Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com

George W. Bush was easily the least qualified person in U.S. history to hold the presidency. Other failed presidents occasionally have one element of their tenure that they can hail as a success, but George W. Bush ended his presidency with failure on both domestic and foreign policy.

By the time he mercifully left office on January 20, 2009, thousands of American soldiers were unnecessarily dead, thousands of Iraqis were dead, and millions of Americans were out of work. That doesn’t even account for global instability thanks to the vacuum of leadership in the Bush White House.

Yet somehow, my fellow liberals are too soft in assessing Bush’s failure.

They claim that he was a puppet, a tool of other, craftier forces. Most often Cheney is invoked as the man behind the curtain, who used Bush to achieve his evil goals.

Wrong.

Bush is responsible. Bush was the President. Bush was the man who made the ultimate decision to invade Iraq, to do so with an incompetent fool like Donald Rumseld in charge. Bush chose not to react to the memo that warned him about Bin Laden’s plan to attack on 9/11. Bush chose to take resources away from fighting Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq. Bush chose to put industry cronies in key regulatory positions, including those who were supposed to be watching Wall Street. Bush chose to cut taxes for the super-rich without regard to its long-term effect on the U.S. economy. It was Bush who looked out of an airplane window with that same blank expression he always had, watching as New Orleans drowned.

At practically every critical juncture in his presidency, Bush made the decisions that lead to failure, death, and strife for Americans and people around the world. The buck stopped at his desk.

So when liberals lay the blame on people like Cheney, or Rice, or any of the other goons that ran amok in the White House for eight years, they’re letting the ultimate bad actor off the hook.

Bush is responsible for what happened. We shouldn’t ever forget that.

Subscribe

Oliver Willis's feed

Enter email below:

Michael Cohen in the Guardian makes a persuasive argument that Republicans don’t have much to gain by holding the economy to ransom again during the ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations:

In the end, neither side has all that much to gain from dragging the fiscal cliff argument out. Now that President Obama has won re-election, and doing short-term damage to the economy is no longer in the political interests of Republicans, the outlines of a budget deal become that much easier to achieve. Moreover, all those House Republicans have to run for re-election in two years – and would prefer to do so in more optimal economic conditions, rather than in an economy undermined by growth-reducing austerity policies.

There were once good political reasons for Republicans to have a dalliance with economic calamity; no longer is that true. And it’s worth remembering that in virtually every single showdown between Obama and the Republican Congress in his first term (from the tax cut showdown of 2010 and the budget battle of early 2011, to the debt limit negotiations in the summer of 2011 and finally the payroll tax confrontation in the beginning of 2012), it has been Republicans who have surrendered, with far less than half a loaf. In its brinkmanship, the GOP likes to dance right up to the edge; they are far less inclined to take the plunge.

I think Cohen is correct in his analysis – Americans believe that President Obama’s economic policies are heading the country in the right direction, and explicitly rejected austerity at the polls in November. GOP strategists know this and will not be keen to shoulder the blame for a break down in the negotiations, making a decent deal for the Democrats a good possibility. It looks like Obama is sticking to his guns on raising taxes for the wealthy, meaning the onus is on Republicans to budge from their previous position on taxation.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Time for Republicans to get rid of the Romneys and Trumps

By Ben Cohen: It’s fairly clear that the Republican Party is in a state of serious disarray after getting hammered in the general election. The once unified party has begun to crack at the seams, fracturing over issues that were once untouchable cornerstones of Republican ideology. Up for grabs are women’s rights, the environment, foreign policy and now even taxation. Which strand of Republicanism will define the future of the party? Will the hardliners – the libertarians, religious fundamentalists, and tea party activist win the day, or will moderates find a way to bring the party under control and present a more sensible brand of conservatism going forward?

One thing is clear – what they are doing now is not working, and it’s going to get much, much worse. They are facing a demographic nightmare and an evolving public consciousness that free market capitalism and tax cuts are not the solution to the nation’s woes. Republicans are going to have to think out of the box if they want long term electoral success, and many of their ideas won’t be popular.

