Halpin writes: "Given shifting economic conditions and demographic trends, conservatives now have to come to grips with rising inequality and diminishing mobility in American life and look seriously at the left's ideas about the use of governmental actions to expand security and opportunity for a diverse population."
Is there a new left? (photo: Time Magazine)
How the American Left Has Gotten the Upper Hand
By John Halpin, ThinkProgress
05 March 13
t's difficult in modern politics for those of one ideological persuasion to adequately describe and comprehend what the other side believes on its own terms. Progressives correctly scoff at right-wing notions that they are trying to pursue some undefined "European socialist" agenda and force the federal government into every aspect of American economic and social life. Progressives see themselves engaging in pragmatic uses of both governmental and private actions to solve concrete problems such as poverty, the lack of health care, or climate change. Progressives want to achieve greater liberty, equality, and opportunity for all people in a manner that acknowledges actual inequalities in social life and takes appropriate steps, within democratic and constitutional limits, to redress these inequities.
Conversely, conservatives rightly recoil at liberal depictions of conservatism as little more than an elaborate justification for greed, moral self-righteousness, economic privilege, and inequality. Conservatives see themselves advancing ideas about limited government and citizenship where individuals and families are the center-piece of social life and economic activity revolves around market interactions with little interference by outside forces. They believe a decentralized and limited government is more consistent with human nature and produces better economic outcomes.
Obviously, there's more to each of these political traditions than described here. And it's certainly fair for ideological proponents to question one another about their motivations, theories, core values, and policies.
But given the mutual confusion that often arises in ideological discussions, it is refreshing as a progressive to read Tod Lindberg's astute article, Left 3.0, in the final issue of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review.
Lindberg argues that the latest iteration of the left has transcended its past ideological divisions to put forth a practical, technologically sophisticated, and politically viable set of ideas tempered by expectations of slow but steady progress. What holds the left together in Lindberg's analysis? "[T]he achievement of a greater degree of economic equality by means of politics." This belief in equality has evolved throughout the nation's history:
One story is its ideological evolution, from the socialists and anarchists of the early twentieth century, through the battles of the communist and anti-communist Left of mid-century, on to the birth of the New Left in the turbulent 1960s, through the quiescence of the Left during the period of neoliberal (i.e., conservative) dominance for the generation following the election of Ronald Reagan. Or one could tell the story in terms of the progressive movement at the end of the nineteenth century, through FDR's New Deal, to LBJ's Great Society, on through the primary challenge Sen. Ted Kennedy launched against Jimmy Carter, its failure, and Bill Clinton's emergence as a "New Democrat" distinct from the old liberal partisans of an expansive role for the federal government.
Both stories, however, come together with the emergence of the newer Left - call it Left 3.0, tracing the ideological progression from old Left to New Left to today's newer Left. Left 3.0 is not only an ideological movement, but also effectively controls (or rather guides) a political party fully competitive at the national level. Left 3.0 is an entity whose internal divisions are minuscule in comparison to the shared convictions that hold it together. Left 3.0 is a creature of its times, well-organized and fully synced to the digital culture out of which it emerged. And Left 3.0 has come into its own at a time, not coincidentally, when its political rival, the GOP electoral coalition, already under strain because of shifting demographics, is deeply divided over vexing social issues on which Left 3.0 offers clear answers.
Not everything in here is correct. Equality is certainly a primary value for progressives and a core part of our national foundations. But progressives have always placed a premium on human freedom as well. It's clear that the left today holds many advantages over the right on issues of individual choice and a more expansive notion of economic freedom that includes protections against unwarranted interference by the state but also positive steps - on income support, health care, education, and other areas - to increase opportunities for people to exercise real liberty.
Similarly, Lindberg's conception of the left as entirely hostile to its ideological opponents is overstated. From my experience, the left as a whole doesn't view its critics as ignorant, stupid, or venal as Lindberg writes. On the contrary, since the late 1970's progressives have grappled with conservative critiques of government spending, taxation, and regulatory policy fairly seriously in policy and political terms - sometimes too much so. (Financial sector deregulation in the 1990s and the current fervor to cut government spending come to mind.)
But today it seems the shoe is on the other foot as Lindberg suggests. Given shifting economic conditions and demographic trends, conservatives now have to come to grips with rising inequality and diminishing mobility in American life and look seriously at the left's ideas about the use of governmental actions to expand security and opportunity for a diverse population.
Lindberg's historical and ideological analysis provides much to chew on - for both progressives and conservatives.
Parry writes: "The reality is that these guys act as if they've never read the Constitution and have spent too much time watching Fox News."
Illustration, the signing of the US Constitution. (photo: GenealogyOfConsent.WordPress.com)
Perverting the Constitution for Power
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
04 March 2013
The U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wingers are making bizarre arguments for gutting the Voting Rights Act, suggesting their real goal is to allow more suppression of minority voters and thus elect a Republican president who will keep the right-wingers as the Court’s majority, writes Robert Parry.
fficial Washington's boilerplate regarding the five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court is that they are "strict constructionists" who believe in a literal reading of the Constitution. But the reality is that these guys act as if they've never read the Constitution and have spent too much time watching Fox News.
For instance, Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is widely regarded as the "reasonable centrist" in this group, seems to believe that the Constitution made each state an "independent sovereign." He used that phrase last Wednesday in oral arguments on whether to strike down the Voting Rights Act and especially Section Five, which requires jurisdictions with histories of racially motivated voter suppression to get federal court permission before changing their voting laws.
