The Syrian Refugee Crisis and the Undoing of the GOP

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

26 November 15

Most weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: the GOP debate over Syrian refugees, Trump's latest surge, and the comparatively low-key Democratic presidential race.

epublican presidential candidates and governors have called for turning away Syrian refugees, Ben Carson has likened them to “rabid dogs,” and Donald Trump is peddling an urban legend about Muslims cheering the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New Jersey. How can a major American political party do this without incurring some political cost?

It can’t. The GOP — not just Trump and Carson — offers something to offend almost every minority group in the country: black, gay, Latino, and Muslim people. And one majority group: women. Even its so-called moderate Establishment candidates are culpable: Jeb Bush called for admitting only Christian refugees from Syria; John Kasich has proposed a government agency to promote “core Judeo-Christian Western values,” a plan that strikes me as not just anti-Muslim but anti-Semitic despite the lip service paid to “Judeos”; Marco Rubio opposes abortion even in cases of rape or incest. None of this will hurt Republican candidates in safe, gerrymandered House districts or in deep-red states. But it will cripple them in presidential elections, and contested races for the Senate and governorships in purple or even purplish states, let alone blue ones. 

But it must be said that the call for banning Syrian immigrants, besides being a xenophobic replay of America’s brutal record of turning away European Jews and incarcerating Japanese-Americans during World War II, is most of all a stab at political bait-and-switch: The Republican candidates think that if they rail enough against the lethal potential of 10,000 destitute Syrian refugees subjected to a two-year American vetting process, maybe no one will notice that they have no coherent ideas for combatting actual ISIS terrorists as opposed to imaginary ones.

No one else in the West has a fail-safe idea, either, but the Republican presidential candidates are particularly clueless. They repeatedly state that Obama’s efforts are insufficient but then, as the president has noted, just repeat his current policy, only louder. Some seem to think the problem will be solved, as Rubio has it, if a president will only say, “We are at war with radical Islam.” Ben Carson has called for “moderate forces” in Iraq and Syria to establish “sanctuary zones” — blissfully unaware that these “moderate forces” he hopes to recruit will be drawn from the same populace he is calling “rabid dogs.” Lindsey Graham has called for 10,000 American troops to help do the job — a proposal that is a nonstarter with the American public largely because of the war in Iraq that he helped champion and prolong. The others offer only bluster and gobbledygook that are merely more polite variations on Trump’s vow to “bomb the shit out of them.” The pugilistic Chris Christie seems to think we can defeat ISIS in part by keeping 5-year-old orphans out of Jersey.

Last week, Karl Rove welcomed terrorism as a winning issue for Republicans and cited a September poll from Gallup showing that 52 percent of the public believes that Republicans will do a better job of protecting America, while only 36 percent says the same of Democrats. But that poll was taken before the Paris attacks. The latest Washington Post–ABC News poll, conducted since Paris, found that despite a drop in Obama’s numbers, Hillary Clinton was more trusted to “handle the threat of terrorism” in one-on-one matchups with every major GOP presidential candidate. That 3 a.m. phone-call ad that failed in 2008 may easily mow down the gaseous GOP armchair generals of 2016.

That same Post-ABC poll showed that Carson had fallen from being neck and neck with Trump to a fairly distant second place (32 percent to 22 percent). What happened to Carson? Why is Trump, who has lately gone so far as to justify the pummeling of a black protester at a Birmingham, Alabama, campaign rally, rising yet again? 

As I wrote in my New York piece back in September, Trump is “a crass, bigoted bully with a narcissistic-personality disorder and policy views bordering on gibberish” who also may be the best thing to happen to American politics since Obama. He is continuing to prove the first part of that equation, heaven knows, but also the second: His repeated supremacy in the polls is exposing the built-in biases of those in the press who have dismissed his numbers as a transitory blip since day one and has also shown up the bankruptcy of the anachronistic, consultant-shaped political campaigns that offer the voters pablum like Jeb! as a feckless alternative. Most important of all, Trump is exposing the heart of a virtually all-white political party’s base by speaking its most repellent convictions out loud and unambiguously rather than let them continue to be cloaked in the euphemisms of most of his ostensibly more respectable opponents. 

Trump isn’t suffering any penalty in the polls because the base believes this stuff — the base that has been bullying the GOP ever since John McCain empowered the Ur-Trump, Sarah Palin. And it’s fear of that base’s power in the primary states that has made Trump’s GOP adversaries, except those at the bottom of the pack with nothing to lose, so slow and ineffectual in taking him on. It’s not lost on them that Trump’s bigotry — whether aimed at African-Americans, Latinos, or Muslims — only boosts his numbers. That’s why they are coming up with their own me-too plans to turn away Syrian refugees. That’s why they are remaining silent when a black protester is beaten up at a seemingly all-white rally in Birmingham. That’s why, after the Charleston massacre, they didn’t come out against the Confederate flag until after the Republican South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley, did so and gave them political cover. They are hoping that when Trump does wear out his welcome they’ll inherit his following. We can thank Trump for inadvertently exposing just how much the GOP leadership cowers before the racists and crazies.