While the Left should be happy that the Republicans are a mess, it isn’t good for democracy to have one party so removed from reality that there is little point engaging with them. So here are some suggestions for top brass at GOP central – a five step program to get their house in order and get back to being relevant in a rapidly changing country that is leaving them behind. The steps we’ve outlined won’t be easy to implement, but they are necessary if the Republicans want to attract top talent and capture the imagination of the public:

1. Publicly disown prominent media blowhards like Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, Mark Levin, and Sean Hannity. Moderate Republicans need to take control of the GOP messaging quickly and aggressively, and that begins with creating a very visible rift between the party and the Fox News propaganda complex. This will be extremely painful to do and the backlash will be vicious and prolonged. But Limbaugh et al. are paper tigers with no substance behind their rhetoric and Republicans will have to gamble that in the long term, honesty and reality will win. As Andrew Sullivan stated on Bill Maher’s ‘Real Time’, “The first conservative who will be the future of that [Republican] party will be the one who says Rush Limbaugh does not speak for the Republican Party, he is a poison on the discourse…..You see the media industrial complex on the right is so lucrative, they don’t want to lose him and it is now controlling a political party. That has to be severed, Fox News has to be demonized, has to be cut off.”

2. Join the President in opposing Citizens United. There are already signs that Republicans are aware of just how corrosive and dangerous the Supreme Court’s ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was, and there needs to be a unified effort to reverse the decision and ban unlimited outside funding of political campaigns. As Jonathan Chait wrote during the Republican primary:

The Republican elite is justifiably terrified at the prospect of Newt Gingrich capturing the nomination. Gingrich, as I’ve argued, is riding the wave of revulsion and contempt for President Obama that this same Establishment has stoked for three years. But his campaign is also blowback to the party Establishment in another, more mechanical way. His campaign is surviving entirely as a result of the Citizens United ruling, decried by liberals and celebrated by conservatives, which allows unlimited campaign expenditures, as long as they’re not coordinated with campaigns.

Unlimited funding means that corporate interests will almost always win, or at least drag politics in a direction that works against the long term interests of the Republican Party. The GOP needs to change its economic platform if it wants to remain relevant because the era of Romney style vulture capitalism is getting increasingly harder to sell.

3. Use traditional Republicanism as the basis for a new economic ideology and completely disown Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman. Traditional conservatism doesn’t bow to markets – it believes in small government, but also believes in curtailing the power of big business. There is a Libertarian dictatorship within the Republican Party, and it has stifled debate making change almost impossible. Market fanaticism has ensured the party has had no new ideas in over 30 years, and this cannot go on. There are Republicans not wedded to the dictates of deregulated markets and they need to be given a more prominent platform. Joe Scarborough represents a type of conservatism that has been long dead in America and has the guts to actually tell the truth about who owns the party. We need to hear more from people like him.

4. Stop lying. The Republican Party has a terrible track record with telling the truth. Mitt Romney’s run at the Presidency exemplified modern Republican politics perfectly – it was based on lying about literally everything, from abortion to taxation and global warming. And in particular, Republicans have lied about President Obama. The Republicans have waged a completely dishonest campaign against the President, promoting an insidious mythology that he is some sort of closet communist Muslim who hates America. There are many, many issues that the President can be criticized for – drone killings, the NDAA, wire tapping, his ties to Wall st etc etc – all issues that true conservatives should be seriously concerned about. Instead, the Republican Party has created a make believe Obama and attacked that making them look idiotic in the process.

5. Embrace environmentalism. This could be key to redefining the Republican Party. It sounds far fetched and so contradictory to current Republicanism that dismisses global warming and regards environmentalists as subhuman (Ann Coulter once said, “The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours”), but it could capture an entire new demographic. There are non political Evangelical Christians who would line up behind them if they got serious, activists who would jump ship immediately if the Republicans outflanked the Democrats, and a new generation that is disenchanted with both parties inactivity on the issue.

