It’s official — Republicans failed to pick up a single governorship or seat in the House or Senate.
And the Winner Is …
They’re counting the votes for the Senate Majority Leader …
MSNBC says Hoyer wins.
Update: The vote is 149 to 86, they are saying. Not close.
Update update: Chris Bowers provides perspective.
Update update update: Senator Kennedy is on MSNBC now demanding updated intelligence on Iraq. Exactly right.
Twenty Thousand Troops
Alarmed that Daddy and the Democrats were going to take away his war, Junior threw a tantrum. Simon Tisdall reports for The Guardian,
President George Bush has told senior advisers that the US and its allies must make “a last big push” to win the war in Iraq and that instead of beginning a troop withdrawal next year, he may increase US forces by up to 20,000 soldiers, according to sources familiar with the administration’s internal deliberations.
Mr Bush’s refusal to give ground, coming in the teeth of growing calls in the US and Britain for a radical rethink or a swift exit, is having a decisive impact on the policy review being conducted by the Iraq Study Group chaired by Bush family loyalist James Baker, the sources said.
Although the panel’s work is not complete, its recommendations are expected to be built around a four-point “victory strategy” developed by Pentagon officials advising the group. The strategy, along with other related proposals, is being circulated in draft form and has been discussed in separate closed sessions with Mr Baker and the vice-president Dick Cheney, an Iraq war hawk.
Point One calls for increasing U.S. troops levels in Iraq by as many as 20,000 soldiers. Point Two is about regional cooperation and asking for help from U.S.-friendly Middle Eastern nations like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Point Three calls for reconciliation among Sunni, Shia, etc. And finally —
Lastly, the sources said the study group recommendations will include a call for increased resources to be allocated by Congress to support additional troop deployments and fund the training and equipment of expanded Iraqi army and police forces. It will also stress the need to counter corruption, improve local government and curtail the power of religious courts.
Haven’t we all been talking about all these “points” since 2003? Is there anything new here? Or isn’t this the same old non-plan, just kicked up a notch?
Are not points three and four goals instead of plans? I can just see Junior slapping his knee and saying, “I know! We’ll get the Sunni and Shia to reconcile!” No problemo. Put it on the to-do list, and it’s as good as done.
Tisdall continues,
“You’ve got to remember, whatever the Democrats say, it’s Bush still calling the shots. He believes it’s a matter of political will. That’s what [Henry] Kissinger told him. And he’s going to stick with it,” a former senior administration official said. “He [Bush] is in a state of denial about Iraq. Nobody else is any more. But he is. But he knows he’s got less than a year, maybe six months, to make it work. If it fails, I expect the withdrawal process to begin next fall.”
The “last push” strategy is also intended to give Mr Bush and the Republicans “political time and space” to recover from their election drubbing and prepare for the 2008 presidential campaign, the official said. “The Iraq Study Group buys time for the president to have one last go. If the Democrats are smart, they’ll play along, and I think they will. But forget about bipartisanship. It’s all about who’s going to be in best shape to win the White House.
The official added: “Bush has said ‘no’ to withdrawal, so what else do you have? The Baker report will be a set of ideas, more realistic than in the past, that can be used as political tools. What they’re going to say is: lower the goals, forget about the democracy crap, put more resources in, do it.”
A month ago, we were being told that James Baker’s Iraq Study Group would recommend narrowing U.S. goals to stabilizing Baghdad and reaching a political accommodation with the insurgents so that troops levels could be reduced. But a funny thing happened on the way to the accommodation.
Monday, President Bush met with the Iraq Study Group. On Tuesday, Bush launched an “internal policy review” separate from the ISG. And today we’re hearing that the ISG is considering a plan more to Bush’s liking.
I mostly agree with rightie blogger Rick Moran (yes, hell did freeze over) on what’s going on here.
In effect, Bush has co-opted the ISG and forced them to concentrate on “a strategy for victory†rather than “phased withdrawals†and timetables.†…
… Bush has altered the Commission’s deliberations and changed its dynamic by engaging the bureaucracy in a long delayed (too long?) review of Iraq policy from which these recommendations have sprung. Baker’s group had little choice but to incorporate them into their report or risk being shunted to the sidelines in the policy debate.
Of course, it’s also probable Baker (or somebody) was “leaking” shit prior to the midterm elections to make people think Bush was about to change his policy. We have no way to know what options the ISG really was considering.
The ISG’s apparent shift, assuming it is a shift, happened so quickly that Sidney Blumenthal’s most recent column is already outdated. He wrote that the neocons were moving to “confound” Baker and the ISG so that troops would not be withdrawn from Iraq. It appears they won already.
By some non-coincidence, yesterday Gen. John P. Abizaid told the Senate that the phased troop withdrawals being proposed by Democratic lawmakers would be bad. However, staying doesn’t seem to be an option, either —
General Abizaid did not rule out a larger troop increase, but he said the American military was stretched too thin to make such a step possible over the long term. And he said such an expansion might dissuade the Iraqis from making more of an effort to provide for their own security.
“We can put in 20,000 more Americans tomorrow and achieve a temporary effect,†he said. “But when you look at the overall American force pool that’s available out there, the ability to sustain that commitment is simply not something that we have right now with the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.â€
Hmm, had Gen. Abizaid given that 20,000 figure to Bush or to whoever is doing the “internal review”? Did Bush decided that if he could get a “temporary effect” by sending another 20,000 troops he’d take it just to buy time? Because he is not going to withdraw from Iraq, no matter what. Not now, not in six months, not in two years. His ego is on the line, people.