Kennedy expressed concern that this requirement violated the constitutional provision declaring each state, in this case Alabama, to be an "independent sovereign." However, there is no such language in the U.S. Constitution. In fact, the Constitution intentionally expunged language about states being "independent" and "sovereign," which appeared in Article Two of the Articles of Confederation as it governed the United States from 1777 to 1787.
The problems caused by that language led to the convening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The idea of 13 "independent" and "sovereign" states had proven unworkable, so George Washington, James Madison and other Framers jettisoned it in favor of national sovereignty invested in "We the People of the United States."
General Washington, who presided at the convention, was a particular foe of state "sovereignty" because he and his revolutionary soldiers had suffered under the chaos of 13 "independent" states failing to meet obligations to fund and equip the Continental Army. That chaos then continued through the first years of independence.
So, the Constitutional Convention ignored its instructions to simply propose amendments to the Articles of Confederation and instead threw them out altogether, including Article Two which read: "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated."
In the Articles of Confederation, national sovereignty was specifically denied the central government, which was not deemed a nation or government but simply a "firm league of friendship." That power relationship was essentially flipped by the Constitution, which made federal law supreme and left the states responsible mostly for local matters.
Rewriting the History
The consolation prize that the states got was the Tenth Amendment which, in effect, replaced Article Two of the Articles of Confederation and must be read in comparison to that language of "sovereignty, freedom, and independence." The Tenth Amendment simply states that "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Though the modern American Right has sought to make the Tenth Amendment a central governing principle - claiming that it tightly constrains the federal government and gives broad authority to the states - the amendment was really a rhetorical sop to the Anti-Federalists. It had very little meaning since the Constitution granted sweeping powers to the Congress and to the President, which is why the Anti-Federalists fought so hard to block ratification.
But the Right's narrative of the nation's Founding often ignores why the Constitution was written, i.e. to obliterate the failings of the Articles of Confederation. By deleting that key part of the story, the Right can pretend that the Framers were seeking a weak central government and were enamored of states' rights, when nearly the opposite was true.
So, you'll hear in the ubiquitous right-wing media this "scholarship" about how the Framers wanted the states to be "sovereign" and "independent." But what was alarming about Kennedy's remark is that it appears this bogus narrative has now seeped into the U.S. Supreme Court, where the right-wing justices seem to believe the Articles of Confederation are still in force. [For more on this history, see Robert Parry's America's Stolen Narrative.]
Kennedy is seeing language that is not in the Constitution. One has to begin to wonder if he is simply in thrall to the right-wing faux history, or is he just another political activist masquerading as a justice, eager to do what he can to insure that a Republican succeeds President Barack Obama and then will appoint new right-wing justices when some of the current ones retire.
In this apparent pursuit of a permanent right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts presented his own sloppy reasoning for striking down Section Five of the Voting Rights Act. He claimed - without providing a source - that the proportion of blacks voting in Mississippi is much higher than the number in Massachusetts. Roberts called Mississippi the best and Massachusetts the worst.
But Massachusetts officials, including aides to African-American Gov. Deval Patrick, denied Roberts's claim, and Supreme Court clerks declined to provide data to support the Chief Justice's claim, which apparently originated in a dubious reading of Census data.
But the central flaw in Roberts's argument - even if his numbers were right - is that no one is alleging that Massachusetts has a history of Jim Crow laws suppressing the black vote. Mississippi does. And it's fair to say that the Voting Rights Act is a principal reason the black vote is as high as it is.
Voting as 'Racial Entitlement'
Rounding out the right-wing justices' efforts to transform the high court into what sounds more and more like a Fox News' pundit panel, Justice Antonin Scalia threw in his cranky notion that the Voting Rights Act was a "perpetuation of racial entitlement," suggesting that the right of blacks to vote was some kind of federal government handout.
Scalia, who is widely acclaimed by the mainstream media as a great legal intellect, apparently has little knowledge of the Fifteenth Amendment, which states: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
That would seem to make clear that Congress has the authority to exercise its judgment in protecting the rights of blacks and other minorities to vote, which Congress did in passing the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and overwhelmingly reauthorizing it as recently as 2006.
But now the right-wing clique running the U.S. Supreme Court seems ready to ignore the wording of the U.S. Constitution, to rely on some dubious data, to utter some inflammatory words, and to apply language from the inoperative Articles of Confederation to gut the Voting Rights Act and permit the restoration of Jim Crow laws.
Based on this anything-goes interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, these right-wing justices are now expected to at least strike down Section Five, thus clearing the way for Republican-controlled states to enact new ways to devalue the votes of blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and urban white youth who embrace the nation's multiculturalism.
One almost expected these right-wing justices to resurrect the "Three-Fifths of a Person" clause, which was repealed by the post-Civil War amendments ending slavery and asserting equal protection under the law. Why not? If they're reaching back to the state "sovereignty" and "independence" in the Articles of Confederation, which was repealed by the Constitution, why not embrace the concept that whites are more of a person than non-whites?
The Court's right-wing majority seems determined to do whatever it can to get another Republican president into the White House as soon as possible so their majority will be sustained, much as five Republican partisans installed George W. Bush after Election 2000, although he lost the popular vote and would have lost Florida if the Court had allowed all legally cast ballots to be counted.