As for the Carson bump, it’s gone the way of the Fiorina bump. It certainly didn’t help him that his own foreign-policy adviser told the Times, for attribution, that the good doctor didn’t know squat about the Middle East. As Paris has felled Carson, it has boosted Trump by fusing terrorism with the issue that made him a GOP hero: immigration. “Donald Trump was elected president tonight,” Ann Coulter tweeted the night of the Paris carnage with typical hyperbole. Trump will not be elected president unless Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, Virginia, et al, secede from the Electoral College. But he can’t be ruled out yet as the GOP nominee. The Wall Street Journal trumpeted on its front page last weekend an effort by the “Republican Establishment” to mount a “guerrilla campaign” to “defeat and destroy” Trump. How? It would create an ad that “would link Mr. Trump’s views and style to his celebrity foe, Rosie O’Donnell, in hopes of provoking a reaction from Mr. Trump” as well as “fake pro-Trump ads” that would use “a Trump impersonator to show him insulting people.” This plan is so stupid you have to wonder if it wasn’t conceived by Rove.

You can’t fight something with nothing. Which candidate is going to take Trump out? Bush, who supposedly rose from the dead after his last (slightly) less-embarrassing performance in the last GOP debate, is at 6 percent in the Post-ABC poll; Rubio, still the subject of countless pieces touting him as the perfect candidate on paper, is at 11 percent. The RealClearPolitics poll average in South Carolina, whose primary has been since 1980 the most reliable indicator of who will win the GOP nomination, is indistinguishable from the national numbers: 27.5 percent for Trump, 21.8 percent for Carson, 12.3 percent for Rubio, 11.3 percent for Cruz, and 6.8 percent for Bush.

Meanwhile, Trump has a plan B: He is now saying that he may run as an independent after all. This is further confirmation that his faux “pledge” not to do so, signed with much fanfare at the Trump Tower, has all the standing of the Munich pact of 1938, with GOP chairman Reince Priebus reenacting the role of Neville Chamberlain.

Things are a little calmer on the Democratic side, where Hillary Clinton's biggest problems lately are front-page reports in the Times and Washington Post showcasing her ties to Wall Street and her role in her family’s $3 billion donor network. Will continued stories like these hurt her at all?

I just saw Adam McKay’s upcoming new movie The Big Short, from the Michael Lewis book, and it made me furious all over again at those who made a killing during the housing bubble while so many Americans lost their savings, their retirement plans, or their homes in the crash. But the star power of Christian Bale, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and Steve Carell is no more likely to pull a majority of the Democratic electorate away from Clinton than Bernie Sanders has. Nor is Clinton likely to suffer any lasting damage by her own tone-deaf gaffes, like her offensive effort in the last Democratic debate to link her coziness with Wall Street to 9/11. And if she ends up running against Trump — or, for that matter, Rubio or Bush or Cruz — she will be seen, by comparison and perhaps not without reason, as a relative populist no matter her speaking fees from Goldman or her ties to Robert Rubin. 

What Mayor Emanuel Needs to Learn From the Killing of Laquan McDonald

By Steve Bogira, Chicago Reader

26 November 15

t's hard to put a positive spin on the release of a video showing a white Chicago police officer needlessly snuffing out the life of a black teen, but Mayor Emanuel did his best Tuesday afternoon. "This episode can be a moment of understanding and learning," the mayor said at a press conference at police headquarters.

He himself has a lot to learn.

You may recall the mayor sounding an alarm last month about policing in Chicago and throughout the nation. At a summit of mayors and law enforcement leaders in Washington, Emanuel called attention not to the unjustified harm that some officers were doing to civilians, as revealed by numerous videos, but to the harm videos were doing to policing. 

Officers were shrinking from their duties, the mayor asserted, for fear that a video might portray them badly. "We have allowed our police department to get fetal, and it is having a direct consequence," Emanuel said. "They have pulled back from the ability to interdict . . . they don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact."

That the mayor would focus on police becoming "fetal" was especially remarkable given that he was well aware, when he made those comments, of the dashboard-camera video showing the final moments of Laquan McDonald's brief life—a life ended by officer Jason Van Dyke on an evening in October 2014. McDonald, 17, was carrying a small knife, but in the video he appears to be walking away from police. Van Dyke shot him again and again and again, 16 times in all, the final bullets fired when McDonald lay limp on Pulaski Road—in nearly a fetal position.