You might recall that Senator John McCain has been making noises about sending more troops to Iraq. Today the editorial board of the Seattle Post-Ingelligencer published an open letter to the Senator (emphasis added):
Dear senator:
Sending in another 20,000 U.S. troops is the solution in Iraq? This is 2006, not 1966. The U.S. has had its seminal experience with what was euphemistically dubbed “escalation” in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam Memorial is notable for its chronological growth, with the names of American dead etched in walls that grow in height with each passing year of that conflict.
Perhaps your choice of arguing for an approach in Iraq supported by a mere 16 percent of the voters is your way of trying to regain your maverick status. Well, there’s maverick and there’s just plain loco.
See also Think Progress, “General Abizaid Smacks Down McCain’s Plan To Send More U.S. Troops To Iraq.”
I want to go back to what the unnamed official told Simon Tisdall — “If the Democrats are smart, they’ll play along, and I think they will. But forget about bipartisanship. It’s all about who’s going to be in best shape to win the White House.” That the posturing of politicians in Washington requires flushing away lives, and that “smart” people should think this is OK, is beyond obscene. And if Democrats do “play along,” this will mean they didn’t get the memo the voters just sent them. The BooMan writes,
You know, there is a certain breed of American that simply can’t get over the fact the American people gave up on the great experiment in Vietnam and that Congress pulled the plug on the project. They happen to be in charge of our foreign policy at the moment, which is a bit of a disappointment for patriotic Americans that kind of care about the direction, financial well-being, and international reputation of our country.
The midterm elections were kind of unambiguous when it comes to what the American people think about and hope for our great experiment in Iraq. And, you know, you go to war with the electorate that you have, not the electorate that you might wish that you have. And anyone that refuses to acknowledge that the electorate doesn’t buy into the idea that we need to continue to roll wheelbarrows of cash and promising lives into the quicksand pits of Iraq in order to fight them over there instead of in the trailer parks off our interstate exits here…well…they are just fighting Vietnam all over again.
I don’t care how great the ratings are for Fox News, the American people will eventually smell a bill of goods when it is held under the nose until the putrefaction is unmistakable.
I think the enormous majority of Americans will perceive the “20,000 troops” gambit as foot dragging, and any politician fool enough to support it is in for another thumpin’ in 2008.
We didn’t lose Vietnam because the populace lost interest. The populace lost interest because they realized they were being lied to and that the reasons we were there were different from the reasons we had been told. They lost interest because the strategy was fatally flawed and that there was no prospect that escalation would ultimately change the losing dynamics. It was a tragedy of epic proportions. So is Iraq.
Yes, as Steve Gilliard explains.
So, boys and girls, what have we learned today? We learned that the ISG is not going to produce some elegant solution to Iraq that everyone in Washington can sign off on while they hold hands and sing “Kum-by-yah.” We learned that if Daddy and his friends were trying to take Junior into hand and make him mind — they failed. We learned that some politicians in Washington have no more regard for the lives of U.S. troops and Iraqis than chopped spinach.
Next, we’re going to find out if the new Democratic majority in Congress has any more spine than the old soft-shelled minority. And we’ll learn if Congress will exert its constitutional authority and put an end to Junior’s warmongering.
More Cracked
While I was writing the last post the news came out that Trent Lott will be the Senate Minority Whip in the next term.
What can one say, but … thank you, Jesus.
The Right Blogosphere is pissed. Jeff Goldstein writes,
Now, if somebody will volunteer to dig up Dick Nixon and get him on the ticket for ‘08—maybe with Buchanan as a running mate (if Agnew’s moldering corpse proves too difficult to keep tethered to a chair in one solid piece)—the GOP can officially finish itself off with one last glut of pork, then, by way of massive party coronary, return us all to our republic’s salad days of Carteresque social and foreign policy.
I hate to say this, but Dick Nixon’s corpse would do a better job running the country than George W. Bush is doing. Not that I’m suggesting we give postmortem government a trial —
Atrois is wallowing in nostalgia (enjoy; you earned it, buddy).
Senator Mitch McConnell, lovingly described in Capitol Hill Blue as “a thug and shakedown artist,” will be Senate Majority Minority Leader. Way to go, GOP!
Cracked
I’ve been predicting the crackup of “movement” conservatism for, well, awhile. Today it’s obvious even to some pundits that The Great Disintegration has finally arrived. (Never fear; Cokie Roberts remains clueless; via Avedon.)
This is not to say that the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy will go away soon, or that David Horowitz will ooze back under his rock-of-origin. The wingnuts still have a lot of power and can still do a lot of damage. Yet their days of near-absolute dominance of national politics are behind them. For good, I say.
Floyd McKay writes for the Seattle Times,
The Achilles’ heel of the Republican “base” constructed by Karl Rove for the 2000 election and continued through 2006 was always that the strategy relied on a rock-hard minority propelled into majority status by organization and cash. …
… The best that can be done with a base of this size is to find ways to pump it up to 51 percent, which was Rove’s strategy — get one vote above 50 percent, call it a mandate, give your financiers tax breaks and tell the evangelical base how important it is.