However, as Bush's fate and the Court's Republican majority hung in the balance, five GOP partisans - including current Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Clarence Thomas - suddenly fell in love with the post-Civil War's Fourteenth Amendment and its "equal-protection-under-the-law" principle. With Kennedy writing the majority opinion, they somehow twisted it into an excuse for not counting the votes of blacks and poor people.
That way a Republican was put into the White House and could fill Court vacancies, which Bush did in selecting John Roberts and Samuel Alito to replace William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor.
Now, by overturning much if not all of the Voting Rights Act, the Supreme Court's Republican majority could clear the way for more suppression of non-white votes and thus increase the chances that a Republican president will be in place to ensure that the right-wing majority doesn't slide into the minority.
[For a limited time, you can purchase Robert Parry's trilogy on the Bush family for only $34. For details, click here.] Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6853"><span class="small">Frank Rich, New York Magazine</span></a>
Monday, 04 March 2013 12:44
Rich writes: "The Republican Plan A is simplicity itself: steal future elections by disenfranchising those Americans who keep rejecting the party at the polls (blacks, young people, Latinos)."
The US Capitol Building at sunrise. (photo: Jim Young/Reuters)
Lipstick on an Elephant
By Frank Rich, New York Magazine
04 March 2013
Deep behind a tangle of denial and rebranding initiatives, a GOP resuscitation plan emerges.
nyone who turned to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's "five stages of grief" to track the fallout from the Republicans' 2012 defeat could see that Denial arrived right on schedule Election Night, when Karl Rove self-immolated rather than accept that Barack Obama had won reelection. Anger followed the morning after-with much Republican rage aimed at Mitt Romney, a loser so instantly maligned and deserted by his own troops that until he finally resurfaced this week for an interview on Fox News he might as well have been on a Mormon mission to Mars for all anyone knew or cared. What we've seen ever since is Bargaining, tinged with more than a touch of stage four, Depression. Republicans of various stripes are caroming like billiard balls among cable-news channels, op-ed pages, and WTF postmortem panel discussions, trying to identify a formula that might salvage a party embraced by 22 percent of the public, according to a USA Today-Pew survey in mid-February.
It's gotten so gloomy that at the annual House Republican retreat just before Inauguration Day in January, the motivational speakers included the executive who turned around Domino's Pizza and the first blind man to reach the top of Mount Everest. Were the GOP a television network, it would be fifth-place NBC, falling not only behind its traditional competitors but Univision. Every postelection poll, with the possible exception of any conducted in Dick Morris's bunker, finds that voters favor the Democrats' positions on virtually every major issue, usually by large margins: immigration reform, gun restrictions, abortion rights, gay marriage, climate change, raising the minimum wage, and the need for higher tax revenue to accompany spending cuts in any deficit-reduction plan. Given that losing hand, what's a party to do? It's far easier for NBC to cancel Smash than for the GOP to give the hook to an elected official like Steve Stockman, the Texas congressman whose guest at the State of the Union was the rocker turned NRA spokesman Ted Nugent, best known for telling the president to "suck on my machine gun." For every Todd Akin who fades, another crazy Stockman (or two) springs up. Strategies to work around the party's entrenched liabilities have been proliferating since November 6, as Republicans desperately try to stave off the terminal Kübler-Ross stage of Acceptance.
The Republican Plan A is simplicity itself: steal future elections by disenfranchising those Americans who keep rejecting the party at the polls (blacks, young people, Latinos). This strategy was hatched even before Election Day, with widespread local efforts to reinstate Jim Crow obstacles at the ballot box, from reduced voting hours to new identification requirements. After the election, a parallel scheme was revived: state laws that propose slicing and dicing the Electoral College to increase the odds that a Republican presidential candidate could win an election while losing the popular vote. Next up is the Supreme Court, ruling this term on a new challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That signature civil-rights law, born in the crucible of Martin Luther King Jr.'s incarceration in Selma, was reenacted with bipartisan unanimity in 2006 (the vote was 98-0 in the Senate, 390-33 in the House). But now that the GOP is under existential threat, the highly political chief justice, John Roberts, seems poised to do what he has to do. He's already on record saying that "things have changed in the South"-which may come as news to the African-Americans forced to wait for hours in Florida (and elsewhere) to vote last November.
Plan B for a GOP resuscitation is-or was-the quick fix of finding a ready-made messiah, preferably one who could be anointed the new Ronald Reagan. Such was the Platonic idea, if not the reality, of Marco Rubio, the 41-year-old first-term Cuban-American senator from Florida who induced orgasms among conservative elders with his potential to put "a new face" on the party. Rubio is "the best communicator" since Reagan, in the estimation of Rove-an analogy echoed by many, including John McCain. (McCain has also judged Romney and Sarah Palin to be Reaganesque, but never mind.) Rubio "can explain his views on Univision without a translator," enthused the awestruck Michael Gerson, a former George W. Bush speechwriter. Or, as another onetime Bush spin artist, Nicolle Wallace, chimed in: "He's everything we need and more. He's modern. He knows who Tupac is. He's on social media." A Spanish-speaking young (or at least youngish) guy who has listened to a black person (if only through headphones) and is on that newfangled Facebook-cool! The only way he could check more demographic boxes coveted by Republicans would be if he turned out to be gay. Alas, Plan B fizzled while the Time cover anointing Rubio "The Republican Savior" was still on the newsstands. The savior's disastrous response to Obama's State of the Union address did for a bottle of Poland Spring water what Clint Eastwood did for an empty chair.
