Essential Pawlenty: Ya, I Got Nothin'

If the Tea Bagging parties didnt tip you off the GOP is grasping for whatever they can find to return to relevance. Enter Tim Pawlenty "moderate" Republican governor of Minnesota. Pawlenty is a rumored pretender to the GOP throne. Given this its not surprising to see him giving an interview to the NYT about how Republicans are going to make a stunning comeback and return to power. The problem? He has no fucking clue.

One of the clear problems that the Republicans have is that they havent come to the table with anything that resembles new ideas. They rely on the old Reagan trope of tax cuts, spending, cuts, god, gays, guns. We should expect that a future leader of the republican party like Pawlenty pretends to should be someone with new ideas. Pawlenty should bring new policy focuses that enable him to persuade a public still wary of republicans and their policies. From the interview here is what Pawlenty says about his vision for getting the GOP back on top,

“Some of it will be the inevitable pendulum swinging back,” he said. “The Democrats, being in full control of the White House and Congress, will inevitably overplay their hands. It is the predictable thing that happens when you have total power. They will go too far, and there will be an inevitable reaction to that.”

“Feeding off what they do wrong is not a strategy,” he said. “We may get some tailwind from that, but it can’t be the central tenet of our strategy.”

But he said he was concerned with “the utter lack of concern they seem to have for the deficit and debt — and I don’t point my finger just at President Obama,” noting the steadily escalating deficits during the years of Republican government as well. He said Mr. Obama has offered the country a “very expansive view of government that I don’t agree with.”

And he said that Mr. Obama had failed to take advantage of his political capital to force Congress, for example, to cut back on earmarks. “He can get almost anything he wants out of this Congress,” Mr. Pawlenty said.

“My prediction is you’re going to see some near-term uptick in the economy — regardless of these policies, just because it’s the nature of these things,” he said. “But the thing to keep an eye on is the boomerang effect of this massive infusion of money. I’m not just talking about the stimulus bill and the spending bill, but what’s coming. The Big Kahuna health bill. The Big Kahuna energy bill.”

“Our strategy can’t be just pointing out the negatives of President Obama’s agenda,” he said. “We have to have our own agenda and our own ideas. I think the party has done an okay — but not great — job of responding to the president.”

“You are going to have a second round of problems,” he said, “and those problems are going to be directly attributable to the misguided and over-baked fiscal policies that you are seeing right now.”

Earmarks, Deficits, Liberal-Over Reach, Some Sort of Problem because of energy and health care reform. If those sound vaguely familiar they are. Pawlenty says that the republican strategy cannot be to simply sit back and wait for time but really thats all these topics point to as a strategy. No where in this article is the hint of something new in policy terms from Pawlenty. Instead we see the same thing every other conservative has offered from the days of reagan--and for good reason.

“I think, for Republicans, it has to be about staying true to our values and principles, but more effectively applying those to the emerging issues of our time,” he said. “I know that sounds simplistic, but it is the blocking and tackling of how you get things done.”

If only we could talk more effectively and sell it better conservatism would succeed. Maybe its not fair to be so hard on Pawlenty. He doesnt seem to understand that the central idea of Conservatism is a counter reaction to progress and change. Conservatives look to the past, yes that includes fiscal conservatives. They all want to go back to pre New Deal america with the freedom of contract and no safety net. Pawlenty is not the future of the Republican part because he simply lacks innovation. To lead a political party out of the wilderness requires new thinking and Pawlenty just isnt providing it.

Pawlenty said some of the right things but when provided with the opportunity to show off some real policy innovations Pawlenty had nothing. So if your looking for Pawlenty to ride to the rescue of the GOP it doesnt look like its going to happen. His only prescription for getting the GOP back is, time.

Read more...

Is there a price for obstructionism?

Steve Benen has a post up regarding the failure of the GOP to consider moderating after its heavy rejection at the ballot box this year. The post progresses as you might expect with a quote from a moderate followed by the absolute rejection of that quote my the rest of the GOP. What is interesting though is the update,

Post Script: The Times piece added, "It remains to be seen how aggressively Republicans will try to wield the filibuster threat. They have recently signaled they will fight Obama's economic recovery plan if it moves too quickly. But there are political risks if the GOP is seen as obstructionist at a time when voters are clamoring for economic relief and change."

Maybe, but that risk existed in the last Congress and Republicans didn't care. And if the GOP leadership is convinced that it has to be even more conservative to win in the future, their embrace of obstructionism may be unaffected.

To say the Republicans did not care is an understatement. Here is a chart produced by Nate Silver at 538 to show the progression of the filibuster over time.




As you can see the filibuster and the cloture vote have exploded in the most recent congress. The GOP was also decimated in the most recent election. The problem is that they did not lose this election in any part because of the obstructionist tendencies they displayed. The framing of the filibuster is such that the media reports it as a failure of the Democrats to get enough votes to pass a bill. This has essentially raised the threshold for passing legislation from 51 votes to 60 votes. Yglesias explained the dynamic perfectly last year,

It seems, though, that the GOP has decided that if they use filibusters to obstruct congressional action that the press will keep reporting this in a "congress fails to do X" kind of way rather than a "GOP obstructionism" kind of way, which makes filibusters a win-win for Republicans.

The evidence points to the idea that there is in fact very little to no price being paid by the GOP for obstructing the Democratic senate. The biggest threat that the obstructionist Senators face is that they fail in their reelection bids but the Dem gains were so great in the last election it is hard to imagine that the GOP continues to lose more senate seats next time around based on obstructionism. The most obstructionist senators are coming from the most conservative states so the odds of them getting tossed out is not very high.

The conservatives are going to continue on the obstructionist path until something changes to stop them. The options for that are basically two fold. the first is to simply get rid of the filibuster all together. The argument for this is that the passing of legislation already has enough road blocks to keep the bad legislation out. I am dubious about this especially because of the recent passage of the FISA bill but its not like the filibuster was effective in stopping that. it seems like it is only employed to stop things progressives might actually like.