Do you have any suggestions for the Grand Old Party, or do you think it best they stay confused and politically neutered? Comment below and we’ll post the best suggestions!

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

TPM has a great little analysis of the effect Romney’s ’47%’ video has had on his Presidential campaign. In short, it’s not good:

The snap shot is that 57% of independent voters had an unfavorable view of Romney’s outburst (according to a Washington Post poll) – the exact demographic Romney stated he was trying to get at in the talk he was giving. Said Romney:

What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.

The polling looks absolutely devastating if even vaguely accurate as Romney is basically right – his entire campaign must be built around capturing independents – and it now looks like he has lost them.

It really makes you think – if that was originally Romney’s idea to go for the center, why on earth has he run such a nasty, ultra right wing campaign for the better part of the election? It was always going to be an incredibly difficult task for Romney as he had to shore up the base that didn’t trust him, and attract the center at the same time. Given the GOP base now closely resembles something akin to fascism, doing both would have been close to impossible as Romney is now finding out.

I hate to write Romney’s obituary so early as there’s always a danger he could pull the upset, but it’s looking like a demographic catastrophe for the GOP in November. This is equally troubling for their long term prospects as a bad loss will throw the party into further chaos. It’s impossible to predict which faction of the GOP wins out in the long term because American political culture, particularly on the Right, is inherently erratic and unstable. One would think that they’d choose moderation in the face of electoral defeat, but given the direction in which they went after the banking crisis (even further to the Right) anything is possible.

Who knows, the Romney-Ryan ticket might look moderate in years to come. A pretty scary thought.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Plenty of steps on which to genuflect before the tea party.

The Daily Banter Headline Grab (via ThinkProgress):

NO ABORTION IN CASES OF RAPE OR INCEST. The proposal for a “human life amendment” passed without a hitch — and without any exceptions for rape or incest. The committee didn’t stop there; they also adopted language that would ban drugs that end pregnancy after conception, which could potentially include Plan B, the “morning after pill.”

SALUTE TO MANDATORY ULTRASOUNDS. The GOP officially praises states’ “informed consent” laws that force women to undergo unnecessary procedures, require waiting periods and endure other measures meant to discourage them from getting an abortion. One such law receiving a “salute” was crafted by committee head McDonnell, who passed a notorious mandatory ultrasound requirement after he signed an unsuccessful bill to require an even more invasive transvaginal probe ultrasound during an abortion consultation.

NO LEGAL RECOGNITION OF SAME-SEX COUPLES. The committee embraced extreme anti-gay language, even rejecting a proposal to endorse civil unions for gay couples after vehement objections from Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Romney adviser Jim Bopp, who called it a “counterfeit marriage.” The rejection of civil unions, along with the refusal to include a line affirming the legal equality of same-sex couples prompted the organization GOProud to declare, “Those who have engaged in this public platform fight have provided distraction from important issues and damaged Mitt Romney’s campaign.”

REPLICATE ARIZONA-STYLE IMMIGRATION LAWS. Kris Kobach, who wrote the now mostly invalidated immigration laws in Arizona and Alabama, pushed for language calling for a border fence, a national E-Verify system to make it harder for undocumented workers to find employment, the end of in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and an end to sanctuary cities. The committee overwhelmingly approved the proposals, as well as a line chastising the Department of Justice to halt the lawsuits against draconian immigration laws in Arizona, Alabama, South Carolina and Utah: “State efforts to reduce illegal immigration must be encouraged, not attacked.”

AUDIT THE FED. The pet project of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) to audit the Federal Reserve has now been embraced as an official Republican goal. For the first time, the platform calls for an annual audit of the Federal Reserve.

NO WOMEN IN COMBAT. The platform condemns “social experimentation” in the military, which covers everything from the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” to allowing officers to wear their uniforms in gay pride events to letting women serve on the front lines.

