The Party of Tomorrow

One of the trends becoming increasingly evident in modern political times -- perpetuated by Karl Rove and President Bush and embraced recently by John McCain and Sarah Palin -- is the Republican Party’s odd reliance on an electoral strategy that cedes the middle ground and focusing squarely and solely on its base. In that desperate attempt to appeal to those on the far right of the political spectrum, it has used fear tactics and the politics of personal destruction to cast Democratic opponents as nothing more than untrustworthy, soft, and unpatriotic – true threats to everything that a church-going, white, heterosexual living in a pro-America town would hold dear.

Shockingly (or not so much), all Republicans have to show for their efforts is more division, more resentment, more hostility, more ignorance and fewer Republicans. You reap what you sow. Indeed, it’s surprising that the Republicans failed to adopt the Obama strategy of playing down partisanship, building bridges and appealing to the best in us, and it’s humorous how they grew increasingly cynical about its ultimate effectiveness. You would think they’d learn from the lessons of recent history -- electoral landslides, a diminishing base, ceding ground to younger voters, no true standard-bearer, etc -- but no, the race for the next Chairman of the Republican National Committee has exposed nothing but more of the same. E.J. Dionne elaborates:

The message sent over the weekend may have been unintentional, but it was nonetheless powerful. While the candidates to chair the Republican National Committee prepared for a debate held yesterday by the Reagan-era group Americans for Tax Reform, the Democrats leaked word that their next national chairman would be Gov. Tim Kaine of Virginia. The message: While Republicans are looking inward and focusing on appeals to the party's activist base, President-elect Barack Obama wants Democrats to concentrate their energies on recently acquired political terrain and the new converts who were central to his party's sweep last year.

…A top Obama adviser, using trademark Obama language, described Kaine as "a pragmatic progressive, less concerned about orthodoxies than about getting things done." In fact, Obama is already following the path blazed in Virginia by Kaine and his predecessor, incoming Sen. Mark Warner. Their approach was to pursue broadly progressive policies in a non-ideological way and to speak of playing down partisanship -- even as doing so was their way of building the Democratic Party's brand and broadening its base of support.

…By contrast, Republicans seem less focused on how to expand their party's appeal than on hunkering down to preserve ideological purity. For now, the underdogs in the chairmanship fight seem to be the two candidates outside the party's regional and ideological comfort zones, former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele and Michigan state Chairman Saul Anuzis. They confront two Southerners, Chip Saltsman of Tennessee, now most noted for distributing the CD that included the song "Barack the Magic Negro," and Katon Dawson, the South Carolina party chairman. The incumbent, Mike Duncan of Kentucky, is seeking reelection, while former Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell has emerged as the candidate of the conservative stalwarts.

Structurally, it turns out to be much easier for Democrats than Republicans to reach out to moderates because Democrats are the more ideologically diverse party… Thus, when Democrats try to broaden their appeal, they are also addressing middle-of-the-road voters in their own party. Republicans who want to reach out have to fight their party, which is overwhelmingly inclined to stick with the true conservative faith.

Republicans would do well to pay attention to another trend: The young are leaning left. Voters under 30, according to the exit poll, are the only age group in which liberals outnumber conservatives, by 32 percent to 26 percent. And the last four years of the Bush presidency clearly turned this generation off to the GOP. In 2004, 18- to 29-year-olds tilted only narrowly Democratic, 37 percent to 35 percent. In 2008, 45 percent of the under-30s called themselves Democrat; only 26 percent called themselves Republican.

Right-wing loyalists can talk all they want about how President Bush's problem was that he wasn't "conservative enough," but the numbers show they are misunderstanding their party's problem. Obama and Kaine are appealing to a moderate country moving gradually in a progressive direction and have a party behind them prepared to grapple with the realities of politics now. Whoever takes the helm of the GOP will have to persuade a very conservative following that we are not living in Ronald Reagan's America anymore.

McCain vs. McCain

On Salon, Walter Shapiro lays out how John McCain ended up running against himself. “The maverick of days past might be deadlocked with Obama now if he hadn't let the Republican right hijack the Straight Talk Express… All that would have been required to achieve electoral parity and a plausible road map to the White House would have been for the Republican nominee to have transformed himself into the John McCain of the 2000 primaries.”