The second option is to require that the GOP actually filibuster. Currently they just announce that they are filibustering something and Reid treats it as a real filibuster. Instead we might like to see the GOP up there reading the phonebook for 48 hours and reenacting Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That would change the media reporting to the actual filibuster instead of the failed vote for cloture. As added bonus it would be entertaining as hell.

Of course now that we have a Democratic president the Republicans might be a little more wary about blocking popular legislation. As long as the focus is placed on the failure of the dems and Obama to do anything about our situation the Republicans can continue to block to their hearts desire without any price.

Read more...

"Barack the Magic Negro"

I am not sure how many people have seen the movie Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby. It is famous for the song White Christmas. It also famous for a different song, Abraham. to give you an idea of this song and scene here is a review of the dvd,

Still, there are a few duds, the most notorious being a shockingly dated minstrel-show ode to Abraham Lincoln. As Crosby and Reynolds sing "Abraham" in blackface, Holiday Inn's African-American mammy (Louise Beavers) serenades her two small children in the kitchen: "When black folks lived in slavery / Who was it set the darkie free? / Abraham! Abraham!" The scene is a jaw-dropper, alright, but at least it's memorable.

It was that scene which put in a mind to discuss the recent racial flap. Racial discussions are always difficult because of the heated passions they arouse. The controversy surrounding the offensive song "Barack, the Magic Negro" has generated similar passions on both sides of the fight. "Magic Negro" is really a cringe worthy phrase on par with the Abraham number from Holiday Inn. Everyone is well aware that it is not ok to go around referring to african americans as "negros" just as its not ok to go around performing in black face for minstrel shows.. Those who do are trying to make a point that our society has become to "politically correct". This is not one of those phrases that straddles the border between ok and not ok. Negro is as dated as black face.

"Magic Negro" might as well be replaced by what it really means, Uncle Tom. In the outrage over the distribution of the song many people have not looked at exactly where the phrase comes from. It is a cinematic terms for a kind, older, non-sexualized black man who plays a mentor role to a white protagonist. Think Will Smith's character in "The Legend of Bagger Vance". There is no legitimate defense of the phrase applied to barack obama. To label him thusly as the right does is deeply offensive to blacks and whites a like.

Would these same people be happy to have a song written about their wives calling them a "happy whore"? no. That would be completely out of bounds and offensive. Each of the labels Uncle Tom, Magic Negro, Happy Whore are all offensive to those who are characterized as such and should not be allowed. Its not funny. That RNC chair candidate Chip Saltsman thought that not only was it funny but that it was a great Christmas gift says a lot about where the Republican Party is.

"I think most people recognize political satire when they see it," Tennessee Republican Chip Saltsman told CNN. "I think RNC members understand that."

The republican party is facing the challenge of covering up their lily white party. As the NYT reported when discussing this story,

The dispute illustrates a larger Republican challenge in the months ahead: how to oppose the first black president without seeming antiblack. There are no black Republicans in Congress, and a party spokesman could name only 2 blacks among the 168 members of the national committee. Katon Dawson, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party, resigned from an all-white country club in preparing for his campaign to be party chairman.

There is a deeply unsettling racist tinge to the republican party right now. Im not sure if this is a symptom or a cause of their relegation to a southern party but if they hope to grow back to a national party they need to rethink their racial attitude. Otherwise they risk looking just as dated as the black face minstrel show from Holiday Inn.

Read more...

Gop still has no clue where they are going.

Matt Taibi has a piece in rolling stone on the McCain campaign that is classic Taibi. Biting, sardonic and generally painfully true. It lays open the GOP of 2008 as party without a plan and without a clue.

They lost in every way imaginable, on every political front. The symbol of their anti-gay crusade, Colorado congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, was beheaded. The party that had made so much hay running against Mexicans saw noted anti-immigration crusader Bill Sali of Idaho ousted along with several other members of the Immigration Reform Caucus. The GOP's grasp on the so-called "moral values" issue likewise went up in roaring flames, with Rep. Vito Fossella of Staten Island the poster child — his morals were once so perfect that he refused to be seen with his gay sister, and now he's a national joke, bounced after being caught drunk driving and having unprotected, babymaking sex with a married Air Force officer.

The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

I witness the whole pathetic mess summed up a week before the election, on a baseball field in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. The campaign has scheduled an outdoor rally, with a joint appearance by McCain and Palin, at this crucial moment in the race. But now there is driving snow and sleet, trees downed on roads all around, and the campaign — with no alternate indoor plan — is forced to cancel the event at the last minute. I watch as locals keep pulling up to the field, looking for the candidate, a lonely, rain-soaked "Country First" banner whipping back and forth above the stage. The whole scene captures the essence of the McCain run perfectly: Instead of a plan, they had an endless succession of dumb ideas scrapped at the 11th hour in favor of even dumber ones.

It was like that all election season. McCain kicked off his campaign with a stump speech that emphasized his inspirational personal story and experience. Then he picked someone even less experienced than Obama as his running mate and switched to a strategy of attacking his opponent's relationships with people like Bill Ayers. When that petered out, he switched to a new line of attack, trotting out the socialism business and claiming Obama was running for the office of "redistributionist-in-chief." The McCain camp tried running against the press, they tried running against Washington, they tried running against the Bush administration, they even tried running against the "liberal feminist agenda" — the latter just a few weeks after Sarah Palin called herself a feminist.

That was then and this is now. Certainly the GOP must have learned from the disaster that was for them the 2008 election. Umm well no. When democrats went out of power many of them said it was because they acted too much like republicans. they sacrificed core beliefs for some ill defined belief that america is a center right country that hates everything the dems stood for. These people were right that acting too much like republicans was a bad idea because the american people already agreed with the dems position on issue after issue. the dems were literally taking the less popular stances out of fear.