NO STATEHOOD, MORE GUNS FOR WASHINGTON DC. FRC’s Perkins, who recently blamed President Obama and the Southern Poverty Law Center for the shooting at FRC’s Washington headquarters, requested and received a section specifically urging the DC Council to expand gun rights. The same section also opposes DC statehood, which would allow the District to govern itself and put an end to Congressional attempts to impose abortion bans on DC.

NO NEW TAXES, EXCEPT FOR WAR. The platform calls for a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority to approve any tax increase, “with exceptions for only war and national emergencies.” It would also deliberately hobble future Congresses through a cap limiting all government spending to historical average percentage of GDP — “so that future Congresses cannot balance the budget by raising taxes.”

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

By Chez Pazienza: It’s probably fitting that over the past few days I’ve had a line floating through my head from a movie that might just stand as the pinnacle of jingoistic frat boy cinema.

The line in question comes toward the end of Armageddon, when Bruce Willis’s character and his crew of roughnecks have successfully drilled through to the core of the killer asteroid and are preparing to drop a nuclear bomb into the hole that will blow the whole thing to hell. Suddenly, the environment on the asteroid becomes even more volatile — explosive gas vents going off all over the place and violent quakes that throw the astronauts this way and that way — causing Willis to say something about how it’s obvious the rock they’re hurtling toward Earth on doesn’t like them being there. That’s when Will Patton’s character responds determinedly, “That’s because it knows we’re here to kill it.”

Why has this silly scene been on my mind so much lately? Well, think of the giant killer asteroid as the current incarnation of the Republican party, a wave of immigrant and non-white births as the roughnecks, and the seismic political shift they’re bringing to bear on this country as the nuclear warhead. The changing face of America has come to kill the GOP as it’s existed for the past several decades — and the party is not happy about it. Don’t let all the usual macho bluster and tough talk fool you; Republicans are scared right now. Terrified. As in chilled right down to their precious souls — the ones hand-spun by Almighty God just seconds after their dads ejaculated inside their moms. They know their days are numbered.

Census data show that last year, for the first time, non-white births made up over 50% of all births in the U.S. What this proves is what the Republican party already knows very well: the traditionally conservative electorate, essentially their entire way of thinking and the political clout it’s held, is in danger of being demographically pushed out of existence. In case you happen to actually be a Republican and therefore don’t believe in things like facts and numbers, let’s let David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies spell it out for you:

“The Republicans’ problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off. There will come a time when they suffer catastrophic losses with the realization of the population changes.”

The math simply doesn’t lie, and it’s presented Republicans with a stark and unavoidable choice — literally, evolve or die. And we all know how they tend to feel about evolution. One look at the way they reacted to the election of Barack Obama, a flesh-and-blood symbol of the loss of political privilege they’ve enjoyed throughout history, should give you some idea of how the GOP chose to confront its new reality. Resentful conservatives didn’t just stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “La la la la! Not listening!” — they staged a full-on insurgency in the form of the Tea Party, one which dragged the relatively sane and reasonable Republican establishment kicking and screaming to the outer fringes of the far right and has kept it there.

With that in mind it should come as no surprise that the dwindling demographic that currently makes up the GOP base is thoroughly losing its mind over these latest census figures. The Eagle Forum, a group founded by prudish spinster cliché and right-wing crusader O.G. Phyllis Schlafly, responded to the report by not only doubling-down on but going all-fucking-in with the xenophobic rhetoric:

“It is not a good thing. The immigrants do not share American values, so it is a good bet that they will not be voting Republican when they start voting in large numbers.”

