It occurred to me that good strategic reasons explain why the Republican party has become sandwich board silly. Let’s run through the institutional advantages that have kept the party afloat until now.
* Money from rich people. Other movements have come and gone, but since FDR established the middle class and poor as the Democrats’ base Republicanism’s beating heart has been the interests of wealthy establishment in America. Too bad for them business executives are often greedy but rarely stupid.
Bob Clark of Missouri and Victor Hammel of Pennsylvania are CEOs of large businesses who tend to back Democrats but also donate to Republicans. Clark runs Clayco, a St. Louis real estate development firm. Hammel leads J.C. Ehrlich, a pest-control company based in Reading, Pa..
They are the types McCain had hoped to attract. Instead, Clark, who raised thousands for Bush in 2000, has raised more than $500,000 for Obama. And Hammel, who regularly gives money to Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, has donated $2,300 to Obama.
“Barack is definitely more liberal than I am,” Clark said. “But I’m willing to compromise on some of those issues for what I think is the greater good.”
Hammel said, “I would rather pay a little higher tax on a higher profit than a lower tax rate on lower profits.“
* Communication. Let’s admit that Reagan and a generation of Republican Congressmenl did an impressive job of selling an agenda that by and large Americans hate. Clinton might have inverted that but Republican strategy and his own weaknesses effectively turned Big Dog’s charisma against him. George Dubya started the slide, although in my opinion it wasn’t the President’s famous problem with clear English, good faith arguments and telling the truth that did him in but rather his pathological loyalty issues. After ritually humiliating staff like Colin Powell who had real rapport with the public and the media, the the administration’s public face by term two included such memorable figures as Michael Brown, Harriet Miers and Alberto Gonzales. Sarah Palin, Sam Wurzelbacher, Rick Santelli and Bobby “Kenneth” Jindal just underline the point that Republicans have lost the knack for talking to ordinary people. Against John Kerry the GOP might have at least played for a draw; Barack Obama is eating them alive.
* Issues. What is left in the Republican toolbag that Bush didn’t already try? We got tax cuts. We tried privatizing government operations, cutting environmental oversight and deregulating finance. We invaded a foreign country just to watch it die. America codified every point in the Republican agenda short of killing the inheritance tax, and as long you count ‘success’ as the overall well-being of America, none of it worked. The party still needs to please the Christian taliban, but out of power policy proposals won’t do them any good there. The GOP’s religious right strategy basically boils down to (1) gaining power on some other issue agenda, and then (2) using said power to quietly please the Christianist crazies. If Republicans honestly proposed whatTony Perkins and the AFA want they would never see step (1). Since worshipping a comic book version of Reagan’s legacy that has some important pages stuck together is the only part of the Republican agenda that they can talk about in polite company, and they already tried that, the elephants are basically stuck.
As the old saw goes, when you have the facts you bang the facts. When you have the law you bang the law. When you have neither, you bang the table. Too bad for the GOP they can’t even compete at that.
Rick Taylor
Short of privatizing social security. That’s the one unalloyed success Democrats had in the resistance. I doubt many would argue things would be better now, if workers could just take their money out of social security and invest it in the stock market to get better returns.
Conservatively Liberal
I posted this link in another thread. It is a great writeup on Obama and his non-‘SOTU’ speech in front of Congress. You are talking about communication and the writeup I link to is a detailed examination of his performance that night and how he used his communication skills to screw up their vision of unity, actually getting them to applaud things like re-regulation…lol!
He handed them their asses that night and all they could do was sit there and wonder how in the hell that happened.
Michael
Gosh, you mean that adding in an extra layer of administrative expense for privatization of government services turned out to be costly and the provision of the services substandard?
But the folks who expected to benefit from those privatization contracts told us that we’d expect major savings by market based efficiency. I’m shocked, shocked that they might lie.
Quelle surprise.