Republicans have a different problem in that the vast majority of americans dont agree with them or their core beliefs. still that has not stopped people from advocating the purge like Katon Dawson, the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party,

Renew our commitment to our Party’s timeless principles...by reconfirming our commitment to be the party of smaller government, lower taxes, individual freedom, strong national security, respect for the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, the importance of family and the exceptionalism of America.

How many more elections must one party lose before it makes a real change? we might have a chance to find out.

Read more...

Its all they know how to do.

2000 and 2004 were elections where the country felt it was in a relatively good place. Sure 2004 had the War in Iraq but the war was not universally loathed at that point in time and Bush still had a 50% approval rating. Bush strategist Karl Rove ran a campaign based largely on smoke and mirrors. He focused on cultural and other distraction issues designed to fire up his base and win on turn out and voter suppression.

Fast forward to 2008 ans Rove protege Steve Schmidt is running the McCain campaign. Schmidt is a veteran of the Bush campaign and he headed up the war room in 04. He spent his time learning at Rove's right hand. He has a masters in GOP campaigning. Unfortunately for him the election is not taking place in 2000 or 2004. The country is in a bad way. For the first time in a generation an election is about more than cultural issues. Sadly for the GOP those are the only things they know how to do.

Commentators and Bloggers have been looking at the mccain campaign and asking why they persist with ayers, acorn, etc when that stuff is totally unimportant to the public. it seems to make no sense. The answer is that this is all these people know how to do. it has been their specialty for the past two decades. It is all they have ever needed. Now though they are being asked to do something new and different and they are totally out of their depth. So they try to up the game on what they do know getting slimier and slimier. Unsurprisingly they are not succeeding. Schmidt and co is out of their depth.

This of course frustrates them. They lash out and they look desperate, because they are. They simply dont have a handle on what to do against obama and in the face of an actual crisis because they have waged the past elections with smoke and mirrors. When it comes time to deal with problems though tricks dont get it done.

Read more...

Palin's Political Future

I am going to go out on a long and thin limb and say that John McCain is not going to win the presidency and that sarah palin will not become his vice president. So where would that leave her especially in light of the recent troopergate report? Conservatives, well some of them anyway, seem to think she has the chops to make a run in 2012. These people see her as the ultimate GOP candidate who cannot fail in her quest for the presidency do to her small town, ultimate americaness...or something. Others like kos see a future where Gov. Palin is having a tough reelection campaign for the Governorship of Alaska before she ever gets a shot at the top job. I have to go with the later.

The arguments for a palin 2012 run are generally based on the palin effect at the height of the convention bounce. If you have heard Pat Buchannon speak about Palin you can understand this line of thought. Palin did connect with everyone and everyone loves her. She turned it around for mccain but the economy went south and that turned the poll numbers. Without that unforeseeable economic news Palin would be celebrated as Hugh Hewitt intended

"The idea was to tell the story behind the effect that Sarah Palin has had on this election and how it is and why it is that she has basically turned the election around for McCain and why it is that she is resonating with so many people in the country," he said. "The intent was to finish the book by a week after the election, and to have it out before the inauguration."

Was that the plan regardless of who won?

"The book obviously presumed [a McCain-Palin victory]," Mr. Yates said, "but the theory was that her impact on this election will have a lasting effect regardless -- that she's not gonna go anywhere, that she's just gonna be a figure in G.O.P. politics going forward."

the topic of a palin in 2012 was addressed by Chris Cillizza in the Wapo shortly after her debate performance and he provides an excellent rundown of the conventional wisdom on this topic.

Palin's performance last night -- particularly her willingness to stand by conservative principles on things such as gay marriage and do it with a smile (and even a wink) -- further endeared her to not only conservative opinion makers but the rank and file GOPers who will play an outsized role in picking the next nominee of the party in 2012 if McCain comes up short in 32 days time.

...

What Palin did last night is bring her own national prospects back from the brink of disaster with a performance that -- while occasionally exposing her decided lack of knowledge on certain issues -- managed to keep her star ascendant for a party that may well be looking for a new face to lead it on Nov. 5.

Palin is clearly likable, charismatic and telegenic. In an insta-poll conducted by CNN, more than eight in ten people who watched the debate said she did better than they had expected while just seven percent said she had done worse. Asked which candidate was more likable, 54 percent chose Palin while 36 percent opted for Biden.

The CNN poll also showed the obvious weaknesses that Palin must address between now and 2012 -- or whenever the next time the Republican presidential nomination is open. Less than half (46 percent) of the sample said they thought Palin was qualified to be president while 53 percent said she want not. (Interestingly, those numbers were largely unchanged from a pre-debate poll in which 42 percent said she was qualified to be president and 54 percent said she was not.)

And so, judging from the polls, Palin's image to the average American is as a likable Republican who probably needs a bit more seasoning. Sub out "Republican" for "Democrat" in that last sentence and you have the general sentiment about former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards following his 2004 run for president and subsequent vice presidential bid alongside Sen. John Kerry (Mass.).

Clearly this is an incredibly shallow treatment of the situation. Cillizza cites the 80%+ number who felt she did better than expected but that should not have been hard given all she had to do was avoid becoming a drooling post-lobotomy patient wandering around the stage. I mean her expectations were so low 3rd graders would exceed them. Palin basically received an A for effort and a thanks for participating trophy.

The poll numbers indicate that people felt she was not that bad but still unqualified. The crux of the cillizza argument is that after losing palin can go off and learn a couple of national issues to come back next time and try again. She can come back and be a super serious candidate with lots of gravitas overcoming the "perception" that she is unqualified and unable to lead. However, we need to take a closer look at this argument that she is still connecting with the public and that everyone likes her.