It’s not often that a statement is so wildly off-base and yet so inarguably right at the same time. No, immigrants aren’t the shiftless parasites that Tea Party conservatives paint them all to be with the same shit-brown brush. Yeah, they won’t be voting Republican anytime soon — mostly because conservatives continue to call them a bunch of shiftless parasites who aren’t real Americans. The thing is, of course, that they are real Americans — they’re the new face of America. The old one is dying off and its mindset will soon be extinct — the only question is whether the Republican party can adapt and save itself at least in name if not strident ideology. Grabbing on tightly with both hands and trying with all their might to hold onto the privilege and political power they’ve had for generations, trying to slam the door and clamp down on the rising authority of America’s modern immigrant population, won’t work. It’s not the 1950s anymore. They’re simply outnumbered — and they know it. Glenn Beck was wrong. They are the ones surrounded.

And no matter how much of a tantrum they throw, that nuclear bomb is about to be shoved right up their ass.

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

Welcome to this weeks edition of The Daily Banter Mail Bag! Today, we discuss the continued idiocy of austerity, whether there is a double standard when it comes to racism, and the point of Wolf Blitzer.

The questions:

Greece is about to default on its debt, Spain has 25% unemployment, Britain is in recession, France has had no growth. The common thread? All of them followed austerity measures and all of them are in deep s#*t. Why on earth would any politician in the US want to attach himself to austerity policies given what’s going on over there? How is it possible for people like Romney, Gingrich, Graham, Ron Paul etc etc to keep banging on about deficits and cutting spending??? What the hell is going on???
- Jon

Bob: It’s sabotage. In early 2009 when the economy was mostly dead (deliberate Princess Bride reference), I wrote something about how the fiscal hawks would (thankfully) shut up for a while and let Keynes take over. Then, once the economy was fully stabilized and chugging along again, we should take a good look at the deficit. But in addition to the Republican Opposite-Day strategy (doing the opposite of the president, regardless of what it is), the Republicans have determined that a weak and unstable economy is good for their 2012 chances and so they’re deliberately sabotaging the economy by blocking any further stimulus spending. This is where austerity comes in: they know full well that large scale budget cuts will harm growth, but they don’t care. They’re going to do whatever hurts the president, even if it craps up the economy and backslides us into another recession. They’re just that irresponsible. And yet they’re still taken seriously by half the country.

Chez: First of all, calm down. It’s politics — and politics is inherently awful. The reason the right continues to push austerity is simple: It’s only the government and the people the government helps who are forced to be “austere.” The people at the top of the food chain don’t suffer from austerity measures, and the Republican party is about protecting that top financial tier at all costs — literally. The interesting thing is that those measures, as seen through the GOP prism of sociopathy, wouldn’t affect things like the defense budget or other the one or two others areas of the government the right holds sacred — they’d mostly be applied to programs that help people, what the right derisively considers “entitlements.” Eliminating social government programs has been at the heart of the Republican political design for years — and if it happens here we’ll likely see at least some of the same upheaval happening in Europe.

Ben:  Hi Jon, I’m as frustrated as you on this. As clear as the sky is blue, austerity measures are a gigantic failure and it defies logic that any sane politician would argue their merit. However, you must understand that we live in an age dominated by the cult of the free market. It’s a highly dangerous cult because it is not only based on a philosophy that is evidently absurd, but is actively dangerous. The mythology is perpetuated by the business community and the rich because it works in their interest (at least in the short term), and blank slate politicians like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich will parrot whatever their paid to say. Romney isn’t an idiot and he probably understands that without government spending, the economy will continue to shrink. But he doesn’t care, he just wants to get elected and will say whatever he needs to in order to get in.

This is mostly directed at Chez. Your piece on double standards in racism was very interesting and I kinda agree. I think the ‘White guilt’ thing in the media is taken to an extreme. I don’t like Fox, but sometimes they have it right. Sometimes there is racism against white people and it needs to be called out. I don’t think this is a racist view, but the liberal media seems to act like it is.
-Callum