The danger in this system is that even if you hold 70-plus percent of this base, you are still short of a majority, and if you emphasize too much your dedication to the values of the base, you will alienate moderates.
That happened on Nov. 7, and all the polls show moderates fled the GOP in droves and left the white evangelical base — loyal to the end — short of friends outside the South.
Bottom line, the righties finally swung way too far right.
By pursuing rhetoric and policies that targeted the religious right, Bush and Rove turned off many others, certainly including the well-educated, who reacted to their anti-science opposition to stem-cell research and global warming.
One of the significant developments of the midterms was the “swing” of suburban, middle-class voters to the Dems. At New York Newsday, Lawrence Levy argues:
Suburbanites are not anti-change, just anti-extremism of any stripe – whether Democrats in the ’70s or Republicans in the ’90s. They’re not anti-government. Many people move here for more and better government services. And they’re not anti-tax. They’re willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they’re getting good value.
On Tuesday, the finicky, often ticket-splitting suburbs said that President George W. Bush and his party weren’t giving them their money’s worth – not in Iraq, not on ethics, not on the economy. These voters did so because, overall, the GOP again had become too stubbornly extreme and unaccountable.
Neither party owns the suburbs, Levy says. But Republican support had been sliding in the suburbs until 9/11, after which Republican exploitation of fear and “patriotism” caused suburbanites to swing right. But that’s so over.
McKay at the Seattle Times continues,
Some traditional Republican financiers found the current Republican White House and Congress shy on traditional values of low spending and small government, and withheld checks. New-style millionaires have appeared in the high-tech industries in particular, and many see Democrats as more friendly to science and higher education, vital for American competitiveness. Voters earning more than $100,000 still voted Republican by a 52-48 margin, but that is the smallest margin since at least 1988.
Republicans have also lost their edge among better-educated Americans; college grads were split 50-50 and those with advanced degrees voted 59-41 for the Democrats. The latter is the highest since at least 1986. There are plenty of advanced degrees teaching literature and sociology, of course, but more work for law firms, big business and high-tech employers. These folks vote and they also decide where business places its campaign funds. Forty-five percent of 2006 voters have a college degree or more.
If the GOP loses its traditional strength among high-income voters and among college graduates, it is in serious trouble, more trouble than a 100-percent vote from white evangelicals could reverse.
McKay thinks the turning point for many voters was Terri Schiavo. He (and I) think that most Americans watched the “pro-life” carnival outside Schiavo’s hospital with revulsion. As Levy says, middle-class suburbanites are, above all else, anti-extremism.
In today’s Boston Globe, Derrick Jackson writes about the influence of Hurricane Katrina on the midterms. Jackson looks at the impact of the storm on urban voters —
Ron Dellums rattled off why he thought America gave control of the House and the Senate to the Democrats. He said the reason most underplayed by the media was Hurricane Katrina.
“This election was about scandal, it was about checks and balances, about Iraq,” Dellums said. “Also about Katrina. Because at a time that this country was saying that we’re in a foreign country for the purposes of security and safety, when it hit home, our response was inept, inadequate, insincere and lacking in compassion. Here’s the wealthiest nation in the world — gave a Third World response to a major catastrophe. In my opinion, Katrina was a metaphor for everything wrong in urban America. What Katrina did was expose the stark reality of the vulnerability of urban life . . . the winds of Katrina blew through the television all of the pain of urban life.”
Speaking Sunday before the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists at its annual conference at Stanford University, Dellums, 71, the former longtime congressman and mayor-elect of Oakland, said every city is a potential Katrina. Beyond the much-examined issues of preparedness and infrastructure, Dellums said Katrina gave Americans a chance to see how poverty has so many dimensions: in healthcare, education, justice, and the environment. “Katrina opens the door on the domestic front so that we have to address these issues.”
Suburbanites watched also, and even those unconcerned about poverty were disturbed by what they saw. Government spending out of control, yet corpses are left to rot on the streets of a major city? Remember what Levy wrote — “They’re willing to pay high taxes, to a point, if they feel they’re getting good value.” Pretty obvious we’re not getting good value.
Unlike libertarians, who seem not to want government to do anything, I think moderates are less concerned about “big” government than they are about “wasteful, incompetent, out-of-control” government. I suspect moderates are OK with government that is “big” enough to do what they want it to do; that is responsive to civil problems and gives good value for tax dollars spent. As I argued here, we shouldn’t be talking about “big” or “small” government, but about “stupid” or “smart” government.
If you want to know why Republicans were thumped in the midterms, read this interview of right-wing strategist Richard Viguerie by Mary Jacobs, posted on Salon two years ago. Fresh from the 2004 general election, Viguerie assured Jacobs that the right-wing revolution was about to start.
The time is now to take a very different approach to governing that this town hasn’t seen since the 1930s, when Democrats took control of the White House in the 1932 election [with FDR]. Since then, the big-government establishment has driven the political agenda. They started driving it in the early 1930s, and they pretty much drove the agenda through 1994 [when Republicans seized control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years].
