Invade the red states!

Political polling has evolved by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so. Back in the day, presidential candidates were lucky to get a reliable national poll once every week or two, and that was about it. In 2012, individual states were being polled almost daily, and there are so many pollsters out there that part of the game is knowing which ones are the most reliable, which ones tilt to the left or right, and so forth.

This is very much a two-edged sword. Because presidential campaigns have reliable state-by-state polling data right from the beginning of the campaign, it is very easy for them to do “triage” on the whole country: separate all the states into “Solid Blue”, “Up For Grabs”, and “Solid Red”, and focus all their attention on those toss-up states in the middle.

But that means giving up on a lot of territory, and it becomes a vicious self-fulfilling cycle. “Why don’t we campaign in Montana? Because we don’t win there. Why don’t we win there? Because we don’t campaign there. Why don’t we…”.and so on and so on.

As Tip O’Neill was once informed by one of his reluctant voters, more people vote for you if you get out there and ask for support: “People like to be asked”.

Republicans know this. First, they know they face serious demographic problems with women and minorities, so they know they need every bit of support they can get. And second, they are run by a bunch of extremist whackaloons who really do think they need to win every vote and every race so they can protect Umurka from the evil librul menace.

So Republicans don’t give up anywhere: they keep the Republican party alive in ultra-blue New York, they elect fascist governors in Florida and the Midwest, they successfully enact hard-core anti-tax legislation in California, and they built solid majorities in the legislatures of blue states like Ohio and Wisconsin, by means of gerrymandering, vote suppression, union-busting, by any means necessary. And, as old Tip would point out, Republicans get more votes in Blue Country because they get out and ask for them.

 

But Democrats don’t do this.

There are a number of states Obama could have won in 2012 if he had fought for them: Arizona, Indiana, Missouri and so forth. But he didn’t even try.

Down south, Bill Clinton found blacks, women and liberals to back him in Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Georgia in 1992 – that’s 64 electoral votes today. In those areas, Obama not only didn’t compete, he generally did even worse than John Kerry did in 2004. Because he didn’t try.

Out west, Clinton found environmentalists and live-and-let-live libertarians who had moderate views on gays and abortion; he took Montana in 1992, and came within a few points in South Dakota, Texas, Kansas and Wyoming. I’ll hit that point again: Clinton almost won Texas and Wyoming, without even really trying out there. Needless to say, Obama didn’t try out there at all.

You can’t just run for President of Ohio. Democrats need to contest the red states, just as Republicans contest the blue ones. They need to build up state organizations in places that have scarcely seen Democrats in years, nurture candidates, fight for the state legislatures, restore the unions, elect governors. They need to organize and energize blacks in the south, Hispanics in the southwest, and women and moderates everywhere. And they need nominees who want to fight in red states (i.e. not Obama), and who can compete there effectively (i.e. big old white guys like Brian Schweitzer). Go into a bar and shoot pool! Eat some barbecue! Take off your tie!

There should be no place in America for Republicans to hide safely and say “this turf is mine!” Especially Texas. And there should be no place in America where a Democrat should be afraid to tell the tobacky-chewing locals: “I’m going to defend Medicare and Social Security and unions, I think government shouldn’t tell women how to manage their lives, I think ‘equal justice for all’ applies to same-sex families, and I think the Clinton-era tax structure created a hell of a lot of jobs. I’m a liberal and so was Jesus.” There are liberals and moderates in every state of the union, just waiting for someone to come and tell them that it’s okay to put a pro-choice bumper sticker on their car, without fearing the locals will slash their tires one night. That “liberal” isn’t a badge of shame just because Republicans say it is. That we’re right and they’re wrong, everywhere, in all fifty states.

Resistance is futile!

In 2009 I wrote this: “Obama was put in the White House by 40 humans, and one space alien. Seven of Nine, a member of the Borg Collective, came to earth and, as Jeri Ryan, married Jack Ryan, an Illinois politician. Their ensuing divorce battle derailed Jack's Senate campaign, thus making the impossible possible -- the election of an unknown young black guy, Barack Obama, to the Senate. Thus beginning Obama's march to the White House.”

Star Trek may have struck again. In 1991, the same year the actress Jeri Ryan began her fateful marriage, a beautiful young girl named Ashley launched her acting career, also on Star Trek, playing young Wesley’s girlfriend. Now 44, same age as Ryan, Ashley Judd has been working for years as a global ambassador on humanitarian issues and she has also picked up a Masters from Harvard. And she may be the one to slay the most dangerous Republican dragon of all: Mitch McConnell, Senator from Kentucky.

McConnell richly deserves to be defenestrated out of the Senate. The King of Filibusters has done more than any American in a century to destroy Congress as a legislative body, and to foul up the proper functioning of government and politics in this country. Since 1985 he has sponsored no legislation of any consequence, on his own: his raison d’etre is blocking the work of others. Recently he even filibustered his own bill. He has made it clear for years that his aim in life is to attack America’s Democrats, rather than attacking America’s problems.

And he’s ripe for plucking. He came to the Senate without having much more experience than Judd has. After being bounced out of the army for medical reasons he worked as an intern and then was picked to be county executive for the county that includes Louisville, but he wasn’t allowed to run Louisville itself. In other words anything important was left to someone else, with leadership ability. He has made as much as $44 million as a Senator, which no honest politician could possibly do; unsurprisingly he is a bitter opponent of campaign finance reform. And even in Kentucky he is wearing out his welcome: in his 2008 reelection race he only won by 6 points, in a state Obama just lost by 22.

Next up: Tasha Yar for Governor!

What George McGovern could teach the GOP

A tree is best measured when it’s down, so they say.

In 1972 the Democrats were, by any measure, down. George McGovern had crippled the party’s power centers in the big cities and the unions, and rode to the presidential nomination on the shoulders of a coalition which was undoubtedly well-intentioned, but looked, by turns, funny and scary to middle Americans watching on TV. Feminists, gays, black-power activists, lettuce-picking union activists, people with indifferent attitudes toward hygiene, grooming, and wardrobe. Party regulars complained that McGovern was “nominated by the cast of Hair”. After McGovern’s historic drubbing by Nixon, the Democrats scooted back into the White House on the strength of anti-Watergate agita but lost again when Reagan launched the conservative revolution. The Democrats spent three election cycles in the wilderness.

And they learned.

They moved away from the redistributionist tendencies of McGovern and tacked to the right. They compromised with Republicans: without the support of Democrats in the House, Reagan’s tax cuts and gigantic deficits never would have happened. The Democrats consciously moved away from the New Deal and the Great Society, and ultimately proclaimed that the era of big government and welfare state was over. They took measures to enable conservative Democrats to step forward, supporting the Democratic Leadership Council and Super Tuesday primaries down south. They put forward Fritz Hollings, John Glenn, Klansman David Duke, tinfoil whackadoodle Lyndon Larouche, pro-business conservative Paul Tsongas, Bill Clinton, and a gal named Ann Richards who actually won the governor’s job in Texas. And Gary Hart, who ironically got his start as McGovern’s campaign manager. When Obama won in 2008, he hired so many pro-business people that the left complained; and the left fumed as Obama compromised on health care and tax policy and financial regulations, dragged his feet on gay rights and Guantanamo and Afghanistan and climate change, and expressed willingness to give ground on the social safety net.

The Democrats moved to the center.

 

And now a bit of contrast.

The Republicans have been on a downward spiral for quite some time. In 24 years they’ve won the popular vote exactly once in presidential races, and it took a fraudulent war to accomplish that. America has repudiated their medieval social policies on women and gays, their neo-Neanderthal foreign policy, and their 30-year effort to transfer trillions of dollars from the middle class to the rich while destroying Social Security and Medicare. The Republicans face a demographic catastrophe, unless they learn, like the Democrats did.

And have they learned? No.

Unlike the Democrats who have successfully tacked to the center, the Republicans are more extreme than ever. Republicans of even a decade ago would be purged today. Even George Bush, who said only a few years ago that he was okay with civil unions, picked two black moderates for the State job, signed some environmental legislation, tried in his own way to improve schools, expanded public spending even more than Clinton did, expanded economic regulation dramatically, expanded Medicare, and supported renewable energy. Today George Bush would be thrown out of the GOP as too liberal. To say nothing of Reagan, who would be condemned as a RINO today just for his string of tax increases, or Nixon and Eisenhower, who would be Democrats today.

The Republicans never seriously considered adjusting their policies. Instead they have decided to go tactical, and cheat. Suppressing legal voters, suppressing efforts to register voters, attacking unions and other groups who try to support Democrats, trying to rig the electoral college in favor of Republicans, gerrymandering the House so Boehner can keep his job even when more people voted for Democrats, endless lies, threatening violence and secession when they lose, using obstructionist tactics in the Senate, and trying to buy elections outright via Citizens United.

The business with the unions is very telling. Reagan was no big fan of unions – the air-traffic controllers found that out – but thirty years ago he still wooed union voters so successfully that he got the endorsement of the Teamsters. Reagan won them over with his policies, dubious as they were. Today’s Republicans would never dream of trying such a thing: they have given up on winning union support so they want to destroy the unions instead. Likewise, past GOP efforts to woo women, blacks, gays, Latinos: they still pay lip service to the notion of attracting these voters, but that never seems to translate into actual policy. Now they just want to keep those groups from voting at all. Or, at best, they want the votes of these groups, but don’t want to give them anything in return. They would rather do anything, than move an inch to the left.

This is what happens, when facts, logic and reality don’t matter to you. “We conservatives are the only sane people in this country, and if those damn voters are too stupid to see that, then we’ll just take them out of the loop! It’s for their own good! Democracy is over-rated, especially when we lose!”

Call out GOP liars and get shunned by the media

Great article from Dan Froomkin on the media’s weak performance in the 2012 election.

Norman Ornstein is a superb political analyst and historian. Earlier he wrote an essay pointing out what everyone knows but no one has the guts to say: that Republicans in 2012 adopted a strategy of lying as much as they possibly could for political advantage, because the media, fearing accusations of bias and the loss of advertisers, would continue to peddle the false equivalency of asserting that both parties lie equally. Even the self-appointed truth-tellers, newspaper ombudsmen and fact-checkers, fell into the trap of refusing to call out lying Republicans too often, for fear that they would be accused of bias.

Not only did the essay have no positive impact, Ornstein and his co-author are being shunned. Newspapers no longer use Ornstein and his pal as nonpartisan sources because they are obviously biased, and the Sunday talk shows will only try to book them if they can counterbalance them with a Republican speaker – as though “Truth” and “Republican” are opposing philosophies.

Which, of course, they are.

So…anyone who points out that Republicans lie more than Democrats….must be lying?

What a world.

As I pointed out earlier, if the media had done their jobs in 2008 and 2012, pointing out the cataract of lies that underpinned those two Republican campaigns, Obama would have won by even larger margins. And the Democrats would still have the House, too.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/republican-lies-2012-election_b_2258586.html

Could Collins and Ayotte lead a GOP heretic movement?

America has said in poll after poll, and in the recent election, that they have finally rejected everything the conservative movement stands for: over-muscular aggression abroad, banning abortion, treating gays and minorities like dirt, transferring trillions of tax dollars from the middle class to the rich, gutting Social Security and Medicare. So have Republicans gotten the message?

Currently the GOP is putting on a great show of soul-searching. They are bashing Grover Norquist in front of the cameras. Ann “Democrats Are Guilty Demonic Godless Traitors” Coulter is saying “give in on taxes, we lost!” The party is trotting out all the women and brown faces they can. But how much of this is serious? How much of the soul-searching goes beyond messaging and into philosophy and policy?

None. Although it seems that many disparate Republican voices seem to be making a cacophony of argument which sometimes borders on heresy to the far-right, that isn’t really what is happening. They are doing three things: trying to cover up their extremism to win new converts, attacking a few extremists for show when it’s tactically advantageous, and meanwhile continuing forward with the same extremism they’ve been lugging around for three decades. Let’s look at all three.

 

First, they pretend to be warm-fuzzy touchy-feely New Republicans while peddling the same extremism. They pretend that they love the poor and dislike the rich, but keep on attacking programs for the poor and defending tax cuts for the rich. Pretend they love Latinos, even though they’re still working to throw brown people in jail in red states when they have actual governmental power. Pretend they barely know social conservatives: keep quiet about their continuing anti-abortion stance, but keep it in the party platform; and keep bashing Sandra Fluke and other uppity women. Pretend they want to be welcomed again in the blue states, even though they’re peddling the same old message, particularly the nasty anti-union and anti-voter sentiments that killed them in the critical Midwestern states (they’re pushing yet another union-busting bill in Michigan).

And of course, attack Grover Norquist, but only because it will persuade the slow-witted that Republicans are the reasonable party in the fiscal-cliff fight. Even though they’re still sticking to Norquist’s actual policies on taxes, and sticking to a hardline on Medicare and Social Security and Obamacare, and ignoring Obama’s proposals, and then still trying to blame Obama for the impasse on taxes. “We’re totally sane and reasonable now!” Like Norman Bates in Psycho II.

Second, they do things that look like they’re purging extremism, but are really just inside-baseball tactics. Prepare to launch primary attacks on tea-party candidates, but only if they look like they’ll lose in the general election; this may have led to Jim Demint’s defenestration from the Senate. Attack tea-party members of Congress by tossing them off of committees, but only because they threaten John Boehner’s power. Attack Karl Rove and Dick Morris, but only because they made Republicans look bad on television. Get rid of the Iowa straw poll, not because it will promote extremist candidates, but because it may promote candidates that the party can’t fully control.

And third, they pretend everything’s fine and keep pushing to the right. Embrace the rich particularly when they donate, block the poor from voting, use the fiscal-cliff issue to primary RINO candidates in 2014. And if they don’t get what they want, get desperate: advocate secession, try to block the electoral college from reelecting Obama, refuse to even talk to Democrats, spend even more money, promote Palin for 2016. And try to win on process: get more pliant debate moderators, use softer words to mitigate the harsher policies in the party platform, campaign more cleverly than Romney did, suck up to the mainstream media, keep gerrymandering House districts so they can keep more seats even when they lose the popular vote like they did in 2012.

In other words, there is no evidence that they have really gotten the message, that America does not want or need their philosophy anymore.

 

And here’s a particularly telling point. If a moderate non-crazy movement were to pop up in the GOP, it would need leaders of some kind. Where would they come from? The House Republican caucus is dominated by tea-party extremists who are perfectly willing to crush any House member who strays from the hard line, even their own Speaker, who is already on thin ice over the fiscal-cliff issue. The Republican governors are dominated by hardliners who spent the last two years suppressing black votes, throwing Mexicans in jail, crushing unions, signing anti-abortion laws, and declaring holy war against all things liberal. Nongovernmental conservatives are as far to the right as they have ever been. In the Senate you have Brown, Lugar, Snowe and Hutchison, who are all leaving office. Lisa Murkowski won office as a write-in, beating a Republican tea-party candidate, so she has no pull with the party faithful. So who is left, to lead any heretic movement in the GOP?

Senators McCain, Graham, Ayotte, Collins.

So. Right after Obama was reelected, the Republicans decided they were going to punch him in the teeth by launching an attack on a potential cabinet nominee, Susan Rice, an attack which has no basis in reality and which was discredited even before the campaign ended. Who did the Republicans send out for this barely-sane extremist attack?

Senators McCain, Graham, Ayotte, Collins.

The message to Republican moderates everywhere: stick to the party sheet music. Shut up and color. Either the party is ensuring that these mavericks – two of them blue-state women -- don’t lead an internal civil war from the left, or these mavericks themselves are tacking to starboard to protect their right flanks. If there was any hope of a Republican renaissance, these are the people who would have led it, but the dynamics inside the party will not allow it.

How Scalia could kill the GOP

There was a neat story today about Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s dislike of the landmark Times v Sullivan decision. That decision decreed that public figures can only sue a reporter for libel if they can prove the reporter knew his story was false, or showed a reckless disregard for whether it was false or not. That rule protects reporters, newspapers, TV news, all the media.  Scalia, anchor man for the conservative majority on our highest court, thinks the rule is too easy on reporters: he says it’s too easy for the media to launch dishonest attacks against public figures and get away with it. “You can libel public figures at will, so long as somebody told you something — some reliable person — told you the lie that you then publicized to the whole world”, Scalia complained.

I hope Scalia gets his way on this, in the Supreme Court.

It is true that if news outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and CBS all must be able to defend the accuracy of their criticisms of politicians in court, it will have a stifling effect on political journalism.

However, if Scalia gets his way, all of conservative media goes off the air. Fox would have to give up its core business, dishonest smear attacks against Obama and Pelosi and the rest, so they couldn’t function; actually Rupert Murdoch’s entire empire, including the Wall Street Journal, would be crippled. Rush Limbaugh’s entire stock in trade is libel and slander, so he would be forced to get rid of his entire program, pretty much. World Net Daily’s two-year jihad claiming Obama is a foreigner never would have happened. Drudge would be in jail. Breitbart would have died in jail.

O, brave new world!

None of these people know how to do real journalistic homework, the kind that keeps you out of legal and ethical trouble: research, legwork, facts, logic, analysis, accountability, listening to people who disagree with you and pose inconvenient truths. So the Washington Times and the Washington Examiner would stumble off to the elephant’s graveyard. Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck would probably be institutionalized, and George Will and Charles Krauthammer would be rolled off to some retirement home like those two crazy old men in the balcony on the Muppets. All those people who can’t do their jobs without resorting to dishonest attacks and fallacies, Ingraham, Malkin, David Brooks, Erickson, O’Reilly, Peggy Noonan, all forced to stop pretending to be journalists, going off to make infomercials. Add Dick Morris, who even today is using his razor-sharp insight to try to teach the rest of us what happened in the 2012 election. Rightwing think tanks like the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute would go out of business because no reporter could afford to quote them anymore, and with their demise, America would wave goodbye to the illusion that conservatism is an actual philosophy with any intellectual heft.

As for the others, the dirty fact that Republicans don’t want you to know is that there is no equivalency between rightwing media and the rest of the press. People like MSNBC and Kos, under constant attack from the right, are careful about their fact-checking, in a way that Fox will never be. Rachel Maddow, an absolute witch on research and sniffing out facts, once fact-checked herself on the air, on a story about Spongebob Squarepants. So the non-crazy media would be able to adjust to the “Scalia rule” just fine.

The press would, in fact, go back to doing their job the way they used to, before Reagan, Bush and the Republicans decided for us that facts, logic, science and reality no longer mattered.  Fact-checking would become a real profession again. Back in the day, Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley could go on television and call Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon liars, and cripple their careers. What if a new Cronkite could do the same to Boehner, McConnell, McCain, Romney, Ryan, Gingrich? The threat alone would force Republicans to watch their words.

But that’s the real press, in the sane world. Meanwhile, with Fox and Rush and the gang going off the air, we would no longer have rightwing whackaloons quoting Drudge and Sean all over the internet, tormenting their relatives at Thanksgiving with birth-certificate conspiracy theories, boring their football buddies with “the UN is coming to take your guns”. Because the rightwing internet outlets which propagate all that garbage would mostly be gone – that in itself might speed up the internet by 100 percent, and about 90 decibels of daily noise pollution would disappear. Then the only media we’d have left, would be sane, honest media. Not perfect, but honest.

 

That’s just the beginning. Just as the “Scalia rule” would shut down dishonest rightwing reporters, it would also shut down dishonest rightwing politicians too. Because reporters could no longer listen to someone like Mitt Romney accusing Obama of stealing money from Medicare, and then just run Romney’s quote on the air without comment. They would be forced to point out that Romney lied, or else get sued by Obama.

Imagine the 2012 election with the Scalia rule. Every time Romney and Ryan lied about Medicare, or Obamacare, or Benghazi, or jobs, or anything else, the media would practically be required to bust them for it, in public. During Romney’s presidential debates, he lied more than eighty times, and most of the time he was defaming Democrats: the media would have been forced to bust him for every one of those lies, because he lied on their broadcast air. Candy Crowley publicly busted Romney for one of those debate lies, and crippled his campaign:  imagine that impact multiplied by eighty. Likewise if we had had the Scalia rule in 2010, we’d have the public option in Obamacare now, and we’d still have a Democratic House with Pelosi in charge, because all the lies about death panels and dead Grandmas would have been shot down.

With the Scalia rule, we could have a sane, honest country, in which Republican lies are stillborn. So without the GOP Lie Machine, how does the Republican party fill the heads of their followers with lies and hate and fear, so they can herd them to the polls every two years? If the GOP can no longer win with lies, what can they win with? Their shrinking pool of sick old white men and tinfoil paranoids? Their policies? Gutting Social Security and Medicare, vote suppression, filibusters, letting corporations and the rich enslave us all? Treating women and minorities and gays and workers and the sick and the poor and students like cattle, and then expressing surprise that they all vote Blue?

I wonder if we can convince the liberal Justices to take a dive, to go along with Scalia on this one.

 

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/12/06/1286521/scalia-abhors-landmark-free-speech-decision/

The Crazy Industry

As I’ve noted earlier, the Republican party is still having a great deal of trouble admitting they are wrong about anything. America tried their toxic formula of redistributing wealth from the middle class to the rich, waging war on women and minorities, and pursuing a chest-beating foreign policy abroad, and after thirty years America said they’ve had enough.

The problem is that The Crazy isn’t just a party, the Republicans. It is also an industry. At the bookstore, there are entire sections dedicated to books generated by the Crazy Industry. Ann Coulter alone has written nine books; Glenn Beck, fourteen books as well as a movie; Dinesh D’Souza, fifteen books and two movies attacking Obama and Michael Moore; Bill O’Reilly, ten books. And many, many more. All attacking Obama, attacking Democrats, attacking liberals.

The Crazy Industry controls a television network, Fox News, not even counting the religious channels with Pat Robertson and the like. They control a number of major newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, and a huge swath of the radio spectrum by means of Rush Limbaugh and his other radio buddies. There is merchandising, fake Confederate flags, wipe-your-ass-on-Obama toilet paper, anti-Obama T-shirts and coffee mugs. The Crazy makes big money: selling ignorance, fear and hate is boffo business.

On the internet, there are a thousand bloggers spewing, and recirculating, hate against Democrats: WND, Breitbart, Drudge, Newsmax, the Examiner. And of course right-wing think tanks, often with wildly-misleading names, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Family Association, Americans for Truth, Center for Individual Rights, Family Research Council, etc. Just imagine all the right-wing money needed to fund all these institutions!

They are supplemented by Republican couch potatoes who do nothing all day but re-post Democrat-bashing articles on internet forums, over and over and over. That is pretty much their entire lives, every waking moment they are not eating and pooping. The Crazy Industry is an army of millions.

The Crazy Industry is well-funded. Any Republican who strays from the Crazy Sheet Music on guns gets wiped out by the NRA and its donors; a candidate who gets wobbly on taxes gets carpet-bombed by the supporters of Grover Norquist; any Republican who even looks like he’s thinking about taking a step or two to the left will be primaried out of office by the Club For Growth. Express the notion that abortion should be considered to save the life of the mother and you will get dirty looks from a thousand evangelical ministers and their deep-pocketed flocks.

 

The Crazy Industry. More powerful than the banking Industry, or Big Oil, or Big Tobacco, or Big Pharma.

And it is increasingly a closed system. People who live on the Crazy Planet don’t talk to anyone except other Crazies. Analysts call this “epistemic closure”, which is inaccurate: the phrase actually means something else entirely, to philosophers. But the intent is accurate: the desire by the inhabitants of the Crazy Industry to hermetically seal themselves off from facts, logic, reason, science and reality. This is why arguing with them or even trying to educate them is pointless. They cling bitterly to their delusions like the most determined, unmedicated schizoid. The Democrats have now cornered the market of reality-based thinking, because Republicans have been forced to live on the Crazy Koolaid.

 

All of this we know. The problem with all this, is that the Crazy Industry does not have the same interests as the party that helped create it.

Republican party regulars know that in the real world of politics, the only way to get anything done is to compromise once in a while, and sometimes embrace moderation. But the Crazy Industry insists that since the other team is evil, compromising with them is like negotiating with terrorists, and that it’s better to destroy Democratic accomplishments even if people in the real world are hurt in the process: that is why conservatives are laboring with might and main to undermine Obamacare even though it is hurting their own supporters. Party regulars know that the middle ground is where a lot of progress is made; the Crazy Industry has done all they can to turn the middle ground into a scorched, uninhabitable no-man’s land, and to persecute moderates and “RINO’s” of both parties. The party cries “Victory!” while the discordant Crazies cry, in another key entirely, “Purity!”

Republicans want to control government, but the Crazy Industry wants to destroy it; Republican party regulars occasionally want to accomplish something, but the Crazy Industry wants to see dysfunction so they can complain about it.

The Crazy Industry has always thrived on hate and fear: in the 1980s they scared the dimwits with the Russians, and later they scared them with Usama and Saddam. Now they are frightening their base by using what they call crime, illegals, abortion, uncontrolled sex and immorality, but anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows that they are really trying to inspire fear and hate among white people against black and brown people, women and gays who threaten white power and the memories of earlier ages in which those other people knew their place. And all those blacks and browns and women and gays vote, in every-growing numbers. The Republicans can only survive by going brown and getting brown votes; the Crazy Industry has declared war to defend the white against the brown. A nation cannot move forward if their governing ethos is all about destructive hate and fear, but the Crazy Industry cannot survive once the hate and fear subside: spinning up deep, nasty currents of emotion is how the Crazy Industry makes reason impossible and keeps The Crazy in the ascendant.

And as folks like Chris Hayes, Kos and Steve Kornacki have intimated, the Republican party of course wants to win elections, but the Crazy Industry actually thrives on defeat, and the hate and fear which defeat generates. When Democrats win, the Crazy Industry can spew hate against Democratic leaders, their statements, their actions, their policies, and their imagined conspiracies against Traditional America. Their ideal situation is one in which the Republican party is in full retreat before the advancing armies of Obama the wicked communist from corrupt Chicago, Pelosi from the sinful city of San Francisco, Harry Reid from the sinful city of Las Vegas, Bawney Fwank from Massa-taxes. Hating Democrats isn’t enough: the big thing is hating Democrats in power. The Crazy Industry wins when the Republican party loses: they make money selling hate, and hate requires powerful Democratic targets.

The Crazies are a bit like some politicians in parliamentary democracies. They do okay in an opposition role, but as soon as they get anywhere near real power, all hell breaks loose. As Sam Rayburn said, any jackass can kick down a barn but it takes a carpenter to build one; America's extreme rightwing has become, ironically, the Jackass Party.

Citizens United was seen as a boon for Republicans. Hooray, the big money boys can spend money on Republican races is obscene quantities, as long as it is not coordinated with the party and the campaigns! And there’s the key problem no one noticed at first, the lack of coordination. A scary metric for Republican politicians: in the 2012 election, most of the money being spent to elect Mitt Romney, was being spent by organizations out of Romney’s control. And those outside groups spewed so many outrageous lies against Obama that the efforts backfired, hurting Romney (of course Romney’s own dishonest ads hurt him too).

The Republican party not only tolerated the rise of the Crazy Industry, they helped create it, and exploited it to win elections. But now the Crazy Industry has become as powerful as the party itself, and has goals which are often in conflict with the interests of the party. And the party has no clear way of regaining control of The Crazy. It’s a bit like the Pakistanis who undertook a great deal of effort to create the Taliban, a bunch of irrational extremists to do their dirty work for them, and then were shocked when their creation, Frankenstein-like, turned on its master.

Undermining same-sex marriage

The war on gays, Vol. 93,526.

Republicans think that the rules are for everybody but them. Whenever they lose a major political battle in Washington, they try to figure out ways to game the system after the fact, in defiance of the Supreme Court, or Congress, or whoever it was who peed in their Cheerios. The high court reaffirms Roe v Wade, and a dozen red states come up with a hundred ways to make it harder for women to get to a clinic. The high court reaffirms Obamacare and governors stamp their feet and vow to stop it. Everybody in the world affirms that women should have access to contraception, and suddenly Christian health-care providers declare that being forced to hand out birth control violates their religious liberty.

And now that gay marriage is taking hold, conservative groups are at it again. They are working across the country, wherever marriage equality is legal, trying to persuade court clerks to deny same-sex couples marriage licenses – all the clerks have to do is declare that “it violates my conscience!” So watch for this crap to take hold in places like Maryland.

The Battle Against Stupid never ends.

Obama's impeachment, 2014

The Republicans in the last few decades have come to the conclusion that they are so obviously right, and the Democrats so obviously wrong, that when Democrats win a presidential election, there must have been something illegitimate about it. The GOP has only managed to break 50 percent once in 24 years of presidential elections – Bush managed a piddly 50.7 percent as a wartime incumbent against a weak opponent – but they still believe that the only way a Democrat could reach the Oval Office is by some evil miscarriage.

So now they are following the same formula as in the Clinton era: try to de-legitimize Obama, and then block everything he tries to pass, and then try to stop his reelection, and then as a last resort, start talking up impeachment. The problem is that Obama’s administration has been extraordinarily scandal-free, one of the most honest administrations in a century.

The Republicans are fishing around for dirty information about Obama’s campaign financing, with no results. They are trying to peddle the idea that Obama has made the economy worse, which the American electorate knows is nonsense: Obama keeps drafting proposals to create jobs and Republicans keep trying to block them for partisan political reasons. And despite that Obama managed to create five million private-sector jobs.

They are trying to raise a lynch mob regarding Obama actions which have already been declared legal in court, such as Obamacare and the individual mandate, and actions which were not only legal but were pursued by Bush and other Republican presidents: recess appointments, executive orders, imprisoning prisoners of war, using weapons to flush out Mexican drug dealers, appointing issue “czars”, and suggesting that the Constitution be altered.

And of course they are trying to breathe new life into conspiracies that have been debunked and laughed out of town, such as voter fraud and ACORN, Obama’s birth certificate, Solyndra, Obama giving “amnesty” to immigrants, Obama establishing an electricity monopoly, Obama rigging the auto bailout in favor of the unions, Obama violating the War Powers act in Libya, a dozen conspiracies regarding Dodd-Frank, and of course Obama stopping help from getting to the Benghazi consulate and lying about it. All of which have been proven untrue, here in the real world.

None of this has any basis in reality. But the fascinating thing is that some of the people yammering about Obama’s non-existent crimes are the same people who eagerly helped cover up the very real crimes of Obama’s predecessor. These rightwing loons cheered as George Bush violated Article I of the Constitution by violating Congress’s prerogatives, by lying to them to get us into a war, blackmailing them into funding unnecessary troop deployments by threatening to put the troops in danger, defying subpoenas, and using illegal signing statements and administrative actions.

These rightwing cheerleaders applauded as Bush committed endless violations of Article II, perverting the executive branch into a partisan political weapon, illegally prosecuting Democratic politicians and firing Democratic attorneys, directing government offices to spread dishonest political propaganda, failing to uphold Article II responsibilities by keeping or financial system safe or enforcing product safety laws, sending thugs to disrupt officials from counting votes while screaming “don’t count the votes!”, and trying to convert the Vice Presidency into a fourth branch of government with no oversight.

They turned a blind eye as Bush repeatedly trampled over Article III by violating the prerogatives of the courts, by defying orders to preserve emails and concealing evidence. Bush’s violations of the Bill of Rights include illegal spying and secret prisons and torture against the innocent, and lying about it all.

And of course they ignored the garden-variety violations of federal law and other high crimes and misdemeanors: Bush killed thousands of innocent people in the Middle East, allowed other terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center without holding them accountable, turned a blind eye as Iran and Korea built the nuclear weapons which could destroy our cities, inflicted so much damage on our military that PTSD and suicide are skyrocketing, made America hated around the world, endangered a CIA employee and intelligence operations by exposing the employee’s identity, made it easier for aliens to enter the country across the Mexican border and through our ports, and put thousands at risk of disease and death after Katrina.

 

So be sure and remind the Issas and Limbaughs of all this when, inevitably, the Impeachment Bandwagon rolls out of the garage in 2014 or thereabouts.

GOP terrified of naked Indian!

Samoa-born Tulsi Gabbard, 31, is a decorated Iraq veteran and martial arts instructor; she achieved a singular distinction for a female warfighter, becoming primary trainer for the ultra-conservative Kuwaiti national guard. She got a business degree and was elected to the Hawaiian legislature at 21, the youngest ever in the nation. She was just elected to the House of Representatives as a Democrat, 81 percent to 19. She won by 62 points.

She’s got some serious game.

She is everything Republicans hate: she supports choice for women on abortion and contraception, and same-sex marriage. Unsurprisingly she supports women in combat and works to stop the big banks from foreclosing on deployed troops. And she’s a woman in power, a woman who intensely dislikes bullies; while she was accomplishing all this in her very short life, she also defeated a phone stalker.

And when she is sworn into office this January, she will be sworn in on the Hindu holy book, the Gita, not the Bible. Because she is a devout Hindu.

And this is going to cause some silliness. Five years ago the conservative media went totally crazy when Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison reenacted his oath of office using a Muslim Qur’an, and oddly no sensible person ever asked why a Muslim would ever swear on a Bible. The same year, when a Hindu prayer was said on the Senate floor, rightwing protesters interrupted from the visitors’ balcony, and other conservatives condemned the prayer. It violates the Constitution, the Founding Fathers never would have approved, they don’t believe what we believe, blah blah blah. And of course the wingnuts still insist that Barack Obama is a scary Muslim, even though he was, in fact, the only true Christian in the 2012 presidential race, assuming we’re not counting third parties and the Mormon with his magic stones and magic underwear.

So when Gabbard gets up there with her Gita, expect her to get Fluked by Rush Limbaugh and carpet-bombed with The Crazy by the loony right. Three more choruses of “The Death of Traditional America”. OMG this snake-charming slut from the banks of the Barah-maputra! White Christians, look to your muskets!

By the time they are done, Republicans will have alienated the Hindus in America. All two million of them. Because the wingnuts don’t think they’ve done enough to irritate minorities in America. And the Hindus will remember this in the next election. To make my joy complete, two of the largest concentrations of Hindu worship are in states the Republicans absolutely must retain, if they are to avoid the terrible doom of the Whigs: Florida and Texas.

Personally, I think Gabbard should totally mess with their heads, drive the wingnuts nuts. She should strip naked, ululate in Hindi, sacrifice a goat on the House dais, set it on fire, and then give John Boehner the heart of the goat to eat. Make sure Fox News has their cameras rolling. And then just show up in her red power suit and pearls the next day, like nothing happened.

Is music dead?

Country music today has degenerated into pop with the occasional fiddle, and pop has degenerated into defiantly stupid dance music. And all black music, the source that gave the world blues, jazz, rock and soul, has been sucked into the vortex of rap, which essentially consists of juvenile bathroom-wall poetry over a really really loud drum track. And then singing teenagers from Disney, and contest winners. That is the music of today.

Of all the musicians to come on the scene in the last twenty years, the ten biggest sellers have been the Backstreet Boys, Andrea Bocelli, Rihanna and Beyonce, Eminem and the Black Eyed Peas, Shania Twain, Britney Spears, Spice Girls, and Taylor Swift. How many of their songs will be remembered, decades down the road? “Hit Me One More Time”? “Feel Like A Woman”? “What I Really Want”? “You Belong To Me”?

Ah, yes, I remember our wedding day, twirling on the floor, to our song, “My Humps”.

The second batch of top sellers after them: Robbie Williams, Usher, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Enrique Iglesias, Adele, Jay-Z….and it just goes downhill from there. So, any songs in there that will live forevermore? “Paparazzi”? “Rolling In The Deep”?

Look at the biggest song in each of the last twenty years. The only ones anyone can actually remember are “I Will Always Love You”, “Whoomp There It Is”, the Macarena, “Believe" by Cher, “California Girls” by Katy Perry and the Adele song.

 

Not to get all "get off my lawn" on you people, but compare today's sorry state of affairs to the albums we got just from one year, 1975, with records like Born to Run, Physical Graffiti, Wish You Were Here, A Night at the Opera, Rocky Horror, the Tommy soundtrack and Tubular Bells.

In 1975 we got a pile of great albums from singer-songwriters and the like, Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, James Taylor, Carole King, Olivia Newton John, Judy Collins, Harry Chapin, Jim Croce, Joan Baez, John Denver, Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. The former members of CSN&Y produced a total of four albums between them. In one year.

In 1975 the black community unloaded a mountain of music from Parliament, Earth Wind and Fire, the Isley Brothers, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, the Spinners, Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer, the Pointer Sisters, Al Green, the Commodores, the O’Jays, Sly Stone, the Temptations, the Staples, Patti Labelle, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Barry White, Natalie Cole, Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Gladys Knight, Roberta Flack, and Kool and the Gang. All in one year.

In 1975 there was an explosion of music from the outlaws: Waylon Jennings, the Band, Tom Waits, the Outlaws, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Little Feat, the Charley Daniels Band, the Marshall Tucker Band, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, Earl Scruggs, the Allman Brothers and ZZ Top.

In 1975 the world of jazz gave us works from Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Weather Report, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Manhattan Transfer, Dexter Gordon and George Benson.

In 1975 the kings of the music world were still cranking it out: three of the four Beatles had albums out, and the Stones, and the Who, and of course Led Zeppelin. The old dinosaurs like the Kinks still had their teeth, and the Hollies, the Four Seasons, Manfred Mann, the Grateful Dead, Frank Zappa, the Beegees, Eric Clapton, and even Elvis Presley.

In 1975, people who wanted to rock out could buy new albums from Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Jethro Tull, Jeff Beck, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nugent, Grand Funk Railroad, Kiss, Deep Purple, ACDC, Jimi Hendrix (posthumously), BTO, Journey, the Doobie Brothers and Peter Frampton.

In 1975 the old blues guys who started it had albums out, showing everyone how it was done, like Sonny Boy Williamson and Muddy Waters.

In 1975 progressive rock gave us albums from Renaissance, Kraftwerk, King Crimson, Rick Wakeman, Rush, and Styx.

In 1975 people bought new kinds of music by the ton, from Steely Dan, Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, Roxy Music, ELO, Supertramp, War, Abba, KC and the Sunshine Band, Rod Stewart and Chicago.

In 1975 David Bowie, Lou Reed and Suzie Quatro warned us that punk and new wave were around the corner; Bob Marley let us know that reggae and world music were coming.

All that in one year. And it was like that through the late sixties and throughout the seventies. Then all these great streams of music seemingly dried up at once, in the 1980s. Rock mocked itself with Nirvana and Hootie and the Blowfish. Soul and R&B died without warning. Hard rock turned into hair metal. Singer-songwriters ran out of things to write. Country lost its balls; the outlaws died off or sobered up, and meanwhile the punks overdosed, or aged into comfortable British commercials for household products. People like Springsteen and Prince and Madonna and Michael Jackson tried to keep music alive, but how much original music have they produced in the last decade or so?

Twilight of the wingnuts

Democrats have a great deal to cheer about, quite clearly. Not only did our embattled President win reelection, but the American people, in poll after poll and referendum after referendum, showed that they want Democratic ideas. Affordable health care, GLBT rights, fair taxes on the rich, everything.

But the news is actually better than that. Because the events of the last thirty years were actually the high-water mark of conservative ascendancy.

For most of American history, the conservative movement was divided. The Bible-beating, race-baiting southerners were firmly entrenched in the Democratic party, while the big-business bankers and businessmen were on the other side of the line of scrimmage, first in the Federalist party and the Whigs, and then in the Republican party. Conservatives couldn’t unite because the two wings of the movement were always in two different parties.

Then several things happened, to strengthen the conservative movement.

The big one was the race issue. In 1948 Hubert Humphrey crystallized racial equality as a central issue for the Democratic party, and Truman backed him up. This began to loosen the Democratic party’s grip on the south. In the 1960s the Democrats pushed civil rights legislation. In 1968 George Wallace showed southerners that they didn't always have to cling to the Democratic party, and Nixon openly used a racist appeal to win southerners over to the GOP. By the 1980s the south was turning very red, and former hardcore Democrats like Strom Thurmond, Phil Gramm and Dick Shelby were now Republicans. And what that meant was that the big-business Wall Street conservatives and the southern conservatives, the two main pillars of the right wing movement, were all united. As the southerners joined the GOP, they picked up the powerful NRA too.

Also, the Democratic coalition that dominated America after the Depression collapsed. It was not a gradual decline: it happened all in one summer, due to the short-sighted, destructive actions of one man, George McGovern. In 1972 McGovern wanted to run for president, and came up with an ingenious method for securing the party nomination: taking over as chairman of the Commission on Party Structure and Party Selection, and using the party’s rules to grab the nomination for himself, much the same way Dick Cheney took over Bush’s VP selection process and grabbed the job for himself. But in doing so, McGovern had to launch devastating attacks against the major power centers of the party, the unions and the city bosses. He destroyed their power, and then when he needed their money and manpower  in the general election, they said “you declared war against us at the convention, you destroyed our power, we can’t help you now.” There were other reasons McGovern lost big in 1972 – he embraced the same radical elements that scared the hell out of Middle America in 1968 and he handled his VP selection badly – but the one mistake that had long-term consequences was his deliberate choice to destroy the power centers which the Democrats had used for decades to win elections, the urban machines and big labor.

While the Democratic coalition was collapsing, and the southern and big-business conservatives were uniting under the GOP banner, the conservative alliance was adding a third wing. In 1950 America was reeling from the “loss” of China to the Communists, the news that the Russians had acquired the atom bomb through treachery, the communist invasion of South Korea and the anticommunist jihad of Joe McCarthy, and the Republicans swiftly crafted a “Democrats are weak on foreign policy” meme which helped them win elections throughout the Col dWar, something that really only ended when Obama shot Usama bin Laden in the head.

So now the GOP had an alliance of three strong movements: fiscal conservatives selling sexy tax cuts, social conservatives selling “family values”, and foreign-policy conservatives promising to protect America from the bad guys. And just as important, these three movements learned to support each other: the Wall Streeters learned to sing the “pro-life” sheet music, the war hawks learned to preach the low-taxes gospel.

Then other things happened to help the Republicans. Reagan, a superb salesman with impeccable timing, succeeded where Goldwater had failed sixteen years earlier, in selling the conservative message. Conservatives built their own television network, Fox. They concocted a scheme which put harsh conservative rhetoric on the radio for hours each day across a huge swath of middle America, giving the programming away for free, in exchange for advertising deals and the implied pledge that radio stations wouldn’t add liberal programming – the Rush Limbaugh show. The pushed legislative rules to the limit, filibustering any bills they didn’t like and using that tool to slow the flow of Democratic judges into the federal judiciary, thereby giving the federal bench a far-right tilt. And then they used all those rightwing judges to affirm the right of big-money conservatives to buy elections with millions of dollars in ad money. And lots of mud-slinging and attacks, ranging from Willie Horton to “Obama will kill your grandma”.

So, a Republican party with three strong, mutually-supporting factions, with strong messaging, clever parliamentary tactics, tons of money, and an amazing gift for dishonest attack ads. Facing a Democratic party whose power coalition had fallen apart, and which kept trying, foolishly, to reach out the hand of compromise to Republicans who just wanted to kill them. How could the Republicans lose?

The Republicans lost because America saw them try their ideas out.

They saw America, under Republican leadership, follow the war-hawk foreign policy into an unbelievable quagmire in Iraq. They saw supply-side economics destroying the middle class. They saw what the social conservatives meant when they said “family values” and “traditional America”: a nation in which gays and other minorities were barely tolerated, and women were seen as too stupid to manage their own lives.

And the other tactics failed too. The nasty filibusters began to backfire, the millions of dollars in attack ads backfired, the lies got shot down on live television, nothing the GOP tried worked.

And the amazing thing is how briefly the Grand Coalition of Republican elites lasted at the top of the hill. They won two elections with Reagan, a superb salesman, and then beat Dukakis who was one of the worst campaigners in electoral history. That’s it: three elections.

Since then, the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once in 24 years of presidential politics: Bush, a wartime incumbent running against a lazy opponent, scored a wimpy 50.7 percent. They used scary lies about health care to win the House in 1994 and again in 2010, and they used gerrymandering to keep the House in 2012, even though the Democrats actually got more votes than the GOP in the 2012 House elections. And that's it.

The conservative movement reached its high-tide mark during Reagan, and since then they have had nothing to sustain themselves, but dishonest attacks, fear, hate, unethical tactics, and sheer brass. Once they empty that toolkit, what else do they have? America has rejected their belligerent foreign policy, their rob-the-middle-class-to-feed-the-rich fiscal policy, and their medieval attitudes regarding women, gays and minorities. They can’t win on ideas, they can’t win on strategy and tactics. Their bag of tricks is now empty.

Can the GOP admit their error and save themselves?

Republican leaders are now in a crushing dilemma, on many fronts. The problem they face is that America really likes Democratic policies in a number of areas, once Americans manage to clear away all the Republican scare talk about them and get to the facts.

If Republicans go along with the Democrats on these issues, it means admitting they were wrong, it means they lose issues they can bash the Democrats with, and it means their crazy rightwing base will punish them with primary challenges.

But if they fight the Democrats on these issues, the sane 90 percent of the country will reject them at the polls, they way they just did on election day.

This is playing out on a number of fronts.

On budget policy, the tea-party caucus is pushing John Boehner to defy Obama and take us over the fiscal cliff, which forces the Republicans to reject their low-tax pledges and become the party that raises taxes on the whole country, a toxically bad idea for any Republican who ever wants to run for office. But if Boehner does the sensible thing and negotiates with Obama, his own caucus will fire him and replace him with Cantor or Ryan in a heartbeat, or that woman with three names. Boehner has had to deal with this push-pull ever since he became Speaker: that’s what happens when your leader can’t lead.

On Obamacare, it is becoming more and more obvious that Americans really do want the provisions in the plan, getting affordable care, preventing insurance corporations from chucking you out when you get too old or have a preexisting condition. Republican governors are trying to screw with implementation  of the program, because they hope it will deprive Obama of a historic victory, but it will also anger a lot of voters by taking away affordable health care. So do they admit that their three years of scare tactics about dead grandmothers were a load of crap, and stop fighting it? Or continue to resist changes that the voters want?

On foreign policy, Romney realized too late that trying to fight Obama on foreign policy was going to lead him straight into quicksand, and a public spanking by Candy Crowley. After that scarring experience, Romney simply agreed with all of Obama’s foreign policies while also attacking Obama as a failure on foreign policy, which fooled nobody. So now, as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis cranks up yet again, the Republicans are in a jam: how can they criticize Obama for following the same pro-Israel policy that every President since Truman has pursued? The funniest thing about Republican foreign policy is that, as hard as they try to sound like street-corner badasses ready to fight Iran, they have totally failed to see the hand of Iran in what is going on in Israel. This is a pattern that has played out many times over the last thirty years: whenever the international community puts pressure on Iran, the same thing happens – the world is suddenly distracted by the eruption of new violence further west. An explosion of civil conflict in Lebanon, then the intifada, then Palestinian shelling of Israel, again and again. All concocted by the Iranians. And the Republicans, instead of correctly hollering at one of their favorite targets, Iran, insists on hollering at Obama instead, for doing….exactly what they would have done.

Even on the election itself. Republicans have been hollering for a week that Obama won the election on a foul, by promising illicit goodies to gullible, greedy, lazy women and blacks and Latinos. But in 2014 and 2016 the party will need to win over those same gullible, greedy, lazy groups, who aren’t stupid and will surely remember these post-election insults. So do the Republicans blame minorities for screwing up the 2012 election, or begin sucking up to them for 2016? They can’t do both. And in fact they may not be able to do either: nobody really believes the “minorities wrecked the election” meme except the wingnuts, and minorities and women are not going to fall for any Republican snake-oil salesmen in 2016, even if the two people hopping out of the snake-oil wagon are Piyush Jindal and Nikki Haley. Romney, who will never run again, stuck to the “minorities ruined everything” meme, but many big party players who do have further electoral ambitions slapped him down for insulting minorities. And this makes it easier for us to figure out who is most desperate to exploit these groups for future elections: some of the most vociferous violators of the “thou shalt not criticize fellow Republicans” rule, spanking Romney for being mean to brown people, are Chris Christie, Piyush “Bobby” Jindal, Nikki Haley…

So now Republicans must decide whether they would rather admit they were wrong, and lose elections. Or stick to their guns and try to destroy all of the popular policies that Obama ran on, and lose elections that way.

This isn’t the first time the Republicans have been in this jam. For most of the last century, the American people wanted Democratic policies. So Republicans had to figure out a way to champion the same policies as Democrats, while attacking the Democrats who had championed them first. “I agree with everything my opponent wants to do, and if we elect him it will be a disaster for America!” Eisenhower got away with campaigning as a “New Deal Republican” because he was Eisenhower. Nixon tried the same thing in 1960 and was branded as a laughable purveyor of “me-too-ism”: Nixon only won when he sang the racist sheet music to a temporarily terrified nation in 1968, running against a divided Democratic party.

And now, the Democratic hand is arguably stronger than it was forty years ago. As Ulysses Grant once said, sometimes the only way to kill a bad idea is to try it out. So for the better part of thirty years we tried out Reagan’s Laffer-curve supply-side trickle-down strategy for giving trillions to millionaires and hoping they’d give it all back, and unsurprisingly it was a disaster. Only when Clinton steered us back to the left did we get the ship back on an even keel and create twenty million jobs. So now America knows: we’ve seen both parties run the economy, and we know that the Democratic path leads to jobs and growth.

But when will the Republicans admit it?