Category Archives: Republican Party

(Holy) Oil and Water

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At the Corner, Rich Lowry is feeling estranged.

Remember how evangelicals had “matured”? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn’t be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we’re still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues.

I don’t remember hearing that evangelicals had “matured.” Nor have I noticed that Rich Lowry had “matured.” I infer that “matured” means evangelicals were expected to put aside their social and religious views in favor of other issues.

Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn’t over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn’t speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his “I come from you” speech at the “values summit.” This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don’t know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

Excuse me, but … whose conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters? Especially if that “wisdom” is they will drop conservative Christian values in favor of the Republican Party’s interests? I recall no such “conventional wisdom.” Perhaps Lowry mistakes his own wishful thinking for “conventional wisdom.”

For years members of the right-wing “chattering class” believed they owned the copyright on Christianity. They’ve smugly lectured us lefties that we have a religion problem. The Narrative — never forget the Narrative — is that conservatives honor religion and liberals don’t. It says that conservatives march in the bright light of moral clarity to fight Evil wherever it exists, while liberals stumble about in a fog of relativism and play on Evil’s bowling team.

Of course, there’s the Narrative, and there’s the Reality. But let’s put that aside for now.

Evangelicals are not a monolith. Not all are fundamentalists, and even among fundamentalists there is a contingent more eager to kick-start Armageddon in the Middle East than to overturn Roe v. Wade. In America, nationalism, jingoism, and fundamentalism have been fused together for generations. But the Republican Party was not part of this fusion until relatively recent times. Fifty years ago a nationalistic fundamentalist whackjob was as likely to be a Democrat as anything else. Nor, do I believe, did viable contenders for a major party presidential nomination explicitly court the fundamentalist vote until the past quarter century or so.

This is not to say that religion hasn’t played a role in presidential politics; of course, it has. Before John Kennedy, both parties catered to anti-Catholic prejudice, for example. But I know of no other time in our history when one party claimed Christianity as its own exclusive property and used it to club the other party.

Since Reagan, and especially since Rove, the GOP has brandished the white evangelical vote to swing elections in its favor. As Thomas Frank explained so well in What’s the Matter With Kansas, the GOP manipulated white evangelical voters into undermining their own lives, jobs, futures, civil liberties, access to health care, pensions, education, etc., in order to strengthen a financial/corporate/political aristocracy headed by King George W. Bush.

This system worked just dandy as long as candidates could cater effectively to the Christian right while serving the interests of the corporate and military-industrial establishments. Unfortunately for the GOP, none of the current presidential candidates seems able to do that. Instead, the top three candidates appeal to separate slices of the Reagan Coalition pie. You’ve got Rudy Giuliani, who has become the great white hope of the neocons. You’ve got Mitt Romney, who has some support among moneyed interests. And you’ve got Mike Huckabee as the Christian candidate. Pat Robertson’s endorsement notwithstanding, Giuliani is simply not going to get the so-called “values” voters. Romney faces hot anti-Mormon prejudice. And apparently Huckabee doesn’t know “The Islamofascist Enemy” from spinach.

Lowry is perplexed that “values” voters care more about their hot-button sex-and-death issues more than they care about the Republican Party or the corporate status quo. His problem is not that white evangelicals have changed, but that they haven’t. However, by giving Christian conservatives so much clout, the Bush Administration has spooked the moneyed interests that have been its foundation since at least the 1920s.

Poor babies.

Today Romney is preparing to deliver a speech intended to defuse his Mormonism as an issue. Judging by the parts he has released, the speech is going to be a weightless rhetorical froth drizzled with lines like “Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom” and “Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.” Millennia of human history in which religion did just fine without freedom are cheerfully ignored.