That leaves Plan C, by far the most widespread, if unruly, of the Republican salvage plans on view: a wholesale rebranding of the GOP. The only trouble with this approach is that there is no agreement among its adherents about how to go about it, or what the new brand should offer beyond a front man who speaks Spanish, owns an iPod, and is as comfortable with Twitter and Instagram as Reagan was in front of movie and television cameras. Yet if you get to the bottom of all the contradictory rebranding scenarios-and factor in the party's immovable stance in Washington's sequestration showdown-a plausible, time-honored path to a successful Republican future does emerge, albeit one that is none of the above.
Many Republicans in the rebranding claque, from Virginia governor Bob McDonnell to the ubiquitous pundits Laura Ingraham and S. E. Cupp, believe their party most of all has a "messaging" problem. "This is about tone," says McDonnell, who posits that Republicans must start "showing people what we're for instead of what we're against." Newt Gingrich says the GOP should be "the happy party." Reince Priebus, the Republican chairman, proposes building an "exciting party that smiles." Frank Luntz, the focus-group guru behind Gingrich's 1994 "Contract With America," has joined Roger Ailes of Fox News in calling for a whole "new language" (presumably provided by Luntz, for a fee) emphasizing empathy. Ailes has proposed that the negative phrase "illegal immigration" be retired in favor of "a Judeo-Christian approach to immigration."
The most elaborate pitch I've seen for a GOP messaging overhaul was crafted by Mark McNeilly, a former marketing executive who served at IBM during its own rebranding contortions. Writing in the business magazine Fast Company, McNeilly lamented postelection polls showing that voters associate Democrats with terms "appealing to growing segments of the voter population" (that would be "Mainstream, Young, Current, For the People, For Minorities, For Women") but associate Republicans with "Extreme, Old, Out-of-Date, For the Wealthy, For Whites, For Men." Among McNeilly's solutions were for Republicans to push policies that cater to children, promote federalism (and thereby remove social issues, "a big 'inhibitor to purchase' " among young voters, from the national stage), and banish the elephant logo, which "brings nothing positive to the table." (Perhaps the new logo could be :), in keeping with the advice of Gingrich and Priebus.) McNeilly also wants to retool the acronym GOP by having it stand for "Growth and Opportunity Party" rather than "Grand Old Party." As he elaborated, grand is "a word no one still alive uses today unless they are referring to a type of piano," and old is "a negative perception the party needs to move away from." Helpfully-or not-he cited BP, which morphed from "British Petroleum" to "Beyond Petroleum," as an example the GOP might profitably follow.
Whether by coincidence or under his tutelage, a striking number of Republican politicians are busy executing ideas in his playbook. For some time, Marsha Blackburn, a television-hogging Republican congresswoman from Tennessee, has been beating the drum for recasting the GOP as the "Great Opportunity Party." A kinder, gentler postelection Eric Cantor has supplemented his "You Cut" website with a new one under the rubric "Making Life Work" and is now talking about children every chance he can. "What I say is we've got a place I think all of us can come together, and that is for the kids," he said when discussing immigration reform in an appearance last month on Meet the Press. Cantor then moved on to the subject of "a dad here in the inner city," observing that "what we care about, and what he cares about, is his kids." Cantor added, "The point is we've got to be talking about helping folks," which meant invoking still another kid: "I've got a constituent, she's 12 years old, her name is Katie. She was diagnosed with cancer at age 1. I mean, can you imagine?" He did not offer Katie any health-care assistance-but did say, "The federal government's got a role in medical research," presumably as long as it doesn't involve stem cells or cost any taxpayer money.
Listening to this pabulum, I find it hard not to think of Veep, the satirical television series I work on, in which the title character, the vice-president, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, is constantly pandering to voters with empty slogans like "Politics is about people!" Veep plays it for laughs, and it's hard to imagine that some voters aren't laughing at Cantor, Blackburn, Priebus, Gingrich, et al. Equally laughable, I would argue, are the bald attempts at rebranding being practiced by Fox News, which has traded the acrimonious Palin and Dick Morris for the ostensibly more diverse and empathetic Herman Cain and Scott Brown. Surely the same Latino voters who will never forget Romney's call for immigrant "self-deportation" during the 2012 campaign have similar memories of Cain's gleeful plug for an electrified border fence with a sign reading IT WILL KILL YOU in both English and Spanish.
A less cheesy rebranding regimen is being whipped up by moderate conservative pundits like Josh Barro of Bloomberg View, Ross Douthat of the Times, and Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review, who want to reinvent actual Republican policy so that it will focus on the needs of the same middle-class Americans apotheosized by Obama. George Will, among others on the right, has gone so far as to call for breaking up the big banks. "The perception that the Republican Party serves the interests only of the rich underlies all the demographic weaknesses that get discussed in narrower terms," is how Ponnuru crystallized the problem.