Chez:For years there’s been a debate over the definition of “racism” — whether it involves simply judging someone based on the color of his or her skin or the subjugation of a less powerful race by a more powerful one. I don’t really know where I stand on this, but I’m not sure I feel comfortable calling the black-vs.white double-standard in news coverage “racist.” I’m not even sure if it’s wrong — I simply pointed out that it does in fact exist. My issue when it comes to Fox being willing to go ape-shit over all these supposed examples of “reverse racism” is that the network absolutely doesn’t care one bit about fairness or journalistic ethics — it’s not doing it for some noble reason but rather to throw handfuls of red meat to its angry white audience. I don’t think it makes anyone a racist to ask questions about the difference in the way the media can occasionally cover stories dealing with race — particularly race and crime — but I really don’t think Fox News is the outlet to champion the cause of fairness for white people in the news. Honestly, I’m kind of burned out on talking about this subject, but there’s a companion piece to my original that runs today. Feel free to check it out.

Ben: I have a hard time calling out racism against white people, even though it clearly exists, mostly because I think the racism inherent in American (and British) society has been so incredibly damaging throughout history that it’s sort of irrelevant. Sure some white kids get their butts kicked because of their color, but compared to hundreds of years of slavery, murder, rape, theft and impoverishment, it isn’t exactly a pressing problem. Whites are not oppressed in America for one good reason: They overwhelmingly control government, police and business. Blacks are severely under represented in virtually every sphere of influence and have no way of fighting back against institutionalized prejudice, and this is something no white person will ever fully be able to understand. Look, personally I hate racism in any form. I’ve have black people make assumptions about me because of my race, and I’m sure I’ve inadvertently done the same – as has everyone if they’re honest. The difference is, as a privileged white person, my prejudice can seriously affect the life of a black person. And generally speaking, it rarely works the other way around. So no, I don’t think the media needs to start breaking stories on black on white racism. Just go back 50 years and the Klu Klux Klan were hanging blacks on trees for supposed crimes they had committed against whites. We don’t want to see a repeat of that.

Bob: You’re creating a false equivalence. There’s not racism against white people in the U.S. The minority would have to be in a position to racially and economically oppress the majority, and that clearly isn’t happening in America — nor has it ever happened. Racism oppresses back the advancement of minorities at both the societal level and on an individual level. Racist beliefs, racist language and racial discrimination requires an ability to control and manipulate the other race. White people control the press/media. White people control the government (there are exactly ZERO African Americans in the U.S. Senate). White people control industry and the financial system. African Americans at almost every level have very little recourse for justice, given that whites control law enforcement and the judicial system as well. For the entire history of this country, white people have enslaved, oppressed and exploited African Americans in the worst ways imaginable, and one of the two major political parties, the GOP, along with the right-wing press, Fox News and talk radio, is actively demonizing African Americans in order to stoke white anger and, thus, angry white conservative voter turnout and ratings, respectively. This is otherwise known as the Southern Strategy. I assure you, not even the most militant African American group could ever come close to oppressing whites. What you might be observing are fringe examples of anti-white resentment (hmm — I wonder why?) and anti-white bigotry (again — why?). We’re talking about a sliver of a fraction of a percent of the American population hates white people — nowhere near equal to the systemic racial intolerance coming from the white power structure. But there’s no such thing as anti-white racism. Also, the term “white guilt” is an insulting, simplistic term. It reduces the noble pursuit of racial sensitivity and an understanding historical context to a trivial colloquialism. And finally, I urge you to read this DailyKos post by author Tim Wise: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/07/15/884494/-Reading-Racism-Right-to-Left-Reflections-on-a-Powerful-Word-and-Its-Applications

What is the point of Wolf Blitzer? Can anyone explain his existence to me?
-Mark

Bob: He’s an unwaveringly monotone anchor-unit devoid of human emotion. Honestly, when I see him talking, I envision his face popping open to reveal a tiny Men In Black space alien controlling various toggles and servo motors inside Blitzer’s polymer-alloy skull. Seriously, though, I think he’s the “face” of CNN. He’s their straight news guy. Their “look! we’re very serious!” guy. If CNN lost Blitzer, I think the network would crumble.