If we take a look at the dkos daily tracker her current favorable unfavorable levels are at -20. Looking at the internals of the poll only 36% have a favorable opinion of her while 56% do not. That would take some serious rehab before she is legitimate contender on a national stage. Her numbers are held up by the die hard gop support for her otherwise she would be at bush levels. John Edwards was never that unpopular. Regardless of what people may have thought at an earlier point in time palin is not well liked. In fact i would go so far as to assert that a good portion of the country reviles her.

The advocates for the 2012 palin run are also ignoring the fact that palin has become a national joke in many ways. Everyone in the country can tell she has little to no clue what is going on. They know she refuses to do press conferences and that the only interview she can do is with sean hannity or the afore mentioned hugh hewitt. This of course plays right into the victimhood ideology she likes to use but that only work with her base and not the rest of the country. she will have a diehard base of support but not be able to reach beyond that.

Palin will not be able to escape the legacy of the mccain campaign. her role has been as the attack dog. she is the person most identified with the spreading of the ayers attack and with inciting the rapid gopers to a potentially dangerous level. Her image is that of a sarcastic, small minded person. There are more than enough quotes from this election cycle to prove it.

Palin will also be unable to shake the troopergate report. a side effect of waging a war against the media is that when you want to have a particular thing spun in your direction they become less inclined to do so. McCain gets away with this because he spent years cultivating the press and convincing them he was a great guy who deserved respect. Palin simply went straight to the hate. She has no reserve of good will among the media personalities. So instead of the troopergate report being labeled as partisan it gets the bipartisan label it deserves. It is known as the "partisan troopergate report". Their spin is undercut from the get go. it is now public record that palin "violated the public trust" and abused her power.

The palin 2012 idea also relies on palin doing something she has heretofore been unwilling to do, be professional. Palin has yet to demonstrate an ability to inspire confidence in her capacity to learn what is required of her. By this i mean that everything we know about her has shown she is more interested in the perks and attention than in the actual job of governing. She just does not appear dedicated enough. In a post Bush world i think it will be much tougher to get by without a demonstrable depth of policy on something. Cillizza seems to think palin can go away and learn this but i dont see any evidence of her willingness or ability to do so. Remember that she has to overcome the already established perception she is a ditz.

Most of these arguments are why a potential 2012 run would be a failure. However that does not eliminate the possibility of an attempt. The conservative movement still loves her and that more than anything else makes her a future player. We saw how effective huckabee could be with just the religious base. He effectively drew mccain right on many issues and created the meta narrative that mccain has base problems that eventually forced him into the palin pick. Conservatism can never fail you can only fail conservatism. So look for a doubling down on exactly what is driving people away from the party, sarah palin.

Read more...

What? they actually believe this stuff?!

As the McCain campaign becomes more desperate while watching their chances at victory diminish they have turned to virulent smears. Sarah Palin, Cindy McCain, John McCain, and their surrogates have been attacking Obama, saying that he is palling around with terrorists, does not see america like the rest of us, and wondering in a rhetorical way whether we know the real obama. The rallies are less political in nature than they are tribal, primitive anger fests. They have removed all the limits in an attempt to portray obama as a terrorist, muslim, whatever as long as it works to bring his numbers down. Actually even if it does not bring his numbers down it provides some type of cathartic release. These are festivals of hate against obama, democrats, liberals and the media. These rallies are also a symbol of the essence of what the gop has become an unrestrained angry mob dedicated to anti-intellectualism and anything that might relate. For example from first read,

As seen at recent McCain events, this afternoon's crowd was vocal in their support for McCain and their anger with Senator Obama. At one point one man could be heard yelling, "Off with his head," when McCain spoke about Obama's tax plan. That enthusiasm was even more present during Palin's remarks, and as other observers have reported in the past, today there was a sizeable number of people making their way towards the exit after McCain's running mate left the podium.

and josh marshal,

Seems like almost every day now there's a McCain-Palin rally where the campaign has the candidates introduced by someone who hits on "Barack Hussein Obama". Just happened again in Bethlehem, PA. After the fifth or sixth time you pretty much know on the orders of the campaign. It is obviously with tacit approval (to believe anything else is to be a dupe at this point); and quite probably on the campaign's specific instructions.

Given the regularity of the cries of "treason" and "terrorist" and the like, and the frequency with which the screamers seem in oddly convenient proximity to the mics, we should probably be considering the possibly that these folks are campaign plants. It happens all the time. It's just that usually they don't scream out accusations of capital crimes.

Late Update: A thought. At what point do they start burning Obama in effigy at the Palin rallies?

and the wapo

McCain had said that racially explosive attacks related to Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are off limits. But Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol in an interview published Monday: "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more."

Worse, Palin's routine attacks on the media have begun to spill into ugliness. In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric's questions for her "less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media." At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, "Sit down, boy."

All of this has had some interesting effects and none more profound than on the media. The media has this practice of going through the election like they have no effect on the events and discourse, as if it is all organic. this is especially true of the political media. They speak of analyzing the events as if they are fully outside the system. The view everything not like it is real but more like a giant game. people in the know understand that much of what goes on is just for show. it is all to win over the non political people, the rubes who dont watch their shows. The view the actions of the mccain campaign only in terms of what effect it has on polls. Elections are giant games.

Imagine their shock when they find out that all the things that the gop and the mccain campaign has been saying, stuff the media thought was just for show, is being internalized by the public. The stuff about obama being a terrorist is not real, it is just a tactic. No one should actually believe that and yet they do. Now this might still get ignored if it was not accompanied by the direct attacks on the media. The mccain campaign declared war on the media, returning them to the place of hatred in the minds of the standard goper. The standrad goper now believes all that they have been fed and the media is just appalled. So now people like david brooks come out with stuff like this,

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

The thing is that Brooks and his ilk are responsible for this. In private they say one thing. They know she is a cancer. Yet, Palin the the perfect republican ideal. She is exactly what the gop has been building towards. Brooks has helped it along. Instead of standing up to the anti-intellectual tendencies he has so decried he has added and abetted it. For example his column after the vp debate,

On Thursday night, Palin took her inexperience and made a mansion out of it. From her first “Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?” she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington. She ran not only against Washington, but the whole East Coast, just to be safe.