Romney’s problem is that he has to simultaneously ask for religious tolerance while appealing to religious intolerance. Jeremy Lott compares the task ahead of Romney to the way John Kennedy defused the Catholic issue in 1960:

[Kennedy’s] speech has been remembered as a cry for religious toleration and an excoriation of religious bigotry. It contained those elements – “[I]f this election is decided on the basis that 40 million Americans lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized, then it is the whole nation that will be the loser…” – but the thrust of it was Kennedy’s promise that he wouldn’t be a particularly Catholic president. …

… If Romney were to give even a watered-down version of that speech today, he would not be the nominee of the Republican party. Evangelical primary voters may distrust Mormonism, but they have a greater fear of secularism. In that, they’re not too different from the country as a whole – many Americans would rather have a Muslim as president than an atheist.

Lott suggests that Romney “drop the consultant-speak for a few moments to tell voters exactly what it is that he likes about his faith, and where they can go if they’re unwilling to accept that.” Don’t hold your breath waiting for that. Mitt Romney is to authenticity what oil is to water. (See also Andrew O’Hehir and Walter Shapiro.)

Mike Huckabee, meanwhile, has packaged himself as Jesus’ candidate. But Huckabee is being spun by the war-and-profits Right as bad for business and soft on Islamic terrorism. Righties are comparing him to Jimmy Carter — which, in Rightie World, is lower than pond scum.

Now Republican voters are plagued by epic indecision. And Rich Lowry is perplexed that Christian conservatives are less interested in his favored issues than in their own. He sees this as a sign of evangelical “immaturity.” One might infer that, all along, he thought abortion, school prayer, gay marriage, and other issues dear to Christian conservatives were kid’s issues, and that evangelicals were to be humored, not taken seriously. Who’s got a problem with religion, Rich?

Republicans and the “T” Word

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Michael Kinsley says that Fred Thompson may not have what it takes to be the Republican nominee:

The real strategy of Thompson’s plan is a familiar one from past Republican tax plans: Give large breaks to businesses and the wealthy (by, say, abolishing the estate tax), bribe the middle class to go along by offering smaller breaks to them, and don’t worry about paying for it all.

But maintaining your indifference to the size of the bill you are running up requires nerves of steel. You must never waver, never, never express the slightest concern that lost revenue may be a problem, and never, never, never even hint at where you might go to find the money. Thompson followed the script, putting out word that the explosion of economic activity after his tax reform would bring in too much money to even count, yadda, yadda, yadda. Then, unfortunately, he blinked. He revealed that he is a political amateur by making ominous noises about finding some savings through changes in Social Security benefits, which has to mean cuts in Social Security benefits or no money will be saved.

Raise your hand if you would be happy to accept lower Social Security payments in exchange for a simpler tax code.

I thought so.

Kinsley also discusses Mike Huckabee’s “fair tax” proposal:

He has endorsed something called the “fair tax,” which involves repealing all federal revenue sources—the income tax, Social Security tax, estate tax, everything—and replacing them with a 23 percent sales tax on everything except education. The fair tax propaganda says, frankly, that it is intended to be “revenue-neutral.” That is, it would bring in just as much money as the taxes it replaces. No monkey business about explosions of new revenue.

This makes it easy to figure out who would win and who would lose in Huckabee’s so-called “fair” tax. It’s a zero-sum game: Every dollar someone’s taxes go down is a dollar someone else’s go up. What you spend every year is the amount you earn minus the amount you save. On average, Americans save practically nothing, but wealthier people save more. Very poor people actually spend more than they earn, while Bill Gates and Warren Buffett couldn’t spend more than a small fraction of their income if they tried. So, wealthy people are going to see their taxes go down, which means that poor and middle-class people are going to see their taxes go up.

In spite of his soak-the-poor tax plan, the right-wing Club for Growth has gone to the mattresses to defeat Huckabee. Leslie Wayne writes in tomorrow’s New York Times:

As Mike Huckabee rises in the Republican presidential polls, fiscal conservatives have been raising alarms about a series of tax increases he oversaw while governor of Arkansas — new taxes on gasoline, nursing home beds and even pet groomers.