Ben: I believe Wolf Blitzer was the prototype of the modern news anchor created in a giant lab somewhere in Atlanta.  The corporations wanted someone completely bland and innocuous to run their news shows in order to not piss off advertisers, and through trial and experimentation, they came up with Wolf Blitzer. They’ve had to fill his show up with holograms and spinning pie charts to stop people falling asleep, but generally speaking, he does a great job.

Chez: Wolf actually is a wolf. He can summon the creature at will and only the elders buried deep beneath CNN Center can contain it. Speak of this to no one.

—-

Subscribe

Chez Pazienza's feed

Enter email below:

The next President?

Mitt Romney just cannot close the deal on the Republican Presidential nomination. Despite having outspent his closest rival Rick Santorum by an amazing ratio of 4:1 in Super Tuesday States, Romney barely won the most important delegate rich Ohio (by a margin of 1%), and did not do enough to cement his position as the candidate to be, losing in Tennessee and Oklahoma and surprisingly in North Dakota.

Make no mistake, Romney is still the front runner in this race as his money bought him enough victories to stay ahead. He is so cash rich that it would not be wise to bet against him, but he is barely beating the most pathetic field of candidates in recent history.

The GOP now has a very serious problem on their hands as they simply do not have a candidate capable of winning in November. Even if Romney wins, his inability to fend off amateurish campaigns from underfunded and underwhelming rivals spells catastrophe against the extraordinary capabilities of the Obama machine. The Democrats have a telegenic super star with one of the best campaign organizations in history. The Republicans have a disingenuous robot incapable of telling the truth from one moment to the next, who, no matter how much money is thrown at him, cannot come out on top.

Rick Santorum is also incapable of winning a general election. He is too extreme for mainstream America, and while he plays well with the angry white males who watch Fox News, he has no chance with sane Republicans, swing voters or independents. They will simply sit the election out, or go with the President.

The GOP head honchos are fully aware of this problem, and must be desperately running through hail Mary contingency plans for when the dust settles. My guess is that it will come down to the Vice Presidential position. Both Romney and Santorum need a balancing partner to fill their gigantic flaws, and the GOP will have to do a damn sight better than Sarah Palin.

If I were a betting man, I’d go with Jeb Bush for Romney (he gets the Bush Sr. conservatives and a lot of the base) and Condoleeza Rice for Santorum (she’s black, and a woman – two categories Santorum has virtually no chance of appealing to by himself). Neither are particularly good choices, but when you look at the rest of the party, there isn’t much else worth talking about.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Image via Wikipedia

By Ben Cohen: The Republican party is in serious trouble. You only have to watch one of the debates to understand how completely disconnected the Presidential candidates are from reality. This disconnect works well with the base (the crazier the better) but spells suicide for a general election. Should any of the nominees other than Mitt Romney make it through the primaries, Obama will have the easiest re-election campaign in modern history. Rick Santorum’s fire breathing fundamentalism and Newt Gingrich’s sociopathic behavior make it impossible for them to take on Obama, and the money men behind the GOP know this. Mitt Romney is no idiot, but his inability to stick to a single position for more than a week and his astonishing lack of charisma makes a potential showdown with the President a serious mismatch.

More worrying for the GOP is that the problems are further reaching than the upcoming Presidential election. Why? Because the party has run out of ideas and cannot move past and an orthodoxy that the public is beginning to dismiss.

The low tax, no government fundamentalism is appealing when the economy is booming and there are jobs-aplenty. But when there is severe economic uncertainty, soaring costs and stagnating wages, people want action. And waiting for rich people to trickle their money down is not a good enough solution anymore. We’ve been waiting, and while the rich continue to amass sickening amounts of money, most people are not seeing any of it.