To many ears, her accent, her colloquialisms and her constant invocations of the accoutrements of everyday life will seem cloying. But in the casual parts of the country, I suspect, it went down fine. In any case, that’s who Palin is.

On matters of substance, her main accomplishment was to completely sever ties to the Bush administration. She treated Bush as some historical curiosity from the distant past. Beyond that, Palin broke no new ground, though she toured the landscape of McCain policy positions with surprising fluency. Like the last debate, this one was surprisingly wonky — a lifetime subscription to Congressional Quarterly. Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.
...
Still, this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.

By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.

remember that biden won the debate by 2-1 margins. Most people were totally unimpressed by palins winking and over the top folksy manner. People were put off by her "shout out". Palin provided no depth to her answers shifting to energy or whatever she felt like without respect for the moderator. If Brooks actually feels that palin and her intellectualism is a cancer on his party maybe he should write that instead of building up palin in the pages of the nyt?

when you treat everything like a game of risk where candidate actions represent no more than tactics and strategy removed from the real world of effect those nasty tactics and strategies become reality. Soon you get to the point where the efforts you took to discredit your opponents, stuff you never actually believed, has rebounded upon you. You find that you lose control over the mob because they do believe those things and cant imagine not acting on those beliefs. So it serves Brooks, his conservative intellectual cronies, and the media right. the game has run into reality and now every one has to pay the price for their folly. Here, see for yourself.



Update: Digby hits the same point in a slightly different way,

I think this is dangerous stuff and far beyond the pale. We saw what happened in Tennessee recently. It was the act of a mentally disturbed person, for sure. But it was also explicitly political --- he had been trained to blame liberals for his woes and so when he went out searching for someone to shoot, he knew who to target. He'd been reading books which claimed liberals are treasonous and unAmerican, written by people who are treated as being perfectly respectable on television and are welcomed into the highest circles of power. His act was his own responsibility, but those who turn normal political differences into bloodsport for personal profit contributed to the madness.

We are entering a turbulent period in our country. Validating a bogus accusation that your political rival is a terrorist in our current environment is the most irresponsible thing I've seen a campaign do in many a year. They know they are very likely going to lose this election. And McCain certainly knows that the main reason he is losing is because of the dramatic failures of fellow failed Republican George W. Bush. But even knowing that his candidacy was always very likely doomed is not stopping him from releasing this poison into the bloodstream of the body politic, a poison which will be with us for a long time to come. I guess that's what McCain means when he says that Americans should fight for a cause greater than themselves. That cause, evidently, is him.

The mentioning of what happened in Tennessee should accompany any post on this topic.

Read more...

Not Chicken Littles on the right.

Here is the opening of the chicken little story..

Narrator: Chicken Little was in the woods one day when an acorn fell on her head. It scared her so much she trembled all over. She shook so hard, half her feathers fell out.

Chicken Little: "Help! Help! The sky is falling! I have to go tell the king!"

Narrator: So she ran in great fright to tell the king....

When people in the blogosphere use the chicken little characterization they do so when people run around yelling that the sky is falling. The key though is that it is not really falling on them. It is a gross overeaction that leads to the end of the story...

Narrator: So they ran with all their might, until they met Foxy Loxy.

Foxy Loxy: "Well, well. Where are you rushing on such a fine day?"

Chicken Little, Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey (together) "Help! Help!" It's not a fine day at all. The sky is falling, and we're running to tell the king!"

Foxy Loxy: "How do you know the sky is falling?"

Chicken Little: "I saw it with my own eyes, and heard it with my own ears, and part of it fell on my head!"

Foxy Loxy: "I see. Well then, follow me, and I'll show you the way to the king."

Narrator: So Foxy Loxy led Chicken Little, Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, and Turkey Lurkey across a field and through the woods. He led them straight to his den, and they never saw the king to tell him that the sky is falling.

By overreacting and screaming doom chicken little runs into her own demise. She panicked and it cost her dearly. I thought this little reminder was in order because the left is starting to label the right chicken littles.

Update II: Jonathan Martin, meanwhile, is doing an excellent job of reporting the denouement of McCain in Michigan and Virginia. Such is the epidemic of Chicken Little-ism. Many Republicans, never inoculated, are succumbing. (And none of their bloggers have figured out the coveted recipe in the cure!)

"How on earth are we to get people to work for McCain here, when he has already, publicly, in the media, given up on Michigan?" says one GOP leader up there.

“He didn't take threat seriously soon enough,” said a GOP leader in Virginia.

Tomorrow is the last day for new voter registration in both states. It will be interesting to see how the final results might bring more panic.

The problem here should be obvious. THE SKY IS FALLING. The right are not chicken littles because chicken little was not operating in reality but the bloggers and people on the right are coming to reality. There pronouncements of doom are in line with reality based observations of the race. They are more like Jorel from superman who was right that the planet was going to blow up. Their world is coming apart.

Read more...

Give Away is the New AUMF

Andrew Sullivan promoted this from Pethokoukis, on his blog,

Newt Gingrich said voting for the bailout will break against candidates in 2010 and beyond when voters see how destructive it is to the economy. And that's the thing. While the bailout, if Paulson and Bernanke are to be believed, may prevent a financial meltdown, it will not by itself return America to prosperity. The labor market is clearly weakening, and is the last thing to turn around once an economy does regain momentum. So there's a good chance that a perturbed public, currently down on the bailout, will view it as an expensive flop by the time the midterm elections roll around. They will hold its supporters accountable.