But there are more than a few barriers to realizing this rescue plan. As the political scientist John Sides has written, the association of the Republican Party with the rich and big business-and of the Democrats with the less well-off-was as much a fixture in polls in 1953 as it was in 2012. What's remained immutable for six decades cannot be changed overnight, even if there were a will and a way in the party. And there is no will or way. Republicans still oppose Wall Street reform and upper-bracket tax cuts while balking at raising the minimum wage; they have failed to formulate any compelling policy to alleviate the No. 1 cause of middle-class insecurity, health insurance, unless you count Romneycare, the Obamacare Ur-text they disowned. Though moderate conservative pundits may offer ideas for economic remedies that might help the non-rich, no GOP politicians with any clout embrace them. This compelled Douthat to wave a white flag in a blog entry last month, "Real Republican reinvention is a cause in search of a standard-bearer."
That's because real Republican leaders don't want any reinvention that ventures much beyond forced smiles; retooled, focus-group-tested language (in English and Spanish); and blather about "the kids." As another moderate conservative pundit, Kathleen Parker, has conceded since the election, her party now "is the fringe." The GOP's problem isn't bad messaging; it's that its message has been, if anything, all too readily understood. When Akin talks about "legitimate rape" or McDonnell endorses a bill that would impose transvaginal probes even on rape victims seeking abortions, they are not garbling their message but saying it outright, loud and clear. The same goes for Joe Scarborough, who recently branded Paul Krugman an "extremist" comparable to Wayne LaPierre, and Senator Ted Cruz, the rising new tea-party heartthrob from Texas who essentially accused the former Republican senator (and Vietnam hero) Chuck Hagel of being a North Korean Commie mole during his confirmation hearings. The message of the GOP vox populi is no less forthright: Republican audiences at the presidential-primary debates booed a gay American soldier serving in Iraq, cheered the record number of executions conducted on Rick Perry's watch in Texas, and cried out "Yeah!" when a moderator asked Ron Paul if a 30-year-old man in a coma without health insurance should be allowed to die.
All these views are consistent with the actual political leadership of the GOP, as opposed to the more centrist standard-bearers conservative Beltway pundits fantasize about in their dreams. In a recent bout of algorithm-crunching, Nate Silver drew on detailed compilations of congressional voting records, fund-raising sources, and public issue statements to assign conservative "scores" to major Republican politicians of the past half-century. The scores for the new generation of national leaders (and potential presidential candidates) favored by the party's base were all high-Jindal (44), Rubio (51), McDonnell (53), Cruz (53), Paul Ryan (55), Rand Paul (65)-placing almost all of them to the right of such leaders as Richard Nixon (22), George H.W. Bush (33), McCain (39), Romney (39), Palin (41), Reagan (44), and George W. Bush (46). Chris Christie (9) and Jon Huntsman (17) may be beloved by what remains of "moderate" Republicans, but they're the ones who are off-message with the majority of the GOP, not Rubio or McDonnell or Ryan or Paul.
This is why Karl Rove's "Conservative Victory Project," which would oppose rape-obsessed candidates like Akin when they surface in GOP Senate primaries, was dead on arrival. Republicans vote for candidates like Akin in primaries because they actually believe in them, not because they are duped. Let Rove throw his donors' money against Steve King, the nativist congressman toying with a 2014 Senate run in Iowa, and the base will strike back. Indeed, it already has. Hardly had Rove announced his new project than a prominent tea-party organization, Tea Party Patriots, sent out an e-mail superimposing his face on a photo of Heinrich Himmler. The right-wing radio talker Mark Levin was so infuriated that he ranted, "Who the hell died and made Karl Rove queen for the day?" Erick Erickson, who runs the popular blog RedState, wrote that "any candidate who gets this group's support should be targeted for destruction by the conservative movement."
Which brings us to Plan D: What if the GOP doesn't change at all? Certainly that seems to be the case thus far, for all the public clamoring of conservative pundits for a more inclusive and constructive brand. The base is still screaming for a border fence at town-hall meetings. Diversity remains a subject of internal prattle, not practice. At the House's Williamsburg retreat, a panel on "successful communication with minorities and women" had a Latino moderator, two Latino women, three white men, no white women, and no blacks. The participants in a postelection National Review panel on "What Is Wrong With the Right?" were six men, no women. Even a putative young reformer like Jindal, who has demanded that Republicans stop being "the stupid party," has pointedly said that the GOP should not "moderate, equivocate, or otherwise abandon our principles"-specifically listing abortion, marriage, and stopping "European socialism" among the nonnegotiable articles of faith. The country, he says, "doesn't need two Democratic parties"-echoing Barry Goldwater's old battle cry that America needs "a choice, not an echo."
Nowhere is the Republicans' commitment to providing a clear choice more visible than in their intransigence on sequestration. In this Beltway battle, the newly reelected president holds all the cards when it comes to public opinion. A Pew poll in late February showed that, by a large margin, voters would blame Republicans in Congress over Obama for the pain inflicted by across-the-board federal budget cuts. A mere 19 percent of Americans agree with the GOP position that tax increases should be off the table in any deficit negotiations. But the Republicans nonetheless stuck to their script. They were willing to lose the public-relations war, willing even to be hated. Might this be because they have a longer view?