The GOP candidates are finding it harder and harder to sell free for all capitalism, even to their own base. So instead, they attack the President with increasing vitriol, accusing him of infanticide, apologizing to Al Qaeda, and trying to destroy religion in America. And since they’ve pretty much exhausted that line of attack,  the candidates are now attacking each other’s ‘conservatism’ all in the name of purging the party of impurities. Amazingly, it gets more and more extreme by the day and there’s no knowing where it will end. Matt Taibbi wrote a brilliant piece in Rolling Stone describing this bizarre self flagellation we’re seeing on live television:

This current race for the presidential nomination has therefore devolved into a kind of Freudian Agatha Christie story, in which the disturbed and highly paranoid voter base by turns tests the orthodoxy of each candidate, trying to figure out which one is the spy, which one is really Barack Obama bin Laden-Marx under the candidate mask!

We expected this when Mitt Romney, a man who foolishly once created a functioning health care program in Massachusetts, was the front-runner. We knew he was going to have to defend his bona fides against the priesthood (“I’m not convinced,” sneered the sideline-sitting conservative Mme. Defarge, Sarah Palin), that he would have a rough go of it at the CPAC conference, and so on.

But it’s gotten so ridiculous that even Santorum, as paranoid and hysterical a finger-pointing politician as this country has ever seen, a man who once insisted with a straight face that there is no such thing as a liberal Christian – he’s now being put through the Electric Conservative Paranoia Acid Test, and failing!

The long term effects of the Republican implosion will be significant. What has become clear is that there is no single dominant philosophy in the GOP. The free marketers, religious fundamentalists, centrists and Tea Party members are all jockeying for dominance, and all the candidates are attempting (badly) to please all of them. It is an impossible task and one that will prove fatal when fighting Obama later this year.

The Democrats have one overriding philosophy that gives them a clear advantage over the Republicans: They are not crazy.

Sadly it has come to that. The fact that the Democrats craft policy somewhat according to reality means the public at least views them as responsible adults. Other than the die hard base, the Republicans are going to have a very hard time convincing educated Americans that they are fit to run government. Their arguments about the role of government haven’t changed in decades, their unwillingness to embrace modernity is untenable, and their lack of a realistic vision for America’s future is emblematic of very serious dysfunction.

We are currently watching the end of the Republican Party as we know it. It must change or become politically irrelevant for decades to come. It will go one of two ways – the first is to modernize, reform its ideas and accept reality. The second is to withdraw further into itself and its bizarre version of reality, isolating the party from the mainstream and continuing to plug an irrelevant philosophy that bears no relation to life in the 21st century.

What is the most likely outcome? Sadly, it’s probably the latter.

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below:

Not surprisingly, Republican robot candidate Mitt Romney won the New Hampshire primary last night. Through a mixture of relentless ambition and stacks of GOP cash, Romney took a commanding lead, making him the very clear favorite going forward. From the NY Times:

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Mitt Romney swept to victory in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, turning back a ferocious assault from rivals who sought to disqualify him in the eyes of conservatives, in a contest that failed to anoint a strong opponent to slow his march to the Republican nomination.

Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, won by a double-digit margin, a validation of his strategy to use his neighboring state to cement his standing as the front-runner. The candidates who had hoped to use the primary to emerge as his leading rival fared poorly, leaving a fractured Republican opposition.

Superficially, this is great for Romney, but the numbers do not bode well for him in the long run. Romney won Iowa by 8 votes, and only secured New Hampshire by getting just under 40% of the vote.  What does this say about Romney as a candidate?

It means no one really cares about him.

In the general election, not only does Romney face the near impossible task of matching Obama for personal popularity, but he faces the brutal reality that Republicans are not motivated to go out and vote for him. Romney will most likely win the GOP primaries as he has the Bush machine lined up behind him. But he won't be enough to take on Obama's formidable organizational capabilities and unprecedented ability to raise cash. 

In some ways, it's sad to see someone as banal and deluded as Romney run for President. He genuinely believes he is the man for the job and he is willing to embarrass himself on a national stage to fulfill his ambitions. Romney will say literally anything and spend any amount of money to get the nomination signalling he really believes he can win. The truth is, he can't and he's about to find out the hard way. 

Subscribe

Ben Cohen's feed

Enter email below: