages, pensions and health care for active workers, plus the pension and health care costs of more than 432,000 retirees and spouses. Toyota says its total costs are around $48. The Japanese automaker has far fewer retirees and its pension and health care benefits are not as rich as those paid to UAW workers.

The point is that wages are not the problem. Yet the Republican senators who stopped the bailout package wanted to cut wages.

One of the compromises being floated around yesterday was for American automaker workers to accept the same wages and benefits that non-union employees get in the South, effectively making unions irrelevant.

But let’s not kid ourselves that Toyota would willingly pay $30 an hour if GM were not paying about the same. Even if Kentucky workers are not unionized, they benefit from the fact that unions exist.

Righties hate unions so much that Little Lulu and others are talking about the UAW bailout, not the automakers’ bailout.

Remember when John McCain got all misty-eyed talking about wonderful American workers and how they were the backbone of our economy? The truth is that McCain and other Republicans in Washington love workers as much as they love dog poop on their shoes. Workers are cost. Workers want to get paid a living wage, and they want health care, and it cuts into profits. Your average Republican looks at a worker and sees money taken out of his quarterly stock dividend.

Although Japanese and other foreign cars are more marketable than what the Big Three have produced in recent years, the fact is that without massive government subsidies Toyota and other foreign manufacturers wouldn’t be building plants here. Further, if nothing is done about our health care “system,” eventually the foreign manufacturers like Toyota in Kentucky will be in the same boat the Big Three are in now.

See also Steve Benen.

The God Gap, Revisited

Posted on by

For the past few years we’ve been subjected to Amy Sullivan’s admonitions about the Democratic Party’s “God Gap” and how liberals need to learn to talk about religion as glibly as conservatives do.

Well, look who’s got a God problem now. Kathleen Parker writes in today’s Washington Post —

As Republicans sort out the reasons for their defeat, they likely will overlook or dismiss the gorilla in the pulpit.

Three little letters, great big problem: G-O-D.

I’m bathing in holy water as I type.

To be more specific, the evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy branch of the GOP is what ails the erstwhile conservative party and will continue to afflict and marginalize its constituents if reckoning doesn’t soon cometh.

Simply put: Armband religion is killing the Republican Party. And, the truth — as long as we’re setting ourselves free — is that if one were to eavesdrop on private conversations among the party intelligentsia, one would hear precisely that.

“Intelligentsia” being party elites, at the heart of which are “professional conservatives [who] are lifelong Washingtonians who live comfortably as organization heads, lobbyists and publicists,” per David Brooks. This group is neither more nor less Christian than any other random segment of America, and if put on the spot to talk publicly about religion I doubt they’d be any more successful than was Howard Dean.

Parker gets better —

Which is to say, the GOP has surrendered its high ground to its lowest brows.

Is she saying that evangelicals are “lowbrows”? And how do we spell “elitist”? K-A-T-H-L-E-E-N P-A-R-K-E-R?

In the process, the party has alienated its non-base constituents, including other people of faith (those who prefer a more private approach to worship), as well as secularists and conservative-leaning Democrats who otherwise might be tempted to cross the aisle.

Here’s the deal, ‘pubbies: Howard Dean was right.

That’s last one’s going to infuriate movement conservatives more than dissing God.

Ronald Reagan found a way to speak to white evangelical voters that touched their deeply ingrained and tangled narratives about religion, patriotism and race at a time when Bible Belt culture was being exported nationwide via Christian television programming. The Republican Party and a new generation of evangelical media stars like Pat Robertson forged a mutually beneficial alliance that was less about God than it was about money and secular power. And it worked for them for a while, at least in large parts of the country (although not the Northeast).

George Bush caught on to the same trick and was able to keep the alliance going. But the times do change, and most of the nation figured out what a clown Bush is. I also think the Terri Shiavo episode clarified the religion matter, so to speak, for a lot of people.

