We’re so used to Republicans blaming President Obama for everything from Ebola to socks disappearing in the dryer that we have a sarcastic shorthand for it: Thanks, Obama! According to Republicans, even their own ignorant, racist, misogynist wrecking ball of a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is somehow PBO’s fault.
Well! Last night, The Wall Street Journal published what may be the Platonic ideal of this plaintive wail:
Obama’s Greatest Triumph
He is six months away from destroying both the Republican Party and Reagan’s legacy.
By DANIEL HENNINGER
Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.
As wonderful as it would be to credit PBO with skull-fucking Zombie Reagan, it didn’t exactly go down like that. In fact, PBO helpfully warned the Republicans that their oppositional defiant disorder would ultimately bite them on the ass, as Martin “Booman” Longman ably proves in this Washington Monthly column. An excerpt:
The Republicans should have listened to the president’s advice.
They thought they’d get more short-term bang for the buck by encouraging the Tea Party and the Birthers (including Trump). And they did.
And now their long-term reward is “Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan.”
Yep. The whole piece is well worth a read (Longman’s piece, I mean, not Henninger’s).
Still, as gratifying as it is to see all those nasty chickens coming home to roost in the GOP henhouse, it would be foolish to count unhatched chickens in our own coop. I’ll believe the Republican Party is destroyed and Ronald Reagan’s legacy dismantled when I see a stake driven through its fat black heart and not a moment before.
Even so: Thanks, Obama!
Poopyman
Yay! Debbie Wasserman Shultz is now vindicated for not doing a damn thing to regain the House for the Democrats. It’s happening all by itself!
Not.
greennotGreen
The heart of the Republican Party is not black; it’s more of a pasty white.
slag
Indeed. Though I’d add smoldering ashes and salted earth to the requirements list.
? Martin
Yeah, whatever. The voting fraction of the US that is racist/sexist/etc. is still large enough to not be ignored. If the Dems are willing to forgo them (debatable), that means the GOP must inevitably pick them up and represent them. The current GOP looks little different from Goldwater’s GOP, and I’ll bet anything my grandkids GOP will look little different from the current one.
So long as we’re locked in this binary categorization, nothing will change very much. Perhaps roles will flip as they have a few times in the past, but I doubt it.
redshirt
FINISH THEM!
But yeah, no. As long as greed, fear and hate lurk in the hearts of rednecks and their corporate masters, the Republican party will be fine.
Hillary Rettig
was it just a few years back they were hypothesizing a “perpetual Republican majority?” Losers.
“stupid and afraid is no way to go through life, son”
scav
Let’s play it safe. Add buried at crossroads with a brick in its mouth. But even then, the annimating corpusles will rise again under a new name.
Unabogie
@Poopyman: show me on the doll where Debbie touched you…
lollipopguild
@Hillary Rettig: I thought the quote was “Stupid and drunk is no way to go thru life”
Frankensteinbeck
Reagan’s legacy was making racism polite and deniable. That legacy is certainly in trouble right now.
Roger Moore
From the WSJ editorial page to FSM’s orecchiette. But I won’t believe it until the Republican party is dead, staked through the heart, decapitated, had it’s mouth filled with consecrated hosts, and buried at a crossroads at midnight.
Fair Economist
If it happens, it’s not so much Obama’s goal as a side effect of his Republican opposition, which I think he didn’t expect. Obama co-opted many of the Republican’s prior proposals – the ACA, tax cut in the stimulus package, cap’n’trade – and opposing these from the right basically required the Republicans to be crazy, because any proposal rightward of these *is* crazy. I’m pretty sure Obama expected the Republicans to go along with all of these fairly generous comprises from his end. The intensity of Republican opposition -they’d do anything to stop him getting something done, even if it was mostly what they’d wanted all along – seemed to baffle him for the first 4 years or so.
The Republican party imploding from its own craziness will be poetic justice if it happens. I have my hopes, but I’m not going to count that chicken quite yet.
Mnemosyne
This morning, G and I were talking about the Republicans, and I said that I fully expect Alan Keyes to step out on the stage as the Republican nominee, because he’s the guy you call when your high-profile election is about to leave a vacancy at the top.
It took us about 10 minutes to stop laughing hysterically.
redshirt
@Hillary Rettig: They were real close. If W hadn’t been such an incompetent boob they might have got it.
Just imagine if after W’s last term, McCain/Palin had been elected. Supreme Court stacked for decades. Countless more wars, terror alerts, etc.
Obama might have saved us all.
BGinCHI
Man, that WSJ piece is so full of stupid.
Taking flight from reality is really the coin of the realm on the right.
Hey, is anyone else in the country noticing that IL’s right wing, hedge fund manager Governor, Bruce Rauner, is driving the state completely into the ground?
We are starting a 20% pay cut at my university just to stay open. Chicago State is looking like it might close. These are the universities for the working class and first-generation college students of one of the largest cities in America.
Where is the outrage?
dedc79
It’s kind of like the criminal owner of the rundown amusement park blaming the Scooby Gang for his plight. Maybe, um, try not to be a bunch of dishonest fear-mongers and see how that works for a while….
qwerty42
hahahahahahahahaha
(whew)
hahahahahahahahahaha
OK, really, I’ll believe it when I see it, but they sure are going nutzo.
redshirt
@scav: For any creature that can resurrect I recommend cutting them up and keeping the body parts locked up and far apart.
Calouste
@Roger Moore:
Important detail added.
