Month: November 2012

Say adios to The Man Called Petraeus


by digby

I have written reams about The Man Called Petraeus over the years. He’s a Village idol and right wing avatar who turns middle aged white men and the women who love them into giggling One Direction fans.

I dug this one up randomly:

Monday, September 10, 2007

The Oracle Speaks

by digby

Oooh. The excitement is palpable. The Man Called Petraeus is just about to speak! All morning, I’ve been watching the breathless coverage of the handsome General with all those medals on his chest walking in and standing around and then sitting down and then shuffling papers, just holding my breath wondering, “what’s he going to say?” (I only wish they’d provided a countdown clock so I knew just how much longer I had to wait!)

Thankfully, we’ve had team coverage of his entrance and his sitting and standing with lots and lots of speculation that he’s going to say that the surge is succeeding. But how could they know? TMCP is a man of unique virtue and goodness who will speak from the heart and tell the truth like his most similar predecessor General George Washington, who could not tell a lie. So I don’t care what they say. I’m going to sit back and listen to what the Great Man has to say.

And then I will make a sacrifice in thanks for his leadership and Godly attributes. A goat perhaps?

Andrea Mitchell broke down like Walter Cronkite when he announced that JFK was dead as she made the announcement. “This is very sad …” As if the anyone should care about the resignation of  the CIA chief, much less one who resigns over something as parochial as an affair. This guy has some hold on these people.

The Right is taking this especially hard, as you might imagine. They put a huge amount of stock in him for years as a symbol of all that is pure and good in America. You can imagine that the people who impeached a president over an affair are having a hard time reconciling their alleged morals with their love of  the newly revealed TMCP.

Take a look at this breathless Hot Air tick-tock from this morning:

A total bombshell, breaking right now on Fox. Catherine Herridge says the only explanation given so far is “personal reasons,” but notes that he met personally with Obama yesterday and wonders if it may have had to do with the CIA releasing that timeline on Benghazi last week. That was my gut instinct too — either this is fallout from Benghazi or there really is something personal going on.

Why would an affair mean that he couldn’t run the CIA anymore? Was he being blackmailed? Or is there more to it than this? Stand by for updates.

Update: His statement:

“Yesterday afternoon, I went to the White House and asked the President to be allowed, for personal reasons, to resign from my position as D/CIA,” Petraeus said in a statement to CIA staff. “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair. Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.”

If you’d have asked me to list 100 possible reasons why David Petraeus would eventually quit public service, having an affair would have been number 100. If it made the list at all.

Update: NBC says deputy CIA director Mike Morrell is likely to be named interim director, and may well end up being elevated to permanent status.

Update: As for the timing, I assume Petraeus intended to do this for awhile but held off until after the election so that it wouldn’t end up influencing the vote. The media spotlight on the campaign would have only drawn more attention to his predicament and magnified the embarrassment.

Which makes me wonder: If he did fear being blackmailed, why didn’t some potential blackmailer use the campaign as leverage, threatening to push this out there before the big vote if he didn’t pay up?

Update: I’m seriously shocked. The last thing I’d expect from him is a breakdown in personal discipline.

Update: For what it’s worth, Andrea Mitchell and MSNBC are hearing that Petraeus’s resignation really doesn’t have anything to do with Benghazi.

Update: I’m already getting e-mails speculating that the administration wanted him out over Benghazi and that they were the ones who forced his hand by threatening to expose his affair if he didn’t quit. I don’t follow the logic there. If that were true, the ultimatum would have been that he could either resign and keep the affair secret to avoid disgrace or have the affair exposed and then inevitably be pressured to resign anyway. Makes no sense for him to resign before the affair’s been revealed and then admit to it in his resignation.

Besides, would the White House really dare try to strongarm David Petraeus, of all people, that way? He’s probably the most widely esteemed member of Obama’s administration. If they used sleazy tactics to try to force him out, they’d live in mortal terror of him revealing the blackmail attempt and using it to turn the public against O. Just makes no sense to me.