That was the fabled McCain who wooed reporters with nonstop rolling press conferences about the Straight Talk Express, who electrified independent voters
in the New Hampshire primary with his clarion call for political reform and who late in the campaign denounced Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." Make no mistake, McCain 2000 was an unabashed hawk ("rogue-state rollback" was his bellicose mantra) who never deviated from conservative orthodoxy on abortion (though he did give off the impression that rolling back Roe v. Wade was about 993rd on his list of life ambitions). Whether that candidate was the authentic McCain or an impromptu confection whipped up for a gullible press corps, the result was one of the most beguiling losing campaigns in modern political history.

This time around, the septuagenarian Arizona senator shrewdly (or cynically) decided from the outset that he would get right -- very right-wing -- with the Republican base. In mid-2006, when he still dreamed of replicating the front-runner juggernaut of the Bush campaigns, McCain paid homage to Falwell himself by giving the commencement address at Liberty University. Even though McCain was one of only two Republican senators to oppose the Bush tax cuts (liberal Lincoln Chafee was the other), he implausibly championed the cause of making them permanent. McCain presumably believed that these sharp policy reversals were necessary to win the GOP nomination. But, in truth, McCain triumphed because fortune looked his way with a broad grin…

While alternative history is inherently speculative, a reasonable case can be made that McCain could have won the 2008 Republican nomination even if he had not pandered to Falwell and had not abandoned his fiscal conservatism to compete with Romney on taxes. The victory formula would have been built around McCain's biography, his unorthodox style, his unstinting support for the surge in Iraq and the general feeling that eight years earlier the GOP made a tragic mistake with Bush. In short, McCain could have come out of the GOP primaries prepared to run against Obama as a true maverick rather than a generic Republican railing against socialism.

Shapiro lays out the four steps that McCain should have taken.

Run as a deficit hawk: A major reason why McCain has appeared so inept in the face of the financial meltdown is that he lacks a coherent economic philosophy. It defies logic that McCain could simultaneously be so outraged by congressional earmarks and so cavalier about giveaways in the tax code. Green eyeshade budget arithmetic may not make economic sense on the cusp of a deep recession, but it does appeal to traditional conservatives alarmed that the national debt has doubled under Bush. Remember McCain was a candidate who said during the 2000 Republican primaries, "I won't take every dime of the surplus and spend it on tax cuts that mostly benefit the wealthy." The Arizona senator also opposed the Medicare prescription drug bill because there was no way to finance it. A McCain tough on tax cuts and frugal about unfunded domestic programs might have had the credibility to turn his crusade against pork-barrel spending into a true test of political character.

Remember that Karl Rove drove the GOP to ruin: The Rovian philosophy that presidential politics revolves around mobilizing the conservative base in 2004 came within 120,000 votes in Ohio of costing Bush the White House. And that was when the Republican brand and Bush himself were comparatively popular. From the Falwell folly to the Sarah Palin pyrotechnics, McCain (the Sequel) has been far too politically obsessed with worrying about what social conservatives think of him. The answer should have been obvious -- the evangelicals and home-schoolers prefer McCain to Obama, if unenthusiastically. Rather than trying to arouse the base with ominous references to Bill Ayers, McCain should have realized early on that such shrill tactics do not play well with independents and moderates who were his original presidential constituency. As far as declaring war on the New York Times and shunning the reporters who once lionized him, that tactic only makes political sense if McCain's ultimate goal is to win an anchor job on Fox News when the campaign is over.

Risk a convention walkout over the V.P.: Behind-the-scenes reports hint that McCain picked Palin in pique over warnings that the GOP delegates would rebel over the selection of apostate Democrat Joe Lieberman or even pro-choice Pennsylvania Republican Tom Ridge. Campaign strategists are so afraid of televised controversy that they never considered that the best way to demonstrate political independence is to actually do something bold when the entire nation is watching. Had McCain taken on the social conservatives in a convention floor fight, voters would still be talking about the GOP nominee's maverick moxie. At the 1948 Democratic convention Harry Truman (aka McCain's patron saint) stared down a Dixiecrat walkout over the party's civil rights plank. At a time when Palin's picture will soon appear next to the metaphorical definition of albatross, it is clear that McCain should have taken his lumps with Lieberman or risked a ruckus over Ridge. Even Romney would have allowed McCain to argue that Obama is not ready for the rigors of the Oval Office without triggering derisive laughter.