Then things kind of came to a halt. It was difficult for the conservatives to implement a lot of their agenda. [With Bill Clinton’s election in 1992] they didn’t have the White House. The president could veto our legislation, as he did. And then, we had slim [conservative] majorities to none in the Senate. Now we have a comfortable margin. And George Bush has a mandate. It’s humorous and amusing to hear people in the media and liberals in the country — and even some Republicans, though not many, just one as a matter of fact — who are saying we’re not going to move on [our conservative agenda].
FYI, the “one” was Arlen Specter. Specter had just warned Bush not to nominate anti-abortion Supreme Court justices.
And you’ll notice that his staff has been backtracking all day on it. You can’t turn on the television right now without hearing someone talking about the Republicans, saying Bush has an obligation to unify the country. That’s code for “abandon your conservative allies and move to the left.” That’s what they mean by unity: Stop trying to promote a conservative agenda. That’s just what the country needs, one more politician to break his promise hours after he was reelected.
Satisfied that Specter (whom Viguerie wanted to block from the Senate Judiciary Committee chairmanship) was being whipped into line, Specter addressed the question, “Is there any future at all for moderate Republicans in the GOP?”
Absolutely. It’s just that the election was fought not on moderate Republican issues but on conservative issues. It was conservatives who made the phone calls and pounded the pavement and turned out the big vote for Bush and the Republicans in Congress. But yeah, sure, unlike [with] the Democrats, there’s a place for moderates in the Republican Party. The Democrats do not tolerate dissent in their party. You have zero chance of having a successful career in national Democratic politics if you’re not pro-abortion and [don’t] pass the homosexual litmus test. Not so in the Republican Party. Not only are you welcome, but we put you on TV. We give you platforms to speak out on.
Except that if, like Specter, you say the wrong thing, expect punishment.
If they believe in a pro-abortion position, well, we’re not going to accommodate it. Absolutely not. But we do welcome them in the party, and they have made some welcome contributions. To the extent they support lower taxes, a fiscally sound government and a strong national defense — absolutely we welcome them.
In other words, moderates are welcome into the party, as long as they agree with the extremists. OK. But there aren’t enough extremists in America to win elections. To win elections, you have to persuade (or fool) a substantial number of moderates to vote for you.
Two years ago, victorious radicals in the GOP ignored calls to “unify” the country and pushed ahead with their extremist agenda. Today some of those same righties are warning Democrats that they’d better be careful to cater to conservatives. One of the clued pundits, Harold Meyerson, says the Right is in denial.
Republicans may have lost, conservatives argue, but only because they misplaced their ideology. “[T]hey were punished not for pursuing but for forgetting conservatism,” George F. Will, conservatism’s most trenchant champion, wrote on this page last week. …
… Holding conservatism blameless for last week’s Republican debacle may stiffen conservative spines, but the very idea is the product of mushy conservative brains unwilling to acknowledge the obvious: that conservatism has never been more ascendant than during George Bush’s presidency; that the Republican Party over the past six years moved well to the right of the American people on social, economic and foreign policy; and that on Nov. 7 the American people chose a more pragmatic course. …
… [W]hat has defined conservatism in the popular mind over the past couple of years has been its willingness to enlist government to block stem cell research, stop the teaching of evolution and supersede the duties of Terri Schiavo’s husband.
This may be a conservatism that makes libertarians cringe, but it is the conservatism that dominates the Republican Party we have. Republicans generally and conservatives particularly have profited mightily from the rise and politicization of fundamentalism over the past few decades. The decimation of Republican moderates from the Northeast and Midwest in last week’s elections came at the hands of centrist and independent voters who’d had it with the Southernized religious conservatism of the Republicans’ base — and with its moderate Republican enablers.
Finally, conservatives argue that the newly elected Democrats are really conservatives, too — proof that the ideology is in no need of a tuneup. It’s true that some of the Democrats take conservative positions on guns and abortion. But it’s also true that virtually all the new Democrats look askance at free trade, want to raise the minimum wage and back a bigger role for government in making health care more affordable.
At a time when corporations abandon their employee benefits, globalization depresses wages, and individuals are compelled to shoulder more and more risk, the last thing Americans need is a government that tells them — as it told their countrymen in New Orleans last year — they’re on their own.
Righties have been spouting anti-government, drown-it-in-the-bathtub rhetoric for decades. Now they’ve had nearly six years to show Americans what they can do when they get complete control. And America just said no.
The Buck Stops You-Know-Where
See this excellent Kos diary — “NYT: Bush personally guided CIA on torture, foreign detention.”
Litle Lulu Lala
The Right Blogosphere is about to blow a fuse over tonight’s Countdown on MSNBC. A guest of Olbermann’s made a connection between the more, um, rhetorically aggressive righties like Coulter and Malkin and Chad Conrad Castagana, alleged to have sent threatening emails and white powder to various leftie icons (like Olbermann). See David Neiwert for background.
I’m sure someone will post a clip. Too juicy.
Update: See also these fine blogs — Michelle Malkin Is an Idiot; Sadly, No.
Murtha v. Hoyer
Leftie columnists and bloggers are lining up on both sides of the Murtha v. Hoyer fight, and both sides have good arguments.
On most issues I care about, Hoyer has a far better voting record than Murtha. For example, according to Project VoteSmart, in 2006 Planned Parenthood gave Hoyer a 100 percent rating; Murtha got 0. That’s pretty stark. Nearly always, that would be the end of the argument for me. And given the fact that Murtha is under an ethics cloud, one would think Hoyer would be a better choice for House Majority Leader.
