Category Archives: Republican Party

Don’t Be Afraid

Posted on by

Mike Madden writes at Salon:

First, an enormous orange fireball booms onto the screen. The camera shakes and a crowd runs for cover. Next, sirens wail, as an abandoned car explodes. Paramedics tote bodies away from another blast. Militants raise their AK-47s and parade across the desert, their faces masked.

What’s the next image that fills the screen, in a Web commercial by John McCain that really puts the “attack” in “attack ad”? Mitt Romney’s face, above a quote from a Hannity & Colmes appearance where Romney said “a president is not a foreign policy expert.”

The closer the New Hampshire primary gets, it seems, the more terrified the Republican presidential candidates want you to be. That way, you’ll vote for the guy who scared you the worst, and not that guy who’s going to preside over your death at the hands of jihadists. McCain, who wants to shift the conversation away from immigration and onto foreign policy and security issues, has Web ads like “Experience.” Rudy Giuliani — who never misses a chance to remind voters about 9/11 — is airing a TV commercial in New Hampshire called “Ready” that is even more alarming than McCain’s “Experience.” Released just days after Bhutto’s murder, it features footage of the late Pakistani leader, accompanied by a soundtrack of Middle Eastern music. “Hate without boundaries,” intones a narrator. “A people perverted … A nuclear power in chaos.” Mike Huckabee — no foreign policy maven — answered a press conference question about immigration by invoking the specter of Pakistanis with “shoulder-fired missiles” sneaking across the U.S.-Mexico border. Fred Thompson got into the act at Saturday night’s ABC News/Facebook/WMUR debate, proving that even campaigns that don’t have the money to scare people with ads can still try other methods. “We could be attacked with a biological weapon and not even know it for a long period of time,” Thompson told viewers matter-of-factly. (Now enjoy your late local news.) …

… Ask Republicans about the issue, of course, and they’ll say the only danger in advertisements that focus on terrorist attacks is that they won’t go far enough. “Whether we live or die is obviously the most important issue,” said Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., an advisor to Giuliani’s campaign and the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.

You readers are from all over the country. Are people where you live really cowering in fear of jihadists? Or are they more worried about their jobs and health insurance?

Apparently they tried illegal immigrant fear mongering — brown people with funny accents will steal your jobs and seduce your women — tactics in Iowa, to little effect. So they’re falling back on brown people with funny accents will blow up your shopping malls.

Paul Krugman writes about fear today, too.

The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and it’s highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment. ..

…It’s not certain, even now, that we’ll have a formal recession, although given the news on Friday you have to say that the odds are that we will. But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.

This should be good for Democrats. But then …

But the opponents of change, those who want to keep the Bush legacy intact, are not without resources. In fact, they’ve already made their standard pivot when things turn bad — the pivot from hype to fear. And in case you haven’t noticed, they’re very, very good at the fear thing.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that for the past seven years, conservative bobbleheads have wondered why the American people aren’t more appreciative of the great economy Bush has given them. (Professor Krugman provides some graphs on his blog that tell us why.) Very recently the Bushies have begun to notice the economy may be less than great. And the rhetoric, as Krugman says, has swung from hype to fear.

President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.”

And even more dire warnings are coming from some of the Republican presidential candidates. For example, John McCain’s campaign Web site cautions darkly that “Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent, keeping income tax rates at their current level and fighting the Democrats’ plans for a crippling tax increase in 2011.”

What “crippling” tax increase, which would tax entrepreneurs into submission, is Mr. McCain talking about? The answer is, proposals by Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year expire, returning upper-income tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the Clinton years.

I wonder if anyone but the entrenched ideological Right is buying this bilge, but we can’t be too careful.

Finally … if Barack Obama wins the Dem nomination we’re going to be spending a lot of time discussing racism in America. But for now I just want to say that if Senator Obama is the nominee, there’s one thing we can count on: The GOP will stop at nothing to prevent African Americans from getting to the polls.

The chief way this is done is to stir up fear of voter fraud, enabling the GOP to apply “remedies” that keep legitimate voters from voting. And in the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin writes that the Supreme Court is about to hear a voter ID law challenge from Indiana, and the decision could have an impact on which citizens will be allowed to vote in the November elections.

“Let’s not beat around the bush,” Terence T. Evans, the dissenting Court of Appeals judge in the Indiana case, slyly wrote. “The Indiana voter photo ID law is a not-too-thinly-veiled attempt to discourage election-day turnout by certain folks believed to skew Democratic.” He’s not the only one to notice: the three federal judges who approved the Indiana law were appointed by a Republican President; the lone dissenter was appointed by a Democrat. It was also Republican-dominated legislatures that produced the Indiana and Georgia laws, both of which were signed by Republican governors.

Who are the “certain folks,” in Judge Evans’s delicate phrase, that the Indiana law is trying to discourage? The best answer can be found in a friend-of-the-court brief in the case filed by twenty-nine leading historians and scholars of voting rights. They concluded that the Indiana law belongs to a malign tradition in “this nation’s history of disfranchising people of color and poor whites under the banner of ‘reform.’ ” Such measures as the poll tax and literacy tests, they write, were “billed as anti-fraud or anti-corruption devices; yet through detailed provisions within them, they produced a discriminatory effect (often intended) within the particular historical context.” So it will be in Indiana, where the law creates a series of onerous barriers to voting. Consider one: you can get a government photo I.D. by showing your birth certificate, but you can’t get a copy of your birth certificate unless you can produce certain official photo I.D.s. And, with up to twenty million Americans of voting age lacking government-issued identification, the matter of requiring photo I.D.s has broad implications.