Update: Reader “Flip” makes a nice catch. Petraeus’s resignation letter says, “After being married for over 37 years, I showed extremely poor judgment by engaging in an extramarital affair.” But Petraeus has actually been married for more than 38 years; the wedding was on July 6, 1974. In other words, if you read the resignation letter carefully, he’s telling you that this happened sometime between July 2011 and July 2012, not recently. Why didn’t he resign sooner? Or, on the flip side, why didn’t he try to hang on longer if he’d held on this long already?

Update: Hmmmmmmmm:

@markknollerSenate Intelligence Committee says Petraeus will not testify at next week’s closed hearing on the events in Benghazi.

Again, though — if this was actually engineered by the administration to force him out, why wouldn’t Petraeus reveal that publicly? After all of his service, he deserves better than to be blackmailed, even if he’s guilty of a major lapse in judgment.

I don’t know if it will happen, but this has all the markings of a major conspiracy theory — with the Villagers all on board to defend their man. Stay tuned. We may not have heard the last of The Man Called Petraeus.

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Grateful thanks to the women of America–and to Blue State men

by David Atkins

Buzzfeed has a fascinating look at what the 2012 electoral maps would have looked like at various stages of enfranchisement in the United States. Of particular note is the 1870-1920 map showing what it would have looked like if only men had been allowed to vote:

What’s amazing is that even with the great gender gap exposed by this election, men in most coastal and New England blue states would still have supported the President.

Meanwhile, If it were solely up to white men, the President would only have received 37 electoral votes.

So thank you, women of America. And thank you to liberal men as well. What we know clearly now is that the biggest racists are also the biggest misogynists, and they’re regionalized to the areas of the country that have always been the biggest headaches and the cause of our bloodiest war.

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GOP: we need more nativist partners


by digby

Rich Yeselson has written a fascinating analysis of the American electorate in the wake of the Democratic victory this week. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but this particularly interested me:

[T]he Republican Party is stuck between the revanchist cultural anxiety it needs to sustain its white male and elderly base, (which is actually encouraged and shared by its paymasters), and the inexorable erosion of that base. Any efforts to appeal to new immigrant groups of Latinos and Asian Americans (also carried 3-1 by Obama), let alone African Americans, will come up against the fears of the base that the country they knew is fast disappearing. To affirm the base’s cultural anxiety is to simultaneously denigrate the dark, lazy (John Sununu’s description of the president), moochers, criminals, and degenerates. Even a bland, representative business chieftain like Mitt Romney couldn’t run a technocratic, Mr. Fixit campaign at a time of slow economic growth. He needed surrogates like Sununu and bogus issues like Obama’s gutting of the welfare rules to make sure that the resentful stayed resentful. Other moderating voices of intellectual conservatism, like David Brooks or Ross Douthat, have more influence with their liberal friends than they do with Mitch McConnell or John Boehner—or certainly with Emma and John Runion in Florida.

No easy solution to this dilemma would appear forthcoming. The country badly needs a responsible, center right party, along the lines of the Canadian conservatives and almost every other center-right party in the world, led by a sober business class. When a party wins a landslide of the majority white vote, however, and still loses, it is in trouble.

The Party seems to be trying to come to grips with that. But the solutions are very difficult. This one struck me as one of the most likely approaches:

The working-class white vote that created the modern Republican majority is precisely the subset of voters that feels most threatened by mass immigration, culturally and economically. They revolted when Bush tried to force it on them. They will revolt again. Conservative parties as a rule have constituents that resist the kind of social change brought on by mass immigration. You can be a conservative party or a mass immigration party, not both.
[…]
Over 70 percent of black voters believe that immigration is too high. Conservatives already need to learn to speak to urban voters; why not start with the most-churched members of the city? Just like your core of Midwestern working-class whites, they believe themselves to be part of an American core that is destabilized by mass immigration. It is time to reach out to them, to assure them that you will make immigration work for all Americans, that the interests of America’s oldest minority will not be lost in the America to come. That seems like the natural task of a conservative to me.

This is, of course, an old strategy called “divide and conquer” and it’s been used successfully against immigrants since the beginning of this country. It’s called “nativism” and it’s been an important part of right wing populism since forever. I suppose it’s a measure of progress that they’re finally admitting that African-Americans are … Americans. But the idea of Republicans pitting them against Hispanic immigrants is a whole new level of cynicism.