MattF
There’s some feeling that Der Trump is flaming out. This from Slate:
You think? I’m somewhat skeptical. In any event, the R convention is going to be… Yuuuuge. Maybe the Quicken Loans Arena should be reconfigured into a giant popcorn bowl.
Major Major Major Major
Thanks for the image of “skull-fucking Zombie Reagan”, Betty.
Here, I took another picture of my cat with too many iPhone filters, it’ll act as temporary brain bleach. http://imgur.com/a/vCDK3
SarahT
@BettyCracker: Sorry to go OT, but I’m hoping that some BJers will sign on to this effort to stop the state of Georgia from murdering another black man (RIP Troy Davis):
https://www.change.org/p/state-board-of-pardons-and-paroles-grant-clemency-to-kenny-fults
Yes, I’m aware that people of all races are wrongfully executed with alarming frequency in this country, but this case is particularly egregious. Thanks, and again, please forgive the interruption.
Peale
@Hillary Rettig: Yeah. Just like the Dems were celebrating their oncoming permanent majority through multicultural demographics. Both celebrations were premature.
Republicans have a a lot of money and more time than we like to think. I still think we’re more likely to lose social security to privatization than we are to see universal single payer, and more likely to have a republican governor in New York before we see a Democrat in Arizona or Florida.
Major Major Major Major
@redshirt: just to be safe, destroy anything that looks like a phylactery or horcrux too, or better yet all their material possessions.
Chris
Fuck it, I’m willing to give Obama credit if they insist on doing so. It’s not like it’s the kind of thing to be ashamed of.
Ken
@Hillary Rettig:
That was based on Karl Rove’s “50% + 1” strategy, which you’ll notice becomes “50% – 1” if two of your people die. I’ll never understand why Rove was considered a political genius.
Calouste
With all the talk about the GOP dumping Trump at a brokered convention and nominating Ryan/Kasich/Romney/Zombie Reagan in his place, I’m wondering how they are actually going to achieve that.
Thing is, most of the delegates are not going to be the usual delegates from the previous conventions. They are not going to be the GOP county treasurers and former state representatives and people like that, who are connected to the party, and can be convinced (or “convinced”, if-you-know-what-I-mean) to vote for the establishment. Cruz and Trump delegates are going to be raw, extremist, true-believing, dominionists and/or racists. People with little connection to the party machinery. How are you going to get these people to vote for yet another grey establishment candidate, when they have been explicitly voting for an anti-establishment candidate?
Betty Cracker
@Peale: The only thing that keeps us from having a Democratic governor in Florida is the incompetence of the party at the state level. Florida went for Obama twice, and Rick Scott won twice with less than 50% of the vote.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
I think that’s a misunderstanding of the real origin of many of those proposals. Cap-and-trade, market based health reform, and the like were never serious policy positions; they were only counter-proposals to keep the Democrats from getting theirs through. That’s why the Republicans never passed their versions when they had control over both Congress and the White House. As soon as the Democrats threatened to achieve something by pre-compromising on the Republican proposal, they’d refuse to accept it and make a counter-proposal that was even further to the right. The problem they’ve had with Obama is that they’ve now moved so far to the right that there aren’t any plausible counter-offers left to make.
boatboy_srq
Obama may not have destroyed the GOTea. But he certainly enabled them to destroy themselves.
Miss Bianca
@Fair Economist:
You know, liberals have a version of the trope Betty cites above, which is the whole “eleventh-dimension chess” meme – the notion that PBO is somehow engaged in some serious skull-f*ckery with the opposition when the truth, more often than not, seems to be that he’s engaged in simple good-faith efforts at good government – which efforts have somehow become so bizarre a spectacle in current political times that no one can take ’em at face value.
His nomination of Merrick Garland for SCJ being the latest case in point. I mean, it is possible that PBO nominated him knowing that the optics of standing up this particular candidate’s nomination were going to be really embarrassing for the Republicans – and with good reason. However, I find myself clinging to Occam’s Razor here (ouch!) and thinking, “PBO genuinely likes the guy and genuinely thinks he’d be a good SCJ – and *that’s* his primary motivation – and *always has been*”. He’s a genuinely straight-up guy. It’s just that the amount of opposition he’s had to face, to say nothing of its sheer batshittery, and the amount he’s been able to accomplish because of it, makes him look like a positive Machiavel.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
I think President Black Ninja pretty much saw this all coming, and his no fucks left to give attitude is his way of telling us that our faith in him has been rewarded, and he is pleased.
MattF
@Ken: There’s an important truth buried in there: elections are generally decided at the margins. Note that the elections of 2016 may turn out to be exceptions to that truth.
japa21
@MattF: After next Tuesday, it will probably be all but impossible for Cruz to reach the necessary number of delegates to win outright, which means that a contested election will be all but unavoidable. I don’t see Trump having enough delegates for a first ballot victory either.
bemused
Good Booman column.
I can’t believe Trump is going to be the Republican candidate. I don’t think he wants it and he didn’t think he’d get this far. The Republican establishment/donor crowd doesn’t want him. Will Trump take himself out or has the GOP got a real plan to take him out? Will the Republican candidate end up being Paul Ryan? This is probably all wild speculation but I just can’t imagine the GOP capitulating without some desperate moves.