Let’s face it; today’s Republicans hate democracy.

Updates

Posted on by

Some polls are starting to show a big post-Iowa bounce for Obama. On the GOP side, Huckabee trails McCain and Romney.

Mike Allen and Ben Smith of The Politico write that Clinton advisers are fearing a New Hampshire loss.

Great bit from Niall Stanage at The Guardian:

Much of the punditry immediately following last night’s debate focused on her [Clinton’s] angry response to a comment by Edwards that cast her as the candidate of the status quo.

But one important sentence near the end of her reply was largely overlooked: “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”

She sounded the same note again towards the debate’s end. When Obama began speaking about people’s feeling of being frozen out of politics, and about the need to bring those people back into a “working majority” for change, Clinton interjected.

“Can we just have a sort of a reality break for a minute?” she asked contemptuously.

This kind of calculated attempt to encourage cynicism now seems to be the best the former First Lady has to offer.

Tom Schaller says the Clinton Era ended last night at 9:34 p.m. EST. This is followed by an interesting discussion among commenters on the nature of anger in political campaigns.

Unrelated but weird:

Great Moments in the Bush Presidency, or other stuff you only learn by reading UK news sites:

Early in his first term, President Bush introduced a visiting President Putin to his Scottish terrier, Barney, and the Russian made no secret of his disdain for the small dog. When Bush later visited Russia, Putin showed off his much larger dog, Koni, a black Labrador, and suggested it could dispatch Barney with little effort. “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner,” Putin is said to have boasted, “than Barney”.

Don’t call him “Pootie-Poot.”

Questions

Posted on by

There is so much good commentary floating around, and so many thoughts in my head, I hardly know where to start. So I’ll just jump in with a list of still-unanswered questions.

Is Barack Obama for real? He makes a good speech, but his record as a junior senator from Illinois is not all that inspiring. Even so, Charles Peters writes in today’s Washington Post that he accomplished remarkable things in the Illinois legislature.

Is George Bush relevant? Dan Froomkin writes,

In his 30-minute Reuters interview, Bush also explained his strategy to remain relevant in the coming year, as attention shifts to the question of who will succeed him. The strategy involves making sure Republicans in Congress don’t break ranks. (See my Dec. 13 column, Congress Goes Belly Up.)

Said Bush: “[M]y challenge is to remind the American people that while they’re paying attention to these primaries there is a President actively engaged solving problems. …”

Yeah, he figured out how to change the light bulb in his desk lamp.

Has Ann Coulter flown home to Planet Ogle-TR-56b? Her web page today as of 2 pm features a rerun of her infamous Kwanzaa column. Nothing about current political news.

Who’s in denial? Michael Gerson says Democrats are in denial because they want to undo all of George Bush’s popular and successful policies. Um, who’s in denial, Mr. Gerson?

Will the real next Ronald Reagan please stand up (and then sit down)? All of the GOP candidates claim to be the next Ronald Reagan. One says he will cut taxes just like Ronald Reagan did (before he raised them). Another says he will stand up to foreign enemies, real and imaginary, just like Ronald Reagan did. But John F. Harris and Jonathan Martin write at The Politico:

Huckabee’s message will be the most unorthodox, at least as the Bush-era GOP goes.

He’ll use class-based rhetoric to reach out to disaffected members of his party and those “Reagan Democrats” who are socially conservative but economically more populist. But his lynchpin is social issues — Huckabee’s success will validate the role of Christian conservatives in the GOP tent.

Certainly a lot of Reagan’s initial appeal was that he played the role of Wyatt Earp, riding into town and cleaning up the Iranian Hostage Crisis. The part Reagan actually played in that sorry episode is another matter entirely. But the Reagan mythos and the Reagan reality never did live in the same neighborhood. The myth is that his tax cuts brought about the best economy the nation ever saw and that he single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union. The truth is that he raised taxes as much as he cut them, his economy was based mostly on a housing bubble, and the Soviet Union brought itself down, more or less, after Reagan had left office.

Reading what Harris and Martin wrote, it struck me that Reagan’s appeal really never was about what he accomplished in office — his record overall was not bad, but not outstanding either — but about his persona. He was very good at playing the role of POTUS. His genius was in reading the public mood and giving the people the performance they wanted at the moment. And white working-class Americans embraced him as their friend and champion, even though (based on his record) he really wasn’t. He communicated to them that he understood — and thereby validated — their fears and their anger and their biases. He reached out to the disaffected.

That’s not a role Mitt Romney can ever play, no matter how many taxes he promises to cut.

Huckabee has stumbled badly in the foreign policy area, true, but other than bringing their sons and daughters home from Iraq I don’t know if most working-class Americans give a bleep about foreign policy at the moment. And, yes, the Republican establishment hates him because of the populism angle. Even suggesting that government might be put to use to make life more fair and secure for average Americans is the blackest of heresies among the GOP elite.

