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Trans Military Ban: Why Doubling Down on the Culture Wars Won't Save Trump |
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Saturday, 29 July 2017 08:37 |
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Burmila writes: "With the administration quickly taking on the feel of a bad circus, earlier this week President Trump signaled his intent to turn to an old strategy intended to solidify support among the Republican base. He is following the formula correctly, but it is unlikely to work this time."
Soldiers in Basra. (photo: PA)
Trans Military Ban: Why Doubling Down on the Culture Wars Won't Save Trump
By Ed Burmila, Rolling Stone
29 July 17
Rehashing an old Bush-Rove strategy from 2004, president's inflammatory stance on "wedge-issues" has already backfired spectacularly
 ith the administration quickly taking on the feel of a bad circus, earlier this week President Trump signaled his intent to turn to an old strategy intended to solidify support among the Republican base. He is following the formula correctly, but it is unlikely to work this time.
George W. Bush and his key strategist Karl Rove famously boosted Republicans' chances in the 2004 election by using "wedge issues" against Democratic candidates. This involved, most prominently, introducing ballot measures about same-sex marriage in a number of key states including Ohio.
The theory was that conservative-leaning voters who might be unimpressed by Bush's first term performance would be motivated to vote by their strong opposition to same-sex marriage. Other issues used to similar effect during the W years included abortion and stem cell research bans.
As election strategies go, this was not a bad one; Bush entered 2004 on somewhat shaky ground, with voters becoming increasingly dissatisfied with an Iraq War that was promised to be short and easy. Tapping into conservative voters' strong feelings about social issues made sense.
Using that template, Trump has signaled a strong shift toward "Culture Wars" messaging this week. Unfortunately for him, it probably won't be effective at all this time. Each election requires a strategy that is suited to the political context of the moment. What worked in 2004 is hardly guaranteed to work in 2017.
First, the pointlessly cruel decision to ban transgender people from the military, even those currently serving in combat without issue, was an attempt to tap into the same vein as the same-sex marriage bans in 2004. The move backfired immediately and spectacularly; within minutes of the announcement, conservative stalwarts like Orrin Hatch, Joni Ernst, and Richard Shelby denounced the ban. Defense Secretary Mattis indicated that he will not enforce such a ban unless directly ordered. And these, remember, are reactions from Republicans.
Although Trump insisted the decision was a military one (made, curiously, over Twitter without involving or consulting the military) a staffer told a journalist:
"This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue. How will the blue collar voters in these states respond when senators up for re-election in 2018 like Debbie Stabenow are forced to make their opposition to this a key plank of their campaigns?"
This is the Rove strategy down to the letter. But we already see strong evidence that it won't work again. Public opinion on LGBTQ+ issues have changed dramatically in two decades, and today the percentage of voters stirred into a froth by transgender people is small even among conservatives. Ask North Carolina ex-Governor Pat McCrory how his "bathroom bill" worked out for him.
Further evidence of the shift in strategy can be found in Trump's statements throughout the week. Culture war issues appear to be all he has left given the failure to produce any legislative victories since inauguration. He has escalated anti-immigrant rhetoric to some truly appalling levels, race-baiting in ways that make the classic "Willie Horton" TV ad look subtle in comparison.
Trump appears suddenly to have discovered religion too, patronizing actual believers with capslock shouting about America "WORSHIP(ING) GOD!" He followed with low-hanging fruit for his base like glorifying law enforcement, which is more important than ever to counter the threat the average American faces from…the Mexican MS-13 street gang?
If this seems like a Mad Lib of random ideas thrown together, it isn't. These are all issues aimed directly at the authoritarian-follower personality types that love Trump: God, scary immigrants, law and order, and the always-terrifying transgender Americans. A wise bettor would place a solid wager on Trump introducing a flag burning amendment and a proposal to make English the official language before the end of the year. It's only a matter of time until he gets sufficiently desperate to dust off those old Culture Wars chestnuts.
One thing that 2004 had that 2017 decidedly does not was a robust economy. Trump repeatedly boasts that the stock market is high while ignoring the fact that for normal people, the economy (and job growth in particular) remains poor. What job growth has taken place since the 2007 recession is largely confined to the lower wage service industry. These are jobs, but certainly not the kind of jobs out of work Americans in Rust Belt states are looking for to provide for their families.
Obviously none of these issues are brand new to Trump; immigrant-bashing and overt Nixonian appeals to law and order both featured heavily in his campaign. However, he rarely spoke of religion and made only conciliatory (if vague) remarks toward LGBTQ+ people. That has changed now that he has decided to double down on cultural wedge issues. We can expect a steady diet of this divisive, confrontational approach as the 2018 election begins in earnest later this year.
What can Democrats do to fight back? Denounce this talk from the White House as the distraction that it is and talk about issues voters actually care about. The hard truth is that any voter blind enough to believe that Donald Trump is a religious man is beyond Democrats' reach anyway.