The Club for Growth, a politically influential antitax group, has dubbed Mr. Huckabee Tax Hike Mike and poured money into anti-Huckabee advertisements that were broadcast in early nominating states, with more on the way. Mr. Huckabee “spends money like a drunken sailor,” according to the group’s news releases, and it has sprinkled YouTube and the airways with videos that mock him and his policies.

Frankly, your average drunken sailor is a miser compared to most Republicans.

But the record offers a more complex and nuanced picture. While taxes did rise in the 10 years that Mr. Huckabee was governor, the portrayal of him as a wild-eyed spendthrift is hardly apt. For the most part, Mr. Huckabee’s tax initiatives had wide bipartisan support, with the small number of Republicans in the overwhelmingly Democratic state legislature voting for the tax increases and many maintaining that the state was better for them.

David Lightman writes for McClatchy Newspapers:

In the late 1990s, as the nation’s and Arkansas’ economies boomed, that wasn’t difficult, and Huckabee presided over substantial tax cuts. In 1997 and 1998, state lawmakers approved $97.9 million in income-tax relief, and another $14.1 million in smaller tax breaks.

About 65 of Huckabee’s 90 tax reductions were enacted from 1997 to 1999. The centerpiece was $90.6 million annually in individual income-tax breaks, but most of the cuts were small and highly specialized.

Among them: exempting residential lawn care from the gross receipts tax, a Salvation Army sales-and-use-tax exemption and an exemption for sales of biomass to produce electricity.

Huckabee came to Washington in 1999 and boasted about his record. “The big battle was no longer, ‘Which taxes will we raise and by how much?’ but ‘Which taxes will we cut and by how much?’ ” he told the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research center.

Bill Clinton’s economy made being a tax cutter easy and fun.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

But as the economy soured early this decade, Huckabee found himself in the same situation as many other chief executives: Massive spending cuts weren’t enough to balance the budget, so he had to find new revenue.

The State Supreme Court handed him another problem when it ruled that Arkansas’ education-funding system wasn’t meeting student’s needs and had to be revamped.

So in 2003, Huckabee had a very different message. In his State of the State speech that year, he warned lawmakers that, “If you deem that all new revenue sources, your proposals or mine, are indeed dead on arrival, then you’ll be saying that teacher pay increases are dead, scholarships are dead, medicine for the elderly is dead, that long sentences are dead and that we’ll have a massive early release of thousands of inmates from the (prison) system.”

Unlike the bleepheads of the Club for Growth, Gov. Huckabee actually had to govern a state. But in GOP Land, facing reality is heresy, and as a candidate Huckabee has to prove he can still be oblivious. Back to Kinsley:

Neither Thompson nor Huckabee has anything useful to say about the real problem, which is the huge gap between revenues and spending that George W. Bush, having inherited a surplus, is leaving behind. Thompson’s willingness to take on Social Security would earn him some points for courage if he were planning to use the money to reduce the deficit or address the entitlements problem. But he wants to pour the money into new tax cuts for business, which is not just a bad idea but an incredibly lazy one. There’s more to running for president than buying a round of drinks at the country club and asking what’s on people’s minds.

At least Huckabee’s revenue neutrality would not make the problem worse. For this, the business wing of the Republican Party is hysterically labeling him a “fiscal liberal.”

A what? For Republicans, the epithet liberal used to mean someone who wanted the government to spend a lot of money that it didn’t have. Then it meant someone who wanted the government to spend what it had, but no more. Now, apparently, you are a “liberal” if you only want the government to spend a few hundred billion dollars a year more than it has.

Actually, the spending debate is now over, or should be. The GOP bluff has been called. Republicans had six years in which they controlled the White House and (for most of that time) both houses of Congress. They could have cut any spending they wanted. They did the opposite. None of the realistic Republican presidential possibilities is discussing spending cuts except in the vaguest terms.

But if you peer into the abyss of debt and say that what this country needs is another tax cut, that makes you a good conservative.