But Molly Ivors writes at Whiskey Fire that evangelicalism has become the refuge of the disaffected.

Religion, specifically the evangelical religion which replaces all sorts of community and cultural structures, has a pretty clear appeal for a lot of people who see in it an answer. Our own brilliant chicago dyke, who posts at corrente, once explained how this works:

    … Republicans have spent the last 25 years doing away with all the things that once made America a great place for the working class: decent public education, secure manufacturing and farm jobs, responsible government that meets the basic needs of the people, a critical media that calls out politicians who don’t, and balanced public political and social discourse that addresses the concerns of the little guy. These things are effectively dead in rural America today, and if you’re in Kansas or upstate Wisconsin or delta Mississippi, times are tough, and have been for a long time. I grew up in the country, and I cringe every time I go back, to see just how poorly a lot of folks are doing these days. The problem is that for many, they don’t even really know that once, life in rural working class America was much, much better.

The evangelical movement, in providing an identity and community for the hard-pressed, has essentially replaced American civic life for a lot of people. And Huckabee is the result.

Evangelicalism and civic life have been wound up together for generations in most Bible Belt communities, but I agree something seems different now. And I also think that what Bill Kristol and Rush Limbaugh and Rich Lowry never understood is that working-class Americans never really took their corporatist/imperialist brand of conservatism to heart. All along, they were just looking for a leader who could understand and validate their fears and anger and biases.

Thus, I think it can be argued that Huckabee is filling that part of the Ronald Reagan role better than anyone else at the moment, and that’s why he won in Iowa.

The question is, how much of the electorate is still looking for the next Ronald Reagan?

Strangleholds

Posted on by

Michael Tomasky at the Guardian and Paul Krugman at the New York Times both point to the same phenomenon within the GOP — that the Republican presidential candidates are nearly all promising to continue George Bush’s policies, even though the public hates those policies.

Krugman writes,

All in all, it’s an economic and political environment in which you’d expect Republican politicians, as a sheer matter of calculation, to look for ways to distance themselves from the current administration’s economic policies and record — say, by expressing some concern about rising income gaps and the fraying social safety net.

In fact, however, except for Mike Huckabee — a peculiar case who’ll deserve more discussion if he stays in contention — the leading Republican contenders have gone out of their way to assure voters that they will not deviate an inch from the Bush path. Why? Because the G.O.P. is still controlled by a conservative movement that does not tolerate deviations from tax-cutting, free-market, greed-is-good orthodoxy.

And Tomasky writes,

It’s pretty astonishing, really – we’re at the tail end of a failed presidency, and the people running to succeed it are promising to continue its failed policies.

Now, many observers would say, well, they’re just pandering to their party’s rightwing base, and once one of them secures the nomination, he will tack to the centre. Undoubtedly, he will, for tactical reasons. But the real question is how the next Republican will govern should he happen to win. And the answer to that question is that there’s every reason to assume that he will be just as a conservative as Bush for one simple reason: the interest groups that run the GOP will not brook much deviation from the standard line.

Those interest groups are three. The neocons run foreign policy – the Iraq disaster has not affected their influence in the GOP one whit. The theocons run social policy. And the radical anti-taxers run domestic policy. Until forces inside the GOP rise up to challenge these interests, any Republican administration will be roughly as conservative as Bush. The candidates have slightly different theories of stasis, they will tinker around this edge or that, but that’s about all you can say.

Both Tomasky and Krugman point to John McCain as someone who has utterly sold out. Krugman writes,

Mr. McCain’s lingering reputation as a maverick straight talker comes largely from his opposition to the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which he said at the time were too big and too skewed to the rich. Those objections would seem to have even more force now, with America facing the costs of an expensive war — which Mr. McCain fervently supports — and with income inequality reaching new heights.

But Mr. McCain now says that he supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Not only that: he’s become a convert to crude supply-side economics, claiming that cutting taxes actually increases revenues. That’s an assertion even Bush administration officials concede is false.

Oh, and what about his earlier opposition to tax cuts? Mr. McCain now says he opposed the Bush tax cuts only because they weren’t offset by spending cuts.

Aside from the logical problem here — if tax cuts increase revenue, why do they need to be offset? — even a cursory look at what Mr. McCain said at the time shows that he’s trying to rewrite history: he actually attacked the Bush tax cuts from the left, not the right. But he has clearly decided that it’s better to fib about his record than admit that he wasn’t always a rock-solid economic conservative.

(See also “McCain’s Unlikely Ties to K Street.” The boy has utterly sold out every principle he ever had. He stood up to torture but not to the GOP Powers That Be.)

Tomasky:

And yet, by and large, the Republican candidates are running on exactly the same policies that Bush has pursued. Consider this list. All the major Republican candidates want to “stay the course” in Iraq, denouncing any discussion of withdrawal as evidence of pusillanimity. All see the fight against terrorism in more or less Bushian terms. All want to make the Bush tax cuts, now scheduled to sunset in 2010, permanent – even John McCain, who at the time voted against them. All have promised the leaders of the Christian right that they will appoint supreme court judges “in the mould of” Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

What this euphemistic language means is that whatever a candidate’s previous positions on abortion and gay rights – Rudy Giuliani, for instance, has supported both – the leaders of the religious conservative movement have exacted commitments from all the Grand Old Party candidates to appoint the kind of judges they want, and that matters far more than past positions.