Social-Christian conservatives might argue that it’s their party, too, and maybe it was the neocons who really screwed the pooch. Or the small-government, deregulation uber alles conservatives who wore out their welcome. And I say there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Pass the popcorn. And tell Amy Sullivan to find a new issue.

The Hole Gets Deeper, the Faithful Keep Digging

Posted on by

I don’t know that the Right has entirely given up their “it’s still a center-right nation” argument, but lately another talking point is elbowing its way to the center of the rightie attention span. The new argument is that it was the Republican Party that voters rejected, not conservatism.

E.J. Dionne has a slightly different take on this. He notes that McCain picked a right-wing running mate and ran a classically “conservative” campaign against Obama. Yet he got clobbered on election day. Dionne continues,

Note that I have been using the word “conservative,” not “Republican.” This is because the Republican Party is now wholly owned by the conservative movement. The new Democratic majority is built in part on voters who once thought of themselves as moderate Republicans but have abandoned the party in large numbers.

In other words, voters rejected the Republican Party because of the extreme conservatism it has come to represent.

Dionne goes on to say that the GOP is splitting between the “ideological” conservatives and the “dispositional” conservatives.

The ideological conservatives hold to a faith linking small government and tax-cutting to extreme social conservatism. That mix is increasingly incoherent and out of step with an electorate that is more diverse and more suburban than ever. Ideological conservatives talk obsessively about returning to the glory days of Ronald Reagan and sometimes drop Sarah Palin’s name as a talisman.

Dispositional conservatives have leanings and affections but not an ideology. They have had enough with rigid litmus tests, free-market bromides irrelevant to the current economic downturn and anti-government rhetoric that bears no relationship to the large government that conservatives would inevitably preside over if they took power again.

Dionne says, and I agree, that the dispositionals will win out eventually, but not right away. In the short term, the ideologicals will still be in control and calling the shots. The GOP hasn’t yet stopped digging the hole it’s in.

Shifting gears just a bit — a few days ago, Dionne wrote another column in which he expressed hope that the Obama administration will help the nation find common ground on abortion.

“There surely is some common ground,” Obama declared toward the end of the third presidential debate.

He argued that “those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say, ‘We should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.’ ” Obama added: “Nobody’s pro-abortion.”

To which I said, yeah, right. Wake me up when it happens. There have been several attempts to create a “common ground” movement going back to the 1980s, and every time it is attempted it quickly falls apart. Essentially, someone on the pro-choice side makes the same speech Obama made in the third debate. And then the anti-choice side proclaims it doesn’t negotiate with baby-killers. End of attempt.

But today I read at Washingtonpost.com that some on the anti-reproductive rights side are waving a white flag and expressing a willingness to talk. Jacqueline L. Salmon writes,

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education — services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies.

The day after the election I explained why I believe abortion is done as a national issue. That doesn’t mean we won’t still be hearing about it on a national level, and in some regions of the country it still has some clout. But the last election revealed that opposition to abortion has no power whatsoever to swing a national election. If anything, I believe their rigid anti-reproduction rights position cost the GOP quite a bit.

The hard core of the anti-reproduction rights movement is unmoved, of course.

“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don’t think it’s really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”

Tons of data collected around the world over many years reveal that there is one sure way to reduce abortion — increase the use of contraception. From Alan Guttmacher:

Publicly funded family planning clinic services already enable U.S. women to prevent 1.4 million unintended pregnancies each year, an estimated 600,000 of which would end in abortion. Without these services, the annual number of unintended pregnancies and abortions would be nearly 50% higher. Among many other benefits, family planning clinic services also save $4.3 billion in public funds each year.

The irony is that Planned Parenthood may very well prevent more abortions than all of the anti-choice organizations combined.

Anyway, whether pregnancy assistance programs will make any measurable difference in abortion rates remains to be seen, but as long as they aren’t coercive, hey — give it a try.

Update: See Steve Benen.

Endangered Species

Posted on by

It occurs to me that the Big Three automakers and the Republican Party have a lot in common. Essentially, both institutions have been run by a cadre of the shortsighted and insulated who believed they had all the answers and didn’t have to change with the times.

