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Benghazi BS: Republicans, Desperate For A Scandal, Make Mountain Out Of Molehill
So it seems that the latest hyped-up Republican balderdash regarding the White House response to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi centers on the discovery that the talking points developed for U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice were edited.
Pardon me while I yawn.
Seriously, this is the big, damning revelation that’s going to make Benghazi a bigger scandal than Watergate? Please. This is a bunch of hyped-up horse crap that doesn’t mean diddly squat, except that it is being used as a political cudgel by a bunch of hypocrites who engage in the same, largely innocuous practices on a daily basis.
First, let me tell you a little bit about talking points. People who work in politics and public relations are very familiar with talking points, which, for those who do not know, is a list of answers to questions that a politician, or a public or corporate official, might be asked by media or investigators. Talking points are crafted to keep the spokesperson from saying anything that might conceivably be used to attack the person, or the office, or the company, that the spokesperson represents. They are used as a defense against the “gotcha” culture that today prevails in politics and journalism, in which any poorly considered word can be turned into an attack (justifiably or unjustifiably), even if that word is taken wildly out of context.
Every politician, and every politician’s staff, uses talking points for exactly this reason (just as the ridiculous people who attack President Obama for using a teleprompter also use teleprompters virtually every time they make a major speech). And, with every politician’s office or corporate entity that uses talking points, there is always a multilayered review process that almost inevitably leads to revisions, because of the hair-trigger sensitivity involved. There is a justifiable fear that any single word that isn’t perfect (and perfectly innocuous) may boomerang, and this leads to a hypersensitivity on the part of the people who write and edit the talking points.
So what have we learned here about the talking points the administration initially used after the Benghazi attack? We learned that they went through multiple iterations and that a State Department official spent a lot of time quibbling about a few words because she was worried about what some unnamed senior officials in her department might think.
As someone who has spent most of the last dozen years writing talking points until they’re coming out of my ears, and dealing with the hypersensitive worrywarts who parse every word, I understand exactly what happened here. And what occurred here was almost certainly a case of overzealous caution that, in all likelihood, amounts to nothing more.
But the Republicans in Congress know that most people have no idea what talking points are, why they are used, and what the process is in developing them and using them. And they are counting on this fact to help them make something sinister out of this. Certain media organizations who undoubtedly know better are not only allowing them to get away with it, but helping them spread it, and this, sadly, is nothing new. Scandals, trumped up or otherwise, are good for ratings. And anybody out there who seriously believes that the “liberal media” is in bed with the Democrats, consider how much we heard about Whitewater, or Monica Lewinsky, or dozens of other things even more ridiculous, during the Bill Clinton presidency. Media outlets want viewers and readers because this is how they make money, and scandals are good for business.
What’s really happening here is happening for multiple reasons, none of which emanate from a legitimate concern about the security of our embassies. While numerous outlets reflect different numbers, a well-documented article by the admittedly liberal-leaning Media Matters for America demonstrates, through usage of independent sources, no fewer than seven such attacks during the George W. Bush administration. Where were these investigation-demanding Republicans then?
What’s really going on can be summed up in four quick points:
1) The fact that Republican members of Congress, in order to impress their political base, must attack the president constantly. Any Republican who doesn’t appear sufficiently aggressive against the president (see Charlie Crist, Chris Christie, etc.) immediately gets torn apart by the conservative base, and in some cases, such as what happened to Crist (now a Democrat), ends up facing a primary challenge.
2) The fact that Republican politicians have never gained any traction in their constant attempts to stoke hatred against the president and thereby weaken his personal brand. It has driven Republicans to distraction, as noted in a proposed super-PAC attack against President Obama during the 2012 election, that “Americans still aren’t ready to hate this president.”
3) The desire to bog the Obama Administration down in defending itself against ridiculous attacks rather than continuing to create uncomfortable pressure on the Republicans on actual issues, such as background checks for gun purchases. If you don’t think the president’s efforts on this issue have been producing results, look only at how Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) and other Senators, of both parties, have seen their approval ratings fall off a cliff since voting against the background-check bill.
4) The Republicans’ abject fear of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gaining the Democratic nomination in 2016. As Time magazine reported on April 12th—just before this ridiculous tempest in a teapot was ginning up—numerous Republican political movers-and-shakers were all but conceding that Secretary Clinton would be unbeatable in a 2016 presidential run. They need to tarnish her now and either convince her not to run, or at least dent her approval ratings.
This isn’t about national security or a “cover up.” This is about the Republicans’ ongoing efforts to find a silver bullet against a president who, just like Bill Clinton, they couldn’t beat fairly at the polls. It’s also an attempt to preemptively destroy Hillary Clinton, whom they know they can’t beat at the polls. Don’t buy the hype.
What Mark Sanford's Victory Means
My boss asked me this morning who was going to win the special U.S. House election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina) and his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of comedian extraordinaire Stephen Colbert. I told him Sanford was going to win by about 52% to 48%. I was a little short on the margin, which ended up around 55%-45%, but correct on the result.
I was able to pick Sanford in part because the polling had swung wildly in his direction, but also due to the inescapable fact that the 1st District of South Carolina is heavily Republican. It voted for Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points last year, a significantly larger margin than Romney achieved in the state as a whole. And if your district is to the right of South Carolina as a whole, it’s not voting for any Democrat, regardless of circumstances.
I also picked Sanford because of the trend we are seeing across the country, which is that voters are voting much more based on ideology than on personal characteristics. We saw an example of this in the easy reelection of Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) despite his prostitution scandal.
It is true that sometimes, people go against their own partisan grain if their party’s candidate says or does something particularly offensive, and we saw that in the landslide defeat last year of former U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri). I’m not convinced that Akin would have won that race if he hadn’t made his idiotic comment about rape—I think McCaskill is a much better politician than she gets credit for, and I cannot believe that her landslide win was entirely due to Akin’s flub—but I think it’s clear that the race would have been much closer without Akin’s disastrous gaffe.
That said, it appears, more and more, that while some mistakes can still sink a candidate, a candidate’s marital infidelity is no longer one of those fatal miscues. Admittedly, this hasn’t really been tested when it comes to female candidates—and it would be interesting to see how such a scenario would play out—but can you name the last male candidate for high office who lost an election, which he otherwise would likely have won, strictly because he cheated on his wife? We might have to go back to Gary Hart, whose promising 1988 presidential run tanked after he was discovered to be having an affair.
For all the talk about “family values” and the “sanctity of marriage” emanating from the GOP, Republicans in South Carolina’s 1st District had no qualms today about sending an admitted adulterer to represent them in Congress, just as their Republican compatriots in Louisiana had no issue reelecting Vitter. And on the other side, the job approval of Democratic President Bill Clinton was never higher than it was when Republicans—led by confirmed adulterers Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde—impeached him for the fallout surrounding his affair with an intern.
It looks like the big lesson from Mark Sanford’s victory tonight was that marital infidelity doesn’t matter in politics, as long as a candidate remains faithful to the ideology of his constituents.
Blue vs. Red—Or Blue vs. Gray?
A few weeks ago, I did an analysis of all the final 2012 election results broken down by region. I wanted to see how the results came out if we compared the South against the rest of the country, and also to see what kind of majority President Obama compiled outside the South.
While the results were by no means a surprise, they did demonstrate, as expected, a stark political difference between the South and the rest of the country.
I broke the country into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, West and South, each containing either 12 or 13 states in order to make the comparisons as apples-to-apples as possible. As a result, West Virginia ended up as the only red (Republican) state in the Northeast, even though I think most people would rightly consider West Virginia a Southern state, culturally and politically. But it also has historical ties to the Northeast as well, so one can make a case either way.
And I included Oklahoma in the South, which—based upon virtually every interaction I’ve ever had with Oklahomans—seems to me to be a fair and correct designation. I know many Oklahomans consider themselves Midwesterners, but as a native Midwesterner myself, I see Oklahoma having far more in common—culturally, politically and geographically—with the South than the Midwest.
I also designated Kentucky as a Southern state, and I can’t imagine I’d get much disagreement from anyone on that one. I challenge anyone to find a Midwesterner, or even very many Kentuckians, who’d consider Kentucky a Midwestern state.
Feel free to disagree with any of those designations, but let’s say, for instance, that we shifted Oklahoma into the Midwest and West Virginia out of the Northeast and into the South; neither move would have changed the results for any of those regions by very much. For example, the Midwest would have gone from favoring President Obama by about 51%-48% to about 50%-49%.
The results were clear: the South is not just a political outlier, as compared to the rest of the country, but it is out of touch with the rest of the country by an extremely large margin. Using the breakdown I employed, I found that President Obama won the Northeast 58.6%-39.8%; the West 54.2%-43.2%; and the Midwest 50.7%-47.6%. His victories in the Northeast and West were by double-digit, landslide margins; his victory in the Midwest was close, but clear.