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In case you were wondering about priorities

by digby

From the exit polls.

So why do we talk about them s if they are the biggest problem facing America?

Update: BTW, I’m hearing lots of chatter about doing Romney’s cap on charitable deductions as a way to raise revenue without raising tax rates. Why do I have a feeling that is something the army of tax lawyers and lobbyists are all gleefully rubbing their hands over? After all, they get paid big bucks to find new loopholes.

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Fiscal Cliff notes

by digby

James Galbraith lays down some truth on the Grand Bargain nonsense:

That the looming debt and deficit crisis is fake is something that, by now, even the most dim member of Congress must know. The combination of hysterical rhetoric, small armies of lobbyists and pundits, and the proliferation of billionaire-backed front groups with names like the “Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget” is not a novelty in Washington. It happens whenever Big Money wants something badly enough.

Big Money has been gunning for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid for decades – since the beginning of Social Security in 1935. The motives are partly financial: As one scholar once put it to me, the payroll tax is the “Mississippi of cash flows.” Anything that diverts part of it into private funds and insurance premiums is a meal ticket for the elite of the predator state.

And the campaign is also partly political. The fact is, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are the main way ordinary Americans connect to their federal government, except in wars and disasters. They have made a vast change in family life, unburdening the young of their parents and ensuring that every working person contributes whether they have parents, dependents, survivors or disabled of their own to look after. These programs do this work seamlessly, for next to nothing; their managers earn civil service salaries and the checks arrive on time. For the private competition, this is intolerable; the model is a threat to free markets and must be destroyed.

You have to read the whole thing to understand just how much of a scam this deficit nonsense really is.

They’ve ginned up this “fiscal cliff” as a Shock Doctrine tactic to create a sense of emergency in which to push through some shock therapy. They’re saying they want to avert a near disaster of their own making — by creating a slow rolling disaster as our income inequality, starved education system, degraded safety net and dilapidated infrastructure get worse and worse.

Krugman said this morning what the administration should do:

Just say no, and go over the cliff if necessary.

It’s worth pointing out that the fiscal cliff isn’t really a cliff. It’s not like the debt-ceiling confrontation, where terrible things might well have happened right away if the deadline had been missed. This time, nothing very bad will happen to the economy if agreement isn’t reached until a few weeks or even a few months into 2013. So there’s time to bargain.

More important, however, is the point that a stalemate would hurt Republican backers, corporate donors in particular, every bit as much as it hurt the rest of the country. As the risk of severe economic damage grew, Republicans would face intense pressure to cut a deal after all.

Meanwhile, the president is in a far stronger position than in previous confrontations. I don’t place much stock in talk of “mandates,” but Mr. Obama did win re-election with a populist campaign, so he can plausibly claim that Republicans are defying the will of the American people. And he just won his big election and is, therefore, far better placed than before to weather any political blowback from economic troubles — especially when it would be so obvious that these troubles were being deliberately inflicted by the G.O.P. in a last-ditch attempt to defend the privileges of the 1 percent.

I just don’t know if that’s what he wants to do. It is just as reasonable to think that he wants to make this Big Grand Bargain Deal that is a “balanced approach” where everyone’s got “skin in the game” and “the rich pay a little bit more.” He’s said so many times ever since the beginning of his first term.

Erskine Bowles is being talked about very seriously as the next Treasury secretary. And yesterday, he said this:

What does that alternative look like? We already have the blueprints.

It’s the type of bipartisan package toward which the fiscal commission I co-chaired with former senator Alan Simpson, the Domenici-Rivlin group, the Senate’s “Gang of Six” and the Obama-Boehner negotiations all worked. It’s a package large enough to put the debt on a clear downward path, relative to the economy, and designed well enough to promote, rather than disrupt, economic growth. It’s a package that includes real spending cuts and structural entitlement reforms to make Social Security solvent while slowing the growth of federal health spending while protecting vulnerable populations. And it’s a package that institutes fundamental tax reform that simplifies the code and encourages economic growth by cutting spending in the tax code and generating additional revenue for deficit reduction…

I have been saying for months that the deal that’s emerging is for (temporary) chump change from millionaires in exchange for cuts to “entitlements.” When the Democrats made revenue the hill they would die on rather than cuts to SS, Medicare and medicaid, it was baked in the cake. Indeed, from the sound of it, the Democrats are so wedded to calling “revenue” a victory that they’ll do almost anything to get it.