There’s more. Healthcare is a priority in this election. But to hear these Republicans, you’d never know it. Their healthcare plans range from cynical to inadequate. Climate change? They barely acknowledge the problem and are particularly loath to acknowledge that human activity has contributed to it. They continue to insist, as Republicans since Ronald Reagan have, that the only real domestic enemy the American people face is the federal government, which they continue to want to starve.

Of course, the GOP candidates are not coming out and saying they are going to continue George Bush’s policies. From what I’ve seen (from a distance, here in New York), they are pretending George Bush doesn’t exist. But they’re singing the same old song Republicans have been singing since Reagan — cut taxes, shrink government, love God, hate minorities, and kick foreign ass.

These viewpoints long have been sponsored by the Moneyed Elite, who have used their vast media infrastructure to persuade un-elite Americans that these are the opinions they should have, too. And they’ve gotten away with this for a long time. But E.J. Dionne says there’s a different wind blowing in Iowa:

Us-vs.-them economic rhetoric is often said to be out of date, impractical, even dangerous. But in the closing days of a very tight race, Edwards has his opponents, particularly Barack Obama, scrambling to make sure a trial lawyer from North Carolina does not corner the market on populism.

Obama is vying with Edwards for the non-Clinton vote, and the Illinois senator was on the air yesterday with an Edwards-like television ad assailing the flow of American jobs abroad. Obama spoke last week of “Maytag workers who labored all their lives only to see their jobs shipped overseas; who now compete with their teenagers for $7-an-hour jobs at Wal-Mart.” He had heard from seniors “who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can’t afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price.”

Even Hillary Clinton, whose discourse is typically longer on policy details than egalitarian wrath, told an appreciative crowd in Story City last week that the “interests of working middle-class families” had been “subordinated to the interests of the wealthy and well-connected” and that the Bush administration acted on the mortgage crisis “only after Wall Street began to feel the credit crunch.” She promised to “end the student loan industry’s scams, which have ripped off families” and condemned “no-bid contracts,” “cronyism” and “corruption.”

Since the Reagan era, the heroes of the nation’s economic story have been valiant entrepreneurs who “took risks” and “created wealth.” This narrative advanced the Republican cause and seeped deeply into the Democratic Party. If Iowa is any indication, there is a new narrative in which the old heroes are cast as the goats of the story and the new heroes are people like “the guy in Orange City.” There is a thunder out of Iowa, and it is shaking both parties.

Of course, the majority of the punditocracy, especially the ones who are incessantly on television, will not notice this trend. They will continue to insist the American people want tax cuts more than they want health care, and if economic populism does determine the outcome of the 2008 elections, the bobbleheads will be caught totally off guard. And then they’ll come up with a reason why the elections weren’t really determined by economic populism. Just watch.

What is harder to predict is what will happen to the GOP if it loses the White House and more seats in Congress by a decisive margin in November. In a normal world, such a defeat would cause a massive re-alignment of power within the Republican Party, allowing “moderate” (i.e., possibly not crazy) Republicans to come to the forefront and take over party leadership. But the Moneyed Elite will still own the party, so it’s possible that can’t happen no matter what.

On Hair and Privilege

Posted on by

There’s no better illustration of the intellectual bankruptcy of the Right than a comparison of Mitt Romney and John Edwards.

And yes, I’m talking about the hair. Righties cannot speak of Edwards without calling him the “Breck girl.” Surely Mitt goes through as much shampoo as John. The point, of course, is to feminize Edwards, but I say if either of these two leans more toward yin than yang, Mitt’s the guy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And speaking of guys with hair …

We could analyze all of the presidents and their coiffures, but I suspect there is little correlation between hair quality and job performance. Or masculinity, for that matter. John Kennedy’s alleged lasting contribution to men’s fashion was the death of the hat (Snopes questions this). Whatever the cause, fedoras for daytime wear did disappear suddenly about the time JFK was elected — the better to see a guy’s hair, my dears. But no one has ever questioned JFK’s manliness, as far as I know.

No matter. Someone introduced the “Breck girl” comment into American political discourse, and righties (plus Mo Dowd) picked it up and can’t let go of it.

And then there’s the wealth issue. David Leonhardt writes in today’s New York Times that Edwards and Romney both made fortunes in the 1980s. Yet Edwards is running on economic populism an Romney is a “free markets” guy.

The two men represent a clear divide between the Democratic and Republican parties over whether the government should redistribute more wealth, from the rich downward, now that economic inequality is greater than it has been since the 1920s.

I’d like to point out that ordinary working people created most of that wealth. Inequality doesn’t grow because the wealthy are somehow more deserving and working stiffs less so; it grows because the wealthy are able to control the wealth distribution system to their advantage. The role of government is not to take money away from the rich to give to the poor, but to keep the wealthy from gaming the system.

And this is good for us all in the long run, primarily because a nation with a large and upwardly mobile middle class is likely to be a politically stable nation; a nation in which most of the population is shut out of enjoying the wealth they create with their labor is asking for revolution.

