File this one in the “liberal Democrats advising the Republican Party” pile (colloquially: “the trash can”). Here’s a shock: the liberal Democrat thinks that conservative Republicans are too conservative!
Republicans are being held hostage by their base
By Harold Meyerson, Published: April 26
Republicans have a problem. Their base is killing them.
Volunteering for campaigns, engaging in grass-roots activism, combating media misinformation, engaging the national political discourse, pressuring entrenched politicians, donating money…why would you need any of that when you could have the approval of Harold Meyerson?
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s announcement Monday that he will not seek the presidency is just the latest sign that politically sentient Republicans fear their party’s voters have moved so deeply into la-la land that winning their support in next year’s primaries could render their nominee unelectable in November.
Let’s count the things that are wrong with this sentence:
1) Haley Barbour, the guy who, through nothing but his own sheer political stupidity and laziness, started a shitstorm by saying that he didn’t remember the Civil Rights Era in Mississippi “being that bad,” is now the paragon of Republican political acumen.
2) It assumes that Haley Barbour was electable in the first place, which he wasn’t.
3) It assumes that Haley Barbour was performing adequately in the polls, which he wasn’t.
4) It assumes that Haley Barbour was dead-set on running, no matter the cost, when it appears he barely had a toe in the water.
5) It assumes that Haley Barbour is uncomfortable portraying himself as a staunch conservative, which he isn’t.
6) It assumes that the country recoils in horror against deep conservative principles, which it doesn’t.
7) It assumes that having moderates in the primary would produce a more moderate primary winner, which it probably wouldn’t. (A topic for another day)
“Friends of Barbour,” reports The Post’s Dan Balz, “said that he had come to the conclusion that Republicans can win only if they are totally focused on serious issues and not distracted by some side issues, such as Obama’s birthplace, that have arisen in the early going.”
This means that Barbour’s decision not to run implies, idiotically, that Barbour would have liked to campaign on entirely non-serious issues like who’s the best American Idol judge. If memory serves, this is precisely the opposite of the point Meyerson was trying to make.
But Republicans are massively distracted by birtherism. A New York Times-CBS News poll last week showed that while 57 percent of Americans believe that President Obama was born in the United States, against 25 percent who didn’t, just 33 percent of Republicans believed him American-born, while 45 percent did not.
Fun facts. Here are some more:
In 2007, 22% of Americans believed that George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened. Compare this against 35% of Democrats and 18% of Independents. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/bush_administration/22_believe_bush_knew_about_9_11_attacks_in_advance
The birther narrative favors Democrats, while the truther narrative favored Republicans. Now take a mental stroll back to 2007 and compare the media coverage. Crickets? Yeah, no one cared in 2007. But now, the media can’t get enough of conspiracy theories. The major difference is in which party it’s embarrassing.
The other difference, of course, was that Bush found the idea of the allegations so intrinsically heinous, that he wanted to hear nothing about it. By contrast, Obama enjoys the birther rantings. They make him look sensible (which be decidedly is not) by comparison.
The Republican level of birtherism was effectively identical to that of self-identified Tea Party supporters, 34 percent of whom thought Obama was U.S.-born, while 45 percent did not.
Let’s take a look at this logical progression:
a) Members of the Tea Party are the most egregious Right-wing wingnuts.
b) The Republican Party was not always dominated by wingnuts.
c) Birtherism is the primary example of wing-nuttery run amok.
d) The wingnuts have virtually identical measures of sympathy for birther arguments as traditional, moderate conservatives
Conclusion: It takes slightly less mental fortitude than is proffered by a drunk toddler to see that the birther movement has absolutely nothing to do with the Tea Party, and calls into question the validity of point a.
Which is to say that the loopy, enraged divorce from reality of the Tea Potniks has infected the entire party.
Sigh. It’s like they’re beyond helping.
That, indeed, has been the strategic premise of Donald Trump’s campaign, be it pseudo, proto- or provisional,
Pseudo, proto-, and provisional are not related in any discernable way other than starting with the letter p. If this were an SAT question, and you were asked to find the next in the series, the correct answer would be “pterodactyl.”
for the Republican nomination. Nothing in Trump’s background suggests he actually believes the birther snake oil he is peddling
Then again, nothing in his background suggests that he is actually a conservative. We’re not idiots. We know it’s 18 months before the actual election and just under a year before the serious primaries. Trump is a protest vote designed to tell Republican candidates to grow a pair.
with considerable success in GOP ranks. What his background, and foreground,
It’s almost as though he enjoys making little lacerations in written English. Stop peppering commas on your writing to give a conversational tone. You can’t pull it off and it grates.
do make clear is that he is utterly without shame. If stoking his campaign requires affirming the absurd beliefs of rubes whom he would instantly fire on his TV series, well — it’s worked, hasn’t it?
Yes, it’s rather the astute business move to promote his television program by instantly alienating 57% of the American people. Just how they teach it at Wharton.
And it’s not just Trump. “Birther bills,” which require presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates, are moving through a number of Republican-controlled state legislatures.
There are two requirements to qualify to become President of the United States : one must be a citizen born in the United States
In Oklahoma Arizona
Oh Jesus. Now he’s not just telling us what to do and what to believe, he’s also telling us what we meant.
that an official Republican crossing-over into birtherism
I’m confident that’s not at all how she interpreted the bill.
would place the party and its nominee on the paranoid fantasy side of the gap between the real and the imagined,
Jan Brewer is a governor that has nowhere to go from here. She will never be seriously considered for the presidency, and has little reason to run for the federal legislature. Given that Arizona
while Democrats and independents gaped in amazement from the other side.
