Showing all posts tagged: GOP
Paul Krugman, The Ignorance Caucus
The truth is that America’s partisan divide runs much deeper than even pessimists are usually willing to admit; the parties aren’t just divided on values and policy views, they’re divided over epistemology. One side believes, at least in principle, in letting its policy views be shaped by facts; the other believes in suppressing the facts if they contradict its fixed beliefs.
Republicans’ Committee Chair(MEN).
Another thing that’s awful —> What radical positions these men have taken.
hi-larious.
(via newsweek)
Lamar Smith, who authored SOPA and doesn't believe in climate change, has been appointed as chair of the House Science Committee.
On Tuesday afternoon, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced that the Republican Steering Committee had recommended Smith as the new chairman. The full House GOP caucus will vote on all chairmanships Wednesday and is expected to ratify the steering panel’s choices.
Because appointing only old white men to chair every panel in the House wasn’t regressive enough.
Fuck you, Boehner, and fuck you House Republicans.
The Republican story about how societies prosper — not just the Romney story — dwelt on the heroic entrepreneur stifled by taxes and regulations: an important story with which most people do not identify. The ordinary person does not see himself as a great innovator. He, or she, is trying to make a living and support or maybe start a family. A conservative reform of our health-care system and tax code, among other institutions, might help with these goals. About this person, however, Republicans have had little to say.
In the days since the election, Republicans have received (and given one another) a lot of advice: Step up the ground game. Soften on immigration and abortion. Embrace same-sex marriage. Appeal more to single women, Hispanics, and young people. Run the younger, more charismatic candidates Republicans have waiting in the wings. Some of this advice is good, and some of it bad. But the weakness of the Republican party predates the emergence of same-sex marriage as an issue, the development of Democratic micro-targeting strategies, and the growth of the Hispanic vote. And wasn’t Josh Mandel, the losing Ohio Senate candidate, supposed to be one of those great young conservative hopes? However much charisma and brains the next crop of Republicans brings to their campaigns, they need a stronger party.
The perception that the Republican party serves the interests only of the rich underlies all the demographic weaknesses that get discussed in narrower terms. Hispanics do not vote for the Democrats solely because of immigration. Many of them are poor and lack health insurance, and they hear nothing from the Republicans but a lot from the Democrats about bettering their situation. Young people, too, are economically insecure, especially these days. If Republicans found a way to apply conservative principles in ways that offered tangible benefits to most voters and then talked about this agenda in those terms, they would improve their standing among all of these groups while also increasing their appeal to white working-class voters. For that matter, higher-income voters would prefer candidates who seem practical and solution-oriented. Better “communications skills,” that perennial item on the wish list of losing parties, will achieve little if the party does not have an appealing agenda to communicate.
- Ramesh Ponnuru, The Party’s Problem
Basically, Ponnuru is envisioning a new Republican party that is not Republican, but something else: one that cares about the average American, not the rich.
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
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- 15/11/12
- 15 November, 2012
- Comments
- 3
- 3 notes
- elections 2012gopsouthern strategyquotationslee atwater
Lee Atwater, cited by Rick Perlstein in Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
The GOP Is Over
The GOP is demographically challenged. This was the last time they could mount a serious run for the presidency, and they lost handily. Romney had a 20% advantage among white Americans, and lost all the swing states.
Kevin Sack and Sarah Wheaton, First, Republicans Must Find Common Ground Among Themselves - NYTimes.com
The longer-term concerns for Republicans were revealed in exit polling. While Mr. Romney won the votes of 59 percent of whites, 52 percent of men and 78 percent of white evangelicals, Mr. Obama claimed 55 percent of women, 60 percent of voters under 30, 93 percent of African-Americans and more than 70 percent of Latinos and Asians.
Although the president’s majority shrank nationally, he won a larger proportion of Latino and Asian votes than in 2008. Among Latinos, Mr. Romney’s share of the vote fell 17 percentage points below the 44 percent won by George W. Bush in 2004.