Jonathan Martin writes at The Politico that the GOP is split between the Old Guard, who thinks the past two elections were just a speed bump, no course correction needed; and the new guys, who are scared stiff and want an overhaul.

Haley Barbour, definitely an Old Guard type, had some interesting things to say.

Barbour, speaking on a panel session at the Republican Governor’s Association meeting in Miami devoted to sifting through this year’s electoral destruction, recalled serving as executive director of his state party in the aftermath of President Nixon’s resignation, when Democrats elected 49 “Watergate Babies” to the House in 1974.

It got so bad, Barbour recalled, that there was a task force set up to consider whether Republicans should change their name.

It’s true that the GOP took a beating in the 1974 midterms, post-Watergate. In 1976 the Dems took back the White House, but in an election much closer than the one we just had. In 1976 the Dems gained only one seat in the House, and although some Senate seats changed from one party to the other, the balance in the Senate remained the same as before.

So, for the Republicans, 2006 and 2008 put together were worse than 1974 and 1976 put together.

And the Republican brand wasn’t nearly as damaged after Watergate as it is now, IMO. Because during the Watergate crisis we all saw Republicans who kept their heads, acknowledged that Nixon was off the wall, and put aside partisanship for the good of the country.

Sure, the Republican Party protected Nixon for a while, until it became obvious he really had abused the power of his office and that the facts were going to come out sooner or later. But then most Republicans did something you hardly ever see Republicans doing today — the honorable thing. Millions of Americans watched at least part of the Watergate hearings on television, and those Americans saw Republicans in the Senate and House asking tough questions of the administration. There was not the solid wall of spin, lies, smears and double-talk the GOP puts up around its own today.

If anything, the 1974 and 1976 elections were an artificial boost for the Dems. The Dem Party was still hemorrhaging white voters because of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Watergate created a unique circumstance that only temporarily slowed the ascendancy of Republicans.

Today’s Old Guard Republicans think that their recent losses came about because of unique circumstances. If we stay the course, basically keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’ll come out of this OK, they say. Jonathan Martin continues,

As for this year, Barbour argued there was a way to defeat Obama—by rendering him unacceptable to American voters.

“And the McCain campaign did not choose to try to make that argument,” he observed.

Somebody explain to me what other argument the McCain campaign did choose to make. I must have missed it.

RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, who has worked at the highest levels of Kentucky and national Republican politics for decades, expressed optimism about the GOP’s prospects for the 2010 mid-term elections, suggesting the GOP losses this year were a result of a toxic stew very much unique to the cycle.

“The mood of the country is what was bad in this campaign,” Duncan said in an interview at the governor’s meeting. “It was 90-10 wrong track, you had the war, we had the economy going south on us, we had the third-term curse, all those things.”

What it was not, he insisted—offering post-election polling that showed voters still supported right-leaning positions, just not McCain, to make his case—was a rejection of the party’s conservative philosophy.

“If you look at the American electorate, and where they stand and what they believe—we’re in good shape.”

I keep reading just the opposite is true; that nearly every demographic and opinion trend is moving away from the GOP. See also Billmon, “Tomorrow Belongs to We.”

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is in the Young Upstart GOP faction.

“We cannot be a majority governing party when we essentially cannot compete in the northeast; we are losing our ability to compete in the Great Lakes states, we cannot compete on the west coast,” Pawlenty argued, also citing similar problems in the mid-Atlantic and interior west. “Similarly, we cannot compete and prevail as a majority governing party when we have a significant deficit as we do with woman, where we have a large deficit with Hispanics, where we have a large deficit with African-American voters, where we have a large deficit with people of modest incomes.” …

… Later, talking to reporters, Pawlenty put it more plainly: “The Republican Party is going to need more than just a comb-over.”

Comb-over. Heh. But according to Martin, even the Young Upstarts aren’t calling for an ideological shift. They just think the party ought to actually address real problems. Expect the 2012 election to be held in a tar pit.

The Grand Old Party