After Goldwater lost by a landslide in 1964-a far more sweeping defeat than Romney's-the GOP took a hit in public stature that makes its present travails look tame. In the account of the journalist Theodore H. White, Goldwater's chief speechwriter, Karl Hess, couldn't even get a patronage job as an elevator operator on the Hill in 1965 because of his association with the debacle. Soul-searching moderates and Establishment types of the early sixties, fearing that the GOP would go the way of the Whigs, behaved much as their counterparts have been doing now, calling for more inclusiveness and less "obstruction and negativism," according to Rule and Ruin, Geoffrey Kabaservice's invaluable recent history of moderate Republicanism's demise. Charles Percy, the Illinois centrist who lost his 1964 governor's race, argued that fellow reformers must "take this party away from being a sort of Anglo-Saxon, white Protestant party." Even the conservatives running the Texas GOP agreed that they had to attract new constituencies like "blue-collar workers and Latin Americans," as the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak described those constituencies back then.
But then as now, it was the hard right, not the moderates, that constituted the party's base and the source of its grassroots energy. Then as now, the GOP was determined to pander to the Old South rather than court minorities. (Goldwater received 6 percent of the black vote; so did Romney.) Then as now, the right could argue that most Americans still preferred the bedrock conservative plank of limited government to the activist Washington offered by Democrats. In a poll taken in August of 1964, Lyndon Johnson received high marks as a leader and was unambiguously headed toward a resounding victory over the unpopular, shoot-from-the-hip Goldwater. But the same poll also showed that most Americans were opposed to the swollen federal budget and LBJ's big-government projects: civil rights, the war on poverty, medical care for the aged. In our own time, polls on and since Election Day have revealed a similar disconnect: Support for Obama and for nearly all Democratic policies is contradicted by clear majorities who think government does "too much" and threatens "personal rights and freedoms."
Conservatives have solid reasons to believe that over time their position will prevail if they wait out the hits they take along the way. That's a lesson that was learned after 1964. Much as right-wing purists like Mark Levin and Erick Erickson rail against Karl Rove's deviations from tea-party orthodoxy in 2013, so Goldwater's loyalists and heirs stood firm in defeat, fending off their party's erstwhile reformers. In the 1964 postelection issue of National Review, Ronald Reagan, still two years away from being elected governor of California, condemned "traitors" who might try to reclaim the party from true conservatives. Sixteen years later, he and the modern conservative movement had driven most of the "traitors" out of the party hierarchy and taken charge.
These days, the GOP has no new Reagan as yet waiting in the wings. It faces a demographic cliff that may take far longer than two years to scale, no matter how many blind mountain climbers deliver pep talks-especially if Republicans in Congress can't even mobilize on immigration reform this year. But the party controls far more of American governance, federal and local, than it did after Goldwater's defeat. It has continued to push the country-and both the current and previous Democratic president-incrementally to the right. Whatever the acronym stands for, the GOP remains nothing if not true to itself. It could not be rebranded even if it wanted to change-and it does not want to. A cosmetic face-lift would fool no one. Its current leaders are more faithful than ever-more faithful than Nixon, Ford, and both George Bushes ever were-to the principles laid down by Goldwater and Reagan. In the end, the party's best bet may be not to do something but just stand there until history cycles back to it once more.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5903"><span class="small">Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Monday, 04 March 2013 09:43
Excerpt: "Why does Bob Woodward get to lie - twice! - and still be Bob Woodward? And why is it that the Republicans can be so intransigent and Barack Obama gets blamed?"
Bob Woodward is an associate editor of the Washington Post. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
The Rules of Washington Morality
By Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
04 March 13
Why does Bob Woodward get to lie -twice!- and still be Bob Woodward? And why is it that the Republicans can be so intransigent and Barack Obama gets blamed? Michael Tomasky explains.
oodwardgate got me reflecting on the question of Washington morality. Now yes, that's an oxymoron if ever there was one. But surely there is some set (however bizarre) of impulses and rules that lets Bob Woodward say what he said, and Politico promote it as if it were a feud between two soap opera stars, with both walking away essentially unharmed, as they likely will (certainly in Politico's case; Woodward's black eye will need a little time to heal). More important than that, there must be a set of impulses and rules that observes what has been going on in this town for the last four years, with Republicans being the most obstructionist opposition in the country's modern history, and yet somehow contrives to blame Barack Obama for the fact that our government can't function. I have divined three such rules that seem to apply to the present case and to most of the big dilemmas the capital has confronted in recent times.
Rule One: When information is being injected into the discourse, the content of the information is far less important than the stature of and/or establishment's feeling about the person injecting the information. You could be as prescient as old Tiresias bumping his way around Thebes, but if the Washington bigwigs have never heard of you or haven't already given you their seal of approval, you're wasting your time. However, if you already possess said seal of approval, you can say pretty much anything, and you will be taken seriously.
Think of Colin Powell at the U.N. That was one howler after another. Now granted it was hard to know that in real time. But what it wasn't hard to know at that point in the spring of 2003 was that the neoconservatives then peopling the Bush administration had been thirsting for war against Saddam since 1991, and anyone who knew that (as all of Washington should have) would have taken the general's presentation with several grains of salt. Of course, the opposite happened. Powell was widely respected, and, well, it seemed impressive, with all those photos of all those trucks surely doing clandestine, trucky things.
As for the obverse, my liberal allies, this explains why information that seems so obvious to us never gets through. Yes, when the private market isn't pumping enough money into the economy, that's when the public sector should be doing it-it's exactly the wrong time to tighten the belt. This is Keynes 101. A bushelful of Nobel laureates have been running around saying this since 2008, most recently the great Robert Solow in the Times the other day.