What we can hope for is that both the left and right wings balk at this Big Deal. The centrist majority insisted on a bunch of phony deadlines and are acting as if they are written in stone. They aren’t. They created them, they can change them. We don’t have to do this.

Update: The president just spoke and indicated that he wanted to extend the middle class tax cuts right now but that he wouldn’t cut entitlements without asking the wealthy to pay a dime more. I’m guessing that’s what they’ll go for. A dime from the rich in exchange for cuts in social security, Medicare and medicaid.

I hope I’m wrong. But the Villagers are all saying that the country voted for bipartisanship. They always do. And the consensus among Andrea Mitchell’s NBC sewing circle of Chuck Todd, Chris Matthews et al, the “word” is that the GOP is ready to accept some vague “revenue” (as long as it’s not rate hikes) in exchange for a hike in the retirement age. If I had to guess at this moment, I agree that that’s the pound of “skin in the game” they really want. Whether they get it will depend on how demoralized the Norquistian Tea Partiers are and whether the progressives have any muscle at all.

Update II: James Clyburn says that they have to tweak Medicare and Medicaid. He says he can deliver the votes for the president if the right wing Republicans won’t play. So ….

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It’s a white problem, not an age problem


by digby

As I wrote yesterday, I agree with David’s post below. I honestly think that ideology probably mattered far less than a rejection of the general meanness and lack of empathy shown by Republicans over these last few years of hard times. I guess I’m just a Pollyanna, but I don’t believe that a majority of the American people feel the kind of hatred for their fellow men and women.

However, I must take exception to one thing that David said below. He indicates through his final picture that this is the province of elderly white people and they are not going to be allowed to dictate the course of this country for the future. Here’s the problem: it isn’t just elderly white people. It’s white people, even young ones:

The youngest are indeed, more Democratic. But they also, as usual, feature a larger share of third party votes, many of which are libertarian and will translate into Republican votes as they get older. Yes, they’re less conservative than their elders, but not that much less conservative.

The reason I bring this up is because I think it’s important to be clear eyed about generational theories. I grew up in what was thought by every cultural and political observer of the time to be a monolithic liberal generation. We made up a gigantic portion of the population and changed many things in our time. But it was a mistake to believe that we were all liberal, even if popular culture made it seem so — as Nixonland showed, the baby boomers were politically divided just like everyone else, even then. And many of them became more conservative as they grew older.

There are fewer white racists among the younger generation, no doubt about it. And David is right that many of the dogwhistles were aimed at the old codgers. But there was only about a five point difference between the oldest white Republican voters and the youngest — and there is no difference at all among whites over the age of 39, most of whom will be voting for a very long time to come.

This is less an age problem than a race problem and we’d better be aware of that.  Take it from me, it’s highly unlikely that these younger white people are going to get any more liberal as time goes on.

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Did they really think only old white men would hear the dogwhistles?

by David Atkins

The political world is still reeling from the stunning revelation that Mitt Romney and his advisers had no idea they were going to lose until the returns came in. It turns out that Romney’s push into Pennsylvania was neither desperate nor a bluff. They literally did believe they were expanding the map.

There’s much that can be said about this. The first point, of course, is that Romney and Ryan were supposed to be hard-nosed numbers guys if nothing else. That was their entire claim to fame. And they couldn’t apparently see the numbers that anyone taking a random look at the poll trackers could tell at a glance. That is very scary, and says a great deal about the conservative bubble of epistemic closure. No longer are the pied pipers leading the deluded flock. The inmates are now running the entire GOP asylum.