The basic thinking here is that the give away becomes the AUMF vote. That 2010 will look very similar to 2006 when the country was so tired of the incredible violence in iraq that it revolted and severely punished the party in power. This is getting at something important that has been brewing in the liberal blogosphere since the inception of the Paulson Plan, Digby's THE TRAP. While Digby is applying this more towards the current election and the possibility of McCain running against the bail out to beat Obama the long term implications are there.

We will see the rebirth of the phony fiscal conservative image before our very eyes as our brave POW hero, John McCain, takes on the great malefactors of wealth while the soft, liberal elites behave like toadies to the rich. It's a neat trick for a man who owns seven houses and thirteen cars, but in America, you can be a multimillionaire and still be a man of the people as long as you drink a beer the right way.

Kilgore concludes that the Democrats must demand Republican votes in congress including John McCain's. But I don't see the mechanism for doing that. After the campaign he's run, I don't think we can rely on his "honor." So, the Dems can ask, but the Republicans will find a reason to do what they think will benefit them politically. And that is to sufficiently separate themselves from Bush and the congress that they can realistically be perceived as the real change agents.

The GOP and its ideology has failed in governance. Conservatives like to think Bush is not a real conservative but really he is just a natural extension of Reagan without the speaking skills. Given this problem what they need is a reset. They need a catalyst that can return them to their roots, a puritinization. The possibility exists that this bail out proposal could be that event.

The first thing to note is that it fits with preconceived notions about the worst of democratic party excess on spending. A traditional complaint that conservatives have against dems is that they spend too much money on the people who dont deserve it. If any one ever deserved to be bailed out less than the ibankers who knowingly too huge risks with instruments they could not even understand they probably committed a war crime. It looks like the dems are just throwing money at a problem, wasting it.

That no one actually seems to think this will work is also a problem. How can the dems line up behind something people said would not work? At least with iraq people were being told it would go great. Here it is all based on a "slap" mentality. Slap the markets and they calm down and somehow start to properly value their paper. People are not going to get behind that idea.

Opposing a big give away would be inline with traditional gop rhetoric. Ideologically the GOP should be against doing anything. Their position is that the free market is the best instrument to make economic decisions. The government should have a minimal role in the economy. 700 Billion is not a minimal role. Because it is so inline with traditional gop rhetoric it will not be a hard sell to the american people that the gop philosophy was the correct one. If the bail out flops it would be used as evidence that the republican ideology in its true form is right and that bush did indeed pervert it somehow. It would be seen as the republicans coming home to principle after the Bush years, they have seen the light etc. It worked for McCain with the Keating 5 right?

Another major point is that this is not the first time Dems are led into a disastrous policy by their own political cravenness. Iraq already happened. It is a classic case of fool me once shame on you foll me twice shame on me. Fool me three times and im an idiot. The country has an extremely low opinion of Bush. The country trusts him about as far as the distance between the nucleus of an atom and its valence shell. Still, the dems are willing to proceed in linking to him and following his dictates without revealing exactly what information they are acting on. The country will not tolerate that. In legal terms this is a minimum of negligent legislation. A reasonable person would know better.

When i say that the dems are linking themselves with Bush i should probably assert that they are also making this bill their own as much as they ca without scrapping it and starting over. They want to tack on all the provisions they can but the core is still the bush plan that pulled 700 billion out of nowhere. If you want to make it easy to run against you put your brand all over this bill.

The other consequence of this bill that is coming to light is that it should prevent any democratic agenda spending agenda should Obama win. That is the new media narrative that has begun to permeate the discourse. Much like '92 the dems are supposed to be the responsible ones and to hold off on the things like health care or education or SCHIP because the country just cant afford it. It is a perfect story for the GOP to run on should the dems actually try to do anything. Everything will be too expensive after the Dems irresponsibly spent all the money on the bail out.

The issues with this bail out are many and the up side is miniamal. given these conditions does it really even make sense to do this? I know the dems are trying to get some minimal cover from the GOP but really everyone will label them the driving force behind this in 2010.

Read more...

More Evidence McCain is out of Touch Elitist.

I am not a technology guru but I consider myself proficient in dealing with my computer. Technology more than almost anything demonstrates how current people are. Young people are typically the first adopters of new tech, though not always. For many people having the newest technology is a status statement. In this race Barack Obama has been the candidate who takes the most advantage of technology and the candidate who appears most comfortable. The GOP does not look ready to cede the tech field to Obama entirely and they are trying to appear more tech shrewdness by taking email suggestions for their party platform. Their sad attempt just goes to highlight how out of touch and far back they are on matters of technology. The most out of touch among them might be their second highest profile member and Presidential nominee, John McCain.

NYT has published an article on the GOP efforts to portray themselves as the leaders in the use of technology and the internet to create interactivity. I feel sometimes now like I read the portrayals of the GOP in articles in a more favorable light than they might have been intended. For instance, I read the opening paragraph-

The conventional wisdom prevailing since the start of the 2008 campaign has always maintained that technological astuteness is the specialty of Senator Barack Obama and his followers. Rightly or wrongly, Senator John McCain has been burdened with the image of someone whose campaign is hopelessly behind the times, who can’t navigate the Internet unless his wife or aides are there to guide him.

I think that it is definitely a correct portrayal of McCain. McCain has made repeated statements that belay his lack of tech knowledge and skill. McCain used the nonsensical phrase "a Google" to describe the most famous internet search engine in the world. McCain had the lack of awareness to say during an interview with the New York Times that even though his aides "go on for [him]" right now, "[he's] learning to get online myself, and I will have that down fairly soon. McCain has also said that he is "an illiterate [who] has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get." Of course this may all be wrong, because McCain may not speak for McCain. Now here comes the GOP claiming they are now the party of the people and the web.