Hoodie
@Fair Economist:
That characterization is the crux of the problem. Being conservative does not per se require opposing everything or being crazy. The GOP could have, for example, simply come forward and said they’re all for expanding Medicaid, e.g., using the fiscal reasons Kasich sometimes cites, and rejected other parts of the plan. Or supported the exchanges and fought on the subsidy levels and they way they were financed. No, this was driven by the media as a whole, and particularly by the right wing media’s framing of everything in terms of black helicopters and FEMA camps, because that generates revenue. It also sets the agenda by which conservatives get elected. You see some of the same thing in certain outlets on the left (for example, one that rhymes with “Balon”) when talking about Wall St. or whatever but, thankfully, that’s on a smaller scale. Obama is not responsible for any of that.
lollipopguild
GOP= Grifters on Parade. When you are a party of con artists creating your own reality/history to replace the real items it eventually makes you crazy. Our current GOP has made itself into a carbon copy of the old communist party in the USSR. What ever happened to them?
BGinCHI
From Kthug:
lollipopguild
@Ken: He got W elected twice.
Punchy
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
Chris
@Ken:
Hasn’t this pretty much always been the GOP strategy, going back to the Gilded Age, though? Have a 50% + 1 majority of “Real Americans” that serve as your voter base and make sure they’re at the throats of the other 49% of the country, using the resulting division to rule without trouble. In the old days, their 50% + 1 were Northern WASPs (with immigrants and, in lesser measure, Southern whites as the 49% “other”), since Nixon it’s basically been white people versus the nonwhite.
Rove may have actually said it out loud, but this kind of “divide by conquer” thing has always been SOP or so I thought.
SFAW
@Roger Moore:
You’re letting them off easy. Not sure that I like this kinder, gentler version of you.
SFAW
@Punchy:
I’d correct you, but you’re on a roll.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@SarahT: You got it. I despair of seeing effective criminal justice reform within my lifetime.
Apropos of not much, does anyone else have strong opinions about auto play videos in a sidebar?
Mnemosyne
@lollipopguild:
I still say that W was vastly underestimated as a campaigner and got HIMSELF elected twice. Rove’s supposed genius was actually him + W.
Yes, W was a crappy president, but that’s just more proof that campaigning =! presidenting.
lollipopguild
@Punchy: Of course not!
Betty Cracker
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I think auto play videos in general are an abomination.
Calouste
@bemused: The problem the GOP has at the moment is that there are at least 752 delegates to their convention that want Trump, even if Trump no longer wants Trump.
Punchy
@BGinCHI: You misidentified “KS” and “LA” and misspelled “Brownback” and “Jindal”.
SFAW
@boatboy_srq:
They ain’t dead yet.
Betty Cracker
@BGinCHI: Krugman is exactly right.
Cermet
@bemused: Too late for him or them; if he pulled out massive numbers of racist thugs would boycott the election and besides losing the Senate, they could lose control of the House. No, if he gets close to the magic number he is there candidate; they will most likely allow a third party run (and hid their support) to ensure tRump loses but the die is cast.
SarahT
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Thanks so much. And if you can spare a few moments to write the Georgia Parole Board, that info is also in the petition email.
MattF
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): It really is just getting worse and worse. Pop up modal ads, pop under persistent views (won’t go away unless you quit the browser), auto play– and the ad networks are all open targets for malware. There’s a real possibility that much of it will collapse of its own weight in the not-too-distant future.
boatboy_srq
@Chris: Another factor here is that Rove’s math works so long as you offset the -2 factor Ken points out by excluding 2+ of your opponents. Hence the Voter Fraud™, Anchor Baby™, drug testing for public assistance (do felony charges follow positive tests, or merely exclusion from public assistance?) and other horrors the GOTea continues to call on as justifications for their suppression of dissent.
boatboy_srq
@SFAW: No, and there’ll be no guns in Cleveland, so it will take a little longer. But watching them eat their own is increasingly entertaining.
RepubAnon
@Fair Economist: Obama’s strategy for destroying the Republican Party was simple and elegant: he simply warned them from time to time that the Republican Party’s increasingly harsh rhetoric was damaging the Republican Party’s ability to engage in the type of compromise the US system of government requires. (He knew that they’d do the opposite of whatever he advised.)
Once the Republicans heard Obama’s advice, they proceeded to double down on their road to destruction. Right wing hate radio, a product of Ronald Reagan’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and increasingly-concentrated ownership of mass media (resulting from Republican-inspired deregulation), reinforced this choice.
Now, one could argue that the Republicans could start taking responsibility for their own actions rather than blaming their own short-sightedness on others. However, Republicans think of personal responsibility the way Leona Helmsley thought of taxes – they’re only for the “little people.” (Republicans also think taxes are only for the poor and the middle class, but use the marketing phrase “don’t tax the ‘job creators'” to hide their true agenda.)
raven
@boatboy_srq: “there’ll be no guns in Cleveland”
Inside anyway.
Miss Bianca
@SarahT:
Done.
Betty Cracker
@Cermet: I hope you’re right because I’m pretty sure Trump would lose big time, which would be a joy to behold in addition to a bullet dodged for the USA and the world. I keep having nightmares that they’ll somehow manage to get him out of the way (by whatever means necessary) and run someone with a better chance of winning, such as Kasich.
Bill
What difference does it make if the party is destroyed? The racist, misogynist, greedy voters that make up the party aren’t going to disappear. They’ll just re-assemble as the Freedom and Liberty Party (pick a ridiculous name) and carry on as usual.
The problem isn’t the party per se. It’s the country.