Imitating success is a useful strategy in many areas of life, but in politics success is more about catching lightning in a bottle and correctly reading the zeitgeist of the moment. By returning to a strategy used successfully more than a decade ago, Donald Trump is proving himself unable to do either.
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Ted Cruz: "The Dream of Keeping Poor People From Seeing a Doctor Must Never Die" |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 28 July 2017 13:47 |
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Borowitz writes: "Acknowledging that the government shutdown was coming to an end, an emotional Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor today to make an impassioned speech, telling his colleagues, 'The dream of keeping poor people from seeing a doctor must never die.'"
Senator Ted Cruz. (photo: Getty)
Ted Cruz: "The Dream of Keeping Poor People From Seeing a Doctor Must Never Die"
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
28 July 17
 The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report." 
 cknowledging that the government shutdown was coming to an end, an emotional Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor today to make an impassioned speech, telling his colleagues, “The dream of keeping poor people from seeing a doctor must never die.”
His eyes welling up with tears, Sen. Cruz said, “I embarked on this crusade with a simple goal: to keep affordable health care out of the reach of ordinary, hard-working Americans. And while this battle was lost, that dream—that precious, cherished dream—will live on.”
Reflecting on the government shutdown and near-default that almost touched off a global financial apocalypse, Sen. Cruz said, “We’ll give it another try in a few weeks.”
Sen. Cruz’s closest ally, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) also spoke reverently of the shutdown, calling it “the most expensive Civil War reënactment in history.”
“Unfortunately, once again, the wrong side won,” he said.
Over in the House of Representatives, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) congratulated his colleagues on the deal to resolve the shutdown, telling reporters, “This proves that when we work together, we can come up with a totally unsatisfactory solution to a completely unnecessary crisis.”
But the last word belonged to Sen. Cruz, who ended his emotional speech with a quiet benediction: “Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.”
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FOCUS: McCain's Moment |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 28 July 2017 11:52 |
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Pierce writes: "The John McCain the country had been waiting for finally showed up early Friday morning."
Senator John McCain. (photo: Getty)
McCain's Moment
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
28 July 17
The John McCain the country had been waiting for finally showed up early Friday morning.
 arly Friday morning turned out to be the day that John McCain became John McCain.
He was the third (and fatal) Republican vote against the so-called "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act, a hideous dog's breakfast of a bill that was written over lunch in the Republican conference on Thursday, and which was presented to the Senate at 10 o'clock Thursday night, whereupon Mitch McConnell graciously bestowed upon it two hours of debate, at least an hour of which was spent wandering around the stalagmites in the mind of Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, who droned on endlessly, refusing to yield to questions from the Democrats and eventually making everyone listening to him wish that he'd just break into song or do a little dance, anything to break up the monotony.
After a motion to send the bill to committee sponsored by Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington failed, McConnell held the vote open for nearly an hour, giving his people time to work on any fence-sitters. Even Mike Pence came down to join in the lobbying and, if necessary, cast another deciding vote. Pretty soon, it became obvious that McCain was going to be the focal point of all the politicking. That was when Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, did a very smart thing. She walked over to McCain and talked to him for a good 45 minutes, essentially boxing everyone out, even Pence, who tried his best. The drama kept building and Murkowski kept talking to him. She, along with Susan Collins of Maine, were the true stalwarts against the bill, voting against every attempt to demolish the ACA, and even voting against the bill coming to the floor, which is something that McCain couldn't bring himself to do. Murkowski even stood up against some clumsy—and marginally illegal—threats from Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior. She and Collins were implacable. If you told me that some of their courage rubbed off on McCain, I wouldn't argue with you.
"Those were some of the bravest votes I ever saw in politics," said Angus King, the Independent from Maine.
After a while, with the entire Senate chamber rapt with attention, McCain walked down the aisle and across in front of the presiding officer's desk, over to the Democratic side of the chamber, where he joined a group consisting of Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. The smiles started small, and then spread around the semi-circle of Democrats and McCain, whose love for the dramatic gesture remains undimmed, spread his arms out and lifted his head in mock supplication. Everybody laughed. Not long afterwards, Mike Pence left the chamber entirely, rather than preside over an impending political catastrophe.
The only thing that saved the day was the way it ended. The rest was taken up by a legislative process that had as much to do with orderly democracy as a tornado does with home décor. All day, the two sides went slanging after each other over amendments that they knew had no chance of becoming law. By the end of the afternoon, McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Ron Johnson called a press conference at which Graham called the skinny repeal a fraud, but at which all three indicated that they still might vote for a bill that none of them wanted to see become law. They said they would vote for it only if they got assurances from the leadership in the House of Representatives that there would be an actual conference committee formed prior to the bill's final passage. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, put out a bit of flummery that guaranteed no such thing. And then, when the actual bill finally came to the floor, it was worse than anyone had anticipated.