But equally important to note is one reason why they disbelieved the polling that clearly showed they would lose: they thought that youth and minorities would turn out at lower rates than in 2008, despite the growth of both demographic segments in the intervening time. They believed that the 2008 election was a black sheep that could not and would not be replicated:

They misread turnout. They expected it to be between 2004 and 2008 levels, with a plus-2 or plus-3 Democratic electorate, instead of plus-7 as it was in 2008. Their assumptions were wrong on both sides: The president’s base turned out and Romney’s did not. More African-Americans voted in Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida than in 2008. And fewer Republicans did: Romney got just over 2 million fewer votes than John McCain.

The question is, why did they believe this?

Despite the craziness of Sarah Palin, it’s important to remember that John McCain and most of the GOP establishment didn’t go hard after the Nixonland race card in 2008. Sure, there was some of that. But they knew that if they pushed it too hard, it would backfire on them.

In the intervening four years, the Republican message against Obama has been nothing but one long racist tirade.

Muslim. Kenyan. Foreign. Hussein. Doesn’t share our values. Not Christian. Wants to cut the work requirement in welfare. Obamaphones. “Holder’s People.” Black Panthers. “Moochelle Chewbacca Obama.” “The White Hut.” “Entitlement society.” “Makers versus takers.” Recovery, not dependency. Parasites.
This:

And this:

Did they think African-Americans wouldn’t notice? Did they think only white people could hear those dogwhistles and outright racist primal screams?

Did they think Latinos wouldn’t hear the last four years of vitriol thrown at them and their families by Fox News and the fever swamps on the AM dial? That they could celebrate Jan Brewer’s and Joe Arpaio’s sick sadism and that Latinos would take heed?

Did they think that Asians could be subjected to this hateful nonsense and not know exactly where they stood on the GOP’s totem pole?

Did they believe that young people wouldn’t notice that Republicans wanted to saddle them with Vouchercare, keep them off them parents’ healthcare plans, burden them with massive student loans and spit upon every social value of equality they hold dear?

Did they believe that women would forget that the GOP platform wants to force them to carry their rapists’ babies, and insist that they continue to cheated out of 25 cents or more on every dollar in the workplace? Did they believe that they could do this to the amazing Sandra Fluke and that young women wouldn’t know exactly what to do about it?

Did they believe that they could reject wholesale every piece of sound science on reproduction, evolution, climate change and economics, use the word “Professor” as an insult during debates, and that educated Americans of all stripes wouldn’t react as if their lives and safety depended on it?

Are boardroom and parish Republicans so used to speaking in code to one audience while bamboozling another audience that they thought no one would notice?

Sure, Barack Obama has lost some of the glitz and allure of his 2008 candidacy. The ugliness and realities of politics will do that, and Obama’s insistence on compromise above all else hasn’t helped.

But did the Republicans really believe that women, youth, minorities, and educated folk wouldn’t recognize a visceral threat to our existence when we saw it? That we wouldn’t turn out to vote? That we wouldn’t do everything in our power to prevent the measures of our lives from being determined by these people?

Apparently so. But they misjudged badly. We’re here. We noticed. The dogwhistles didn’t go unheard. And we’re as determined to stop them as we’ve ever been.

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Tomorrow belongs to them

by digby

This new video from the Heritage Foundation should knock the right wing out of its doldrums:

As Molly Ivins famously said, it was better in the original German.

Update: Richard Viguerie is already agitatin’ as only Viguerie can agitate:

This seems like a goods time to read this important piece by Rick Perstein about Conservative Movement Inc.

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Romney’s cryin’ (poor)

by digby

No really …

The GOP nominee emerged late last spring from a long and bruising Republican primary season more damaged than commonly realized. His image with voters had eroded as he endured heavy attacks from Republicans over his business record. He also felt compelled to take a hard line on immigration—one that was the subject of debate among his advisers—that hurt his standing with Hispanic voters.

More than that, Mr. Romney had spent so much money winning the nomination that he was low on cash; aides, seeing the problem taking shape, had once considered accepting federal financing for the campaign rather than rely on private donations.

The campaign’s fate led on Wednesday to second-guessing and recriminations among Republicans chagrined that a seemingly winnable race slipped away. Some Republicans wondered whether the Romney campaign had misjudged the power of President Barack Obama’s coalition, while others were questioning Mr. Romney’s and the party’s approach to immigration.