Frankensteinbeck
@BGinCHI:
I can go with that description. The rich didn’t create the racism, and they don’t control it, but it was kinda going in their direction. They hopped on and yelled ‘Hey, you know what would really stick it in the eye of those negro-loving liberals? Tax cuts and deregulation!’ And for awhile, everyone was happy because the blacks got shafted hardest and they could all agree they were being responsible and common sense, not racist.
redshirt
@Betty Cracker: I’m feeling very confident none of those clowns can win. So confident in fact I’ve moved on to considering who would be worst for down ballot votes. Kaisch might do best since he seems bog standard Repuke; Cruz second best, with Trump 3rd. Best case scenario is Cruz with stolen nomination and Trump with a half hearted 3rd party run.
bemused
@Calouste:
@Cermet:
I just can’t visualize Trump in the last stretch but there’s no doubt their convention will be a big hot crazy mess.
SarahT
@Miss Bianca: Thanks so much.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: And Rs generally have fewer inhibitions about dipping into polluted waters to do God’s work. If, for example, Ryan is pushed ahead of the pack by some unmentionable force… he might have some trouble maintaining his smooth reputation.
redshirt
@Bill: We’re getting better, year by year. We just need to make sure we can institutionalize that progress and continue building on it, while rolling back the regressions these fascists have introduced.
patroclus
Both articles are hyperbolic. Neither party is going to be “destroyed” – losing an election does not equate with destruction. But the analysis in the Washington Monthly article is essentially correct – because he wanted to actually pass legislation, Obama adopted Republican positions and expected at least some Republican support for it. But as others have said above, what really happened is Obama merely exposed that the prior Republican positions where actually shams – the Republicans never intended to actually enact them; they were merely debating points against the Dems’ positions. This resulted in Obama occupying the center ground and the Republicans were thus pushed (by their choice) into only naked oppositionism. This is a very untenable position in politics in the long run, but in the short run, it can win off-year elections. Trump is a result of the Republicans’ positioning – by outflanking (with his rhetoric) everyone to the right, he is merely playing the game that they created.
Hopefully, it will result in a Democratic landslide and we’ll re-take the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court and make enough gains in the House that the dynamic will shift. But even if that happens, the Republicans are still a strong party that could bounce back in the next mid-term.
scav
@MattF: Companies seem to think we’ll buy their product if they really fucking annoy us at all possible times in all possibly venues.
Iowa Old Lady
We’ll have to be sure to bury the head separately from the body. Even then, I won’t believe it until they start talking like normal people again.
Frankensteinbeck
Bear in mind, when people who write think pieces say ‘destroy the Republican Party’ they don’t mean stopping it from ever winning again. They mean stopping it from listening to their think pieces. Trump’s rise is the kind of thing considered impossible, contrary to the elite’s control and inevitably smashed down, even in 2012. As far as they’re concerned, it may be destroyed, and what continues is something new with the same name.
EDIT – How popular was ‘Jeb will be the nominee because it doesn’t matter what the base wants’ early in this campaign?
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Betty Cracker: Go to the test site…
boatboy_srq
@raven: Well, that’s where the chief architects of Reichwing oligotrainwreckopoly will be, so they’re safe for a little longer. Outside will just be the hangers-on, tale-bearers and the rest of the oi polloi: guns among that crowd won’t result in more than the odd tragic shooting/self-inflicted-wounding which won’t move the needle far.
MattF
@scav: The good news is that I can’t identify an advertisement from any particular company that’s doing this– I get annoyed with a site I’m reading for hosting the ad, but the ad itself goes directly into my brain’s ‘corporate bullshit’ trashcan.
Mike in DC
I’m not counting any victory until it actually happens. If things go the other way in November it is a virtual destruction of the Democratic party instead. So we should work like we’re down 20 points.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@MattF: Among the reasons I love adblockers, but I expect you’re correct in your prediction. The interwebz done got monetized to death, and it could get a bit more literal in the long run.
Face
@Bill: But if they assemble into 2 or 3 different parties, they likely can never win national elections, as long as the Dems stay united.
I agree a “breakup” of the GOP doesn’t eliminate the shitty voters, but it does splinter them into enough sub-groups that no 1 subgroup can muster a majority of votes for national offices.
Mandarama
@Punchy: You’re right! Psychotic, but absolutely right.
Iowa Old Lady
@BGinCHI:
Well, I feel outrage! Is there no investment in the future these guys aren’t willing to destroy in order to save a buck today?
Barbara
@BGinCHI: Yes, unfortunately. I sometimes think that one of the most unfortunate coincidences in history is that core civil rights legislation was passed at just about the exact moment in time when the extraordinary U.S. post-WWII bubble started to deflate. It would have started dissipating no matter what domestic policies we had pursued but the correlation in timing seems to have made many white people more willing to believe that somehow civil rights are the cause of their ensuing economic distress, and of course, many people have perceived a clear strategic advantage in letting them believe just that. This is not a defense of NAFTA or any other trade policy, just an observation that most people are not complicated and will accept simple explanations just because they “feel” right. Also, if there is one salutary development in this year’s Republican election it is the insistence by many of these people that a dog whistle signaling solidarity with racial resentment isn’t enough to keep them happy.
scav
@MattF: I’ve too got the ignore brand tendency down pat, but am working on developing a residual instinctive hatred for repeat offenders. American jeans did it with a single effort on one ‘L ride which might be a record.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
This was my favorite part of the WSJ piece
He’s talking about the the Feb, 10 health care summit where Obama pointed out that all of Paulie Blue-Eyes’ arguments agains the ACA were either flat out wrong, or hyperventilating worst case scenarios ( that were disproved by what actually happened). And that summit was two years after the meeting where R House and Senate Caucuses decided on a policy of total obstruction, making Obama a one-term president.