How would a law in Arizona
Brewer is not alone in her concerns. Karl Rove, still the GOP’s canniest strategist, told Fox News viewers that Trump was “off there in the nutty right”
Rove is at least half right. Trump is quite obviously a nut (or at least being nutty—he may actually be doing all of this under the “any press is good press” philosophy), but he is not a right-winger. Instigating a trade war with China
and a “joke candidate” for pandering to birther conspiracy theories.
No argument here.
The joke, however, may be on Rove and those reality-based Republicans trying to figure out a way to defeat Obama in the next election.
I’m so glad that Harold Meyerson is looking out for us.
If Rove really wanted to stop Trump and the birthers in their tracks, he should have looked Fox News viewers straight in the camera’s eye and told them to change the channel.
Uh…why?
Widely shared paranoid fantasies existed long before Fox News and Rush Limbaugh,
The implication being that both pander to paranoid fantasies, which is simply untrue; both have been generally skeptical of, or at very least unhelpful to the birther movement.
of course, but it’s increasingly clear that the success of news and opinion outlets devoted to counter-factual news in the service of partisan ends has driven a rift between their audience and the rest of the nation.
Says the professional opinion writer, hoping that his dim audience doesn’t realize that he is admitting to plying “counter-factual” information.
If the rift were merely ideological, it wouldn’t pose a problem for the Republicans: Ideological rifts are the very stuff of politics.
You haven’t adequately demonstrated that there is a rift between Republicans. In fact, you have presented statistics to prove that there is not.
Increasingly, though, the rift between the Tea Partyized Republicans and everyone else comes on the question of empiricism.
We’ve already established that there is not a significant ideological divide between the Tea Party and mainstream Republicans. Similarly, as independents continue to be attracted to the Republican party, there’s no discernable gulf between Republicans and moderates/independents, either.
This scares the shit out of Harold Meyerson.
Watch Fox News or listen to right-wing talk radio long and credulously enough, and you’ll end up believing
“You’ll end up believing?” That doesn’t sound very empirical.
that Americans found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
We did; they were just very old and semi-functional. We also found numerous Scud missiles and other armaments that clearly and directly violate the ceasefires from Desert Storm.
Similarly, conservatives know that the no-WMD-in-Iraq narrative doesn’t discredit the war effort, particularly given the reasons given for starting a war in Libya
that sharia law is being imposed on Dearborn , Mich.
The more accurate fear is that sharia law is being imposed on Western Europe , and it is. Even so, when there were stories about sharia being used in America
that climate change is a hoax
The argument, and this is subtle now, is that man caused climate change is a hoax. Much to Meyerson’s chagrin, man-caused climate change is not an empirically provable fact (at least not with currently available data.)
and that Obama fears revealing the truth about his birth (a frequent theme of Fox’s Sean Hannity).
As a frequent listener of Hannity’s radio program, this comes as news to me.
For someone with such a premium on empiricism and deference to the raw truth, these are all very vague and generalized concepts that construct with precision the caricature of talk radio perpetrated by the left wing. Mr. Empiricism is empirically wrong.
The authorities at Fox moved back from the brink a bit when they decided to let Glenn Beck go, but Beck was just one among many right-wing talksters whose cumulative effect has been to render rank-and-file Republicans a receptive audience for nonsense-spouting demagogues such as Trump.
Make up your mind. Is there a rift in the Republican party between the sane Republicans and the Tea Party, or are all Republicans crazy?
If the espousal of birtherism truly becomes a necessity for winning the Republican presidential nomination,
It isn’t, and everyone in the field, including moderately attractive candidates like Barbour, knows it.
the right’s war on empiricism
Let’s look at the left’s war on empiricism:
The left believes that raising tax rates on the rich will increase revenues realized by the federal government, despite no discernable historical correlation between tax rates and tax revenue as a percentage of GDP.
The left ridiculed scorned Republicans for pointing out that Obamacare has death panels. Obamacare has now moved to implement a board that rations health care, which in some cases will cause death. Hence, death panels. No apologies have been issued to Sarah Palin.
The left believed that Barack Obama was qualified to be president, despite his complete lack of executive experience to guide that opinion.
Young leftists get their news primarily from Jon Stewart.
The left refuses to acknowledge that Obama’s anti-oil energy policy has exacerbated high pump prices.
The left has argued that nuclear power is unsafe for Kansas, for fear of a 9.0 magnitude earthquake in an area a thousand miles from the nearest tectonic rift.
The left has argued that public sector employees do not earn more total compensation than their private sector counterparts.
will have served not merely to build and mobilize a base, but also to isolate that base from the majority of Americans who still inhabit, at least most of the time, a reality-based universe.
Seriously…is there a schism or not?
Winning the support of crazies, Haley Barbour may have concluded, is no way to win the White House.
Except the entire premise of this article is that it is impossible to win the White House by playing to those on the other side of the sometimes-alleged schism. Either way, it would have been impossible for Haley Barbour because he was a highly flawed candidate with virtually no name recognition.
Still, the ignorance is baffling. The schism that undid the right in 2008 did not occur by moving too far to the right. To the contrary, it happened by moving too far to the center. Staunch conservatives like myself did not donate money, make calls, put up signs, or even vote. I was demoralized that my choice was between two people with whom I strenuously disagreed.
This is going to be the problem for Democrats this election. President Obama has lost independent voters by the truckload. He is going to have to spend so much energy courting the middle, that the energy and enthusiasm of the young, fickle left-wing base will fracture and dissipate his 2008 coalition. The question is not what proportion of the democratic stronghold demographics (Blacks, college educated women, those below the poverty line) he carries, but how many of these demoralized, uninspired constituents actually show up.
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