What really makes you a good conservative is to believe you can have something for nothing. All their elaborate theories about supply-side economics and “fair” taxes are fiscal alchemy. If we can just find the right formula, they think, government revenue will appear magically, and fairies will provide the government services we want without our having to pay for them.

Boxes

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Today many people are posting this anti-abortion video and noting the subliminal message — that women are just objects, not people.


As Trailer Park Feminist (who has a transcript) says, “And shouldn’t we treat women like property, you know, just in case?”

Conversely, if you thought there was a chance a woman might actually being a fully sentient human being, and not just an ambulatory major appliance … well, I second Mustang Bobby:

I’m not sure which is more amazing; the ease with which the anti-abortion folks can reduce a complicated and intensely personal event such as a pregnancy down to this simplistic and dehumanizing idiocy, or the idea that they can portray women as nothing but a cardboard box and get away with it.

See also Bean (the comments are a hoot).

I’ve written many times before that an absolutist anti-choice position requires denying the autonomy and humanity of women. Certainly people of good will might favor some restrictions, such as gestational limits, on elective abortion. By absolutist I’m referring to the people Ellen Goodman wrote about earlier this year —

Cynics, take heart. We offer you advance word from the troops preparing for Monday’s annual March for Life marking the 34th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. The parade’s theme this year is “Thou Shalt Protect the Equal Right to Life of Each Innocent Human in Existence at Fertilization. No Exception! No Compromise!”

No exception! No compromise! Lots of exclamation points!

You can find high-flown absolutist rhetoric declaring that even a zygote has rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That may sound glorious and all, but in real life an absolute “protection” of “human life” from conception requires stripping fertile women of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in extreme cases their rights to life, also. There are copious real-world examples of women living under draconian abortion laws who die gruesome deaths because of those laws. Clearly, such laws value the lives and humanity of women less than the lives and humanity of embryos. Women in these countries often go without medical help after a miscarriage because they fear persecution by the Womb Nazis. This is nothing other than political oppression.

For that reason, I continue to be astonished at the number of self-identified libertarians who see nothing wrong with banning abortion. The same people who roar with righteous indignation over big, oppressive government have no problem with government treating women like brood animals.

The words libertarian and liberal share the root word liberty. Over the years a great many views and opinions have been labeled “liberal,” but liberty and equality remain liberalism’s cornerstone. As it says here, liberalism’s fundamental principle is that “freedom is normatively basic, and so the onus of justification is on those who would limit freedom, especially through coercive means.”

I bring this up because I want to make it clear that, although liberals may disagree on many issues, no one who wants to criminalize all abortion can rightfully be called a “liberal.” If libertarians like Justin Raimondo want to claim that person, of course, that’s their business. But he ain’t one o’ ours.

Libertarians will disagree, but I say the essential difference between liberals and libertarians is that the latter define oppression as something only the federal government can do. If state governments violate the rights of its citizens and treat women and minorities like chattel, that’s OK with them. Liberals, on the other hand, think oppression is wrong no matter who or what is doing the oppressing. We think, for example, that if a state is denying its African American citizens equal treatment under the law, it’s a legitimate use of federal power to force the state to stop the oppression. Libertarians generally disagree, and would rather allow states to discriminate than concede any part of state sovereignty to Washington or federal courts.

Thus, to most libertarians, liberty and equality are less important than maintaining a weak federal government.

Justin Raimondo asks why “neocons and sectarian leftists” have united to “smear” Ron Paul. I can’t speak for everyone, but I do want readers of this blog to understand what Ron Paul stands for. And he stands for the political oppression of women. His followers seem to think it is enormously significant that Paul wants to keep the federal government out of abortion law and give the states total authority in the matter. I, on the other hand, think Womb Nazis are Womb Nazis, no matter what branch of government they report to.

I have seen people show up at liberal/progressive gatherings with Ron Paul T-shirts and buttons who don’t seem to know anything about Paul except that he’s against the war in Iraq. Well, folks, educate yourselves.

If you agree with Ron Paul’s views (meaning you aren’t one of my regular readers) then vote for him. That’s what republican government is about; you vote for the candidate you think will best represent you. My intention here is to be sure we’re all clear that Ron Paul is no liberal.

Yes, the Iraq War is a vital issue, but it’s not the only vital issue, and Ron Paul is not the only anti-war candidate. The struggle for liberty and equality in this country will continue long after the Iraq War has scrolled off the page into history.

And women aren’t boxes.

Projections

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Frank Rich writes,

New Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful “America’s Mayor” cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton ’tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Yet the Giuliani campaign springs back after every wound, like Rasputin. I admit, it’s making us nervous.

Rich goes on to snark about Judith Regan’s lawsuit against HarperCollins, which is juicy stuff. But I want to tie Rich’s column into something I read yesterday in the Boston Globe. Scott Lehigh wrote,

Massachusetts readers of the Sunday Globe may have choked on their coffee when they came across this finding in our new poll of New Hampshire: Granite State Republicans see Mitt Romney as the most trustworthy of the GOP candidates.

Certainly anyone who watched Romney retrofit his positions to run for president would find that a tad curious. Frankly, I might not have believed it either – had I not spent last Friday evening at an event in Hudson, listening to Romney and interviewing voters about him.

New York to Boston: Want to dish?

What’s more, voters I talked to didn’t particularly care that Romney has done some serious flip-flopping.

“Don’t they all?” said Loraine Battey of Hudson, who is undecided. “They say what people want to hear.”

“They all lie,” added Fred Taylor, a Hudson resident and Romney backer.

And the moral is, people see what they want to see.

The Giuliani campaign is particularly anxious to kneecap Romney support in New Hampshire, Lehigh says. So the Giuliani campaign is painting Romney as a flip-flopper and political poseur.

Well, if anyone would know political posing, it’s Giuliani. But why is it that so many voters get crushes on bad boys? Even voters like the above-quoted Fred Taylor, who know their candidate is a bad boy, still want to marry him. They seem to think once the knot is tied, the bad boy will become the man they want him to be.

At the Washington Post, Sridhar Pappu observes this phenomenon:

“When I talk to even Republican colleagues who run focus groups, you have these little old conservative ladies who say the most important issues are on abortion, on guns, on keeping taxes low,” says New York-based political consultant Joe Mercurio. “And when they ask these people who are you going to vote for they say Giuliani. I think a lot of people don’t care about Kerik and the marriages and living in a gay friend’s house, because they think he’s going to run against Hillary” Clinton.

Maybe he could defeat Hillary Clinton. But then we’d be stuck with Giuliani as President. America should just bend over and kiss its fanny goodbye. And Giuliani is George Bush with brains. You like cronyism? You like polarization? You like chief executives who think they are above accountability? Then Giuliani is your candidate.

My impression of Romney is that he’s not so much a bad boy as an empty suit; all packaging, no content. (But then, I haven’t spent that much time in Massachusetts.) But that makes him the perfect blank screen onto which voters may project their fears and ideals. And, I have to admit, he cleans up well. No wonder he’s leading the field at the moment.

Let’s skip back to the Frank Rich column. Here Rich is talking about the Wall Street Journal:

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan’s lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as “a gossip column story,” and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit’s reference to that “senior executive” at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper’s brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled “A Journal Briefing — Whitewater.” You’d think the controversies surrounding “America’s Mayor” are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We’ll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper’s Murdoch era.

But beyond New York’s dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch’s Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani’s checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It’s astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

Damn liberal media.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York’s municipal archives. Historians told The Tribune there’s no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton’s papers has received all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it’s hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of “Whitewater,” an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

We can hope.