Mr. Romney and Mr. Edwards also represent a divide among the affluent themselves. Many of the new wealthy — the great majority, in all likelihood — see their success as a sign of this country’s economic strength. Yet there is also a minority — including Mr. Buffett and William H. Gates Sr., Mr. Gates’s father, who have both opposed eliminating the estate tax — worried about inequality. …

… Every leading Democratic candidate has proposed rescinding the Bush administration’s tax cuts on households making at least $250,000, saying the money can be better used on programs to help the middle class. Every leading Republican candidate favors making the tax cuts permanent, saying that tax increases would hurt economic growth and, by extension, the middle class.

It may be significant that Edwards is the son of a mill worker and Romney is the son of an automobile executive. Romney explicitly denies there are two Americas, but it’s possible he’s never lived in America. Instead, he has lived his whole life in the Privilege Bubble.

Yet, on the Right, Edwards is called out for being a prissy poseur. Byron York wrote in September:

By the way, Edwards’s line, “I was brought home to a two-room house in a mill village” was carefully crafted, a reflection of his years of experience as a personal injury lawyer. Yes, after he was born he was brought home to a small house. But within a year his family moved to a better house as his father, a mill worker, began a rise that eventually made him a supervisor.

Did I mention Mitt’s dad was an auto executive? But the implication is that because Edwards has money now, he can’t possibly be sincere about wanting to help working people get a fair deal. Or else people who wish to help the poor are supposed to be poor. Or something. But in American history there have been other well-off people who fought plutocracy and tried to even the playing field.

Theodore, in fact, made a point of stepping out of the privilege bubble to hang out with cowboys and woodsmen. Franklin’s point of view likely was shaped by polio. Along with the various Roosevelts, the Kennedys — wealthier, I believe, than the Roosevelts — also came to be a fairly liberal/populist group.

The Right cannot honestly debate Edwards’s proposals, or much of anything else, so they fall back on criticizing Edwards’s looks and lifestyle without bothering to examine their own guys in the same light. Did I say something about intellectual bankruptcy? I believe I did.

Update: An editorial from the Concord Monitor — “Romney should not be the next president.”

Going …. Going ….

Posted on by

The good news today is from the Wall Street Journal: Rudy Giuliani has lost his lead for the GOP nomination in national polls.

After holding a double-digit advantage over his nearest rivals just six weeks ago, the former New York City mayor now is tied nationally with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at 20% among Republicans, just slightly ahead of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 17% and Arizona Sen. John McCain at 14%. Other polls show Mr. Giuliani’s lead shrinking in Florida, one of the states he has built his strategy around.

Certainly the entire GOP field is a sorry mess, but Rudy truly frightens me.

Josh Marshall writes,

When Rudy Giuliani’s soft lead in the national polls evaporates, suddenly he’ll be just another GOP hopeful lining up to get his head sliced off in the first big primary and caucus contests. … the big picture is clear: Rudy’s lost his nationwide lead wide.

And the downward momentum will probably push him still further too.. With dismal numbers in the early races and lukewarm numbers nationwide, what’s his political strategy again? Is there any rationale for still calling him the frontrunner?

Yesterday Giuliani was admitted to Barnes Hospital in St. Louis for “flu-like symptoms.” I’m not predicting this, exactly, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Giuliani suddenly develops more health problems that will force him to withdraw from the race, particularly if his poll numbers continue to slide. See Down With Tyranny on this point, also. When Giuliani dropped out of the 2000 Senate race because of prostate cancer (and other things), Hillary Clinton had gained a 10-point lead over him in the polls.

Adam Nagourney’s account in the New York Times recalls a campaign in trouble:

Mr. Giuliani’s campaign began to falter in March. New York police officers shot and killed an unarmed black man, Patrick Dorismond, after he ran from undercover agents who asked if he had any drugs to sell. Mr. Giuliani authorized the release of Mr. Dorismond’s sealed criminal records from when he was a juvenile and went on Fox News Sunday, where he proclaimed that Mr. Dorismond was “no altar boy.” The remarks ripped across an already polarized city.

Mr. Clinton had already been scheduled to appear the next night at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harlem. The church was packed with cameras and reporters as Mrs. Clinton, clasping hands with prominent black leaders, walked in singing “We Shall Overcome,” before delivering a speech accusing Mr. Giuliani of dividing the city.

Mr. Giuliani headed upstate, for a Republican dinner in Binghamton. He spoke for exactly 22 minutes, stood for an eight-minute news conference, and then turned for home. Less than a week later, he abruptly canceled four upstate events because, he said, he wanted to attend the rescheduled opening game of the Yankees.

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign pounced. Overnight, aides arranged a trip for her to the cities Mr. Giuliani had snubbed and worked the telephone with upstate reporters to stoke the story.

The End

By the time Mr. Giuliani stepped in front of the cameras to announce he was dropping out, Republicans had already concluded that the mayor would not stay in the race: indeed, many were praying he would not. His cancer seemed almost beside the point.

If Rudy is trailing as the big primary days approach, I wouldn’t be surprised if he finds some excuse to drop out. I’m not saying he will; just that it wouldn’t surprise me.