I don’t expect Menninger dot acknowledge his own dishonesty, but will anyone bring those other details up when this piece is inevitably chin-stroked by the casts of Chuck Todd’s and Morning Joseph’s chin-stroking tests.
NR
Far from being destroyed, the Republican party now has more power in Congress and at the state level than they’ve had since the 1940s. Those articles are ridiculous.
Obama’s legacy will be a Republican party that is much more powerful and more extreme than it was when he took office. That is not completely Obama’s fault of course, but to claim that he has “destroyed” the Republican party is absolutely insane.
Roger Moore
@Bill:
I think you’re underestimating the extent to which the party cultivates the voters. There’s a real feedback loop between bigoted voters and the party apparatus that depends on them. The party has been carefully feeding the voters propaganda that encourages their worst tendencies, and then those voters vote for the kind of candidate who claims to agree with them. There’s no guarantee that the death of the Republican party will break the cycle, but it’s not going to break itself if the Republican party continues in its current form.
NonyNony
The thing is – Henninger is an idiot.
The GOP is not destroyed. The GOP will not be destroyed even if Donald Trump is their nominee and they lose the White House, the House and the Senate. They will likely still control 23 state governments outright, and share power with Democrats in 20 others. By contrast Dems control a whopping 7 state governments outright.
This is not the sign of a party that is being destroyed. This is the sign of a party whose national leadership is going to get their asses replaced. And that’s actually what Henninger is moaning about here – he blames Obama for the destruction of the GOP’s national leadership.
Except that Obama didn’t do a damn thing to destroy the GOP’s national leadership other than his job as President. They destroyed themselves. John Boehner didn’t have to decide that the best path to keeping his job in the House was to give the Tea Party what they wanted. Mitch McConnell didn’t have to come up with the frankly inane idea[*] that the best way to make Obama a one-term President was to refuse to bargain with him on anything ever. He did that on his own. The national leadership didn’t have to decide to back Mitt “Job Killer” Romney to the hilt in 2012 and drown out other voices – they did that on their own.
Nothing here is an action by Obama – it’s all their own doing. The party of personal responsibility refuses to take responsibility for their own national leadership implosion. Color me surprised.
[*] An inane plan because you know what might have had a shot of making Obama a one-term president? Compromising with him. I guarantee you that had McConnell come up with a compromise that he could have sold as good for the country as a whole but bad for a particular portion of Obama’s voting constituency, Obama would have signed on and McConnell would have had a wedge. Do that three or four more times between 2006 and 2008 and suddenly you’ve got the possibility of getting a challenge from the Left against Obama. It’s how Carter ended up as a single-term president and it might have worked if they’d tried it.
Peale
@NR: Yep. The idea that the party is going anywhere is ridiculous. 2020 Census redistricting, 2030, 2040. There’s lots of things that they can do to ensure that they have effective control over states even after they start losing. The states that the Dems get back are going to look very different from those that they lost. Obama’s legacy might be that he help solidify a coalition capable of only winning the white house for himself. But the strategy relies on winning the white house every four years for the next 30 years.
Betty Cracker
@Frankensteinbeck: That wasn’t an unreasonable assumption early in the process. The base didn’t love McCain or Romney, and yet that’s who was on the menu in the end. One factor that hasn’t been adequately analyzed, IMO, is how many of the money people who would normally be instrumental in de-Trumping a primary race sat on their hands this cycle. In many ways, it may have been a perfect storm. I’m not sure it’s wise to draw sweeping conclusions.
Roger Moore
@Frankensteinbeck:
IOW, the beast has slipped its leash.
Bill
@Face: You’re right about this obviously. But I have my doubts about it splitting in to 2 or 3 groups. Yes there’s major divisions in the party now, but it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a viable third party form in this country.
It also doesn’t address the fact that as a matter of day to day life a huge portion (27%?) of our fellow citizens are racist, misogynist, greedy etc… That brings with it certain challenges.
redshirt
@Peale: We have a real good chance of making the Supreme Court liberal for decades. If Hillary gets 2 terms, that happens. That in and of itself would be a huge deal and would greatly thwart much Republican fuckery.
Bill
@Roger Moore: Disagree. For the most part the party is recognizing what its voters want, and giving it to them. Certainly people are influenced by messaging, but they have to be open to that messaging in the first place.
boatboy_srq
@raven: @boatboy_srq: Afterthought: if Benen is correct the GOTea may not have the funds to staff security well enough to keep the guns outside after all.
hamletta
Over at New York mag, Ed Kilgore has news of One Weird Trick the GOP used to keep the Paultards at bay in 2012 that will keep anyone but Trump or Cruz from snagging the nomination this time around.
chopper
@Mnemosyne:
well, once, but yeah.
Chris
@patroclus:
I don’t think anyone expects the GOP to literally END, after all it survived worse (1912) and so did we (1968). But that kind of massive kick in the nuts that represented a real breakdown in the alliance supporting the party, that takes decades to recover from? That’s not implausible anymore.