And he might be, except for two issues — Iraq and corporatism. Hoyer has undermined efforts by the Dems to form a united front against Bush’s War. He also has uncomfortably close ties to big business and K Street lobbyists; last year he split with Pelosi on free-trade votes and on bankruptcy reform.
Last December, David Sirota wrote,
Here are some questions every Democrat in America should be asking: why is Steny Hoyer, the House’s second-ranking Democrat, going out of his way to undermine the Democratic Party’s message on Iraq? Why is Hoyer using his taxpayer-paid staff to place stories bragging about his efforts to shakedown corporate lobbyists? And why has Hoyer undercut his party on critical votes that would have helped Democrats craft a strong, crisp message?
I used to think it was because Steny Hoyer was just an extraordinary stupid person who had been insulated in the Beltway for so long that he was simply suffering from severe brain rot. But alas, I was stupid in thinking that. What’s really going on is very obvious: Hoyer is waging a not-so-secret, but oh-so-self-serving campaign to topple House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D) and assume the top job in the Democratic Caucus – a job he has coveted since Pelosi beat him out for whip a few years back. And he’s waging his campaign even though it is destroying his own party.
So, you see … there’s a problem.
You don’t need to look very far to see how Hoyer is doing everything he can to self-servingly undermine his party as a way to hurt Pelosi. In today’s Washington Post, for instance, the paper reported that according to congressional sources, Hoyer “told colleagues that Pelosi’s recent endorsement of a speedy withdrawal [from Iraq] combined with her claim that more than half of House Democrats support her position, could backfire on the party.” You might recall that last week it was Hoyer who, after Pelosi came out in support of Jack Murtha’s plan for an exit strategy, was quoted in the Post saying withdrawal “could lead to disaster” – a statement only a Washington politician wholly out of touch with ordinary Americans could make, considering a disaster has long been unfolding in Iraq, and considering most Americans now support an exit strategy.
Then, while Pelosi works to resist the influence of corporate interests as she goes after the GOP’s “culture of corruption,” it is Hoyer who is deliberately landing stories in newspapers about his efforts to formalize his own system of legalized bribery – putting his own campaign wallet ahead of Democrats’ efforts to develop a message of reform. Today in Roll Call, for instance, it was Hoyer who placed the story that details his efforts to “woo K Street” (aka. the corporate lobbying community). The story notes he convened a meeting of “50 business-minded Democratic consultants, lobbyists and corporate officers to get them to commit to writing checks.” And in case you didn’t think Hoyer was trying to land these stories – just check out his website where he brazenly displays a similar story, as if his corporate shakedown operation is a trophy to be marveled at – and not an albatross that directly undermines his party’s message.
Finally, it has been Hoyer who has made a point of actively working against Pelosi on major congressional votes. You remember, it was Hoyer – the Democratic Whip – who refused to whip votes together to try to defeat the corporate-written Central American Free Trade Agreement. When Pelosi tried to build opposition to the disgusting bankruptcy bill, it was Hoyer, the second-ranking Democrat in the House, who not only didn’t whip against the bankruptcy bill, but actually voted for it, after pocketing massive campaign contributions from the banking industry. While Pelosi was taking a stand by voting against the Iraq War, Hoyer was voting for the Iraq War. And when Pelosi worked to keep her caucus together in opposing the GOP Energy Bill, it was Hoyer who voted for the nauseating legislation after pocketing more than $300,000 from energy/natural resource industry cash. That legislation that literally gave away billions of taxpayer dollars to the energy industry profiteers who proceeded to bilk Americans with higher and higher gas prices.
I’m so happy to find someone else doing the research. See also by David Sirota — “DLC’s Revisionist History on Iraq Knows No Bounds” and “Big Money vs. Grassroots: The Fight For the Heart of the Democratic Party.”
What about Murtha’s ethical problems? Jonathan Weisman writes in today’s Washington Post:
Murtha, a longtime senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, has battled accusations over the years that he has traded federal spending for campaign contributions, that he has abused his post as ranking party member on the Appropriations defense subcommittee, and that he has stood in the way of ethics investigations. Those charges come on top of Murtha’s involvement 26 years ago in the FBI’s Abscam bribery sting.
Ain’t nobody pure. I’m not going to make excuses for Murtha. I do think that Hoyer’s ties to K Street and Big Corporations are just as troubling as the allegations against Murtha, if not more so. In the ethics department, I’d say it’s a wash. But some disagree. In some quarters, supporting legislation that hurts the public but favors big-ticket campaign contributors doesn’t register as an ethics problem.
“Pelosi’s endorsement suggests to me she was interested in the culture of corruption only as a campaign issue and has no real interest in true reform,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a Democratic-leaning group. “It is shocking to me that someone with [Murtha’s] ethics problems could be number two in the House leadership.”
David Corn writes at The Nation:
CREW’s low-down on Murtha charges that he abused his position as the senior member of the defense appropriations subcommittee to steer contracts to military firms represented by his brother, a registered lobbyist. The report also notes that Murtha routinely inserted funding earmarks into defense spending bills for contractors that funded his campaigns and hired a lobbying firm run by a former aide on the defense appropriations subcommittee.