But Solow isn't a Washington animal. Ditto Paul Krugman. Why should we believe him, Washington sniffs? Not one of us. Besides he's so snooty, and so ... so negative. Now Joe Scarborough! There's a man to trust. Talks sense, not all this Princeton mumbo-jumbo. Okay, he's not an economist, but what do those fancy-pants economists know anyway?
There are two types of people in this realm-those who yearn above all else to win the establishment's seal of approval, and those who couldn't give a shit. Those who yearn quickly learn to say the right things: that entitlements are our nation's crushing problem, that we simply must attack the deficit, that both sides are equally to blame. If you are of moderately above-average intelligence, you need attend only about 3.2 Washington cocktail parties to figure out that these are the lines to parrot for purposes of advancement.
Rule Two: Custom and process are far more important than substance. Most typical news events are either custom/process stories or substance stories (and obviously there are a lot more of the former than the latter). But when a news event brings both of these issues to the fore, substance will lose every time.
Woodwardgate is a textbook case. When Woodward wrote his infamous column last weekend, the small band of liberal bloggers and opinion writers, we who fashion ourselves (or more accurately were once fashioned by a Bush aide speaking on background who was probably Karl Rove) the "reality-based community," all wrote that Woodward was just factually wrong. That Obama hadn't moved the goal posts. He'd been talking about revenue as part of the sequestration fix since the day the 2011 Budget Control Act was passed.
We were interested in the substance. Silly us. What the rest of Washington was interested in was the simple fact that it was Bob Woodward saying it. All the liberals ended up doing, in fact, was making Woodward more interesting. And then, once it became a Woodward-Gene Sperling story, it was entirely about their relationship, whether Sperling's words were indeed threatening, and so on.
This would be dismissible, but it actually had an insidious impact. Because outside of liberal-land, Woodward's lie about the goal posts has basically been permitted to stand, which has played very much to conservatives' advantage. His second lie, about the nature of Sperling's obviously cordial email to him, has been somewhat refuted, but only depending on the eye of the beholder. This is the kind of thing that happens when substance is given short shrift, because substance has a well-known liberal bias.
Rule Three: While conservatives are expected to behave like conservatives, liberals are expected to behave better. It's a given that conservative Republicans are going to be uncompromising, brusque, blunt, and boorish. It's how so many of them have behaved since they first hit town in the Reagan days, and 30 years on it's the sort of behavior everyone expects of them. Conservative Republicans who aren't this way, who somehow fail to say the occasional crazy and offensive thing, are perversely disappointing, not quite the real article.
But liberals are supposed to be, as the old saying goes, so open-minded their brains fall out. There's room maybe for one liberal crank. But Barney Frank just retired. Mostly liberals and Democrats are supposed to understand that conservatives are obstreperous and not only not behave that way themselves but also somehow compensate for it.
This rule has pervaded the mainstream press coverage of the entire past four years and fiscal matters in particular. If Democrats had been in the minority these past four years and had been as dogmatic about no spending cuts as Republicans have been about no revenue, the Washington establishment would have pilloried them. Instead, now, it's somehow Obama's fault that he hasn't made Republicans see sweet reason.
All these rules work to the benefit of conservatives more often than not because conservatives are generally the ones who try to obfuscate facts or persuade us that a message is credible because of who's conveying it rather than its substance. And then, when liberals complain, they will be seen as behaving churlishly because they're supposed to be better. This is how the scam is run. Washington usually falls for it, and Washington always will.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=15187"><span class="small">Steve Kornacki, Salon</span></a>
Sunday, 03 March 2013 14:20
Kornacki writes: "True-believer conservatives imposed politically toxic positions on the GOP conference and Boehner had embarrassingly little ability to put a stop to the madness."
House Speaker John Boehner. (photo: unknown)
John Boehner: Portrait of a Powerless Man
By Steve Kornacki, Salon
03 March 13
hy does John Boehner subject himself to this?
Not for the first time this year, and probably not for the last, the speaker allowed to the floor on Thursday a major piece of legislation that a solid majority of the Republican Conference voted against, that passed mainly on the strength of Democratic votes, and that the Obama White House will now trumpet as a major achievement. The bill at hand was the Violence Against Women Act, which had easily passed the Senate only to meet with fierce resistance from conservatives in the House. In the end, 138 House Republicans went on the record against it, while 87 backed it. Among Democrats, meanwhile, there wasn't a single "no" vote.
We saw this same dynamic at the start of the year, when the fiscal cliff deal passed with just 85 Republicans voting "yes" - and 151 voting "no." And we saw it a few weeks after that, when a $50.5 billion Sandy aid package cleared the chamber with only 49 Republicans supporting it, and 179 opposing it.
The common thread in all of these instances is that true-believer conservatives imposed politically toxic positions on the GOP conference and Boehner had embarrassingly little ability to put a stop to the madness. It was only when the power of public outrage, poll numbers and pressure from members in marginal districts grew just strong enough that Boehner had the ability to allow floor votes and resolve the issues without losing his speakership to a coup of angry conservatives.