Faith and Consequences

Posted on by

Gail Collins has a wonderfully snarky op ed in today’s New York Times that describes the GOP voter’s predicament:

Mike [Huckabee] is soaring ahead in the early polls, in a surge to the front of the pack that suggests Republicans cannot come to grips with the idea that they are supposed to nominate either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani for president. There has to be a way out! What about Huckabee? He has a good heart! True, his brain doesn’t seem to have a single thought about foreign policy or know much about domestic policy, for that matter. But one well-functioning body part is better than nothing. …

… The Republican pack is one extremely unappealing bunch of politicians, and it’s no wonder that the poor voters have developed buyers’ remorse before they’ve come near the cash register. Huckabee is this week’s exercise in avoidance, and he’s not likely to be the last.

If Iowa opts for Mike (More Sincere Than Mitt, Less Weird Than Rudy), chances are that New Hampshire voters will decide that going that way lies disaster. They’ll probably go for Mitt (Fewer Wives Than Giuliani and More Money Than Anybody Else). Once the small states have spoken, Florida voters may be so appalled by the idea of having to listen to Mitt talk about his beautiful marriage for four years that they’ll opt for Rudy (More Consistent Than Mitt and Remember 9/11). While some candidates are focusing on small states and face-to-face campaigning, Giuliani seems to do best in large states where very few people have actually met him.

Then, somewhere around South Dakota, Fred (Extremely Tall) Thompson’s strategy will finally unfold and the voters will give him the nomination because they’ve forgotten he was ever in the race.

Collins’s op ed, and this Huffington Post piece by Sam Stein, provide fairly unflattering portraits of Huckabee. We learn from Collins that Huckabee once attempted to stop an abortion for a 15-year-old retarded girl who had been raped by her stepfather. We also learn that the Rev. Huckabee likes to get presents. (When then-Governor and Mrs. Huckabee publicly renewed the vows of their 30-year marriage, they registered their wish list at Target and solicited gifts. Wedding gifts are exempt from ethics restrictions in Arkansas.) And Stein assures us that Huckabee is serious when he says he wants to take the nation back for Christ.

I didn’t watch the last GOP debate, but apparently Huckabee’s performance got a big boost from Alan Keyes. Although John Dickerson claims that

Huckabee didn’t need Keyes to help him. He did just fine on his own. His front-runner status fit him Wednesday afternoon (unlike his suits) as he gave thoughtful answers on issues from education to unemployment.

But Collins wrote,

In a great bit of luck for the Huckabee team, the event included Alan Keyes, a candidate so wacky he’s generally excluded even from the none-too-selective list of Republican debaters. It was the perfect way to combat the impression that Huckabee’s religious beliefs, which seem to rule out evolution, are extreme. Next to Keyes, he looks like a logical positivist.

As near as I can tell, Romney’s “religion” speech of last week had no impact on his chances for the nomination. People queasy about his Mormonism are still queasy about his Mormonism. The Weekly Standard endorsed Romney last week, calling him a “full-spectrum conservative.” They seem to think that Romney, more than the other candidates, could keep the fracturing conservative coalition together. But this tells us that, for all their pandering to the Christian Right, the urban elitists of the National Review never really understood the Bible Belt culture and values they claimed to champion.

John Meacham writes at Newsweek:

So it has come to this: the 2008 Republican Iowa caucuses have descended into a kind of holy war. The clash centers on issues that are, in Saint Augustine’s phrase, ever ancient, ever new: the nature of God, the disposition of power and the sanctity of conscience. The skirmish pits Huckabee against Romney in a story of hardball politics and high-minded history, of shadowy slurs and noble principles.

Fights about faith and politics have been with us always. In 1800, there were advertisements saying voters could have “Adams and God, or Jefferson and no God.” Andrew Jackson resisted the formation of a “Christian Party in Politics.” Abraham Lincoln buried a proposed constitutional amendment designed to declare the nation’s dependence on, and allegiance to, Jesus. A century ago, in the 1908 campaign, William Howard Taft, a Unitarian, was attacked as an apostate by supporters of William Jennings Bryan, an evangelical Christian. “Think of the United States with a President who does not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but looks upon our immaculate Savior as a … low, cunning imposter!” The Pentecostal Herald said in July 1908.

Three weeks away from the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, it seems clear that we have not moved very far beyond where we were in the Taft-Bryan race.

Even Charles Krauthammer is bothered.

This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN/YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.

But this is a monster of the Right’s own creation. They’ve spent years cultivating the Christian Right as a political force, and now it’s a political force. What did they expect?

Update: Is it just me, or does Charles Krauthammer look like a turtle?

Christian Nation

Posted on by

I’m watching “Hardball” on MSNBC, and Rachel Maddow just said Republican candidates had called the United States a “Christian Nation.” Chris Matthews called her on this, expressing skepticism that any candidate had used that exact phrase. Put on the spot, Rachel could not name a time, date, place in which a particular candidate had called the U.S. a “Christian nation.”

But I’m sitting here with all the Web at my fingertips, so I could look it up. Here’s one –

John McCain: “I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation.”

That’s a direct quote.

Even better — Linda Caillouet writes for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette:

Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night.

“The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity,” he said. “And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior.” …

… Huckabee told the pastors gathered in the Salt Palace Convention Center that while the March 1, 1997, tornadoes which struck Arkansas were tragic, at least the devastation could be clearly seen from a helicopter. In contrast, he said, the catalysts for the nation’s recent school shootings — including the one March 24 near Jonesboro that left four students and a teacher dead and 10 others wounded — were harder to see but were driven by “the winds of spiritual change in a nation that has forgotten its God.”