Murtha, according to Sloan, was also instrumental in undermining the House ethics committee. In the late 1990s, he successfully pushed (with other legislators) to change the committee’s rules to prevent it from accepting ethics complaints from parties outside Congress. He also pressed Democratic leaders to name Representative Alan Mollohan of West Virginia the senior Democrat of the ethics committee. Mollohan has had his own ethics troubles–which have forced him off the ethics committee–and is a member of CREW’s Top (or Bottom) 20. (See here.) “Murtha really doesn’t like the ethics committee,” says Sloan, speculating this may be due to Murtha’s involvement in the Abscam bribery scandal of the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The ethics committee chose not to file charges against Murtha, after which the panel’s special counsel resigned in protest.) “Murtha seems like a bad choice from our perspective,” Sloan said.
CREW’s reaction to Murtha is being robustly linked on the Right Blogosophere. We know how much righties care about ethics.
The fight to be Pelosi’s No. 2 has its odd dynamics. Hoyer is regarded as a centrist sort of Democrat. He’s no virgin when it comes to the institutional corruptions of House, readily hitting up corporate interests for campaign cash. But Hoyer has not been accused of ethical violations. Though Murtha advocates a get-out-of-Iraq-now position, he is a hawkish conservative who has attacked Hoyer for being too liberal.
By publicly endorsing Murtha–who has voted more with the Republicans than almost every other House Democrat–Pelosi has backed the fellow who has been less loyal to the party, who has engaged in liberal-baiting, and who is widely considered to be the underdog in the race. Murtha is indeed the Democrats’ leading critic of the war, and he and Pelosi, another war opponent, have found themselves in the same foxhole. (Hoyer, like Murtha, voted to give Bush the authority to attack Iraq, but he has not turned on the war and has criticized Democratic calls for withdrawal.) Perhaps Pelosi figured that with the Iraq war likely to be the major source of dispute between her and the White House (and congressional Republicans), she needed an antiwar hawk right by her side. But much of this present tussle might be more personal than policy. Pelosi and Hoyer have long been rivals; she defeated Hoyer to become the Democratic minority leader.
At this point, you might be asking yourself, why not ditch both bums and get somebody else? I don’t have an answer. You’ll have to ask someone who understands political infighting in the House.
But here are two ringing Murtha endorsements from bloggers I respect. First, Taylor Marsh:
Melanie Sloan of CREW talks about it being “shocking” that Murtha might be the number two person in leadership. Well, I wonder if Ms. Sloan would find it “shocking” walking in to a hospital room finding a soldier with his legs blown off and telling him that his brothers in arms had to redeploy a fifth time because Democrats didn’t have the muscle in the leadership to get us out of Iraq.
The ethics issues swirling aroung the Iraq war smell like a four year old dead carcass, but I don’t see anyone holding Bush or Cheney accountable or stopping them from running an undending war that went south a long time ago.
Ouch.
The real issue is that Murtha gets it. His information comes from the military and the top brass who couldn’t talk to Rumsfeld. They helped change his mind on the war. He hasn’t shut up since. …
… When Murtha stood up on the House floor almost one year ago he was met swiftly by the swiftboaters, who mounted a campaign against him all the way into election day. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not holding Murtha up as some paragon of virtue. But he’s a hero on Iraq that brought us all to victory last Tuesday. Kids are dying and there is no good road through, no good choices. Murtha knows it and he can make the case. He can also stand up to anything Bush or anyone else offers up and do so forcefully.
But there is a deeper problem. It’s about Goldwater-Nichols and what happened to it under Rumsfeld’s watch. It was implemented after the failed Desert One mission to get our hostages out of Iran. But Rumsfeld’s arrogance and the fact that he ignored it is part of why we’re in this mess today, which likely led to the military going to Murtha and why he finally spoke out. Rumsfeld silenced the military and they had nowhere else to go, which had a chilling affect down the line. Rumsfeld broke the spirit of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, if not more.
The Goldwater-Nichols Act provides that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has a direct line of communication to the President. Rummy ignored that, Taylor says, and saw to it that Bush got only information that was filtered through him. And so the military went to Murtha.
The other Murtha endorsement comes from Steve Gilliard:
CREW is worried about earmarks, I’m worried about dead and wounded GI’s. I can see their point, I just don’t give a shit about it.
If they want to worry about earmarks, fine. But to me, I am sick and fucking tired of seeing teenagers getting their skulls replaced and learning to walk on artificial legs. I’m tired of PTSD stories from kids who aren’t old enough to rent a car. I am tired of seeing grieving parents collapsing at their teenager’s grave side.
If making Jack Murtha majority leader will make that clear, to Bush if no one else, that the priority is Iraq, and that the war MUST end, then I’m for Murtha or anyone else who can make that happen.
We’ve been complaining since 2002 that Dems are spineless on Iraq. I think the first order of business for Democrats in Congress is to unite on Iraq and push for a timely withdrawal. If the choice is between Murtha and Hoyer, and Hoyer might undermine that effort — and history says he will — then Murtha’s our man. We may very well revisit that decision once we’re out of Iraq. But let’s get out of Iraq first.
Update: See bolobiffin at Smirking Chimp.
