Is the GOP Cracking Up?

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

30 October 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 third GOP debate.

here were ten candidates onstage in the CNBC prime-time Republican debate, not to mention the other four candidates who appeared earlier in the kiddie-table debate. Did last night winnow the field?

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been treated to a steady barrage of articles and opinion columns in virtually every major publication touting Marco Rubio as the most talented, the most likely, the most obvious survivor in this overcrowded field — the sole Establishment candidate who can survive the onslaught of the Trump-Carson crazies and walk away with the prize. The only flaw in the Rubio case is that there has been no evidence that his fellow Republicans particularly like him; as a first choice among GOP voters, his poll numbers are more or less in the 10 percent range (though, we’re assured, he’s everybody’s second choice).

Last night was Rubio’s opportunity to prove his case. He grabbed more speaking time than anyone except the tenaciously tedious Carly Fiorina. And he is nothing if not slick and glib. His response to every tough question is always the same. He invokes his father, a bartender, and his mother, a hotel maid. He sanctifies himself as the living proof of the power of the American dream. The litany sounds automatic at this point, but who knows? Maybe it plays. If his rise among actual voters, as opposed to pundits and political professionals, is to come, it must start now. Particularly since the once-favored candidate among Establishment Republicans, the fallen Jeb!, had the least speaking time last night, leaving Rubio an enormous opening to poach whatever remains of his onetime mentor’s support (and donors). John Kasich, who might also have inherited some of Jeb!’s mantle as the adult Republican in the room, and who seems far more substantive and accomplished than Rubio, came across as shrill and angry in tone in the debate (even when his words were not so).

So now we’ll see if Rubio’s anemic poll numbers start to rise. Meanwhile, the overall question about the GOP in 2016 remains the same. Do Republicans, especially those who vote in primaries, want a center-right candidate who has actually worked in government, or do they want a rank outsider?

No matter what the pecking order, the fact is that half, or a bit more than half, of the Republican electorate still is telling pollsters that it doesn’t want a Rubio, Bush, or Kasich. It wants Ben Carson or Donald Trump or (for a while) Fiorina. I think we can say that Fiorina is done; her brief vogue ended because she is both a world-class scold and the most unconvincing populist imaginable. (She not only laid off 30,000 employees at HP but nearly destroyed the company for those who remained.) Trump is wearing thin, but even at his thinnest, he’s still outpolling most of his opponents by double digits. And Carson — the new favorite — well, he makes Trump sound like Disraeli. As the debate once again demonstrated, he babbles platitudes, generalities, and utter nonsense; lies about his own history (including as a peddler of a suspect patent medicine); and seems to regard his own ascent in politics as akin to the Second Coming. If he and Trump continue to lead the GOP field, the Republican Party has a true crack-up on its hands, with its traditional donor class and corporate infrastructure in irresolvable conflict with its radical base. It’s worth noting that the miracle man who is supposed to paper over this conflict in Washington — Paul Ryan — received scant respect from the presidential hopefuls last night. If Trump and Carson both fade, it would seem that the only acceptable alternative to the base would not be Rubio but the far-right Ted Cruz, whose debate performance was just as slick.

One other point about last night: The lustiest cheers of the evening, some of them generated by Cruz, were for the candidates’ attacks on “the media” in general and the debate moderators in particular. CNBC surely did everything it could to prove the candidates’ case. Without explanation, the debate was preceded by nearly 15 minutes of banter by ill-informed and bombastic commentators, including the Trump ally (and aspiring Senatorial candidate) Larry Kudlow. Among the questioners at the debate itself were Jim Cramer, a poster boy for the reckless excess and conflicts of interest that found their apotheosis in the Wall Street crash of 2008, and Rick Santelli, whose 2009 on-air rant about American “losers” inspired the tea-party movement. The whole event felt like a disorganized amateur night, and one can only imagine Roger Ailes howling with delight at every wrong turn. I would be bitter about the fact that the debate took me away from too much of Game 2 of the World Series, though, given that I am a Mets fan, maybe that was a blessing in disguise.

It’s hard to see how things could get worse for Jeb Bush. He has been forced to cut campaign staff and expenses. He is relying on his brother and his parents to reassure donors. At a South Carolina town-hall meeting last weekend, he attracted criticism by complaining about the job of running for president, saying that he has “a lot of really cool things” he could do rather than suffer the indignities of trading jabs on the campaign trail. Did last night help him at all?

No. Bush is finished. I’d argue that he was never a real candidate to begin with, for all the money and Establishment support he attracted. There are three basic requirements for running for president: a cause or causes you vehemently want to advance, the proverbial fire in the belly, and an enthusiastic group of grassroots supporters who want to propel you to the White House. Bush had none of the three.

His campaign has been a study in incompetence that has mainly dramatized the candidate’s sense of entitlement. He was utterly blindsided by the single most obvious obstacle he was destined to face — addressing the record of his brother’s administration. As Elizabeth Drew laid out the evidence in a devastating New York Review of Books blog post last week, there were many reasons why Bush should have been prepared for the question Donald Trump raised about 9/11. The period between George W.’s inauguration in January 2001 and 9/11 was rife with national-security failures as the Al Qaeda threat grew daily. Rather than address those failures, Jeb took the position that it was impertinent to raise the question. He was similarly caught off guard by repeated questions about his brother’s instigation of war in Iraq.

