The Last White Hope?

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white-romneySometimes when righties have a new obsession I fail to make connections to where the obsession came from. Yesterday I saw that a number of righties were calling Mittens the “new James Knox Polk.” To which I thought, They want to invade Mexico? WTF? Not that I’d put it past them.

It turns out that operatives like Karl Rove are circulating the idea that Mittens expects to be a one-term president who will enact a bunch of significant stuff and then retire, as Polk did. And Romney’s staff seems to be the source of this notion. Some of them are telling reporters that Romney plans to “fix things” even if it means enacting unpopular policies and taking the political hit.

John Ward writes,

Multiple senior Romney advisers assured me that they had had conversations with the candidate in which he conveyed a depth of conviction about the need to try to enact something like Ryan’s controversial budget and entitlement reforms. Romney, they said, was willing to count the cost politically in order to achieve it.

The idea that Whiplash Willard would fall on his sword for anything — well, unless there’s a tax write-off involved — strikes me as preposterous, but let’s go with this for a moment. Jonathan Chait writes that Republicans see Romney as the last hope for imposing their vision of America on the rest of us before they are swamped by changing demographics —

A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988. The Republican strategist told Brownstein, “This is the last time anyone will try to do this” — “this” being a near total reliance on white votes to win a presidential election.

I wrote a long story last February arguing that the Republican Party had grown intensely conscious of both the inescapable gravity of the long-term relative decline of the white population, and the short-term window of opportunity opened for the party by the economic crisis. I think we’re continuing to see the GOP operate under an integrated political and policy strategy constructed on this premise. This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views about the role of government than does the party’s current base. …

… Blowing up the welfare state and affecting the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history is a politically tricky project (hence Romney’s belief that he may need to forego a second term). Hence the Romney campaign’s clear plan to suture off its slowly declining but still potent base.

Mittens literally is selling himself to the Republican Party as the Last White Hope.

See also Thomas Schaller, “Republican National Convention: Heart of Whiteness.”

Viguerie: Romney Attempts Takeover of His Own Convention

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I get all kinds of bizarre stuff in my email inbox, but this communication from Richard Viguerie is in a class by itself. It begins:

Romney’s Agents Attempt Coup at GOP Convention

Manassas, Virginia — “Grassroots conservatives have launched an unprecedented rules fight against an attempted coup by Mitt Romney at this year’s Republican National Convention,” announced Richard Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.

Ooo, sneaky Mittens. How dare the Republican nominee presumptive attempt a takeover of his own nominating convention? What is the world coming to?

Actually, what I’m hearing is that the Washington establishment is changing the convention rules on the fly so that they don’t have to seat potential troublemakers — e.g., Paulites and baggers — as delegates. Watch out for this.

The Video Everyone’s Talking About

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Tweety can be a clueless dork sometimes — well, most of the time — but once in a while he wakes up and actually says something worthwhile. Here he tears into Reince Priebus for resorting to racist dog whistling —

“You can play your games and giggle about it but the fact is your side playing that card. When you start talking about work requirements, you know what game you’re playing and everybody knows what game you’re playing. It’s a race card and yeah, if your name’s Romney, yeah you were well born, you went to prep school, yeah, brag about it. This guy has an African name and he’s got to live with it. Look who’s gone further in their life. Who was born on third base? Making fun of the guy’s birth certificate issue when it was never a real issue except for the right wing.”

Let Republicans Be Republicans

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I have advice that leftie vocational protesters will never take, but here goes anyway — When your opponent is voluntarily making a fool of himself in public, stay out of the bleeping way.

The Republican National Convention promises to be a hot mess. Evan McMorris-Santoro writes,

Unfortunately for the man who’s just days from finally sealing the deal and becoming the Republican presidential nominee, the Republican Party’s frayed edges are on full display here even as delegates wait for the actual convention to start.

The come-together moment follows a week that ripped open the wounds of the Republican primary that were supposed to be fully healed in time for Romney’s big party.

See also “A Party of Factions Gathers, Seeking Consensus.”