Murtha’s got some problems with earmarking, but Pelosi also means to fix earmarking for good … How is she going to do it? By making her first agenda item a rule change that lawmakers who earmark be identified publicly … It is an intriguing one-two combination. By installing Murtha as her Majority Leader, and then making his weakest issue out of bounds for the incoming Congress, Pelosi is making a strong case to be the remedy for a hopelessly corrupt governmental culture. She is saying Game Over, and she means it.
The next two years are going to be interesting.
Elephant Autopsy
Liz Sidoti of the Associated Press reports that Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida will replace Ken Mehlman as chair of the Republican National Committee.
Martinez started slowly in the Senate where he was embarrassed by a one-page unsigned memo that originated in his office. Written by a Martinez aide and disavowed by Senate Republicans, the memo laid out the political benefits to getting involved in the fate of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman whose end-of-life battle became a rallying cry for conservatives.
“This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue,” said the memo. Its author resigned.
A quick cruise around the rightie blogs tells me “the base” is way underwhelmed. They’re pissed because Martinez, who immigrated from Cuba in 1962, is a moderate on immigration. Allahpundit:
Hot Air commenters agree: it’s an awful pick, transparently aimed at appealing to pro-amnesty Hispanic voters. If the GOP goes ahead and puts Boehner and Blunt back in place in the minority leadership, you’re looking at a very dire electoral situation in 2008.
It’s probably no surprise that the GOP chose someone anti-gay after rumors had swirled for years about the exact sexual orientation of outgoing RNC chair Ken Mehlman (Mehlman publicly avoided the question for years).
But even more interesting is that a top staffer on Martinez’s Senate campaign, Kirk Fordham, was also the former chief of staff to child sex predator ex-congressman Mark Foley. Foley represented Florida in the House. Martinez represents Florida in the Senate.
I’m just saying…
I’m saying the Republicans are flapping around like a headless chicken. And who is in charge these days, anyway? President Bush is still, I assume, the official head of the party, but he’s a head that few seem to be following at the moment. Even the VRWC media machine is abandoning him. The Bush cult of personality appears to be evaporating rapidly, which is a good thing. But the Republicans have invested everything in Bush for the past six years, and now their investment is deflating like a failed soufflé. What are they going to do?
More post-election commentary — Chuck Todd writes,
When a political party gets shellacked, the intra-party feud becomes dominated by the base, not the moderates. The base will swear, in this case, that the party needed more true-blue conservatives running, or that it should have been more conservative in its congressional governance. And then these losses would have been avoided.
There are some shreds of truth in that thinking, but the GOP will only isolate itself even more if it takes a turn to the right. Republicans will not regain the majority if they continue to grow away from the inner-suburban voter. Missouri and Virginia, for instance, sent that message loud and clear.
My survey of the Right Blogosphere tells me righties want to erase the past couple of years. That not being an option, they still want hard-Right positions from the GOP. I’m sure the Christian Right is as militant as ever. Republicans must choose between appeasing its whackjob base and getting elected outside the Deep South. Will they (date I say it?) choose to move left to win back independent voters? Will they have to mirror the Clinton strategy of taking the base for granted (who else are they going to vote for?) and moving right?
Todd also provides evidence that President Bush’s last-minute trips to Missouri and Montana helped push those Senate seats into Democrats’ laps. In spite of what we were being told about a last-minute Republican “surge,” the Democrats actually picked up most of the last-minute votes in those states, according to Todd.
It’s hard not to look at the White House and wonder if it was flying blind. For 18 months, there was evidence that this was going to be a tough midterm thanks to basic history (six-year itch, after all) and the war in Iraq. So why didn’t Karl Rove attempt to do what he did in ’02 and ’04 and dictate the terms of the debate? It was clear this was going to be a national election, yet the White House stuck to its “stay the course” guns for way too long. Northeastern Republicans were desperate for Bush to pivot on Iraq and he just wouldn’t do it. When he finally did, it was too late.
The political arm of the Bush White House doesn’t usually miss this badly, but it appears this election was misjudged from the beginning. Maybe they believed all the “genius” books that were being written about them.
Todd predicts that “cooler heads will prevail,” and that Republicans will be thinking “moderate” (or a facsimile thereof) in 2008, even though this will alienate the base. But Karl Rove may still try to run Republican politics his way.
Rove’s divide-and-conquer political strategy, his insistence that Republican candidates embrace the war in Iraq as a campaign issue, his supremely self-assured predictions of victory — all were proven deeply, even delusionally wrong last week.
His prediction that Republicans would retain both houses of Congress, in particular, is hardly explicable by “bad math” and Mark Foley.
Either Rove lied or he’s clueless. Or both. But will that tarnish Rove’s reputation in Washington? Maybe not.
Rove, at least for the moment, remains too powerful to be ignored. Plus, he knows how to play the press like a fiddle. Right now, he’s on a rare, on-the-record charm offensive — and so far, it seems to be going pretty well.
Froomkin quotes several other analysts who say — as I wrote yesterday — that Rove is making excuses for his campaign decisions. For example, Peter Baker:
The Architect, as President Bush once called him, has a theory for why the building fell down. “Get me the one-pager!” he cried out to an aide, who promptly delivered a single sheet of paper that had been updated almost hourly since the midterm elections with a series of statistics explaining that the ‘thumping’ Bush took was not such a thumping after all.