Really, this has been the story of Boehner's entire tenure as speaker. In the 112thCongress, Boehner famously negotiated to the brink of a deficit reduction "grand bargain" with President Obama, one that would have exchanged modest revenue increases for serious cuts to safety net programs. But even that was giving away too much in the eyes of the Tea Party crowd, forcing Boehner to walk away from the table. Back then, Boehner could mostly settle for not striking deals with the administration and leaving most issues to fester. In the minds of most Republicans, the lousy economy would knock Obama out of office in 2012 and deliver the Senate to the GOP too, empowering the party to impose a true-believer agenda in 2013.
But then Obama won a resounding reelection victory, Democrats added to their Senate majority, and the GOP lost seats in the House. This has created a new dynamic in the 113thCongress, with an emboldened second-term president more confidently pushing his agenda and ratcheting up public pressure on Republicans to meet him halfway. It's also helped that Obama has had public opinion on his side, and that in the case of the fiscal cliff, Republicans were facing the prospect of being blamed for automatic across-the-board tax hikes if they failed to compromise. So in this Congress, unlike the last one, there is serious pressure on Boehner, for the overall good of his party, to make some deals.
But he's hamstrung by the fact that what's good for the GOP's overall image isn't necessarily good politics for individual Republican members. Many of them represent deeply Republican districts, where there's no such thing as a serious general election challenge. That moves all of the action to the GOP primary, which has two effects: 1) It increases the likelihood that a Tea Party-type will win the seat; 2) it forces Republicans who aren't truly Tea Party-types to behave like Tea Party-types so that they can win primaries. This pressure exists in non-safe districts too, but there's a little more tension for these Republican members, who have to worry about potential primary challenges along with the general election. And then there's Boehner, who is deeply distrusted by the conservative movement, thus forcing him to consider the possibility of a revolt by restive conservatives before making any major decisions.
Thus, the only real option for Boehner is what we keep seeing this year. When there's a major piece of legislation where public opinion is on the Democrats' side, Boehner has to wait until enough pressure and outrage has built that a healthy number of Republicans from marginal districts who value their seats and Republicans from safe districts who value having the majority decide it's in their interests to resolve the issue. Only then can Boehner move the bill to the floor. And even then, the majority of Republicans will feel compelled - either by their genuine ideological views or by fear of a primary challenge - to vote against it.
Which brings us to the sequester that's now kicking in. This is hardly a surprising development. Obama has made his negotiating position clear: He wants to get rid of it and enact a "balanced" fix that includes entitlement cuts and increased revenue from tax deductions and loopholes. There is absolutely no way that Boehner could sell anything along these lines to his conference right now. Conservatives in the House and across the country are still smarting from the fiscal cliff deal, so anything involving more revenue - even if it's not actually from tax rate increases - is a non-starter. For now.
But what happens as the sequester is implemented and Americans begin to see the impact? And as the defense industry, which still has real clout within the GOP, even if it's not nearly as much as it once did, begins to feel the impact? And what happens as the prospect of an ever worse situation - a government shutdown triggered by the March 27 expiration of the continuing resolution that now funds the government - approaches? What if polls show voters breaking hard against the GOP?
That's the kind of political toxicity that Boehner needs to sell any kind of a deal to his fellow Republicans - one that would give some ground on revenue, incur the wrath of the right, pass mainly with Democratic votes and (ideally for Boehner) allow the speaker to hold onto his title. In fact, as best anyone can tell, this basically is Boehner's strategy right now. As Politico reported earlier this week, he seems to be "aiming for a hefty dose of spending cuts and reforms like a change to calculating government benefits called chained CPI and closing a few tax loopholes."
Chained CPI or some other serious cut to the safety net could prompt anger on the left that could complicate the new Boehner strategy of passing big bills with Democratic support. But that's not his worry right now. For whatever reason, he likes being speaker, even though he's an unusually powerless one, and he wants to keep the job. So he'll take the sequester and wait.
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t's difficult in modern politics for those of one ideological persuasion to adequately describe and comprehend what the other side believes on its own terms. Progressives correctly scoff at right-wing notions that they are trying to pursue some undefined "European socialist" agenda and force the federal government into every aspect of American economic and social life. Progressives see themselves engaging in pragmatic uses of both governmental and private actions to solve concrete problems such as poverty, the lack of health care, or climate change. Progressives want to achieve greater liberty, equality, and opportunity for all people in a manner that acknowledges actual inequalities in social life and takes appropriate steps, within democratic and constitutional limits, to redress these inequities.
fficial Washington's boilerplate regarding the five right-wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court is that they are "strict constructionists" who believe in a literal reading of the Constitution. But the reality is that these guys act as if they've never read the Constitution and have spent too much time watching Fox News.
nyone who turned to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's "five stages of grief" to track the fallout from the Republicans' 2012 defeat could see that Denial arrived right on schedule Election Night, when 
oodwardgate got me reflecting on the question of Washington morality. Now yes, that's an oxymoron if ever there was one. But surely there is some set (however bizarre) of impulses and rules that lets Bob Woodward say what he said, and Politico promote it as if it were a feud between two soap opera stars, with both walking away essentially unharmed, as they likely will (certainly in Politico's case; Woodward's black eye will need a little time to heal). More important than that, there must be a set of impulses and rules that observes what has been going on in this town for the last four years, with Republicans being the most obstructionist opposition in the country's modern history, and yet somehow contrives to blame Barack Obama for the fact that our government can't function. I have divined three such rules that seem to apply to the present case and to most of the big dilemmas the capital has confronted in recent times.