Josh Hueco
I finally got around watching that kid speak at CPAC. And they say we liberals are whinging pencilnecks?
demkat620
Yeah, I don’t know what you call this other than insane…
Michelle Bachmann at CPAC:
That is just taking stupid to a whole new level.
burnspbesq
Well said. The death throes of the Republican Party would be fun to watch, if it weren’t for all the collateral damage being done to the lives of ordinary Americans who did nothing to deserve what is happening to them.
mistermix
On your first item (business): I live NY-29, a Republican district where the first Democrat in 20 years (Eric Massa) was elected by a tiny margin in ’08. The other day the Chamber of Commerce went out of its way to create a press release thanking him for voting for the stimulus bill.
The local wingnuts seemed to take little notice of this, but when the "part of business" starts losing the support of stalwarts like the Chamber, it’s time to turn out the lights.
Swervus
That is a bold statement indeed. Perhaps the stupidity of the few that managed to help bring the country down was so astonishing that it managed to splatter everyone, even the smarties, with teh stoopid jizz?
Or perhaps they are more crafty than non-stupid and have a nose for profits? Either way, calling the majority of business executives stupid is still something that I can feel safe doing.
TR
I’m pretty sure that was her campaign slogan.
"Bachmann for Congress: Taking Stupid to a Whole New Level!"
Well, that or "She Be Da Woman!"
Brick Oven Bill
TimF, do you really believe that Clark, the real estate developer, raised $500,000 for the elected official that he perceived to be the likely winner for the ‘greater good’?
Personally, I think Clark’s activities might have more to do with having the ‘stimulus’ package include $131 billion in new construction spending for federal office buildings, among other things. You know, in that bill that the lawmakers did not read.
$500 million for a new office building for the Social Security Administration. That should get things humming.
Just Some Fuckhead
Hmm.. maybe we can eliminate social security and the inheritance tax just to see if things improve. I’d hate for us to come this far down wingnut road and turn around right before the very thing that will save us all. I just don’t want us to be all like "what if.." for the next howevermany years.
Ned R.
@Brick Oven Bill: Why Brick, you sound almost regretful. Fear not, I’m sure there will be a stimulus for blog commenters with random Tourette’s Syndrome impulses about Jewish Democrats in Mexico, and all will be well.
John Cole
Anyone have a link to Bill Bennett at CPAc discussing socialism. Smiley’s link in the other thread did not work.
AhabTRuler
@Swervus: I would argue that it was a case of groupthink on a massive scale, and that such a form of herd stupidity can strike anywhere. For a similarly catastrophic, and far more bloody, example, one could cite the start of World War I as a situation where many smart people were absolutely convinced that they were following a correct and neccessary course of action.
Dennis-SGMM
@AhabTRuler:
Taking home salary+bonuses equal to the GNP of some small countries couldn’t have hurt either.
georgia pig
@John Cole: This whole socialism thing intrigues me, particularly because they keep talking about "European-style" socialism, not good old-fashioned Stalinism. They seem to think this has some strongly evocative negative meaning. But, I don’t know, after years of travelogues in Provence and Tuscany, BMW cars, the Food Network, etc., I think "European" evokes a pleasant association for a lot of Americans, i.e., they wouldn’t mind a little European socialism. This goes back to that mindless "codespeak" DougJ has dealt with in other posts, to quote Inigo Montoya "I don’t think that word means what you think it means."
Brick Oven Bill
“But I’m willing to compromise on some of those issues for what I think is the greater good.”
The $450 million for the new General Services Agency office building, this is not an earmark, you see. Building these guys a new office building is smart. There will be florescent light bulbs in it, creating stimulus.
This $450 million, and the other $130.55 billion of federal construction spending in round one, not much of it went to real estate developers, you see.
Martin
From the available evidence, the GOP is willing to alienate everyone in order to retain the following groups:
1) People that believe that the world is 6,000 years old and socialism will bring about its end and beam the good people up to heaven
2) Multi-millionaires who care more about personal wealth than production
3) Gun owners with at least a minimal comfort level for government overthrow
4) Straight WASPs concerned about losing their power status.