The theory is this: The building’s infrastructure was actually quite sound. It was bad luck and seasonal shifts in the winds that blew out the walls — complacent candidates, an ill-timed Mark Foley page scandal and the predictable cycles of history. But the foundation is fine: “The Republican philosophy is alive and well and likely to reemerge in the majority in 2008.”
The rest of Washington might think Tuesday’s elections were a repudiation of Rove’s brand of politics, but Rove does not. . . .
Rove’s brand of politics aims to sharpen differences with the opposition, energize the conservative base and micro-target voters to pick off selected parts of the other side’s constituency. As he has in past elections, Rove designed a strategy to paint Democrats as weak on national security and terrorism, the “party of cut and run.”
In an expansive interview last week, Rove said that strategy was working until the House page sex scandal involving ex-representative Foley (R-Fla.) put the Republican campaign “back on its heels,” as he put it. “We were on a roll, and it stopped it,’ he said. ‘It revived all the stuff about Abramoff and added to it.”
This may be just bravado, but I’m betting it isn’t. As I wrote yesterday, Rove gained his reputation as a political genius by picking off Democratic incumbents in Southern states. Right now he’s in a place he’s never been before — standing beside an incumbent whose incompetence has been laid bare for the whole world to see. Is Rove smart enough to realize he needs to re-think his strategy? He doesn’t appear to be.
… here is Rove’s extraordinary explanation to Allen of his pre-election predictions:
[H]e does not believe his data let him down. “My job is not to be a prognosticator,” he said. “My job is not to go out there and wring my hands and say, ‘We’re going to lose.’ I’m looking at the data and seeing if I can figure out, Where can we be? I told the president, ‘I don’t know where this is going to end up. But I see our way clear to Republican control.'”
Kenneth Walsh writes for U.S. News and World Report:
[Rove] is telling GOP operatives and organizers that things weren’t as bad as they seemed and that the news media have been exaggerating the extent of GOP losses.
“There was a rush to say there was a huge wave against the Republican Party,” says a Republican strategist who is close to Rove. “That was premature.”
For example, Rove says many races went down to the wire–there were 35 House contests in which the winner got 51 percent of the vote or less–suggesting that the country is still closely divided between Republicans and Democrats. In the 18 races decided by 8,000 or fewer votes, the GOP won 12 and lost six, Rove says. Rove argues that there was a bad “environment” for the GOP, one marked by stories of scandal and corruption, intensified by the unpopularity of the Iraq war and President Bush.
Rove estimates that 10 House seats were lost to the GOP specifically because of one-time scandals and that those losses weren’t due to any flawed strategy on his part. Rove also says the results were not outside the norm in which a president’s party generally suffers losses in congressional elections in his sixth year. In addition, Rove tells glum Republicans that the party “saved” eight to 14 GOP candidates because of its vaunted 72-hour plan to get out the GOP vote.
However, Walsh says, there is much grumbling within the GOP. Bush critics complain Rove just continues to do what worked for him in the past and is too inflexible to change his tactics to match changing reality.
John Dickerson wrote last week that beltway Republicans were not blaming Karl Rove on last week’s loss. As reality sinks in many of them are likely to re-think their position. But George W. Bush is still head of the party, and Karl Rove is still his political strategist. Unless, somehow, another leader emerges before 2008, for the next couple of years its going to be every elephant for itself.
Who’s Your Daddy?
Via Steve M., Michael Goodwin writes in the New York Daily News,
Republicans, with their macho men and muscular policy prescriptions, are in decline because they are out of answers. Dems are getting better at seizing their opportunities, and doing it with women playing a leading role.
Put another way, Mommy is taking over because Daddy screwed up.
Oh, please. Macho men as in
or maybe
or
?
And let us not forget
… as opposed to Democratic girlie-men like
or
or
?
Give me a break.
Steve M. writes,
Goodwin seems to be using “Mommy Party” as a compliment, which may make him the first member of the political class ever to do so, and maybe that’s good — but I worry, because if voters think the Mommies have taken over, soon this will be declared a huge problem, a threat to our national greatness, and pundits (seemingly from across the spectrum because they’ll include quite a few who claim to be liberals) will be scanning the horizon looking for signs that the demasculinized national nightmare is not permanent and “men are back.” (You remember that phrase from the fireman-fetishizing immediate aftermath of 9/11.) The last thing we need right now is a punditocracy-wide search for macho men to make everything all better — that’s basically how we got into this mess.
There’s a nice profile of Senator-elect Jon Tester in today’s New York Times, btw. It begins,
When he joins the United States Senate in January, big Jon Tester — who is just under 300 pounds in his boots — will most likely be the only person in the world’s most exclusive club who knows how to butcher a cow or grease a combine.
The Republicans have Ahhhnold, but he represents the Hollywood version of manliness. Our guys are the real deal. They don’t have to pose with firemen or borrow somebody’s tool belt to look manly.
I don’t like the “Daddy Party,” “Mommy Party” stuff anyway, and not just because it paints Dems as wusses. If politicians are like parents, then citizens must be the children. Conservatives might think that way, but American liberalism is based on the understanding that citizens are grown-ups who can govern themselves, and they do so through representative government.
Someday I should write a post arguing that male righties have a fetish about manliness because they are so unsure of their own. I sincerely believe that’s true. Until then, do us all a favor and slap down the “mommy party, daddy party” nonsense whenever you run into it, OK?