Repeat and repeat: "I am not George Bush": Yes, McCain finally uttered those magic words during the final debate. And he ripped into Bush for his initial blundering conduct of the Iraq occupation, his doubling of the national debt and his neglect of climate change in an off-message post-debate interview with the conservative Washington Times. But this is pretty late in the game to break with a president whose performance in office is given a thumbs-down rating by three-quarters of the voters. McCain's belated criticisms are akin to Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence in 1815. As McCain knows well, there is a persuasive conservative case to be made against Bush for his free-spending big-government fiscal recklessness, for his trampling of constitutional norms (from vice-presidential sanctioned torture to White House signing statements) and for his record of incompetence from New Orleans to Baghdad. Instead of wasting time at the GOP convention on chants of "Drill, baby, drill," that was the moment to try out cries of "Bye, Bush, bye." If all the loyal Bushies stayed home in November in protest, McCain might lose as many as a dozen Texas votes in the greater Crawford metroplex.

The Bush stigma may be so indelible that it is possible that not even the return of Ronald Reagan could save the 2008 GOP nominee from voter backlash. But unlike, say, Adlai Stevenson or Barry Goldwater, McCain probably cannot even derive satisfaction from knowing that he ran an uplifting campaign in an impossible political climate. That is the apparent problem with McCain's Faustian bargain -- it has brought him neither honor nor votes. McCain (the Original) might not be winning right now, but the odds are that the race would be far closer in 2004 Democratic states like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota. If nothing else, the candidate who led the McCain Mutiny in 2000 might be going out as a Happy Warrior not as a political chameleon who has lost any sense of his true identity.

The Palin Choice

Andrew Sullivan reminds everyone of Karl Rove’s recent remarks on Face the Nation about Tim Kaine’s “inexperience”:

Rove: "With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he's been a governor for three years. He's been able but undistinguished. I don't think people could really name a big, important thing that he's done ... [Kaine] was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it's smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa, or Gilbert, Arizona; North Las Vegas, or Henderson, Nevada. It's not a big town."

Sullivan: Palin has been governor for less than two years of a state with 600,000 people, compared to Virginia's 8 million. Before that, she was mayor of a town with 6,000 inhabitants, compared to Richmond's 200,000. Someone able to become president of the United States at a moment's notice? Politically, I have no idea how this will play. As an act of presidential governing, as McCain's first real presidential decision, it was and is fundamentally unserious.

A Constant Reminder

One of the more amazing aspects of this election is the inexplicable way in which the media and so many conservatives still take the word of Karl Rove as gospel. When he was winning elections (granted, it depends upon your interpretation of “winning”), he was viewed as the unrivaled political genius who was transforming the face of electoral politics. But just how good was he?

Consider that the candidate he helped groom into a two-term president is now widely seen as one of the most destructive Commanders-in-Chief, one of the most divisive leaders, and one of the least effective executives in our nation’s history. For good reason, his approval ratings are at historic lows.

And what did Karl Rove always tout as his ultimate objective each step of the way? It was to create a permanent Republican majority. And how has that worked out? Well, he may have actually accomplished the opposite through polarization, unilateralism, incompetence, corruption, and poor judgment. So maybe he's not such a genius after all.

Nevertheless, each time Rove takes a jab at Barack Obama it quickly becomes a headline. The latest - that Obama is a self-centered martini-drinking elitist flip-flopper. Yeah, I know, Rove used the exact same play-book against John Kerry, but this time it's different because this Democratic nominee stoops so low as to play the race card. Yeah, I know, it’s a hollow accusation meant to stir racist sentiments but what do you expect from the same guy who played the race card against John McCain (the candidate he now champions) eight years ago.

One of the claims that stands out amongst others is the Rove assertion that Obama, yes Obama - not McCain, is the flip-flopper in this election who cannot be trusted.

Mr. Obama has said he "strongly supported public financing" and pledged to take federal funds for the fall, thereby limiting his spending to roughly $84 million. Now convinced he can raise more than $84 million, he reversed course last week, ditching the federal money and its limits. But by discarding his earlier pledge so easily, he raises doubts about whether his word can be trusted.

What’s interesting/ridiculous about this assertion is that John McCain’s flip-flop on public financing was not only more egregious than Obama’s, but that it was illegal. Oceanna explains:

The Democratic National Committee has filed suit today in federal district court in Washington, D.C. to force the Federal Election Commission to investigate John McCain's decision to unilaterally withdraw from the FEC's matching funds program for the primary election despite his already having used program to benefit his campaign financially.

Let's review: John McCain signed a binding agreement with the FEC back in August 2007 to accept spending limits for the primary and to abide by the conditions of receiving matching funds. To get out of that agreement, FEC Chairman David Mason explained in February, the FEC must grant permission, and for stating this obvious legal truth David Mason is being forced out of the FEC. What's more, based on past FEC rulings McCain would not have been allowed to withdraw from the matching funds program, because in December he pledged to use his matching funds as collateral for a private loan to keep his campaign afloat.