It did away with the individual mandate and, after a few years, with the employer mandate as well. It defunded Planned Parenthood. It left open the possibility that the states could once again allow insurance companies to decline coverage due to pre-existing conditions. A belated CBO score indicated that 16 million Americans would lose their insurance if the bill passed as it was written, and that six million Americans would lose their employer-based health insurance. And, because the bill was being passed through the reconciliation process, certain budgetary targets had to be met, so there was a huge cut to the Centers for Disease Control that was simply a case of collateral damage. All of this had to be debated in two hours.
You can spend hours trying to determine why McCain voted the way he did. He certainly took some convincing to do so, unless you think his inexplicable vote to proceed on Tuesday was the beginning of some Machiavellian exercise to saw off the limb behind McConnell and the president*. Maybe he truly was revolted by the bizarre process through which this exercise was conducted and perhaps he truly did yearn nostalgically for regular order. Maybe he didn't want what may be his last major act as a U.S. senator to be the person who jacked their healthcare from 16 million of his fellow citizens. Or maybe it was just pure cussedness. Whatever the case, when McCain walked into the chamber and dropped his thumb down, the whole place turned into a goddamned Frank Capra movie.
"It was a pretty good movie, wasn't it?" Angus King said. "It's easy to stand up to your opponents. It's much harder to stand up to your friends."
(Let history note, however, that David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, almost swiped McCain's big moment completely by accident. When they called his name, Perdue shouted, loudly, "No!" As a hundred reporters picked their jaws up off the floor, he changed his vote with a hand signal toward the president's chair but, by then, McCain had voted and general hilarity had broken out.)
In many ways, this was the end to the 2000 Republican primary campaign that looms so large in McCain's personal history. It was both a flashback to, and fulfillment of, those heady days when McCain seemed to be a legitimate heir to Teddy Roosevelt's Republican party, before George W. Bush and Karl Rove meanly ratfcked him in South Carolina. A lot has happened since then, most of it not very good. He wanted to be president so much that he lost touch with the soul of that campaign. He is going to be reckoned as a curious figure in American political history, but he is going to have that moment early Friday morning. On a humid Washington night beneath a hot orange sliver of a moon, there was something like redemption in the way the cheers rolled into the Capitol from the protesters who'd gathered outside, a blessing from a half-forgotten moment in time.
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FOCUS: The Sun Rises Today Over a Washington Less Riven by Cynicism |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=40776"><span class="small">Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page</span></a>
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Friday, 28 July 2017 10:30 |
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Rather writes: "I do not diminish the headwinds we face. I do not excuse the vulgarities and injustices that sadly find root in America. And I do not underestimate the capacity of some of our elected officials to rally passions with appeals to our basest instincts. But what happened early this morning in the Senate chamber will go down as one of the most dramatic showdowns in the history of that august body."
Dan Rather, retired journalist. (photo: Getty)
The Sun Rises Today Over a Washington Less Riven by Cynicism
By Dan Rather, Dan Rather's Facebook Page
28 July 17
 erhaps...
Perhaps the sun rises today over a Washington less riven by cynicism...
Perhaps the fortified walls of intransigent partisanship may start to crumble...
Perhaps the cold calculus of political gamesmanship will begin to give way to the moral accountability of empathetic policy...
Perhaps the clarity of three Republican senators - two strong, independent women and a gravely ill American hero - can lead us on a path to increased normalcy....
Perhaps we can learn to appreciate more all the historic bonds that tie us together as a nation and be less consumed by the damaging forces that tear us apart...
Perhaps... perhaps... perhaps...
I do not diminish the headwinds we face. I do not excuse the vulgarities and injustices that sadly find root in America. And I do not underestimate the capacity of some of our elected officials to rally passions with appeals to our basest instincts.
But what happened early this morning in the Senate chamber will go down as one of the most dramatic showdowns in the history of that august body. While we will have to wait and see where it goes from here. For today I chose hope, a clear-eyed hope, but a hope nonetheless.
In a quirk of timing, these last few days I have been re-reading and putting the finishing edits on my book entitled What Unites Us (due out this November and written with my long-time collaborator Elliot Kirschner). The message of the book is one in which I believe strongly: We are a nation with a common destiny, if we chose to embrace it. From the right to vote to the environment, from service to the free press, from empathy to audacity, we are a people and a nation with a deep foundation built on a strong but imperfect sense of unity. On my countless journeys throughout every corner of this great land I have seen the goodness of my fellow citizens expressed in ways big and small, public and anonymous, and from every part of our diverse population.
I am an optimist, and always have been. That optimism has been tested in my life on several occasions, but rarely more so than recently. However I am now more encouraged than I have been in a long time that we may, just may, be able to come together. We need each other. None of us has a monopoly on wisdom, other than, perhaps, the wisdom of knowing we cannot accomplish what needs to be done alone. And that is how it should be.
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rom the beginning, I have believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people. The so-called ‘skinny repeal’ amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker's statement that the House would be ‘willing’ to go to conference does not ease my concern that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time.