Just don’t try telling that to the Republican Platform Committee and its leaders. In a novel experiment, they have been online for several weeks now, seeking suggestions about what their platform should say. More than 12,000 people have responded, offering proposals, either as written text or in video form, that anyone interested can access.

“This is the first attempt by either party to solicit people’s input into the platform so broadly and transparently,” said Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, co-chairman of the platform committee. His co-chairman, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California added: “People might think that if you look at this, the Democrats are much further along” on the technological side, “but if they look at our platform, we’re so much further along, and more open too, in using today’s technology to get greater input.”

The first thing to note is that the platform is essentially worthless. The parties celebrate the platform every four years, but it has no impact on any legislation or anything of consequence. So the GOP can claim it is inclusive and reaching out to the people all it wants but until they make the platform their litmus test for everything, three monkeys in a shed could write it and it would never matter. Shockingly the input of the public might not mean all that much.

What the 112 members of the platform committee will do with those ideas once they begin meeting in St. Paul next week is another matter. In separate interviews, both of the chairmen said not to expect significant changes from the positions Republicans have taken in the past on issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

“I don’t think the delegates will change significantly, or at all, the language on social issues that has been worked out over years,” Mr. Burr said. “But we do want a platform that looks forward and not backwards, and that means an opportunity to state more clearly than ever what we stand for, what are our principles.”

It is clear that nothing will really change and that the input of these people was all for show. Can we really expect the authoritarian GOP to take direction for the little people? Not likely. The GOP platform will be consistent by nature as conservatives are against change. I think is disingenuous thought to ask for input on something that is not going to be changed or matter.

Why is all this important? With the advent of the McCain is rich and out of touch meme the tech issues should make a big return. Not because McCain is old and so cant use the internet but as Andrew Ramano points out-

For one thing, McCain's computer illiteracy doesn't reflect a lack of curiosity--it reflects a lack of necessity. Over the past 10 years, most adult Americans have encountered and explored computers primarily in the workplace, where the ability to communicate and find information on the Internet has gradually become a required skill. But McCain's job in the U.S. Senate--where all communication and information has to be filtered through staffers--has actually made fluency more difficult to achieve (or at least less necessary).

McCain is so elite he does not need the internet or computers or email. That sounds pretty out of touch to me. How many Americans can go through life now without the constant us of the computer? Not many. You have man who cannot remember the number of houses he has and a man who does not need or care about the most important communications revolution since the television.

To say that because McCain has staffers though does not excuse his lack of interest in the internet. He has never been interested in a topic and looked it up online or wanted to find the score of a baseball game somewhere? Does he ask someone else to do it? I think that McCain’s lack of knowledge about the internet show how out of touch he is and it needs to be revived.

Read more...

Romney v Huckabee for the Soul of the GOP

Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee emerged from the GOP nomination process as the leaders of their respective GOP factions. Huckabee represents the social conservatives. He aspires to speak for the evangelicals, who reportedly make up 25% of the electorate. Romney represents the business side of the GOP. He is the consummate executive and as a former CEO is the GOP’s possible poster boy for someone to fix the economy. These two factions are warring for the chance to have someone from their camp land as the McCain VP and the fight has major long-term implications for the party.

The GOP really needs to find its soul. As a governing party, the Republicans have been an abject failure when measured by legitimate metrics, like how well America is doing. The aggressive hawk faction of the party is represented by McCain and they are not going be in ascendancy after the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. McCain is not the long-term face of the GOP and the field after him is not especially impressive. The current successor to McCain is likely to be Mitt Romney. This is not something that the social conservative wing likes or can accept.

As speculation heats up about the possibility that Sen. John McCain might pick former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney as his running mate, Huckabee is pooh-poohing the idea.

"The issue is that, in many ways, Mitt Romney has had very definite swings of position, not just on one or two things, but on many of the issues," Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said on Fox News today.

"I think that there are better choices for Sen. McCain that will have the approval of values voters," he added.

It is a regular occurrence that those who come in second for the GOP in primary battles get the next shot at the top of the ticket. Regean, Bush 41, and McCain are examples of this. Thus placing Romeny as the VP slots him in line for the next time following McCain.

The value voters that Huckabee is representing are in a tough spot. For the first time in a long time, they could be looking at being shoved out of the halls of power. A McCain Romney ticket would feature two people who are not committed to a Jerry Fallwell/Pat Robertson Christian Conservative point of view. At most, they would be paying lip service to retain those voters. McCain would like to make a run at Michigan and sure up his economic and domestic policy cred. Placing Romney on the ticket would make sense from that point of view. McCain would then rely on the fact that those same voters loathe Obama. McCain believes they have nowhere to go except into his corner because they cannot stand Obama.

Romney also makes sense in that to regain the possibility of winning on a national scale the GOP will have to revisit what it wants in its candidates. We see that the CC voters who are only strong in the south are getting squeezed out. For example,

"Huckabee is the leader of what I call the Taliban wing of the party," said Patterson, who has supported Romney, a native Michiganian. "They would rather lose on some self-defined principle than put someone on the ticket who is honorable and would bring strength to the ticket."

That principle is abortion. McCain made some brief waves when it was floated in an outreach session that his VP might not be inline with the CC on abortion but only on gay rights. It really set of the CC wing of the party. James Muffett, head of Michigan’s Citizens for Traditional Values, joined McCain for a meeting on Wednesday night.

To select a running mate who supports abortion rights would be “wrong-headed, short-sighted, fracture the Republican Party and not allow us to capitalize on the Democratic Party’s fracture right now,” Muffett argued.

“If he does that, it makes our job 100 times harder. It would dampen enthusiasm at a time when evangelicals are looking for ways to gin up enthusiasm.”
McCain, Muffett said, got that message in their meeting.

“Some people in the movement say it would be the kiss of death. He heard that in the room last night.”