So, four months ago the DNC filed a complaint with the FEC to investigate all this, but because there's been no quorum the Commission couldn't actually do anything. (Four votes are needed to authorize an investigation, and only two of the six seats are currently filled.) But under the law, if the FEC doesn't act within 120 days, you get to sue in district court to force the FEC to act. What the lawsuit asks the Court to do is issue an order saying, (a) the FEC must act to investigate the complaint within 30 days, and (b) if it doesn't (or can't), the DNC should be able to sue McCain directly to force his compliance with the law. Moreover, the Commission is likely to be back in business before month's end. This lawsuit will place this investigation atop its agenda.

Bottom line: John McCain played fast and loose with the law. He used the public financing system when it was convenient and helpful to his campaign, ignored it once the money started flowing again, and now takes a hands-off approach to the millions in the 527 money to be spent on his behalf. It's time for the shenanigans to stop, and this lawsuit will help shine a light on just how unprincipled this so-called "maverick" is.

In the end, I really don’t mind seeing Karl Rove in the headlines every day. His assertions always border on the absurd and, more than anything, he serves as a constant reminder of the divisive politics of the past, the promise and change that Barack Obama could bring, and the increasingly blurry differences between John McCain and George Bush. Turd Blossom, indeed.

Knesset-Gate Continued...

During a press gaggle aboard Air Force One, White House Counselor Ed Gillespie said: “And I would again encourage the media, whatever you want to do, it's your editors - to ask them if maybe you might ask the Speaker of the House, or the leader of the Senate, or the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, what sentence that the President uttered, what words do you disagree with in those comments in the Knesset?”

Senator Joe Biden, never one to back down, gladly responded:

“Here’s what I disagree with – this White House long ago perfected the art of the political misrepresentation and innuendo masquerading as policy and stringing together sentences that seem unobjectionable when read in isolation, but send a very different message when read together. What is stunning is that this is the only president I can think of – and I’ve served with seven of them – who would engage in this kind of activity while overseas in the Knesset, even as he revealed a totally incoherent policy.

“In the space of three paragraphs, the President cited the outrageous statements of Iran’s leader; said “some” believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals; and drew a parallel to “an American senator” in 1939 declaring that talking to Hitler might have prevented World War II and the Holocaust. Then, his staff told the press on background that the remarks were a reference to calls by Senator Obama and other Democrats to engage with Iran, only to later say on the record the President intended no such thing. Karl Rove would be proud.

“As to the incoherence, to say that those who would negotiate with these terrorists and radicals are peddling “the false comfort of appeasement” is one of the most extraordinary self-indictments by any administration in history. As recently as the day before the President made his remarks, his own Secretary of Defense called for engaging Iran. His Secretary of State has done so repeatedly. And the President himself struck a deal with Libya’s Qadafi and wrote polite letters to North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, who would make most people’s top ten lists of “terrorists and radicals.”

“The President was right to engage Libya and North Korea, just as his cabinet officials are right to want to engage Iran. That’s the best way to get them to change their conduct. The President was profoundly wrong to launch a political attack from abroad. That’s beneath the office of the Presidency. Ed Gillespie should stop playing the American people for fools.”

The "Unholy Alliance"

In a recent Sunday Times column, Andrew Sullivan discusses the “unholy alliance” of Hillary Clinton and the far Right.

Last week was officially the moment that the race for the Democratic nomination slipped through the looking glass into surrealism. Here is a brief list of those people who are now actively supporting Hillary Clinton’s candidacy: Pat Buchanan, a charming man slightly to the right of Genghis Khan; Rush Limbaugh, the most voluble and incendiary of right-wing talk-show hosts; Richard Mellon Scaife, the media mogul who financed the virulently antiClinton crusades of the 1990s; and, if you read between the lines, even Karl Rove, the “architect” of the past decade or so of Republican dominance in electoral politics.

Am I hallucinating? I promise you I’m not. The merging of the forces that once persecuted the Clintons with the Clinton campaign itself has been a wonder to behold. Some on the once solidly anti-Clinton right have even been directly urging people to register as Democrats to vote for her. Limbaugh began his pro-Clinton campaign when Ohio and Texas were at stake. Last Wednesday he claimed success in getting enough Republicans to vote for Clinton in Pennsylvania to keep her candidacy alive. Limbaugh calls his initiative Operation Chaos. “Were it not for Operation Chaos, [Barack] Obama could win this by winning the primary process. But he can’t now,” he bragged last week. Yes, this is the same Limbaugh who rose to fame hawking White-water and Lewinsky for eight years. Now he wants to save the couple he once wanted to impeach.