JustRuss
Is anyone else bothered by that premise? I never saw Obama’s goal as destroying the Republican party. He came into office very openly stating he wanted to work with Republicans to get stuff done, and went out of his way to do so. And they gave him the finger, repeatedly. Sure, he’s probably enjoying a bit of shadenfreude at the GOP’s predicament, but I expect there’s more sadness at the irrational intransigence that brought them here.
Peale
@redshirt: Yep. Oh, I agree. I just hope our voters realize that. Otherwise, when Texas does get around to redistricting based on citizenship tests so that rural white populations count more than urban districts, or just stops issuing birth certificates to the children of mothers who can’t pay a birth certificate filing fee, we’ll at least have some way to stop them. But between that and abortion control and “religious freedom” run amuck against the LGBTs, it seems like every day “we’re not winning.”
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara:
Worse, it happened just before the onset of a 25-year-long urban crime wave that was like rocket fuel for white racism, and a disastrous war that was started by the leaders of the old liberal coalition. The coming of Reaganism was really overdetermined.
agorabum
@Peale: yep, the Rs hold the house, senate, and most states. I certainly hope they get a major shellacking, but at the moment their massive dysfunction only exists at the 2016 presidential primary level. They are still mean and dangerous.
Miss Bianca
@Iowa Old Lady:
Chicago State closing?? Oh that is bad, very bad news…
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: That too! Plus, generally, a lot of change in social dynamics, e.g., feminism, decreasing church attendance, and so on. The backlash was probably inevitable. But the racial resentment seems to be the factor that is most explicitly connected with the notion of reduced economic circumstances, whether through paying too many taxes or losing one’s job to minorities (at first) and then, later on, to immigrants.
When I first moved to North Carolina in the early 80s, Jesse Helms was running for Senator against James Hunt, then governor. Hunt was a classic kind of moderate business friendly Democrat who did a lot to beef up the Research Triangle and bring a lot of businesses and federal agencies to the area. That was his basic electoral claim.
To which, Helms had a few responses, like this one: “There are more people living in sin in Chapel Hill than in all the rest of North Carolina combined.” (I bet that’s no longer true!)
Or: “It just means a bunch of liberal Yankees are coming here to get paid too much while the good people of North Carolina get to mop their floors and see their rent skyrocket.”
And then, the tv ads — this guy, Marvin Finkelstein who got married to his long time partner in Massachusetts as soon as he could, made ads that were explicitly racist. Imagine a picture of white hands opening up an envelope and crumpling the letter inside, the one telling him that he had not been hired — because of affirmative action! Meanwhile, much of North Carolina’s industrial base (furniture, textiles) wasn’t hiring anyone, black or white, because it was too busy moving abroad. And yet, white textile workers would gather to march in protests against affirmative action. Even then, it was surreal how easy it was to distract white workers with racial and cultural resentment.
Matt McIrvin
@JustRuss: “I was going to call it a carnival atmosphere, but that implies fun.” –Barack Obama, a couple of days ago
No, I don’t think he enjoys it.
Matt McIrvin
@Barbara: That “hands” ad was nationally famous. Sort of the daisy ad of its time.
SFAW
@patroclus:
Not really. They made the calculation that denying Obama ANY accomplishments — whether those accomplishments were Rethug-friendly or left-friendly was immaterial — would weaken him for re-election, and would give them their best shot to get all three branches. In addition, they believed (not without justification) that Obamacare would be a long-term winner for the Dems. If President McCain had proposed the Heritage Foundation plan (or whatever it was that Obama used as his starting point), they would have fallen all over themselves supporting it, because then THEY would have been seen as the Party What Supports The Common (Wo)Man.
Barbara
@Matt McIrvin: But I bet you didn’t have to watch it 20 times a day! Actually, it was so bad I turned off the tv for several months until the election was over. I was so viscerally revolted by Helms and everything connected with him that I stopped listening to U2 after Bono became Helms’ best bud in order to raise money for AIDS victims in Africa — a worthy cause, of course, but I could never, ever see Senator Asshole as being anything but an evil bigot.
Uncle Cosmo
@scav: IIRC there was a study publicized some years back that found the probability a prospective customer would buy a brand name item was most highly correlated with recognition of the brand name–irrespective of whether that prospective customer held a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the brand in question or of its advertisements.
This is why ads are omnipresent, LOUD & in your face: They don’t really care if they piss you off or not. No wait, they prefer to piss you off–because you’re more likely to remember the brand name. It’s also why they’ve gone to shorter & shorter ads–all that counts is remembering the brand name, everything else is filler.
sherparick
@BGinCHI: Yep. Professor Krugman once again, all by his lonesome (and pretty much just by his lonesome), justifies my e-subscription to the Old Gray Lady. Certainly their political reporters and editors Great Clinton Hunt and Love Affair with Young Marco Rubio had me reaching for the cancel button many a time. There are two rules related to Krugman as Brad DeLong writes: 1. Paul Krugman is always right; 2. If you find yourself disagreeing with Paul Krugman, refer to Rule 1
The Week has a hit piece on Hillary by a a young “Progressive” that essentially recycles a bunch of right wing memes as proof about her dishonesty. All I can say is the older and wiser Jill Abramson has a far different take. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/28/hillary-clinton-honest-transparency-jill-abramson
sherparick
It is called giving them enough rope to hang themselves. The Republicans still had to to decide to put a rope around their neck and jump.
