This is harsh but there is an element of truth in it:
A “parasite” on the Democratic Party is how journalist Edward Isaac Dovere describes former President Obama in his forthcoming tell-all book “Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaign to Defeat Trump.”
In a chapter entitled “Benign Neglect,” Dovere writes that the section’s namesake is how Obama aides privately described his abandonment of the Democratic Party once in the White House. “‘Negligence’ might be more accurate,” Dovere, writer for The Atlantic and former chief Washington correspondent for Politico, writes.
“The numbers are hard to ignore: during his eight years in office, Obama oversaw a net loss of 947 state legislative seats, 63 House seats, 11 senators, and 13 governors,” he continues.
In 2008, Democrats increased their majorities in the House and Senate, delivering Obama the legislature for his first two years in office. In 2010, Republicans took the majority in the House with the Tea Party wave and Democrats maintained but shrunk their majority in the Senate. In 2014, Republicans gained control of both the House and Senate.
Dovere writes that the 44th president carried himself with a “self-assured self-regard.”
“Obama never built a Democratic bench and never cared to, aside from a few scattered candidates who interested him,” according to the book.
Dovere writes that “defenders” of Obama have argued he didn’t want to “taint” his presidency by ” mucking about in fundraising,” or that he didn’t want to spoil the image voters had of him as an independent politician, or that faced with the choice to campaign or govern, he would always choose govern.
Dovere writes that during his first term, Obama used the party structure as a “host” for his next campaign.
In 2009, Obama hired his friend Tim Kaine to head the DNC, even though Kaine was also serving as governor for the first year on the job.
In a scathing passage Dovere claims Kaine was at the time “commuting two days a week to oversee the pilfering of talent, money, resources, and purpose for the Obama reelection effort that was already under way.”
“In his second term, he cared about what happened to the husk as much as any parasite does,” Dovere says.
Dovere pointed to the Obama team’s decision to strike a deal with the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that saddled the committee with $2.4 million in leftover debt from Obama’s 2012 election. In return, “Obama for America” gave the DNC its email list, and Obama was supposed to headline additional fundraisers.
Obama’s peak pride came in 2015, Dovere writes, when on back-to-back days the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare, his signature achievement, and ruled the 14th Amendment requires all states to grant same-sex marriages.
“‘In hindsight it’s hard not to see delusion in the self-assurance and the celebration and the sense of moving forward of those two weeks in America,” Dovere writes.
People who’ve read this blog for a long time will recall that I was apoplectic about the Grand Bargain which I knew was a chump move. The Republicans had made it clear for quite some time that they had passed from normal political horse-trading into all-out partisan combat. I was particularly appalled by Obama’s assurance to the red state Democratic Reps who tried to tell him that they were going to lose their seats in 2010 that they didn’t need to worry because “you have me.” There was a whole lot of hubris in that first term. (And it wasn’t just Obama, although he set the tone. His entire entourage was full of themselves.)
However, I did think they wised up in the final term and became a lot less arrogant. And they did a lot of good. I certainly personally benefited from Obamacare. And I think you also have to recognize that they were up against a rabid opposition that was hardly less crazed than they were under Trump. It’s a tough time to be president. The country is coming apart.
Even when our most basic civilizational values are in dispute, there are a few sets of rules and regulations that we nevertheless manage to share. The laws of the sea, for example, or the norms governing the conduct of air-traffic controllers. Pilots of any nationality, even when flying to Caracas, Havana, or Pyongyang, have no reason to believe that the instructions they receive from the ground are political or deceitful, or meant to achieve any purpose other than a safe landing.
Now the dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has shattered that basic assumption in a stunt with no exact precedent. Yesterday, aviation authorities there collaborated in the hijacking of a Ryanair plane that was crossing through Belarusian airspace en route from Athens, Greece, to Vilnius, Lithuania. Belarusian air-traffic control falsely told the pilots that the plane had a bomb on board. According to Belarusian state media, the plane was then “escorted” to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, by a MiG fighter jet.
In reality, there was no bomb, the threat was fake, and Minsk was not even the closest airport; after the plane landed, nobody rushed to get the passengers to safety. The real point of the exercise became clear after two passengers were removed. One of them was Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian opposition blogger and journalist. The other was his girlfriend, Sofya Sapega. Protasevich was one of the original editors of Nexta, a Telegram blogging channel that became one of the most important sources of public information during mass anti-regime demonstrations that took place in Minsk last summer. Protasevich fled the country in 2019 and has been living in exile ever since. In absentia, the Belarusian state had declared him a “terrorist.” While he was being taken away, he told one of the other passengers, “I am facing the death penalty.” Certainly, a prison sentence in Belarus can include Soviet-style interrogations, isolation, and torture.