Now, I don’t see much coherence between these groups other than 4 is largely a superset of 1,2 and 3. 1 and 3 are desperate for someone, anyone to lead them out of their marginalized state, and 2 will make a deal with anyone to keep their pot of gold. In many ways, 1,2,3 are strongly at odds with each other, which is why the GOP has no possible path to a transparent coherent policy without abandoning someone. Instead they’ll keep dogwhistling for #4 – we’ll keep pushing for you guys as the natural inheritors of America.
This will just keep getting worse. If Obama is given any credit at all by the masses, then the GOP has failed their base. The party of nihilism they will be until they decide to wholesale abandon some of those groups. I don’t see it happening until 2010 at the earliest. They still have some power in the Senate, after all, and they were talking permanent Republican majority just 4 years ago – they’ll keep to the plan until they have no power at all.
dslak
Shorter Brick Oven Bill: Businessmen are only voting for the common good when they vote Republican.
Brick Oven Bill
Shorter still: The Founders were smart to empower who they did. As were the moneyed interests.
[One more word, but eighteen syllables, vs. twenty]
dslak
No, that’s not implied in your posts at all. This may seem like an unlikely explanation, but conservatives may simply be incapable of understanding the "shorter" concept.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
That was off the hook!
Tim F be da man! Tim F be da man!
Jim in Chicago
Small business people who are still Republicans haven’t figured this out yet.
Ned R.
@Brick Oven Bill:
Landowning males, including slaveholders?
Mike in NC
I wonder if any of the illustrious speakers at CPAC this past week pulled a Kruschev and started banging the podium with their shoe. That whole crowd would’ve missed the irony.
Comrade Scrutinizer
But more importantly, what’s a "slitde"? A German slit?
Martin
As the old saw goes, when you have the facts you bang the facts. When you have the law you bang the law. When you have neither, you
bang the table.invite a 13 year old to explain your core principles to you.Fixed.
Josh Hueco
@georgia pig:
I agree. If you really sat down and asked someone what was so horrible about 30-hour workweeks, accessible health care, a month’s paid vacation in addition to paid family leave, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine an average person saying ‘no’ to that. Our job as liberals is to get people over their kneejerk response of ‘why should I pay for someone else’s free lunch.’
An additional problem is that ‘soc-ialism’ has also historically been shorthand for race-mixing, atheism, Darwinism, and other supposedly demonic things. Particularly here in Texas, where ‘soc-ialism’ seems to mean ‘The government doing things for the little people besides imprisoning and executing them.’
Hell, a Texan even called me a ‘soc-ialist’ once for stating that as an American I want to live in a country where there weren’t Confederate war memorials on the courthouse lawn.
Brick Oven Bill
Ned; The French tried universal suffrage in 1793, but that didn’t work out too good, and the power was transferred to landowners in 1795. In 1799, Things fell into a dictatorship; Napoleon said:
"The Constitution! You yourselves have destroyed it. You violated it on 18 Fructidor; you violated it on 22 Floreal; you violated it on 30 Prairial. It no longer has the respect of anyone."
This is why I personally support political empowerment for gainfully employed males. This seems like the best way to hold things together, going forward. It would encourage production, instead of consumption, and is the modern equivalent of past standards.
Josh Hueco
That’s why I love B(ombs) O(ver) B(aghdad)–His writings are the equivalent of wingnut beatnik poetry.
Ned R.
@Brick Oven Bill: I am moved! (But not in that way.)
Brick Oven Bill
I know that Winston Churchill is out of favor and Abraham Lincoln is in favor. My position is almost identical to Abraham Lincoln’s on voter eligibility.
But then I apprehend that in no society that ever did exist, or ever shall be formed, was or can the equality asserted among the members of the human race be practically enforced and carried out. There are portions, large portions, — women, minors, Insane, culprits, transient sojourners, — that will always probably remain subject to the government of another portion of the community.
I also get the distinct impression that Abraham Lincoln read every page of legislation before he signed it.
KG
@28: I talk to my dad, a small business owner, from time to time about different things like this. I remember talking to him about shorter work weeks and extended vacations a while back. His thought process was that he’d have to hire more people to cover the time lost. And if you think about it, if you own a company with 12 employees and everyone gets a month off, you basically never have your full staff available. Losing 10 hours a week takes that same 12 employee company from 480 man hours per week to 360 man hours per week. Hiring more people wouldn’t be a problem, except for the increased costs employers face in hiring more people (higher payroll taxes, higher unemployment insurance, higher worker’s comp premiums, higher costs for benefits (my folks, with about 20 employees provide 401(k)’s, health insurance, and a few other benefits)).
These marginal costs hurt small businesses a lot more than they hurt big businesses. Helping small businesses deal with these costs is going to be a huge challenge, I think, for liberals. Personally, I wouldn’t mind more time off, myself, but I’m not one who believes the goal of one’s life should be to reach retirement.
lr
Hey, did anyone else read the comments over at the Christian Science Monitor site in the previous article? About the tea bag parties? Toward the end of the comments, someone links to an article from the Playboy website about Rick Santelli’s links to conservative groups, and how the whole populist rant was preplanned, and the Koch fellow is behind it.
Sorry, I don’t know how to link in your comments, John. Maybe one of you other mor tech savvy blokes will go link it for us.
Kirk Spencer
@Brick Oven Bill:
No. The French tried universal MALE suffrage in 1793. And there were a lot of reasons the convention failed. Implying the blame lay solely upon universal suffrage, especially when this wasn’t so, is a severe misrepresentation of history.
Dennis-SGMM
@Brick Oven Bill:
Why not just go Full-Metal-Heinlein and restrict the franchise to gainfully employed males who have also served in the military? Better still: gainfully employed males who have built their own pizza ovens. C’mon; you know you want to.
KG
Brick Oven – you realize that the Founders actually left issues of suffrage to the States, right? In fact, New Jersey allowed women to vote in 1789. You also know that single women who owned land were also allowed to vote in all the States at the founding, right?
And you realize that the changes came through constitutional amendments which pretty much require a consensus, right?
Brick Oven Bill
Thank you for that correction Kirk, I had got my ‘universal’ information from Wikipedia. I guess that Robespierre concurred with the American Founders, Abraham Lincoln, and me, on that subject.
Kirk Spencer
It seems to be my day to fact-check Brick Oven Bill. Bill, in your nifty little Lincoln quote you conveniently left off a rather critical portion of the quote. Specifically, "Hear what Mr. Clay said:"
Lincoln was speaking AGAINST Mr. Clay. Now he was in this case taking a position against slavery, but the line quoted (and Lincoln’s subsequent disagreement) is still there.
Bill, if you’re going to use history to defend your position, it does you well to not use history that’s AGAINST your position. It also makes us more likely to trust your integrity when you don’t claim support from positions that exist only by lifting them out of context.
Dennis-SGMM
The window for denying women the vote has closed. Minors aren’t, at least in my state, allowed to vote. As for the insane and the culprits, you’ll have to ask the Republicans how they feel about surrendering their enfranchisement.
georgia pig
@Josh Hueco:
True, most Americans wouldn’t recognize a socialist if he bit them in the ass, e.g., they wouldn’t know "The Internationale" from "Hail to the Chief." "Socialism" has become dogwhistle intelligible only to wingnuts.
The thing that’s really interesting is the "European" part. It’s like they’re permanently stuck in Freedom Fries mode. A big part of Obama’s appeal was the possibility of ratcheting down anti-Americanism, and Europe is the poster child for that. A lot of Americans look at Europe as the dream vacation. You can get spring greens, olive oil, Gorgonzola cheese and red wine in the freakin’ Food Lion in Fayetteville. I think a lot of Americans would now even reluctantly admit that the French, even if they can be pricks, were right about Iraq. Conservatives just don’t realize how tone deaf they’ve become, but I guess that’s part of being tone deaf.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Kirk Spencer:
It must suck to have to read his comments to that level. The rest of us just scan them looking for entertainment.
valdivia
@lr:
there was a diary about it on the GOS. Here.
Davis X. Machina
Most of them turn out to be about pie.
Life is short.
Kirk Spencer
@Just Some Fuckhead: I don’t read them to that level, normally. Just today for some reason he keeps batting in my ballpark – bringing up things I KNOW are wrong. Britain only lost 5% GDP in the great depression, Lincoln’s reply in the Alton Joint debate, etc.
I’ve seen the problem on the left, too, but there’s this simple problem he’s displaying. Instead of reading history to test his opinions and conclusions, he does so to support them. As a rule, he lifts things from context. The bad thing is that he doesn’t really realize he’s doing so (and again, I’ve seen this from lefties so do NOT claim it as a ‘conservative’ habit). Still, I keep hoping that when people get slapped with their habits enough they’ll bother to pay attention in the future.
Yeah. We all have our failings. I’m a sucker.
Kirk Spencer
@Dennis-SGMM:
You do realize this is NOT what Heinlein’s Starship Troopers law said, right? Although I grant you it’s what many of those pushing it say it says, it’s not. The only requirement is two years of Federal Service. That’s it. You don’t have to be gainfully employed. Your Federal Service doesn’t have to be military (though it appears that due to the way the government of the book works, all "Federal Service" that isn’t elected or staff of elected is "military"). Also note that the Federal service must accept ANY applicant, and if a job doesn’t exist that the applicant can fill one must be made.
Amusingly, I know a lot of people making the case for this law who would then be ineligible for current right to vote — and a lot of people who would be eligible that hold rather contrary political opinion.
Cassidy the Racist White Man
Would it really be all that bad to demand a period of public service from the citizenry (not exclusively military), in exchange for gov,t services?
Just Some Fuckhead
@Kirk Spencer:
Nah, he’ll just lay low for a bit and then come back at it again. A shame too, because BOB has a lot of personality and a certain je ne said quoi that could be used as a better catapult for his quirky ideas.
smiley
Another good take down here. Pierce’s Part the Last. Maybe we should stop concern trolling them and just let them continue to implode without providing analysis of or recommendations for their problems.
Martin
Depends entirely on how it’s executed. One problem right now is the appearance that the US Military functions entirely as employment of last resort for young people in areas where government services and influence are clearly inadequate (extending from education to lack of job and living wage opportunities).
I don’t think thats any way to run a nations military, yet the evidence is pretty damning. I don’t have a problem asking for public service in exchange for access to college financial aid. Being on the inside, I see a massive resistance from faculty to implementing anything within the higher ed system that would support such a system, however. Not much of what happens in most large universities considers the needs of society (why are more Anthropology degrees granted each year than Civil Engineering?)
I see far too much pressure from the right to front-load the system. They wouldn’t trust graduates to come out and teach, so they’d demand public service before providing the goods, which would be a disaster. Public service is far more challenging for people in the bottom 20% income rung than those at the top 20% so the services would go disproportionately to the better off. The system would have provide first and ask for the service after.
Such an approach is rife for abuse if not done quite well, and I just don’t trust about 40% of Congress to not turn it into some kind of indentured servitude program for big business and the mil-industrial complex.
Ignoring all the political and implementation realities, it’s a fine idea. Not as a threshold for voting, mind you, but for a bunch of other things it’d be fine. I’d be equally open to it extending to business as well. Ag subsidy recipients should be feeding schoolkids for free, for example. But things really do start to develop into an easy socialism at that point.
Martin
John, you need to take cia*is out of the filter. It’s just impossible to function here without saying socia*ism. It’s one of our strongest mocking points.
Comrade Baron Elmo
This post is filled with serious win, Tim. You’ve got a book of bracing political analysis in you, and I hope it gets written one day.
Brick Oven Bill
I always appreciate a fact-check. Kirk has a point, that Lincoln was referring to Clay’s words in the previously posted portion of the debate, and this should have been clarified. But I believe Kirk is the one taking the quotation out of context.
Lincoln was defending Clay’s sentiment and adopting it as his policy position. This was to defend against Douglas’ allegation that Lincoln believed that ‘All Men’ was a biological, instead of royalty, reference.
Lincoln was not arguing that insane people, minors, culprits, and women should vote, as Kirk seems to suggest. He was instead arguing that Africans should be considered as men under the Constitution. Lincoln’s view of voter-eligibility was more restrictive than my theoretical work-based system is. You can reference Section 59 of the debate for Lincoln’s own words on the subject of political empowerment and human biodiversity. I am to the left of Lincoln on this issue.
Wile E. Quixote
@Tim F.
You should read Arsenals of Folly by Richard Rhodes (who also wrote the excellent Making of the Atomic Bomb and Black Sun, and you have my permission to pimp these on the site with links to Amazon.) It goes into a lot of detail about Reagan’s policies towards the Soviet Union that the article you linked to mentions.
Rhodes basically says that the Cold War was incredibly overblown, the CIA and the military lied about their estimates of Soviet military strength to justify their budgets and the Soviets lied so that they would appear stronger than they were and to keep the west on edge.
Into all of this in 1980 came Ronald Reagan. Reagan is condemned by some, lionized by others, as a cold warrior (although it was actually Jimmy Carter who began the increase of US conventional forces in the late 1970s). Reagan believed that nuclear weapons were evil, he wanted them eliminated, not just arms reduction, but completely and totally eliminated. Who was against this? Well let’s see, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz worked to inflate CIA threat estimates of Soviet strength in the late 70s and early 80s and then in the late 1980s in the George H. W. Bush administration Dick Cheney was saying that Gorbachev couldn’t be trusted and that we should push for regime change in the Soviet Union. Cheney ended up being taken of the foreign policy loop by James Baker and Brent Scowcroft because he was such a bellicose nutjob.
I guess we should be thankful that Cheney, Wolfowitz and Perle didn’t get a chance to fuck things up with the Soviet Union the way they did with Iraq, if they had we might not be here today. Reagan deserves a lot of credit, more than he’s given by most liberals, for ending the Cold War. I doubt that Carter could have done it, and Mondale was as much of a tired, out of touch apparatchik as any member of the Politburo in the early 1980s. Of course how did Reagan end the Cold War? Did he pose and posture and threaten? Yeah, but he also talked to and negotiated with our enemies. Today’s Republicans would shit themselves blind over that sort of behavior and a matter of fact did over Obama’s overtures to Iran in his inauguration speech.
jcricket
This is the simplest way to put the argument that conservative tax policies are fucking stupid.
If your business is in any way dependent on consumer spending, putting money in consumers hands (through lowering taxes on the average joe) will increase your business’ profits. Then your salary or stock can go up, and probably more than the tax increase you’re paying.
If only we had some period of time, where we could test this argument. Oh yeah, those horrible, horrible Clinton years in the 90s, where even with higher taxes on the rich, the rich still saw their income grow, and faster than everyone else (took a bigger share of the national income "pie") because of the multiplier effect of consumer spending.
It’s simple math. There’s 95% of "us" and 5% of "super rich folks". Screwing over 95% of the populace to the point where everyone’s income is stagnant, everyone is in debt up to their eyeballs and is one health scare/job loss away from total ruin, just so you can have some tax breaks now, is a short-term/sucker’s game.
If business’ were thinking long-term, at all, they’d be in favor of Obama’s tax plan and some form of nationalized healthcare. I think it’s that they’ve been able to forestall the kind of reckoning we face now that they’ve convinced themselves they can have a free lunch (tax cuts for the rich – fuck over the poor + give them easy credit = $$$$$) forever.