I doubt there is any other nation on earth whose citizens get reminded of God with more regularity than this one.

“Government knows it does not have the answer, but it’s arrogant and acts as though it does,” Huckabee said. “Church does have the answer but will cowardly deny that it does and wonder when the world will be changed.”

The shootings were just one more wake-up call to the nation, he said.

“I fear we will turn and hit the snooze button one more time and lose this great republic of ours.”

Um, for whatever reason, the U.S. has enjoyed random mass violence since its inception. I can’t say that, on the whole, we are more given to random mass violence than we’ve ever been. But the Rev. Mr. Huckabee has a new book out called Kids Who Kill: Confronting our Culture of Violence. According to one review at Amazon.com,

Tumescent with quotes and references to support every idea propounded, the authors rely almost exclusively on conservative voices from William Bennett to Alan Keyes to Michael Medved. Few open-minded people could serious question the knowledge of these sources, but their pandemic citings and the under-representation of liberal mover and shakers (and there a few who advocate such common sense values) may turn off those who ideology blinds them to the sapience of conservatives.

I know you’re all going to rush out and buy the book. Back to the Reverend:

“I didn’t get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.”

He compared his entry into politics to “getting inside the dragon’s belly,” adding, “There’s not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what’s done when Jesus touches the lives of a sinner.”

The most basic unit of government is not the city council, quorum court or state legislature, Huckabee said. “It is Mom and Dad raising kids and teaching them respect for authority, others and God.”

The nation has descended gradually into crisis, Huckabee said, and repairing the damage needs to be gradual, too. He said the solution is simple: faith in Christ.

Yes, we know how well that works.

Update: More Christian nationalism.

Update 2: Pastor Dan begins a series on theological questions to ask the candidates. I’ll get excited when there’s a candidate who can explicate the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta.

Crazy v. Silly

Posted on by

You’ll get a kick out of this Guardian post by Charles Pierce. Just a snip:

Within the struggling Republican party, there is the Angry party and the Crazy party. Sometimes – in fact, often – those two overlap. This year, those two elements between them have produced in the current Republican field the single biggest public fruitcake in the history of electoral government. At the start, it looked like Romney might accede to the leadership of that wing of the modern GOP that occasionally can be referred to as “not insane”. (In 2000, John McCain was the unquestioned leader of this faction, and he’s spent the last seven years denying it, which is how the post became vacant.)

Romney had the money and he had the record to disenthrall his party from the influence of the extremists that have taken it over the cliff and onto the rocks below. In this, he was powerfully equipped to do his party and his country a great service. Instead, against all odds, he’s spent two years carving out yet another political subset. To borrow a famous bit from the Monty Python crew, Mitt Romney seems bound and determined to fashion himself into the leader of the Silly party. …

… Romney was a decent Republican governor for Massachusetts in that he largely let things happen and stayed out of the way. He signed on to a healthcare reform bill that was driven by the Democratic state legislature and, for all his bloviating about it elsewhere, Romney pretty much let gay marriage slide safely into the mainstream. In fact, he largely gave up on the job a full two years before leaving it.

This person is almost unrecognisable on the presidential campaign stage. He has adopted weird, angry positions completely dissonant with his personality as a smooth handler of other people’s money. One minute, he’s Torquemada, babbling about doubling Guantánamo and lecturing McCain, of all people, about the efficacy of torture. The next, he’s running a television spot about immigration in which he makes Tom Tancredo sound like Emma Lazarus. (Subsequently, on that same matter, Romney has accomplished the not-inconsiderable feat of making Rudy Giuliani look reasonable on an issue of public policy.) At some point, Romney should be forced to make a speech while his consultants stand next to him, drinking glasses of water.

I do believe that what’s left of the Old Guard pre-Goldwater/Reagan GOP look to Romney to stop the insanity. However, to get the nomination Romney has to prove his angry/crazy creds to the base.

Frank Rich calls Romney “a glib salesman who seems a dead ringer for Don Draper, a Madison Avenue ad man of no known core convictions who works on the Nixon campaign in the TV series, ‘Mad Men.'” Pretty much my impression. The Old Guard may look to Romney to bring on the Return of Normalcy. But I don’t see much in the way of passion for Romney among the grassroots.

And then there’s Huckabee. Rich thinks Huckabee may be the Republican Barack Obama.

Both men have a history of speaking across party and racial lines. Both men possess that rarest of commodities in American public life: wit. Most important, both men aspire (not always successfully) to avoid the hyper-partisanship of the Clinton-Bush era.

Though their views on issues are often antithetical, Mr. Huckabee and Mr. Obama may be united in catching the wave of an emerging zeitgeist that is larger than either party’s ideology. An exhausted and disillusioned public may be ready for a replay of the New Frontier pitch of 1960. …

… The real reason for Mr. Huckabee’s ascendance may be that his message is simply more uplifting — and, in the ethical rather than theological sense, more Christian — than that of rivals whose main calling cards of fear, torture and nativism have become more strident with every debate. The fresh-faced politics of joy may be trumping the five-o’clock-shadow of Nixonian gloom and paranoia favored by the entire G.O.P. field with the sometime exception of John McCain.