I know somebody’s going to say Republicans always put on a perfectly choreographed show and everyone’s going to snap into place as always, blah blah, and maybe that will happen. But they’ve got a candidate many of them don’t like who can’t get his message straight — he went back to bragging about his Massachusetts health care law this week, which infuriates a lot of them — and more so than in the past there are big factions of rightie activists who put ideology way over party, and who would rather lose than compromise. Which works for me.

Plus, it’s a fact that this year’s platform is the most extreme ever and nuttier than a peanut farm.

What happens at the conventions still can sway an election, IMO. The pundits may disagree, but I think the 1992 GOP convention helped elect Bill Clinton. Clinton was helped by Pat Buchanan’s social war address, Marilyn Quayle’s cringe inducing “I am better than Hillary” speech, and the poignant moment when Mary Fisher, infected with HIV, told the convention that “We have killed each other with our ignorance, our prejudice and our silence.” It was widely seen as a rebuke of the Republican Party, particularly after Buchanan’s hateful ranting about “homosexual rights.”

So I say let Republicans be Republicans. Let them be themselves, and let America see them for who and what they are. Just pass the popcorn.

Gullible and Gullibler

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Frank Bruni writes about gullibility in politics and says a few smart things.

… what’s most distinctive about the current presidential election and our political culture isn’t their negativity — though that’s plenty noteworthy and worrisome — but how unconditionally so many partisans back their side’s every edict, plaint and stratagem.

Of course, this same phenomenon has been striking in every election for the past 20 years, but thanks for catching on, Frank. Now, do keep up.

Bruni cites a film based on a true story that is, I admit, hard to believe. I don’t remember hearing about this at the time, but apparently some guy was getting his jollies by calling fast food joints, identifying himself as a police officer, and having one of the employees or a customer detained by the manager. And then the manager, instructed over the phone by “Officer Scott,” would unquestioningly put the detainee through a number of indignities, including a strip search followed by nude jumping jacks. In some cases the detainee was forced to perform sexual acts on someone else as part of the “investigation.” Here’s an article focusing on the particular incident that became the subject of the film, and it’s definitely off-the-wall. But, apparently, true. There are lawsuits and everything.

The point is that people are wired to follow authoritative leaders. Bruni writes,

People routinely buy into outlandish claims that calm particular anxieties, fill given needs or affirm preferred worldviews. Religions and wrinkle-cream purveyors alike depend on that. And someone like Todd Akin, the antihero of last week’s news, illustrates it to a T. The notion that a raped woman can miraculously foil and neutralize sperm is a good 10 times crazier than anything in “Compliance,” but it dovetails beautifully with his obvious wish — and the wishes of like-minded extremists — for an abortion prohibition with no exceptions. So he embraces it.

But then he says,

People also routinely elect trust over skepticism because it’s easier, more convenient. Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; the climate isn’t changing; Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged; Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.

Wait a minute — one of these things is not like the others. Even Harry Reid admits he doesn’t know for a fact that Mittens didn’t pay taxes for ten years. I haven’t seen any polling saying that a significant number of people believe Mittens didn’t pay taxes. Most of us understand that the charge is meant to goad Mittens either into releasing his tax returns or digging in his heels to not release them and look guilty.

But you know Frank had to throw in an example of leftie gullibility to prove that “both sides are just as bad.” Because “both sides are just as bad” calms Frank’s particular anxieties, fill his given needs or affirms his preferred worldviews. If he had to fully admit that both sides are not just as bad, that one side has in fact gone way off the outrageous scale to an unprecedented degree, his worldviews would melt like Salvadore Dali’s clocks.

Frank continues —

To varying degrees, all of these were or are articles of faith, unverifiable or eventually knocked down.

Except for speculations about Mitt’s taxes, which still haven’t been released.

People nonetheless accepted them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what.

Yeah, we can’t expect an op-ed writer for a major metropolitan newspaper to do the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things, huh? Better just reflect what’s expected from him by his Villager peers.

Clown Show Postponed

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The GOP national convention will begin on Tuesday instead of Monday because of the pending hurricane. I hope it’s not canceled entirely; should be the most off-the-wall entertainment since the Twilight Zone.