Or take Rove. In a brilliant opinion piece last week in The Wall Street Journal he insisted Obama could not win white ethnic voters in the autumn, and he even endorsed one of the Clinton campaign’s least persuasive arguments: that the votes in the Michigan and Florida primaries – deemed illegitimate by party bosses ahead of time because the states broke the rules by scheduling their primaries out of order – should be counted in the popular vote tally. I don’t know anyone outside Clinton’s inner circle who actually believes that those states’ decision to violate the rules (and her choice to put her name on the illegitimate Michigan ballot) should now count retroactively in her favour. But Rove now does – and is clearly doing what he can to legitimise Clinton’s only chance of winning the nomination.

You have to pinch yourself as Buchanan – the former senior adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, and a man who clearly believes John McCain is a flaming liberal – all but endorses Clinton night after night on television. Buchanan’s rationale: “Obama cannot concede that the anger of white America – that its right to equal justice has been sacrificed to salve the consciences of guilt-besotted liberals – is a legitimate anger.”

Meanwhile we witnessed another surreal inversion. Last Tuesday night Terry McAuliffe, the Clintons’ money man, appeared on a network that many Democrats view as anathema and said: “Let me congratulate Fox [the TV network], because you were the first to call it for Hillary Clinton. Fair and balanced Fox: you beat them all.” Fox is now using the Clinton spokesman as part of an ad promo.

The icing on the cake was the endorsement of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by Scaife, the man who bankrolled the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Hillary even sat down with Scaife for a fawning interview. His paper concluded: “Clinton’s decision to sit down with the Trib was courageous, given our long-standing criticism of her . . . Political courage is essential in a president. Clinton has demonstrated it; Obama has not. She has a real record. He doesn’t. She has experience of value to a president. He doesn’t.”

The Clintons are pragmatists, to put it kindly, when it comes to advancing their own interests and have long played the politics of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. It’s also indisputable that Obama gave them a gift with his unforced error about “bitter” Pennsylvania voters. The shrewd and subtle invocation of racial tropes against Obama is also something that these Arkansan operators know well. One recalls that Bill Clinton interrupted his primary campaign in 1992 to return to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a mentally retarded black man. He was a master at bonding with African-Ameri-cans while signalling to white voters that he was also a Bubba underneath. This time, after telling North Carolina voters last week that a black candidate doesn’t care about “people like you”, he has allowed Bubba to become the public face. His wife’s emergence in Pennsylvania as a tribune of the white working classes is part of the Clintons’, er, flexibility.

But what explains the Republicans’ sudden love for the Clintons is a little less obvious than the reasons for the Clintons’ sudden love for them. On paper, there is no actual policy difference to speak of between Obama and Hillary Clinton. Their one main disagreement is on healthcare mandates – and on that question, Obama is, if anything, slightly to Clinton’s right.

What’s going on, I think, is a classic bluff – as well as a simple desire to keep the Democrats’ agony going. Yes, Obama does have obvious problems winning over older and whiter voters in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. His recent sub-par performances have not helped. But in a hypothetical contest between McCain and Clinton, the very forces that help keep Clinton ahead among these voters in the primaries would aid McCain against Clinton in the general election. McCain’s a Scots-Irish Vietnam vet with an independent streak. He should beat her easily in this demographic. If, however, Clinton becomes the nominee by wrestling superdelegates away from Obama at the convention (which, barring a catastrophe, is the only way she can do it), McCain’s advantages grow even more.

The Democrats led by Clinton would haemorrhage desperately needed black votes and young votes. All the new money, new votes and new enthusiasm that Obama has brought into his party would not just disappear; the new voters would be actively enraged, sit out the election or even vote for McCain. For all these reasons, the Republicans know that Clinton is still one of their key assets. That’s why they have a sudden, new-found love for her. Obama scrambles politics in ways they do not fully understand yet, and profoundly fear. Endorsing Clinton’s attempt to redefine him as an elitist, leftist snob is win-win for them.

If Clinton prevails, they know how to beat her. If she loses, she will have legitimised a main Republican line of attack against Obama. It’s not that hard to understand. And it’s even more intelligible when you absorb a simple fact. Beneath the headlines about suicidal Democrats, there is a sobering reality for the Republicans in the current polling.

Even now – as the Democrats are tearing themselves apart – the polls are still showing that McCain and Obama are all but tied in the national vote. In a swing state such as Minnesota, Obama actually has a 14-point lead over McCain, as of last Thursday. The death match is now. And the Clintons and the Republicans need all the mutual support they can muster.