Mnemosyne
@chopper:
I’m counting the whole Demoncrats are stealing Florida! as part of the 2000 campaign, and W and his assholes won that campaign 5-4.
patroclus
@Miss Bianca: No, Rauner has stated that he wants Chicago State to close, and it’s definitely part of his agenda, but Madigan and the Dems control the legislature and something like that would be unacceptable, so unless the Trustees themselves decide to do it, it won’t happen. However, because of Rauner, the state government is currently dysfunctional – there is no budget, there are no appropriations bills and so, by default, we are on a pay-as-you-go system whereby lawful obligations are met if and only if state tax revenues continue to come in. What this has meant is that less money has been available to all sorts of state institutions; including universities, and they themselves have been cost-cutting so as to maintain continued functions. It’s different from Wisconsin (and Kansas and Louisiana etc..) where Walker and the Republicans passed all the cuts into law.
Madigan has succeeded in stopping Rauner’s idiotic agenda for nearly a year and a half and he’s only got 2 and a half years to go. So for that time, Illinois is going to limp along with less money for everything; hence the problems at the universities. Only if the Dems cave or Rauner gets re-elected with a more idiotic legislature are any permanent changes likely. I realize that’s small solace to the teachers who are getting pay cuts now, but they’re not going to be closed given the current dysfunctional dynamic.
Anya
They’ll still keep the house because of gerrymandering & Dem incompetence. There are so many house seats that are not contested, including winnable seats.
Fair Economist
@Miss Bianca:
I agree with you about 75%. I agree he thinks Garland is a great pick and he thinks Garland would be a great supreme. But I do think he *considered* the politics. He’s learned by now that the Republicans are consistently crazy, and Garland does seem carefully considered to put maximum pressure on the Republicans – decidedly moderate, older, and with lots of connections in Washington.
patroclus
@SFAW: I see your point, but McCain didn’t campaign on the Heritage Foundation plan at all and I seriously doubt he would ever had proposed it. The Republican plans that Obama cribbed from were from Howard Baker and Bob Dole; who were long out of office and power. What I think revealed those positions as shams was Bush’s failure to propose anything on health insurance for 8 long years, that is, the Republican “plans” were all 20th Century plans – this century, the Republicans haven’t even bothered with proposing any shams. And they still won’t – Repeal and Replace means only Repeal; no Republican has ever gotten specific about a replacement other than Trump’s “lines around the states” things, that is, more interstate competition among the health insurance companies.
Ken
@Roger Moore:
If anything, what this shows is that the beast was never on a leash, nor was it bothering to read the think pieces. The people who thought they were leading it were just walking in the same direction a few paces ahead, and now that it’s turned they look kind of silly.
patroclus
@Chris: Indeed, that’s what I’m hoping for! Parties can be destroyed though: the U.K.’s Liberal Party was destroyed in 1923 (and again in 2015) and Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party was destroyed during the Preston Manning Reform Party era. Unfortunately, in Canada it bounced back when the PC and Reform merged back together and it rendered nearly a decade of Stephen Harper. I would love to see the Republicans weakened badly even if not fully destroyed.
The Lodger
@JustRuss: That quote is as wrong as everything else in the article.
Miss Bianca
@patroclus:
And so, you get stuff like this happening, and then Sen. Sanders starts talking about “free college tuition at state schools”, and I’m all like, “yeah, that’s great – how are you gonna get Republican asswipes at the state level to pump that much tax money into the schools that they are curretnly STARVING?!”
Miss Bianca
@Fair Economist:
Agreed. My statement amended to say, “he considered the politics but the politics ALONE would never account for his decision on Merrick Garland.”
sunny raines
you can destroy the existing republican party all you want, it does nothing about the 30% of the American population that are violent deranged nut-jobs – those they refer to today as the “the republican base.” You can change the name, it does not change the base that got the republicans where they are today. And not for nothing, but susan sarandon and the entire Hillary derangement berniebros cabal prove that there are similarly irrational, illogical, ignorant people on the left, just maybe not so numerous (hopefully).
patroclus
@Miss Bianca: Exactly. The only way Sanders’ proposal stands a chance of being implemented is if the public is willing to accept huge tax increases at both the federal and (particularly) the state level. Which, needless to say, isn’t likely. And because the Republicans would never agree, it would take massive Democratic majorities in Congress and in every state legislature, together with Democratic governors in every state. And, they couldn’t be normal Dems; they’d all have to be Sanders-like Dems; with tremendous political courage and the willingness to be voted out of office almost immediately. Clinton could do some negative ads mentioning this political reality, but thankfully, Sanders has never been THAT much of a threat. The Republicans would have no such compunction.
les
@SFAW:
I don’t know why this keeps living on. ACA is not and was not the Heritage Plan. And Repubs had many years of control and many opportunities to pass it–gee, somehow they never did. Heritage Plan was Paul Ryan’s color book budget–something to wave around as an excuse for opposing any Dem health care initiative, because they never did have and never did want health care reform beyond tort reform and lowest common denominator, cross state line “regulation.” They would not have voted Yay if the actual Heritage Plan had been submitted intact, just like they never did when they were in charge. ACA was the best thing that could get through a Senate with Blue Dog Dems and Joe Lieberman as the gate keepers.
J R in WV
@Calouste:
I think you may misunderstand delegate selection in most states. I don’t think that in most states there are “slates” of delegates for each candidate, and the candidate with the most votes has his slate picked to go to the convention.
I think mostly what happens is that people who work hard for their party and contribute a lot of money and work get offered a chance to go to the big party, and asked to vote for the guys who won delegates in that state’s primary.