Nothing Is Inevitable

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At MyDD, Jerome Armstrong analyzes the most recent polling numbers out of Iowa and New Hampshire. In brief: For the Dems, Iowa is up for grabs. Senator Clinton is ahead by a nose, but her support is soft. Her position in New Hampshire is stronger, but much of this support comes from her perceived electability. I agree with Jerome that if she loses Iowa, which is very possible, New Hampshire could slip away from her also.

But I admit that I have a terrible track record at predicting what voters will do.

Just for some perspective, see Democratic candidate rankings for the 2004 nomination, taken in November 2003:

Not Sure 34%
Howard Dean 15
Wesley Clark 10
Dick Gephardt 9
Joe Lieberman 9
John Kerry 7
Al Sharpton 4
John Edwards 3
Dennis Kucinich 2
Carol Moseley Braun 2
Other 6

(Zogby America Poll, 558 Likely Democrat Voters Nationwide, Conducted 11/3-5/03, Margin Of Error +/- 4.2%)

New Hampshire only, also November 2003:

Howard Dean 38%
John Kerry 24
Undecided 21
Wesley Clark 4
Joe Lieberman 4
John Edwards 4
Dick Gephardt 3
Carol Moseley Braun 1
Dennis Kucinich 1
Al Sharpton 0

(American Research Group Poll, 600 Registered Democrats And Undeclared Voters, Conducted 11/2-5/03, Margin Of Error +/- 4%)

Here are the final results for New Hampshire, 2004.

Kerry 39%
Dean 26%
Clark 13%
Edwards 12%
Lieberman 9%
Kucinich 1%
Sharpton 0%

And the moral is, pre-election poll results are like dust in the wind.

For the Republicans, Mitt Romney is ahead in both polls. In Iowa, Rudy Giuliani is only 4th (after Romney, Huckabee, and Undecided). In New Hampshire, he’s tied for second place with John McCain.

So tell me again why the bobbleheads keep talking about a Clinton-Giuliani race in 2008?

As I remember, all through 2003 many professional television pundits kept saying Dick Gephardt or Joe Lieberman would be the nominee. And now exactly the same crew, albeit a tad more wrinkled, are talking up Clinton and Giuliani. And they get paid for this. I make wrong predictions just as often, but I do it for free. Such a deal.

At the Washington Post, Michael Shear writes about the Hillary phenomenon among the GOP.

They mock her proposals, utter her name with a sneer and win standing ovations by ridiculing her ideas as un-American, even socialistic. She has become the one thing the Republican candidates for president can agree on.

Hillary Clinton.

Earlier this year, the senator from New York was the subject of an occasional laugh line from former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. Now, the trickle has become a torrent as the leading GOP candidates seek to one-up one another in a Clinton-bashing contest aimed at energizing their party faithful.

“The competition inside the GOP for who’s the most anti-Hillary is going to pay dividends,” said Greg Strimple, a GOP pollster and consultant who is not working with any presidential campaign. “Looking for that piece of anti-Hillary energy is what you’re seeing right now.”

I’m glad to see Republicans running an honest campaign for a change. But what will the eventual nominee campaign on if Senator Clinton is not his opponent? The poor dear will have to run on issues. Iraq, health care, the economy? God, guns, and gays?

Heh.

A Cadillac Queen By Any Other Name

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Today the Keyboarding Vegetable makes excuses for Ronald Reagan:

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.

The truth is more complicated.

Of course it is. For example, one little tidbit that Brooks left out is that this same Philadelphia, Mississippi, was already infamous as a place where three civil rights activists were murdered.

I’ve already explained here that “states’ rights” was universally recognized as code for “white supremacy” back in those days. If Reagan didn’t understand what message he was sending, then he was an idiot. You know how upset righties get when you say Reagan was an idiot. And, truly, he was a genius compared to George Bush.

And the moral is: Context is everything.

Instaputz and Bark Bark Woof Woof nicely take down Brooks in more detail. I just want to add one more point to what they’ve written.