The CC are especially worried about losing power on the right because there are increasing numbers of evangelicals including young evangelicals who are looking to move away from focusing only on what Christians should be against. This group is more interested in Global warming and Global poverty as well as HIV/Aids work. Led by Pastors like Rick Warren head of the 22,000-member Saddleback Church in Orange County, Calif and the Mathew 25 network they are looking to be less partisan and that means less Republican. They would draw members away and lessen the power of the CC inside the GOP.

All of this is going on as Justice John Paul Stevens is 88 years old. The possibility of swinging the court to the conservative side for the next several generations is tantalizing for the CC movement. It is their dream and they want to accomplish it while they still can and before the power they have accumulated wanes. So Huckabee and his backers will fight and cajole and threaten to make sure that the VP pick by John McCain firs squarely into their camp and is not the person of Mitt Romeny.

Read more...

McCain Win Bad for GOP?

In the pundit links presented on the DKos front page there was an article on theorizing on the effects of a McCain win for the GOP. I read that article and have to say it was not all that good. The biggest issue I had with it is that it rested on some very poor assumptions. It required assumptions like McCain would not govern as a conservative and that the Obama loss would not hurt Dems so bad. As I read the piece, I could not help but think, “Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.” A McCain win would be a disaster for everyone so if it is worse for the GOP (which i contend it is not) it is only worse in the way losing your health, house and your job is worse than losing your house and your job.

The title of the article is Why a McCain Win May Be Bad for GOP, Good for Democrats. That alone should start up that skepticism. Here is the premise for the article

In the worst-case scenario, a McCain victory in November could likely lead to a Republican bloodletting that would tear apart the GOP well before 2012, contribute to another good Democratic election in 2010 and hand Democrats such a strong advantage during redistricting that Republicans wouldn't be able to recover for years.

What I think is immediately absent here is that the GOP needs a little bloodletting. They have grown stale and old relying on the same old worn tactics and strategies. They need new blood and new ideas and the only way to get those is through some strife and a little upheaval. The type of change needed in the GOP will not come easily just as the change in the Dems from DLC to Dean/Obama was not an easy change.

I also think that the premise misses the fact that the current climate for the Republicans is so bad that it is hard for it to get worse. That is the basic theory of the article that McCain would make it so bad that no one would ever want to vote Republican and that the party itself would be fractured. That might be true but I think that a McCain win would just be postponing the GOP shakeup and rebuilding. The Republicans are playing out a cycle where their ideas and programs have been in power since Reagan. They have had the same players and leaders for the last 20 odd years with people like McCain being one of them. A McCain win would be bad because it prevents the GOP from performing any self evaluation and making the changes it has to in order to compete in the future.

The article really goes down hill from there because it is predicated on the idea that McCain really is a Maverick.

The scenario is simple: McCain wins and immediately follows his own instincts - meaning he tries to patch together a series of coalitions on ethics, immigration, spending and global warming.
Snip…
The one thing that is sure is that a McCain presidency wouldn't merely be a "third Bush term." That's a smart campaign slogan for Democrats, and it should be effective.

But anyone who knows McCain and has followed his efforts over the years - including his 2000 campaign against George W. Bush - knows that, if the Arizonan gets to the White House, he'll follow his own instincts, not the current president's road map.

What this overlooks is that McCain has spent the past eight years moving to the right and cozying up with Bush. McCain has sold out on numerous issues to make his run for the presidency. Almost everything people ever thought McCain stood for has been thrown aside in his quest for the presidency. McCain is not the McCain of 2000 and he is not a Dem in Republican clothing. McCain really will run a third Bush term on the things that matter like the war in Iraq. He has also shown that he is not really committed to ethics as his campaign is run by lobbyists and he has a zero rating on the environment so how much work he will do on Global Warming is not clear.

The article refers repeatedly to the idea that McCain is closer to Dems than the Republicans are but he is not proving that in his campaign. I guess it is not out of the question that once in power he will flop back the other way to some other position on issues like immigration or campaign finance or ethics or not torturing people.

This is how the article treats the effect of the Obama loss on Dems.

Of course, Democrats won't want to lose the '08 presidential race and a chance to end the war in Iraq in the hope of solidifying themselves for a decade. And an Obama defeat surely would produce its own round of Democratic recrimination and finger-pointing. But ultimately, an Obama defeat wouldn't damage Democrats the way it eventually would Republicans.

That is it? I think that this is a vast understatement referring to the consequences of an Obama loss. At the very least the 50 state strategy that Dean and Obama and the net roots has advocated and fought for would be thrown out. An Obama loss would also set back the cause of African American politicians for a long time. It would prove the nay sayers right that America is just not ready for a Black president. It would allow Clinton a big, “I told you so.” This vindication would vault her to the top of those candidates for 2012. It would destroy the enthusiasm and commitment of the young voters and activists who have fought for Barack in every state across the county. An Obama loss would not be a small thing for the Democratic Party.

If the Dems cannot win now would we really expect them to win in 2012? The situation is as good as it has ever been for the Dems. To think that if they blow it now they will get a better shot in 2012 is nonsense. We have the most money, the worst president, the most energizing candidate, we oppose the oldest candidate, the country is ready for change. If not now when? No, a loss to McCain would not simply be setting us up for a bigger win later.

An Obama loss would not only be a devastating tragedy for Dems but it would also be a tragedy for our county. McCain has no intention of ever getting us out of Iraq and all of his policy ideas now seem to be straight from the GOP playbook. The country cannot withstand another four years of these devastating policies designed to raid our treasury and create true class separation in our country. McCain would not do anything about the corruption that pervades the executive branch, as he would more than likely retain many of those people. McCain would be a disaster. So yes, a McCain win would be bad for the GOP because it prevents it from starting the rebuilding process. However, his win would be a disaster for our country and for Democrats.

Read more...