What’s also remarkable is how little Jeb is aware of the changes in his own party. He has seemed perpetually surprised by the heathens in the GOP’s midst. He should not have been. His own father, with his race-baiting Willie Horton campaign against Michael Dukakis, helped invite in the crazies. His brother and Karl Rove gave sotto voce encouragement to the gay-bashing forces of the religious right, and looked the other way as Sarah Palin paved the way for Trump, Carson, and Cruz. Yet Jeb still clung to a belief that the old-school patrician ethos of his parents could run to his rescue in 2016. History will look back at him, if it looks at all, as a world-class fool and the last exhausted gasp of a GOP that no longer exists. 

Imagine if Exxon Had Told the Truth on Climate Change

By Bill McKibben, EcoWatch

30 October 15

ike all proper scandals, the #Exxonknew revelations have begun to spin off new dramas and lines of inquiry. Presidential candidates have begun to call for Department of Justice investigations, and company spokesmen have begun to dig themselves deeper into the inevitable holes as they try to excuse the inexcusable.

(Worst idea: attack Pulitzer prize-winning reporters as “anti-oil and gas activists”)

As the latest expose installment from those hopeless radicals at the Los Angeles Times clearly shows, Exxon made a conscious decision to adopt what a company public affairs officer called “the Exxon position.” It was simple: “Emphasize the uncertainty.” Even though they knew there was none.

Someone else will have to decide if that deceit was technically illegal. Perhaps the rich and powerful have been drafting the laws for so long that Exxon will skate; I confess my confidence that the richest company in American history can be brought to justice is slight.

But quite aside from those questions about the future, let’s take a moment and just think about the past. About what might have happened differently if, in August of 1988, the “Exxon position” had been “tell the truth.”

That was a few months after Nasa scientist James Hansen had told Congress the planet was heating and humans were the cause; it was amid the hottest American summer recorded to that point, with the Mississippi running so low that barges were stranded and the heat so bad that corn was withering in the fields. Imagine, amid all that, Exxon scientists had simply said: “Everything we know says Hansen is right; the planet’s in serious trouble.”

No one would, at that point, have blamed Exxon for causing the trouble—instead it would have been hailed for its forthrightness. It could have begun the task of finding alternatives to hydrocarbons, and the world could have done the same thing. This would not have been an easy job: the world was utterly dependent on coal, gas and oil. But it would have become our planet’s single-minded job. With Exxon—largest company on Earth, heir to the original oil baron, with tentacles reaching around the world—vouching for the science, there is no way we would have wasted 25 years in fruitless argument.

There’s no way, for instance, that Tim DeChristopher would have had to spend two years in jail, because it would have been obvious by the mid-2000s that the oil and gas leases he was blocking were absurd. Crystal Lameman and Melina Laboucan-Massimo and Clayton Thomas-Muller would not have had to spend their whole lives fighting tar sands mining in Alberta because no one would seriously have proposed digging up the dirtiest oil on the North American continent. Students would not have—as we speak—to be occupying administration buildings from Tasmania to Cambridge, because the fossil fuel companies would long since have become energy companies, and divesting from them would not be necessary.

More urgently, rapid development of renewables might well have kept half of Delhi’s children—2.5 million children—from developing irreversible lung damage.

The rapid spread of decentralised renewable technology might have kept oil and gas barons like the Koch Brothers from becoming, taken together, the richest man on Earth, and purchasing America’s democracy. The Earth’s oceans would be measurably less acidic—and we are, after all, an ocean planet.

Some climate change was unavoidable even by 1988—that’s about the moment when we were passing what now seems the critical 350 parts per million threshold for atmospheric CO2. And with the best will in the world it would have taken time to slow that trajectory; there’s never been an overnight fix. So we can’t say which of the various droughts and floods and famines might have been avoided. But because we wasted those critical decades, we’re now committed to far more warming than we needed to be—as one scientist after another has shown recently, our momentum has carried to us the point where stopping warming at even the disastrous 2C level may at this point be barely manageable if it’s manageable at all.

Of all the lies that Exxon leaders told about climate change, none may quite top the 1997 insistence that “it is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now.”

Exxon scientists knew that was wrong, and so did pretty much everyone else. If you could poll all the experts about to descend on Paris for UN climate talks and ask them what technology would be most useful in the fight against climate change, I’m pretty sure they’d say: a time machine that could take us back 20 years and give us those wasted decades.

And if you think it’s just scientists and environmentalists thinking this way, it’s actually almost anyone with a conscience. Here’s how the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News—Exxon’s hometown paper, the morning read of the oil patch— put it in an editorial last week: “With profits to protect, Exxon provided climate-change doubters a bully pulpit they didn’t deserve and gave lawmakers the political cover to delay global action until long after the environmental damage had reached severe levels. That’s the inconvenient truth as we see it.”

Those years weren’t inconvenient for Exxon, of course. Year after year throughout the last two decades they’ve made more money than any company in the history of money. But poor people around the world are already paying for those profits, and every generation that follows us now will pay as well, because the “Exxon position” has helped take us over one tipping point after another. Their sins of emission, like so many other firms and individuals, are bad. But their sins of omission are truly inexcusable.