A judge last Thursday ordered the video released within a week. By that time, Emanuel knew better than to talk about how videos were making police fetal. "Police officers are entrusted to uphold the law, and to provide safety to our residents," he said in a statement. "In this case, unfortunately, it appears an officer violated that trust at every level." He hoped prosecutors would finish their investigation soon "so Chicago can begin to heal." On Monday he called the shooting "profoundly hideous," and said "one individual needs to be held accountable."

Yesterday the Cook County state's attorney's office charged Van Dyke with murder; he's in jail without a bond. The video was released last night. 

The first thing the mayor needs to learn from McDonald's death is that holding one individual accountable isn't in any way sufficient. This shooting was especially "hideous," but Chicago has a systemic problem, which is that police officers who shoot someone unjustifiably can expect to get away with it. It's not a problem unique to Chicago, and it's not new, but there's no evidence that the city has made any progress toward solving it in Emanuel's four and a half years as mayor. The charging of Van Dyke is the exception that proves the rule. He was charged because the shooting was particularly egregious, because some of it was caught on video, and because of a rapidly shifting public attitude toward such shootings.

The second thing the mayor ought to learn is that Chicago needs more than healing. The city needs vigorous investigations of police shootings by the Independent Police Review Authority. If the mayor wanted to point out fetal behavior, he could have pointed at IPRA.

IPRA's predecessor, the Office of Professional Standards, was a unit of the police department. In 2007, the Tribune reported that less than 1 percent of the more than 200 police shootings in the previous decade reviewed by OPS had been ruled unjustified. This record led some Chicagoans to believe "that officers can shoot people with impunity," the Trib said.

After two barroom beatings by police were captured on video that year, Mayor Richard M. Daley created IPRA, an agency supposedly independent of the police department. But like OPS, it's been mostly curled up harmlessly when it comes to police misconduct. I reported in June that for the first time in its history, IPRA was recommending that a police officer involved in a shooting be fired. The officer, Francisco Perez, had fired 16 times into the wrong car after a drive-by shooting on Ashland. The episode was captured on video. IPRA had investigated more than 230 police shootings in its history at that point, had found only a handful to have been unjustified, and had never recommended more than a 20-day suspension. (IPRA has since recommended that a second officer, Dante Servin, be fired.)

One reason police shootings are almost always deemed justified by IPRA is that the main witnesses, and often the only ones, are the shooter and his fellow officers. The night McDonald was shot, Pat Camden, a spokesman for the Fraternal Order of Police, told reporters that McDonald lunged at officers with a knife, leaving them "no choice at that point but to defend themselves." Where did Camden get that story

At least five other officers were on the scene when Van Dyke unloaded. None of them fired a shot. All of them likely were interviewed by an IPRA investigator shortly after the shooting. It'll be interesting to learn whether they reported what the video seems to show—that there was no need for Van Dyke to shoot—or whether they backed up their fellow officer by insisting that McDonald posed an imminent threat to them. But it may be years before the public finds out what they said, because IPRA suspends its investigations when a criminal charge is lodged (such as the murder charge against Van Dyke), and it doesn't release information from an investigation while it's "pending."

Another thing Emanuel should seek to learn is how rigorously IPRA's investigators interview police witnesses during their investigations of police shootings. In my review of interviews of police witnesses by IPRA in a couple of investigations, I've been struck by how feeble the questioning has been.

The mayor also ought to learn what transparency really means when it comes to police shootings, and how far IPRA falls short of it. When IPRA completes an investigation of a shooting by an officer, it surreptitiously publishes its summary and finding on its website. To locate a particular summary, one must know the year the case originated, navigate through three headings to a list of log numbers, and hunt through the summaries associated with the log numbers for a case that seems, from the date and address, to be the right one. Officers are identified only as "Officer A", "Officer B", "Officer C", etc. A less transparent system would be hard to devise. It's yet another way in which police officers, and IPRA itself, are shielded from scrutiny. 

And the mayor ought to learn why his police department abandoned the Force Analysis Panel that was created in 2009, at the urging of Ilana Rosenzweig, IPRA's first chief administrator. (Rosenzweig left Chicago in 2013.) FAP was designed to help officers learn how to avoid unnecessarily putting themselves in jeopardy, in ways that seem to make shooting a civilian their only recourse. Police officials stopped holding FAP meetings in 2012. 

Yes, this can be a time of understanding and learning, but Emanuel needs to lead by example. He's done no leading on this matter so far. He has to learn, and then he has to respond with concrete reforms designed to fix a systemic problem.