I realize it is possible nowadays to favor stronger state sovereignty on principle without being a racist. But Jim Crow and states rights’ were so tightly woven together back in the day that a politician who didn’t want to send winks and nudges to white racists would never have used the phrase “states rights.” I might understand how someone (especially someone not old enough to appreciate the, um, nuances of the times) might be persuaded to think that the Philadelphia speech was just a misstep. But as Paul Krugman wrote of another apologist,

Bruce Bartlett’s attempt to explain away Reagan’s Philadelphia speech as an innocent misunderstanding would be more plausible if it were out of character for Reagan’s career. But tacit appeals to racial politics — often taking the form of tall stories about welfare cheats, culminating in the Cadillac-driving welfare queen — were, in fact, a staple of Reagan’s political career.

Two issues were critical to the Reagan landslide in 1980. One was Iran, and the other was the Cadillac Queen. Iran probably got more media coverage, but IMO it was Reagan’s stories about the Cadillac Queen that won the deal. During the 1980 campaign I can’t tell you how many times I overheard whites say “I’m voting for Reagan because he’s going to kick the n—— off welfare.”

So don’t bother arguing with me that Reagan didn’t run on an appeal to racism. I watched him do exactly that.

The Devil You Know

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I find rightie reactions to Bernie Kerik’s indictment wondrously entertaining. Shorter versions:

Everybody knows politics in the New York and New Jersey are corrupt. Unlike, of course, politics everywhere else.

Whatever Giuliani did wrong, Democrats did it first.

Nobody’s perfect.

Damn liberal media. “[T]he only reason that Bernie Kerik’s being pilloried (Hillary’ed?) now is because he is associated with the Republican frontrunner.” Yeah, the fact that someone with known ties to the mob nearly became head of the Department of Homeland Security shouldn’t bother anyone.

And, above all — Hillary Clinton is the spawn of the devil. Their hysterical obsession with Senator Clinton deserves its own entry in the DSM.

This blogger writes,

And you know, between the timing , and the force with which the news media seems to be applying in covering this little affair, something does seem rather obvious — the only reason that Bernie Kerik’s being pilloried (Hillary’ed?) now is because he is associated with the Republican frontrunner — and the Democrat front runner is Hillary Clinton — someone who decidedly needs her own scandalous past to be mitigated by scandals amongst her opponents.

Given the scandals and Hillary Clinton’s past, even her recent past, doesn’t it stretch credibility beyond the breaking point that this indictment against Kerik comes down just now, while Hillary Clinton’s scandal filled past gets ignored? the timing, in particular, would seem questionable.

The long arm of the Clintons.

I would like to explain how “news” works. The reason the Kerik indictment is in the news is that it happened yesterday. Scandals associated with the Clintons are not on the front pages at the moment because there are no new developments. See, that’s why they call it “news.”

Jammie Wearing Fool even brings up Jim McDougal, who’s been dead for nearly a decade. JWF also mentions indicted fundraiser Norman Hsu, who has “recently been in the news.” Yes, dude, he was recently in the news. A lot. This rather refutes claims of media bias, I would think. But if righties had their way, the nation’s newspapers would still be running photos of Monica Lewinsky on the front page of every edition.

Knee slapper of the week: “[Rudy] wants to win without seeming to be an unprincipled opportunist who changes his positions wherever convenient.” Yeah, he’s doing a heck of a job with that.

Now Giuliani says he “erred” in appointing Kerik police commissioner. Should’ve checked him out better, Giuliani says. But Giuliani was briefed on at least some of those ties before the appointment.

Down With Tyranny writes,

Driving home last night I heard Giuliani claiming it didn’t matter if Kerik bent a few rules because crime was down 60% in NY while he was police commissioner. That’s as big a lie as all the other lies that comes pouring out of Giuliani’s face. Crime in NY was down 8%, not bad– but not close to 60%. And as far as a few rules being broken… Giuliani’s administration was riddled with Mafia connections and Kerik was the go-between.