Perhaps most ominous, the Latino share of the total vote rose to 10 percent from 8 percent in 2004, and the Asian share rose to 3 percent from 2 percent. The electorate is now 28 percent nonwhite, more than double the figure from two decades ago. That growth is certain to continue; in 2011, births to nonwhites outnumbered births to whites for the first time.
To the extent that the GOP is the party of the 1950s — of white electoral dominance — it’s over.
The clamor about the loss is falling into two categories:
- The GOP has to become more inclusive, and reach out to women, latinos, asians, and blacks. Only problem is that the platform doesn’t match up, because those groups don’t agree with intrusive social policies, small government, and rolling over for the rich folks.
- The GOP has to shift its policies to attract these groups. In essence, that translates to moving left, away from extremist craziness, but the most committed republicans are ideologically averse to that.
What’s going to happen?
I’m betting that — in the medium term — the libertarians of the GOP will gain control. This is the quadrant of the American political map that believes in small government and no government intrusion into personal affairs. This will be a GOP that goes along with abortion, gay marriage, and marijuana legalization, while arguing for low taxes and staying out of asian wars. This will be a GOP that could bargain with a liberal democrat in the White House, which Obama isn’t, by the way, but Hilary might be.
The modern GOP is deeply anti-intellectual, and has as its fundamental goal not just a rollback of the welfare state but a rollback of the Enlightenment.
Paul Krugman, Delusions of Reason via NYTimes.com
Republican pessimism is more than a PR headache. Put simply, it is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike. Mr Romney’s campaign slogan was “Believe in America”. But too many on his side believe in a version of America from which displeasing facts or arguments are ruthlessly excluded. Todd Akin did not implode as a Senate candidate because of his stern opposition to abortion even in cases of rape or incest: many Republicans in Congress share those views. His downfall came because in trying to deny that his principles involved a trade-off with compassion for rape victims he came up with the unscientific myth that the bodies of women subjected to rape can shut down a pregnancy.
It was a telling moment of denial, much like the comforting myth that there is no such thing as climate change or, if there is, that humans are not involved. Ensconced in a parallel world of conservative news sources and conservative arguments, all manner of comforting alternative visions of reality surfaced during the 2012 election. Many, like Mr Akin’s outburst, involved avoiding having to think about unwelcome things (often basic science or economics). It became a nostrum among rank-and-file Republicans that mainstream opinion polls are biased and should be ignored, for instance, and that voter fraud is rampant and explains much of the Democrats’ inner-city support. Both conspiracies sounded a lot like ways of wishing the other side away.
Thoughtful Republicans are not oblivious to the dangers that they face. Optimists hope that new leaders will emerge to lead their movement rapidly towards greater realism, and greater cheeriness. If not, electoral defeats far more severe than those inflicted this time will surely impose such changes. Republicans may look back and wish the reckoning had started sooner.
Lexington: State of denial - The Economist
“It is hard for a party to win national elections in a country that it seems to dislike.”
The Republican organization today is extremely dangerous, not just to this country, but to the world. It’s worth expending some effort to prevent their rise to power, without sowing illusions about the Democratic alternatives.
Noam Chomsky
The furor over Friday’s report revealed a political movement that is rooting for American failure, so obsessed with taking down Mr. Obama that good news for the nation’s long-suffering workers drives its members into a blind rage. It also revealed a movement that lives in an intellectual bubble, dealing with uncomfortable reality — whether that reality involves polls or economic data — not just by denying the facts, but by spinning wild conspiracy theories.
It is, quite simply, frightening to think that a movement this deranged wields so much political power.
Truth About Jobs - Paul Krugman via NYTimes.com
The GOP spins off the tracks because of slightly better jobs numbers (below 8% unemployment for the first time in 42 months), and claims jiggery-pokery. ‘Deranged’ may not go far enough.