Via DougJ, The Economist on Mittens:

But competence is worthless without direction and, frankly, character. Would that Candidate Romney had indeed presented himself as a solid chief executive who got things done. Instead he has appeared as a fawning PR man, apparently willing to do or say just about anything to get elected. In some areas, notably social policy and foreign affairs, the result is that he is now committed to needlessly extreme or dangerous courses that he may not actually believe in but will find hard to drop; in others, especially to do with the economy, the lack of details means that some attractive-sounding headline policies prove meaningless (and possibly dangerous) on closer inspection. Behind all this sits the worrying idea of a man who does not really know his own mind. America won’t vote for that man; nor would this newspaper. …

… Mr Romney may calculate that it is best to keep quiet: the faltering economy will drive voters towards him. It is more likely, however, that his evasiveness will erode his main competitive advantage. A businessman without a credible plan to fix a problem stops being a credible businessman. So does a businessman who tells you one thing at breakfast and the opposite at supper. Indeed, all this underlines the main doubt: nobody knows who this strange man really is. It is half a decade since he ran something. Why won’t he talk about his business career openly? Why has he been so reluctant to disclose his tax returns? How can a leader change tack so often? Where does he really want to take the world’s most powerful country?

Yeah, pretty much.

Mitt: Vote for Me ‘Cause I’m the White Guy

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Mitt was planning to run as the Titan of Capitalism and Savior of the Olympics. But those narratives have been tarnished quite a bit, so he’s falling back on the Tried and True and doubling down on whiteness.

Mitt today is saying that this was not a swipe at President Obama —

“I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital,” Romney said in Commerce, Michigan earlier Friday. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”

— which shows us that Mitt is about as funny — and as ethical — as a sub-prime mortgage lender.

And this comes after lying to portray President Obama as an enabler of welfare queens. Next he’ll be telling us that the President do loves him some watermelon.

Pandering to whiteness will get Mittens a lot of votes, unfortunately. Annie Laurie:

A major facet of the GOP’s appeal to working-class white voters, especially white male voters, since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, has been the unspoken advertisment that voting Republican would set you off as a member of the elite… if not actually rich, or well-educated, or white, or male, at least an aspiring elitist with a clear superiority over the faceless mass of those people (non-whites, immigrants, women, DFHs, welfare queens, moochers & looters). …

… A not inconsiderable portion of the Republican voting population consists of those who would (as Davis X. Machina put it) “volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”

Annie Laurie says that much of Mitt’s un-likeability comes from the fact that he’s very bad at faking the winking bonhomie with working class whites that is the bread and butter of Republican politicians these days. And he shows us, over and over, that he’ll stoop to just about anything to appear to be one of the regular (white) guys.

So what if the “birther” bit was a low blow? The crowd loved it!

But the joke’s on them, because to people like Willard Mitt Romney, working-class whites are just employee fodder at the disposal of mine and meat packing plant owners. Or Wal-Mart. Other than that, in the eyes of the wealthy and powerful they are just moochers and takers, expecting their betters (like Romney) to educate their children and provide health care for the old folks. Working-class white is the new black.

Another Day, Another Shooting

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This time the carnage is outside the Empire State Building. The shooter has been identified as Jeffrey Johnson, 53. News stories report variously that Mr. Johnson was fired or laid off from his job either last week or last year, and he stalked and killed someone who was either his former boss or some other former co-worker.

The shooting took place this morning on the streets in the 5th Avenue/34th Street area, which means hundreds of people easily were within range of the shooter’s gun, said to be a .45-caliber semi-automatic handgun.

A construction worker alerted the NYPD, who seem to have arrived almost immediately. The cops and the shooter exchanged fire, and the shooter was killed. At least nine other people in the vincinity were wounded, but it sounds as if none of the wounds are life-threatening. It’s possible some of the wounds were from police bullets. It would be nearly impossible to fire a gun in that area and not hit somebody.

It’s a near certainty the shooter was carrying the gun illegally and probably bought it illegally as well. I’m interested in where he got it. I understand most of the illegal guns in New York City are bought legally in the South, usually Virginia, and then sold on the black market in NYC.

The New York Times is saying that Mr. Johnson had no criminal record, which makes him a law-abiding citizen. Well, until this morning.