This is the sort of thing that people actually need to know about a guy running for president.

As far as Senator Clinton is concerned, if there are any bombshells that haven’t already been exploded I sincerely hope they are discovered and detonated before the nomination is settled. I don’t expect absolute purity in any candidate. But I feel media and Dem party insiders are hustling to give away the nomination to Senator Clinton before actual voters have focused on the presidential race and noticed there are other candidates. So, righties and media, if she can be brought down, please bring her down now. You’d be doing us all a favor. And if new information about unsavory associates and Senator Clinton comes to light, by all means put it in the news.

But regarding the stuff Ken Starr couldn’t get an indictment on — my dears, it’s over. That horse is so dead there’s not enough of a carcass left to beat.

Update: See Steve Benen —

Giuliani has a pattern of cozying up to suspected criminals, and giving them jobs. Accidentally promoting one felon is one thing, repeatedly associating with unsavory characters, including a suspected child molester, starts to reflect poorly on one’s judgment.

I’m sure righties will counter with, yeah, the Clintons have a pattern, too. But righties have long undercut their own cause by ceaselessly promoting every absurd rumor they could find into a national scandal. After a while, to the general public it’s all just white noise. If those with Clinton Derangement Syndrome could learn to discriminate between the credible and the incredible their accusations might have more of an impact. But I’m not holding my breath.

It’s Pat!

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I’ve been living away from the Bible Belt too long to claim that I have my finger on the pulse of the Jesus vote. So I can’t say if Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani is the gift-wrapped advantage for Hizzoner some pundits seem to think it is. Perhaps it is, but Robertson’s influence peaked nearly thirty years ago. Today Robertson is mostly a media sideshow freak whose celebrity endures even as memory of whatever he was originally celebrated for fades away. Sort of like Britney Spears.

Gail Collins:

Even within the ranks of the social conservatives, Robertson is regarded as a tad over the top. Who among us will forget the time he claimed that the special protein shake he was marketing had enabled him to leg-press 2,000 pounds? Or the time he said God had given Ariel Sharon a massive stroke because he let the Palestinians run Gaza? (He did apologize for saying the United States should assassinate the president of Venezuela.)

My impression is — and I could be wrong — that these days Robertson claims a following only among a particular subset of Radical Christendom: those who hate Muslims even more than they hate women.

Robertson’s backing will surely give Giuliani a leg up among voters who believe that God sends natural disasters to punish Americans whose school board members believe in the theory of evolution, or who have the bad luck to live near an inclusive amusement park. (He warned Orlando that when Disney World welcomed gay patrons it was letting them in for terrorist attacks, “earthquakes, tornadoes and possibly a meteor.”)

Yesterday, Robertson said that America’s Mayor had won him over because “to me, the overriding issue before the American people is the defense of our population from the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists.” (So much for judicial activism.) “Our second goal should be the control of massive government waste and crushing federal deficits.”

Now this is the part that I have never been able to get. When did government spending become part of the divine agenda? Is there something in the Bible about smiting down federal bureaucrats?

Keep it straight: Religious righties don’t look to the Bible to learn what to believe. They look to the Bible to justify what they believe.

Steven Thomma and Matt Stearns of McClatchy Newspapers say the Robertson endorsement has “fractured” social conservatives. The Robertson endorsement is significant because it shows the social conservative movement has not coalesced around any one candidate. I suspect this “fracturing” is mostly at the top. As I’ve written before, I think the rank and file of the movement would coalesce around Mike Huckabee if left to their own devices, but the “leadership” is determined to pull their followers in other directions. I can only guess why.

I suspect television bobbleheads, few of whom have ever attended a tent revival, will seize the Robertson endorsement as proof that Giuliani’s support for abortion rights (and his three marriages, and his proclivity for cross dressing, and his gay friends) will not matter to social conservative voters, even though those things probably do matter and Robertson isn’t speaking for anyone but Robertson.