Back in spring, the Romney campaign’s biggest worry was money. So the campaign’s finance chair, Spencer Zwick, huddled with political director Rich Beeson to craft a complex schedule that took Mr. Romney to the cities that were prime real estate for fundraising.

It meant visits to places like California, Texas and New York—none of which were important political battlegrounds—while only allowing for quick side trips to swing states that Mr. Romney would need to win to become president.

Spencer Zwick, the Romney aide who scrambled to raise enough money for the campaign.

On one level the strategy worked: Mr. Romney ultimately garnered some $800 million or more, putting him in close competition with Mr. Obama’s robust fundraising effort.

But Mr. Romney paid a deep political price. The fundraising marathon reduced his ability to deliver his own message to voters just as the Obama campaign was stepping in to define the Republican candidate on its terms. Mr. Romney’s heavy wooing of conservative donors limited his ability to move his campaign positions to the center, to appeal to moderate and independent donors.

The search for cash led him to a Florida mansion for a private fundraiser where Mr. Romney would make the deeply damaging, secretly recorded remarks where he disparaged and dismissed the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes.

In the end, Mr. Romney lost nearly every swing state. Other factors contributed to his defeat, of course, including difficulty making voters warm to him and a dearth of support among Hispanics.

But in the eyes of top aides in both campaigns, that early summer period when Mr. Romney was busy fundraising was perhaps the biggest single reason he lost the election.

Gosh, maybe Mitt should have cashed out a piece of that hundred million dollar IRA. (In fact, did he put even one penny of his own money into this thing?)

I don’t even know what to say. The idea that they and their deep pockets Super PACs lost for lack of money has to be the silliest rationalization for his loss yet.

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No Republicans, more GOTV won’t help you that much

by David Atkins

The consensus among the conservative chattering class appears to be that they wasted their money on Karl Rove and their SuperPACs, and that their consultant class did a terrible job and is screwing them over.

All of this is true, of course, and reminiscent of conversations that progressives were having in 2000 and 2004. Both sides have a consultant problem to a certain degree, but the conservative movement has even more of these flim-flam operations and more big donors to bilk.

Still, the biggest lesson Republicans learned this cycle was that they need to spend less money on TV and mail, and more on direct voter contact. See, for instance, this from one of the Breitbart flacks:

To be sure, Obama and the Democrats also spent a lot on broadcast TV, but they also committed enormous resources in direct voter contact and turning out the vote. The Republicans were several orders of magnitude less sophisticated on this front. Its a big reason why the GOP was able to spend billions on this election and win fewer votes than McCain won in 2008.

Then there’s Rush Limbaugh:

It’s a huge error if [Republicans] think that demography did them in. They didn’t get their base out.

That’s not even necessarily true. We’ll know more when all the votes are tallied.

Regardless, the Republicans’ problem here is that Get-Out-The-Vote (GOTV) efforts are much more useful to Democrats than to Republicans. Why?

Because, simply put, there are many more progressive voters in this country than conservative ones, and conservative voters are much more reliable. If we could guarantee 100% turnout, Republicans would never win another national election.

As effective as the Obama ground game was, Democrats still have a great deal of room to grow our vote among the young and the economically disadvantaged who traditionally vote much less frequently. Republican voters are a smaller (and shrinking) share of the electorate and effectively turn themselves out to vote. Also, as Digby has noted here in the past, most of the conservative “cusp” voters are social conservatives whom the evangelical and hardcore Catholic churches are already working hard to turn out. Ralph Reed didn’t just go away.

Then there’s the fact that money just isn’t as good at buying a ground game as it is at buying TV. A good ground game is much less effective if the people working the ground don’t really believe in the cause. Paid precinct walkers are notoriously unreliable and constantly fake data if their hearts and souls aren’t in the game.

So Republicans can transfer some of their money into GOTV. But it won’t work that well. They’ll be chasing a smaller share of an already mostly reliable electorate, with paid flunkies who won’t be as effective as our passionate idealists, to target voters already being hit with more credibility by religious groups.

Talking about devoting resources to GOTV is just another example of Republicans believing that they can fix their structural, demographic and moral problems by simply throwing money at them and hoping they go away.

It won’t work.

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