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/