Taking all the non-Southern states as a unit, President Obama walked away with a double-digit landslide: 54.3%-43.7% For purposes of comparison, this margin of victory in the Northeast, Midwest and West would be roughly on a par with the national victories won by Presidents Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956; George H.W. Bush in 1988; Clinton in 1996; and even Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944. President Obama’s reelection victory was a landslide—if we exclude the South.
But in the South, it was an entirely different story. In this part of the country, even taking into account President Obama’s victories in the two most non-Southern states in this region (Florida and Virginia), Mitt Romney came away with a landslide victory of his own: 54.3%-44.5%. This is almost a mirror image of what happened in the rest of the country.
So when you’re thinking about how close the national popular vote was in the 2012 election (51.1%-47.2%) and thinking that we have a closely divided nation, you’re partly right and you’re partly wrong. The bottom line is that most of the country reelected the President by a large margin. But the dominance of cultural and political conservatism in the South is what created this artificial closeness in the overall electorate. When conservatives talk about “Heartland values,” they are really talking about Southern values. Don’t be fooled by this hooey; the Midwestern “Heartland” voted for the president.
Most of the country backed the president and his program by decisive margins. It is the South, the conservative outlier, that continues to pull the rest of country’s politics away from its natural, more moderate orbit. And it has been this way from the dawn of American independence. The tail, to a large degree, is wagging the dog.
So the next time you hear about “blue states” vs. “red states,” remember that it’s really more about the Blue vs. the Gray—just as it always has been and probably always will be.
Empathy Begins At Home
Last week, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) made news by announcing that, upon learning his son is gay, he has changed his position on gay marriage and now supports it.
It wasn’t unpredictable that there would be those on the political right who would criticize him for his change of heart. But what disturbs me is the blowback he is getting from some on the left.
I’ve seen a lot of social media chatter, since Portman’s announcement, along these lines: “So it took his son coming out for Portman to change his tune—why didn’t anybody else’s sons or daughters matter to him?”
First of all: Really? A Republican changes his mind and takes your side, publicly, on a crucial civil rights issue, and the first thing you do is criticize him for his motives, or for not doing it soon enough? Focus, people, will you?
Why Senator Portman changed his mind doesn’t really matter. The fact is that, regardless of his motives, he has taken a courageous stand that is almost certain to create political problems for him with at least a segment of his base. Any time a conservative changes his or her mind on this issue, that’s another crack in the wall of intolerance.
But there’s another reason why this is important. Remember when President Obama said one of the key characteristics he was looking for in a Supreme Court justice was empathy? Republicans reacted as if he had committed blasphemy.
Senator Portman’s love for his son enabled him to have empathy, and when that light of empathy went on over his head, he was able to extend it to everyone in the LGBT community and publicly change his position on marriage equality. That’s huge, and it took real guts. But more than anything else, it demonstrated the power of empathy in promoting progressive change.
The reason why the enemies of change are so afraid of empathy is pretty simple. It’s much harder to support policies that hurt a particular group—gays, the poor, ethnic minorities, etc.—when empathy enables you, for a moment, to walk in their shoes and see them as fellow human beings. Senator Portman has demonstrated—intentionally or not—why empathy is the number-one weapon against the opponents of social progress.
The Republican Senator from Ohio should be congratulated and praised for his decision, and those of us on the left should do a better job of understanding what it means: When people feel empathy, we win.
The Sequester: Why It's Going To Happen
I have a theory on this sequester business. I think a number of Republican and Democratic politicians secretly want it. Some Democrats (most notably, Howard Dean) believe this is the only way they’re going to get military spending under control, and some Republicans feel this is the only way they’re going to get any spending cuts at all.
Neither side is happy with all the cuts, but none of them are ever going to happen any other way, and this option, which requires nothing but continued inaction, enables each party to blame the other. Ask yourself a question: would Congress have passed this ticking time bomb in the first place if it really didn’t want it to go off?
Thank You, Dr. Koop
Dr. C. Everett Koop, who served as the U.S. Surgeon General under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, died today at 96 years old.
Dr. Koop was a true hero and a great American, and it is hardly disputable that many Americans alive today owe their lives and their health to him. In fact, the nearly ubiquitous expectation of condom use today, in order to prevent the spread of disease, can be traced directly to Dr. Koop and his extremely visible advocacy of safe sex.
Safe sex may seem like a no-brainer today, but in the 1980s, when social conservatives were feeling their oats—with one of their own in the White House and the so-called “Moral Majority” becoming a political force—it took real courage for Dr. Koop to lead a public crusade for the usage of condoms.
It was a real surprise to just about everybody that Dr. Koop would lead this crusade. A deeply religious, devout, conservative Christian, he considered homosexuality, non-marital sex and abortion to be morally wrong. I could not disagree more with his point of view on these issues. And yet, the fact that he was able to put his views, and the pressure of his ideological peers, aside and go where the facts led him—that is what elevated Dr. Koop to a true national treasure.
Confronted with the AIDS epidemic, which at that time was largely seen as a “gay plague,” those who supported Dr. Koop’s appointment expected him to condemn homosexuality and advocate sexual abstinence. Dr. Koop instead launched his public crusade in which he worked tirelessly to educate the public that the safest way to have sex was to use a condom every time.
Dr. Koop did not simply issue a report and leave it at that. He all but shouted it from the rooftops, using his office as a very public, very visible platform to spread the word across the country and the world. And it worked. When the 1980s began, condom use in non-marital, sexual relationships was by no means a given, particularly among gay couples, or among straight couples in which the female was on the pill. By the time I graduated high school in 1990, it was well understood that if you planned to have sex, you needed to use a condom. In terms of public health, there are probably two things anybody alive at the time remembers: “Just say no (to drugs),” as Nancy Reagan told us; and “Use a condom every time,” courtesy of Dr. Koop.
Additionally, Dr. Koop suggested that children receive comprehensive sex education starting in elementary school, which is still—unfortunately—a controversial issue today, nearly 30 years later. And, in another service to public health, he took on Big Tobacco and promoted the idea of a smoke-free society. We are not there yet, but every year, fewer and fewer Americans are engaging in this risky behavior.
And while Dr. Koop never veered from his belief that abortion was murder, he also refused to cave in to pressure from the right and endorse errant, pseudo-scientific theories that abortion would cause lasting harm to women who underwent one. It is a pity that there are those today who do not have the courage or the wisdom to follow his example.
In a time when it has become increasingly unlikely for those with strong viewpoints to overlook those views, and do what is necessary to save lives and improve public health, Dr. Koop stands as a beacon of reason, courage, and rectitude. Dr. Koop did the right thing for his country and his fellow human beings, even though he undoubtedly disapproved of the actions that made his condom crusade necessary. Despite his beliefs, he was right in his actions. I believe history will record that Dr. C. Everett Koop was one of the most influential and consequential human beings of the 20th century.
In matters of religion, I am an agnostic. I don’t know if a god exists, and frankly, I don’t care. But if the God in which Dr. Koop believed devoutly all his life does exist, and the good doctor has, in fact, met his maker today, I am confident that this divine being has welcomed Dr. Koop warmly, and congratulated him on a job well done.
Godspeed, Dr. Koop. Thank you for a life of service unmatched by almost anyone alive today.
The Coming Republican Valhalla?
I learned on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” today that the number of Americans between ages 18 and 30 is now 80 million—more than 1/3 of all current voting-age adults. As they get older, they are, statistics demonstrate that they are more likely to vote regularly than they are now.
And there are approximately 75 million Americans under 18.
In short, within 20 years, when most of the current plus-65 Americans are, statistically speaking, likelier than not to be dead, the millennials, and those younger than millennials, will make up somewhere in the ballpark of 60 percent (probably more) of all voters. And if Republicans don’t reverse the tide, and these current young people continue to skew progressive on social issues, Republicans will never be able to win a national election without getting upwards of two-thirds of the plus-50 vote. Considering that the 50-to-65 crowd, 20 years from now, will be comprised of the moderate-leaning 30-to-45 crowd of today—which first began voting during the Bill Clinton presidency—good luck to the GOP in getting two-thirds or more of that demographic.
Republicans can do this simple math just as easily as I can. They must know that if they don’t change, they are politically dead. Oh, they may win an election here and there, but it’ll be an increasingly rare occurrence—a death rattle. Yet, rather than making real changes, their actions seem to indicate an attempt to mitigate their decline rather than reverse it. One wonders if they are not just trying to stay alive long enough so that they can ensure their laws will survive after they are extinct.
Viewed in this light, it would seem the Republicans are fighting a rearguard, guerrilla-type political war. They are buying time to get their laws on the books (certainly at the state level, even if they can’t do so at the federal level). If they can get their laws on the books (backed by the numerous lifetime appointees to the federal benches they’ve made since 1981), no matter how badly they lose at the polls, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the eventual Democratic majorities to overturn them—at least, not for a very long time. For example: look at the union-busting measures recently enacted by Michigan Republicans. It is hard to see how they will not suffer at the polls for their actions—but if their chief concern is getting their laws on the books while they still can, then their course of action makes sense.
One would think that if Republicans were truly interested in future political viability, they’d start aligning at least some of their positions, particularly on social issues, with the millennials, who will be the dominant force in U.S. politics by 2030 (if not sooner). But the Republicans aren’t realigning on any of the issues. They are merely incessantly yammering about better messaging, but their problem is not primarily a messaging problem. The messaging difficulties merely are a symptom. Yes, their messaging is bad, but that’s largely because they’re selling a product that fewer and fewer people want to buy. If they think putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling house is going to change their fortunes, they are in for a rude awakening.
I am beginning to consider the possibility that the Republican Party is not, primarily, trying to survive. Perhaps not surprisingly for a party increasingly dominated by deeply religious people, it might simply be trying to ensure itself an afterlife.
Let's Talk About Sex—Please!
If I live to be 100, I will probably never forget my public-school sex-education experience.
That’s because it lasted about 50 minutes and taught me nothing I didn’t already know.
I went to a small junior/senior high school in Indiana, and our eighth-grade course schedule in 1985-86 was very basic. We were all required to take English, math, science, social studies and physical education each semester, and we were required to select one fine arts course, from a menu of art, choir and band.
We were also each required, regardless of gender, to take one semester of industrial arts and one semester of home economics, though we were allowed to decide which of those courses to take first. I opted to take home ec first, because I knew that most of the boys, and a handful of the more mechanically inclined girls, would opt for the shop course first. I had never been mechanically inclined, and I didn’t want my ineptitude on display for the other boys. Equally importantly, I knew that most of the girls—and primarily the best-looking ones—would take home ec first, and I would have the pleasure of their company, in competition with relatively few boys.
Most of my home-ec experience was what you would expect of a 12-year-old male with no particular homemaking skills. I learned the basics of a sewing machine (and created a pair of sweatpants with one leg significantly longer than the other and a large hole in the crotch). I burned spaghetti. And I really liked my teacher, Mrs. W., an extremely personable, funny, good-humored young woman who happened to be married to another one of my favorite teachers. I run into her once every few years, and I understand that she still tells her classes about my sweatpants, nearly 30 years later.
But there was one day that stood out: the day when I was called upon to teach the other boys in the class the basics of our male reproductive systems.
Mrs. W. opened class that day by telling all of us that we would be learning about our systems. And she had all four boys in the class sit at one table, apart from the girls. Knowing Mrs. W. as I do, I have to assume that this arrangement was prescribed; I am certain she would have done it differently, and much better, had she been left to her own devices.
She then distributed to the four of us boys a photocopied diagram of our male parts. I was a precocious child and already well-acquainted with these basics from my many hours of absorbing every bit of information about sex I could get my hands on. I was also a cocky know-it-all in 1985, and I boasted, upon receiving the diagram, that I could name all the parts (which was quite true; I knew all the girl parts, too).
Mrs. W. smiled enthusiastically and—possibly with an eye toward curing me of my boundless enthusiasm for displaying my own brilliance, which had made me the bane of her husband’s existence in my seventh-grade geography class the previous year—informed me that I could instruct the other boys while she went and talked to the girls about their feminine parts.
Well, you can imagine what happened next—which is to say nothing happened, because I was 12 years old and far too embarrassed to take on the role of sex-education instructor. (If you’ve ever seen the delightful cinematic classic Porky’s, think of when the principal stumblingly attempted to discuss “p-p-private par- par- parts” and ultimately settled on “tallywhacker” because “‘p-p-penis’ is so … p-p-personal.”) I don’t recall if Mrs. W. eventually filled in the boys on the requisite information. All I can tell you for sure is that we never had another day of instruction on anything resembling sex for the remainder of our years of formal education.
In short: twelve years of education in my public school district, and our entire sex-education experience came down to one, 50-minute class period in eighth grade in which we were taught what our parts were, but nothing about how to use them responsibly, or even how they interacted with those of our female counterparts.
I was reminded of this experience today when I read a story on Facebook about a woman whose sister had a sex-education lecture in one of her public high school classes recently—delivered by a Catholic nun, who informed them that birth-control pills would give them cancer and render them infertile, and that condoms did nothing to prevent the passage of disease! (I don’t know if she got to the part about how boys will go blind and grow hair on their palms if they engage in “self abuse.” But maybe she left that old chestnut out, because I think it’s well-understood that if this were true, there would be about 150 million blind American men with very furry handshakes.)
That story reminded me once again that, just as foreseen in Orwell’s 1984, sex really is political. It sure as hell shouldn’t be, but it is. And just like seemingly everything else these days, the responsible teaching of sexual education to young people who are, statistically speaking, probably going to need it before they leave high school is being held hostage by conservatives who, it seems, want to repeal the entire 20th century. They demand that we teach youngsters nothing about sex except that it is bad, bad, bad; that preventive measures don’t prevent pregnancy or disease (despite mountains of statistical evidence to the contrary); and they should never, ever do it until they marry.
The utter lack of reality here should be obvious to anyone who has attended high school. In short, whether we adults like it or not, teenagers have a funny way of deciding for themselves about getting it on. On average, most Americans first have intercourse sometime between the ages of 16 and 18—which, for most people, means their junior or senior year in high school. Our choice, as adults, is either to arm them with as much information as possible to keep them from getting an unwanted disease or pregnancy—or bury our heads in the sand and pretend that if we just don’t talk about it, why, surely, they just won’t do it. (Because, yeah, that works. Ask any pregnant teenager.)
Whoever invited the nun to discuss sex with high-school students had to know what they were getting. She’s a Catholic nun—it’s a pretty good bet she’s not going to endorse contraception, and may even lie about it, as happened in the aforementioned case. In short, whoever made that call made a decision in line with the conservative political agenda, which, in a word, boils down to this: NO.
But “NO” doesn’t help when teenagers have been saying “YES, YES, YES!” from the dawn of time. Sex between unmarried teenagers didn’t just start with the sexual revolution and the onset of widely accessible contraception or abortion services. How many girls in the 1950s went to “live with their aunt and uncle in the country” for a year?
This blog post has been coming on for some time. I first considered writing on this topic a few months ago, when I went to a nearby drug store to procure condoms, and I had to search the entire store before finally stumbling on them, tucked away, unmarked, I suppose so they would give nobody any unnecessary offense. And it struck me that we, as a society, are so uneasy about discussing sex and contraception that some drug stores won’t even put up decent signage directing people to the euphemistically styled “family planning” section. It’s ridiculous and, frankly, childish. What’s next—an over-the-counter gel treatment for cooties?
If we want our society’s young people to behave with sexual responsibility, it might help if American adults can stop acting like embarrassed, nervously giggling children when it comes to sex. We need to put a stop to a harmful, politically driven abstinence agenda that’s about as realistic as Santa Claus mating with the Easter Bunny. And most of all, we need to get over this silly discomfort over having mature discussions about the proper, responsible usage of vaginas and penises.
I’m sorry—I meant “p-p-private par- par- parts.”
State of Disunion
So, there are going to be two responses to President Obama’s State of the Union speech on Tuesday. One, the official Republican Party response, will be delivered by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), also known (at least to this blogger) as the only Republican with a strong chance to win the presidency in 2016.
The second response could foreshadow the reason why Rubio might not be the next president. That response, on behalf of the supposedly defanged and doomed-to-irrelevancy Tea Party, will be given by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky).
Let’s put aside, for a moment, this question: How is it that the opposition gets to make two televised responses to the president’s remarks on the State of the Union? And instead, let us consider what these dueling rebuttals say about the state of the opposition.
In short, there is such a cleavage, at this point, between establishment Republicans and the conservapopulists, that they can’t even get together on a single response to a president that they all despise. This does not bode well for their prospects for unity in upcoming elections.
One of the things that worked against the Republicans in 2012 was the fact that the Kamikaze wing of the party—disaffected Tea Partiers and other assorted fringe kooks— couldn’t get behind Mitt Romney until his nomination became inevitable. One after another, the assembled collection of third-rate goofballs (such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Santorum) rose to challenge him and finally succumbed to his monetary and institutional advantages. But the months-long spectacle severely damaged the party’s brand among moderate voters and ultimately, it could be argued, helped sink Romney’s chances by forcing him to pander to the wingnuts, thereby losing him the middle—and the election.
The establishment is now trying to fight back, but having set this mess in motion, the Republican leadership is now finding out how difficult it is to put the goofpaste back into the tube. That’s why the Republicans will have dueling rebuttals tomorrow night.
The bottom line is this: the fact that Sen. Paul is giving a Tea Party speech is a clear signal that the conservapopulists are not going to go gently into the good night which Karl Rove and his colleagues have all planned out for them. You see, Rove and other intelligent Republicans have learned the lesson of the 2012 election—that the spectacle of a Republican Party full of nutballs like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock scared the crap out of centrist voters and drove them, grudgingly, into the arms of the Democrats.
But the Tea Party folks don’t share that view.
In Ayn Rand Paul World, Mitt Romney and the Republicans lost in 2012 because they weren’t conservative enough, and heroes such as Akin and Mourdock were viciously slandered and taken down by the evil liberal, “lamestream” media.
The reason the Tea Party types believe this ridiculous tripe—although most objective observers see it, rightly, as delusional—is because, for the most part, Tea Partiers only talk politics with other Tea Partiers. They reinforce to each other their collective delusion that a majority of Americans think the same way they do—and because they don’t talk very much with anyone who doesn’t think that way, they’re shocked when the electorate rejects their ideas, and they assume that the Democrats must have stolen the election.
The Republican Party has created quite the dilemma for itself. Having invited the kook wing into the party, in a grab for the low-hanging fruit of its votes, the Republican Party has alienated moderates and made itself dependent on the Tea Party. Having seen moderates alienated by the Tea Party, the Republicans can’t compete if the Tea Partiers stay on the sideline. But without the middle, which the Tea Party has alienated, the Republicans also cannot win.
The smarter move, better in the long term, is to kick the Tea Party out of the tent and try to get some moderates back into it. It’s a far better growth strategy, as Rove and other establishment Republicans clearly recognize. But the Tea Party isn’t going along with the plan. It not only likes being inside the tent—it believes it built the tent, with its one-time electoral triumph in 2010, and it is entitled not just to be inside the tent but to run it.
I believe it was Lyndon Johnson who said that it was better to have a troublesome faction inside the tent, pissing out, than to have it outside the tent, pissing in. The trouble for the Republicans is that the Tea Party, wild and undisciplined, is inside the tent and pissing everywhere—outward onto moderate voters, and inward all over establishment Republicans who would actually like to win another election in their lifetimes. The GOP has created a monster that it can no longer control, and it is now in the unenviable position where it loses if the Tea Party stays or leaves.
And if the Republican Party can’t get control of this situation, tomorrow night’s Rubio-Paul split could be an ominous preview of things to come—perhaps a divisive GOP presidential primary in 2016, or maybe even a shattering of the party that could see both men in the general election, splitting conservative votes, and both getting squashed by the Democratic nominee, a la 1912. Get your popcorn ready.
The Latest on GOP Electoral Vote Shenanigans
Various news sources over the past few days provide indications that Republican schemes to rig the electoral vote in future elections may have hit some roadblocks in two key states.
In Florida, reports indicate that GOP House Speaker Will Weatherford opposes the change from a winner-take-all system to a system that would award electors based on congressional districts. Although Republicans dominate the Florida legislature (76-44 in the House and 26-14 in the Senate), chances are zero that any bill will move forward in the House without the Speaker’s blessing.
In Virginia, numerous reports indicate that at least two Republican state senators and GOP Gov. Bob McDonnell oppose such a change. With the State Senate evenly divided, 20-20, any Republican defections would likely kill the proposed legislation.
Now, consider this for a minute. Why do you think it is, in states like Florida and Virginia, that the Republicans appear to be backing down on a scheme that would guarantee Republicans a majority of their states’ electoral votes, regardless of whether Republican presidential candidates actually win the states? Well, it’s pretty simple: at least some Republicans still believe that a Republican presidential candidate can win those states in future elections. To split the states’ electors, in Florida and Virginia, could eventually come back to work against the GOP. (Had such a system been in place in those states in 2000, Al Gore would have become president.)
Although Virginia appears to be trending Democratic at the presidential level, it is still close enough that a very strong Republican candidate could win it (or a weak Democrat could lose it). And we all know that Florida persists in being an up-for-grabs state that either side can win. In fact, President Obama barely won it in 2012 (and it was so close that it was the only state I predicted incorrectly). So for Republicans to split those states’ electors may one day deprive a Republican of victory in a close election. It would be a stupid move, and I expect that Republican legislators in Ohio will come to the same conclusion and keep the current winner-take-all format in place. (President Obama only won Ohio by about two percentage points in 2012, which means that Ohio remains a couple points more Republican than the nation as a whole, as it has been consistently for most of the last century; in a 50-50 presidential election, such as 2000, Ohio is a near-certainty to go Republican.)
While it is undoubtedly a relief to hear that Florida and Virginia may not move forward with this plan, we should still be concerned about a move to fix the elections in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the other three states that went Democratic in 2012 but remained under the control of Republican governors and legislatures. President Obama easily won each of those three states in 2012, and none of them have gone to a Republican presidential candidate in a generation. (Pennsylvania and Michigan barely went for George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Wisconsin last supported a Republican for president in 1984. That would be Ronald Reagan, who captured 49 states that year and barely lost the 50th, Minnesota, which voted for native son Walter Mondale by about 4,000 votes.)
In short, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin have consistently been more Democratic in presidential elections than the nation as a whole for a long, long time. For example, the last time Michigan’s vote went more Republican than the national vote happened in 1976, when the state voted for Michigan native Gerald Ford. In a 50-50 presidential election, these states are all but certain to vote Democratic.
The reason it is still a very real possibility that Republicans may change the electoral allocation in one or more of those three states is because they see no realistic chance that their presidential candidate will win any of them at any time in the foreseeable future. As a result, unlike the situation in Florida, Ohio, and Virginia, Republicans have nothing to lose by fiddling with the electors in Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin.
The GOP proposals in these states are heinous—an absolute insult both to the concept of equal voting rights for all citizens, and to the very idea of democracy itself. Because the GOP has drawn those states’ congressional districts in such a way that Republicans are disproportionately represented in each state, their proposed reforms would virtually guarantee that any Republican presidential candidate would win a majority of the states’ electors, despite losing those states by significant margins.
Michigan would be the most egregious case. President Obama won the state by nearly 10 percent, but under the current Republican proposal, Mitt Romney would have taken nine of the state’s 16 electoral votes, and Obama would have won seven. In Pennsylvania, where the president won statewide by about five percent, Romney would have gotten at least 12 electoral votes, possibly 13, and Obama would have received no more than eight, possibly just seven. And in Wisconsin, where the president won the state by more than five percent, the electors likely would have split 5-5.
Now, let’s take a look at what might have happened in the 2012 election if this scheme had been in place in just Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. As it happened, President Obama defeated Governor Romney by nearly five million votes nationally, and the president won 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206. Under the GOP election-rigging proposal, the electoral vote spread would have shrunk to Obama 306, Romney 232.
Now, let’s say the president’s reelection had been slightly closer—say, perhaps, that he had won by four million votes nationally, rather than nearly five million. That certainly would have flipped Florida, with its 29 electors, to Romney, and quite probably Ohio, with 18 electors, as well.
So, let’s reset here: if the president had won the election by four million votes, rather than nearly five million, and the Republican electoral-vote scheme had been in place in just Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, our electoral college result would have been: Romney 279, Obama 259. In short, Mitt Romney would be president today, despite losing the national election by four million votes.
Now, yes, it has happened that the winner of the popular vote has lost the electoral vote before. It happened in 2000, when George W. Bush became president despite losing the national vote to the aforementioned Al Gore. But that was a rare exception, as were the prior instances of this odd occurrence, which happened in 1888, 1876 and 1824. In all of those cases, except the strange, multi-candidate election of 1824, the national popular vote was so close that one could consider them a statistical tie. For example, Gore’s popular vote victory over Bush in 2000 was about half a million votes, roughly one-half of a percentage point. (The margin for Gore would have grown only slightly even if many Democratic votes in Florida hadn’t been discounted in the final tally.)
But the proposal the Republicans are attempting to advance today would render the popular will of the nation’s voters almost entirely irrelevant. Barring a landslide victory by the Democrats—something on the scale of the 2008 election, which President Obama won by nearly 10 million votes—the Republicans would win every presidential election, even while receiving significantly fewer votes than the Democrats. Landslide election victories don’t happen very often in America—which is why they are remarkable when they happen.
With Republicans having already fixed the U.S. House of Representatives—where they retained control in 2012 despite losing the total accumulated House vote by more than a million votes nationally—and probably being positioned to reclaim the Senate in 2014, the only missing puzzle piece would be the presidency. If they push through their democracy circumvention plans in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, they might nail that last puzzle piece down as well. If this happens, we could see Republicans win the presidency, the House and the Senate in 2016, even if more voters vote for the Democrats in all three cases.
At that point, America ceases to be a democracy and, furthermore, loses all moral authority as the leader of the free world. How can we claim to be a beacon of democracy when our system sets it up for one political party to hold power regardless of how the people actually vote? As Russian president Vladimir Putin noted—in a joint press conference with President George W. Bush, no less—in Russia, the president is the person who wins the most votes. Period. But this would no longer be the case in America.
As noted previously on this blog, there is nothing to stop the Republicans from enacting this legislation. They have the Constitutional right to do it (although my wife, a lawyer who knows the Constitution inside and out, suspects the voters of those states may be able to sue on grounds of disenfranchisement, but I think we know how the current U.S. Supreme Court would probably rule on that). That’s why the 2014 elections in these states are of crucial importance. If Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin go through with this scheme, the voters of those states will have only one chance, in 2014, to put Democrats in charge of the legislatures and governorships so they can overturn these laws before the 2016 election.
The national Democratic Party needs to begin investing heavily now in these states and make a serious push to win them in 2014.