Before we get all soft and gooey about what a swell guy Huckabee is, note that as recently as 1992 he was calling for AIDS patients to be quarantined and said that hollywood celebrities fund aids research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.

Seems to me that over the past year or so Republican voters have fallen in and out of love with a succession of candidates — first Giuliani, then Thompson, now Huckabee. But the War and Profits factions in the GOP hate Huckabee and will do their best to undermine him, which makes the odds he will be the nominee very long, indeed.

Faithiness

Posted on by

David Brooks has a column in today’s New York Times titled “Faith vs. the Faithless,” about Mitt Romney’s religion speech. I plunged into it with the same enthusiasm I have for dumpster diving in really bad neighborhoods. But I was pleasantly surprised that Brooks actually had a glimmer of insight.

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but
speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious.

I’ve read the speech. It not only disses the nonreligious (about which the Rude Pundit gets really rude); it also leaves out anyone who isn’t a monotheist. I guess Mitt isn’t worried about losing the Buddhist vote.

As for the alleged war on religion, Joe Conason rightly points out that it’s mostly been the religious fighting it:

Phonies like Huckabee and Romney complain constantly about the supposed religious intolerance of secular liberals. But the truth is that liberals — including agnostics and atheists — have long been far more tolerant of religious believers in office than the other way around. They helped elect a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter to the presidency in 1976, and today they support a Mormon named Harry Reid who is the Senate majority leader — which makes him the highest-ranking Mormon officeholder in American history. Nobody in the Democratic Party has displayed the slightest prejudice about Reid’s religion.

And an editorial in today’s New York Times gets to the bottom of why Romney had to make the speech in the first place:

Even by the low standards of this campaign, it was a distressing moment and just what the nation’s founders wanted to head off with the immortal words of the First Amendment: A presidential candidate cowed into defending his way of worshiping God by a powerful minority determined to impose its religious tenets as a test for holding public office. …

…Mr. Romney was not there to defend freedom of religion, or to champion the indisputable notion that belief in God and religious observance are longstanding parts of American life. He was trying to persuade Christian fundamentalists in the Republican Party, who do want to impose their faith on the Oval Office, that he is sufficiently Christian for them to support his bid for the Republican nomination. No matter how dignified he looked, and how many times he quoted the founding fathers, he could not disguise that sad fact.

And to do that, Romney evoked the common enemy of all God Nazis — secularists. As Steve M. says —

His basic message was “Well, yeah, I’m a Mormon, but LOOK — OVER THERE! IT’S A DIRTY FILTHY ATHEIST!”

But let’s go on to David Brooks’s next paragraph, which is astonishing, coming from David Brooks:

The second casualty of the faith war is theology itself. In rallying the armies of faith against their supposed enemies, Romney waved away any theological distinctions among them with the brush of his hand. In this calculus, the faithful become a tribe, marked by ethnic pride, a shared sense of victimization and all the other markers of identity politics.

The difference between a tribe and a mere interest group is that tribes are something people incorporate into their identities. The group becomes an extension of the self under the guardianship of ego. But the trick with religion-as-tribe is that one can be a fierce and devoted member of the tribe without being particularly religious, and vice versa. If we could travel through religious history we could dredge up busloads of great theologians and spiritual teachers who would tell us that ego attachment is death to sincere religious devotion.

Another aspect of religion-as-tribe in America is that, increasingly, sectarian distinctions are sluicing together into one vague and amorphous All-American Christianity. Understanding of doctrine becomes less important than loyalty to doctrine and identification with the tribe. Pastor Dan speaks of “faithiness” —

Romney’s appeal was thus not to faith but to “faithiness,” to steal from Stephen Colbert. He didn’t want to appeal to the specifics of belief, because those would have worked against him, but to the quality of being perceived as a person of faith. Brooks got that much right. It is a pernicious tactic, and one that is bound to be tried over and over again as candidate after candidate tries to proclaim themselves the leader of faith and the free world without alienating too many swing voters.

It is a pernicious tactic because, even as Romney paid homage to religious tolerance, the point of his speech was to ingratiate himself with the intolerant and thereby reinforce their intolerance.

There’s no question that there’s a huge block of voters who think they are entitled to demand religious tests for public office. We must never forget that separating political authority from religious revelation made modern liberal society possible. The same wall that separates church from state also separates us from sectarian tyranny.

There’s something else that struck me about the Romney speech. It’s becoming apparent that Mitt is the candidate Old Line GOP party insiders want to nominate. John Dickerson writes,

When Mitt Romney gave his speech on religion in American life Thursday in College Station, Texas, he brought everything but the presidential seal. Introduced by George Herbert Walker Bush, the last popular Republican president, he stood in front of a row of American flags and faced a bank of cameras worthy of a celebrity murder trial. Leading up to the address, his campaign had released pictures of his arduous speechwriting process, exactly as the White House does before the real president gives the State of the Union address.

Various tools like Peggy Noonan and Hugh Hewitt praised Romney’s speech as second only to the Sermon on the Mount. This is the GOP establishment speaking. They don’t like McCain; I suspect they’ve come to realize what a loose cannon Rudy Giuliani is; and Huckabee is bad for business. Mitt’s their guy. He’s starting to look like the GOP nominee to me.