If I’m wrong, I’ll cheerfully admit it when corrected by someone quoting rules about Republican delegate selection. I’ll also claim that state party committees make the rules for their state and party, so they’re all different from each other. It may be that voters get to pick a candidate AND pick a slate of delegates, so that there may be 100% overlap, and there may not be much overlap at all.
I’m looking forward to learning all of these details as we get closer to the conventions.
/snark
G-d bless the Dandy Donald Trump revolution!!
/end snark
Shana
@Major Major Major Major: What a lovely picture! Keep it up.
SFAW
@patroclus:
Immaterial. Whether Obama proposed single-payer, Medicare for all, the Heritage proposal, or something that would be the wettest of Republican wet dreams, the Rethugs still would have voted against it. The actual content did not matter to them, what mattered was that it was put forward by the blackity-black Demon-rat Kenyan Mooslim Usurper, and that he and the Dems would get credit for it. Not unlike the “halo effect” from SocSec and Medicare, which the Dems have now lost (although some are trying to fix that). About the only thing they would have voted for was a bill wherein Obama said he would immediately resign and be succeeded by Grover Norquist (or whomever) and that no Dem Congressional votes were valid after 2008.
SFAW
@les:
I wasn’t focusing on the details nor genesis of ACA. I was responding to the proposal put forth that the Rethugs voted against ACA because whatever “plan” they had proposed, back in the before-time, was a fake, a ruse, etc. Although it is/was possible that the Heritage (or whichever) plan was BS, that had little – if anything – to do with all of them voting against it.
As Groucho said: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”
SFAW
@sunny raines:
I believe that 27 percent is the Balloon-Juice-officially-accepted figure.
PaulWartenberg2016
Dammit, mainstream media!
“Obama’s Legacy of destroying the Republican Party”???
I WROTE THIS ARTICLE ALREADY OVER A WEEK AGO!
Here! http://noticeatrend.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-two-legacies-of-barack-obama.html
Damn plagiarists! Next time, quote me! (mutter grumble ripoff artists mutter mutter)
redshirt
I wonder if Hillary will get even a slightly different treatment, because she’s white.
Republicans are racists to the core.
redshirt
@SFAW: I think 27% might be a holy number that science needs to investigate.
SFAW
@redshirt:
Um …
liberal
@redshirt: if McCain had won, there’s a good chance we’d all be dead after ge confronted Russia over Georgia.
Bill Arnold
So, the argument is that Obama politely asked the Republican party to not self-destruct, and in reflexive thinking described by Cleek’s law, they decided that they therefore must self-destruct, and are in the process of doing so????
I am reminded of that scene in “Mom and Dad Save the World”, where an entire unit of soldiers gets disintegrated one at a time by a Light Grenade that they each pick up after they previous picker-upper is disintegrated.
Alternative theory – they screwed up, playing a short game that is dead-ending.
redshirt
@SFAW: Yes, exactly.
Bill Arnold
@redshirt:
27% is an actual constant of human nature. When you see a polling number like 25% or 29% for a wingnut identification question, you can be sure that there is uncorrected sampling error, and that the pollster involved is naive and doesn’t know that they can calibrate their poll with questions like this.
(What, it isn’t April 1 yet?)
mclaren
Will somebody please draw a cartoon of this?
Pretty please?
With cherries on top?
mclaren
@patroclus:
You are incorrect, sir.
Slashing our bloated grotesquely wasteful military budget would provide more than enough money to fund all of Sanders’ proposals.
You have also utterly failed to account for the tremendous upsurge in U.S. GDP that would vastly increase tax revenues as a result of Sanders’ breakup of the giant sadistic monopolies that restrain trade and extract rents throughout the U.S. economy. Bust those monopolies, and business will boom in America — and as businesses boom, tax receipts will skyrocket.
mclaren
@lollipopguild:
This is where we need to have a serious debate. Many people would say that GOP = Gay Older Pedophiles. We need to debate this issue at length to get to the bottom of it.
fuckwit
keep fucking that chicken
redshirt
@mclaren: The actual answer is Obama is awesome and anything leftover after that is on you.
rikyrah
@BGinCHI:
I noticed. Believe me that people are noticing.
redshirt
I mean that seriously. I love Obama.
mclaren
@redshirt:
Yes, but what none of you stop to consider is…why had the Republican party vomited up such a collection of unelectable lunatics and losers?
Answer: because the Republican party has gone insane. Its policies are so toxic and so destructive and so incoherent that the only people who can espouse conservative policies with a straight face today are the loons who have knotted themselves into such contortions of dementia that they are patently repellant and prima facie unelectable.
The Republican party is at war with the laws of arithmetic. They want to eliminate deficits yet invade every other country on earth and ramp up military spending exponentially. They want to kick-start the U.S. GDP by destroying the middle class. They want to reduce the size of government by forcing the snout of big government into every woman’s vagina and every gay person’s bedroom.
It’s self-contradictory and impossible. Doctor Strange couldn’t make these crazy policies work even with the most powerful Marvel-comic-book magic.
That’s why the Republican party is falling apart. It has crashed head-first into reality and reality is winning. Misognyists may still hate women after the Republican party blows apart, but they are unlikely to have a coherent powerful political movement that will help them attain their goals. Racists may still hate anyone non-white after the Republican party blows up, but they won’t have a convenient sniper’s perch from which to gun down their ethnic targets.