Some of the details remain unclear. Ryanair maintained a bizarre, stony silence in the hours after the hijacking, issuing a statement of such blandness that it could have been referring to routine maintenance problems. Only this morning did the Irish discount airline’s CEO call the incident “state-sponsored hijacking.” But what happened is not in doubt. The Belarusian regime abused air-traffic-control procedures that are designed to inform pilots about genuine emergencies in order to kidnap a dissident. In other words, this is a story that belongs alongside the Russian use of radioactive poisons and nerve agents against enemies of the Kremlin in London and Salisbury, England; Saudi Arabia’s brutal murder of one of its citizens inside a consulate in Istanbul; Iranian assassinations of dissidents in the Netherlands and Turkey; and Beijing’s kidnapping and detention of Chinese nationals living abroad and foreign citizens of Chinese origin. The human-rights organization Freedom House calls these new practices “transnational repression,” and has compiled more than 600 examples.
All of these cases form part of what is becoming a new norm: Authoritarian states in pursuit of their enemies no longer feel the need to respect passports, borders, diplomatic customs, or—now—the rules of air-traffic control. In this new world, dictators are ever more prepared to arrest or murder political dissidents anywhere, no matter what citizenship they might have or which foreign laws or bureaucratic procedures might theoretically protect them. Sometimes these regimes put pressure on other countries to help them. Other times they kidnap people unassisted. The price they have to pay as a result, in sanctions or in bad relations with the outside world, clearly no longer bothers them.
This particular incident is notable because, unlike the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, Lukashenko has so few levers of influence abroad. Belarus has little trading clout, no important investments in New York or London, no oligarchs who own British soccer teams and help normalize the dictator’s rule overseas. That Lukashenko is now willing to falsely detain and possibly endanger a European-owned, European-registered airplane carrying mostly European Union citizens from one EU nation to another means that he is prepared for a total break with Europe—and that he is completely confident of Russian economic and political support when it happens. Already, the head of RT, the Russian state-sponsored international television channel, has tweeted that the hijacking makes her “envy” Belarus. Lukashenko, she wrote, “performed beautifully.” Another senior Russian official called the hijacking “feasible and necessary.” But that isn’t surprising: Autocrats supporting other autocrats who break international law is one more element of the new norm.
We are in an era of chaotic rule-breaking on every level, whether it’s a bunch of delusional yahoos deciding to “audit” an election that has already been decided to a former president successfully promulgating a Big Lie to tens of millions of people to various autocrats simply discarding the international order altogether with very little pushback from the rest of the world. It’s a dicey time.
Last week, to very little fanfare, House Democrats released their 2020 “after action report,” also known as an “autopsy.” The team, led by Rep. Sean Maloney, D-N.Y., included Reps. Jim Himes D-Conn., Katie Porter D-Ca. and Nikema Williams, D-Ga., and was tasked with finding out how the House managed to lose so many seats in an election in which the Democratic nominee managed to unseat an incumbent Republican president. Working with senior staff, Demnocrats analyzed the voter files from the presidential election and other state and local data and compared them with 600 different House race polls in 2020. According to this report in the Washington Post, they didn’t really find anything that most observers hadn’t already assumed from the results.
It turns out that Democrats underestimated the number of hardcore Trump lovers, which they surmised made the “defund the police” and “socialism” lies more potent in the swing districts. That underestimation is attributed to bad polling, which has been validated by pollsters themselves. Many Republicans just aren’t responding anymore and the pollsters failed to successfully weigh their polls accordingly. (This has been going on for a while and really needs to be dealt with.) Maloney told the caucus that such faulty polling led them to spend too much time and money on “red-to-blue” districts and not enough to defend their incumbents in what turned out to be tight races.
They also finally came to terms with the fact that they spend way too much money on TV ads (which is going to make campaign consultants very sad.)
The Democrats always do this after an election and it’s a smart policy. In fact, both parties used to do it routinely, particularly after a loss, so you would expect that the Republicans would have been especially curious to know what brought them low in an election in which they lost the trifecta. But as far as I can tell, the last time the GOP conducted a formal autopsy was after the 2012 election when they were delivered the bad news that they would have to stop being racist and sexist if they wanted to grow their party. Obviously, they did not take that analysis seriously.
What the GOP did do after 2018 was test drive some of their newer ideas about how to “win” when they get fewer votes and how to prevent the Democrats from governing. Recall that after the party lost 40 House seats in 2018, the states of Michigan and Wisconsin didn’t decide they needed to change their message or their policies. As New York magazine’s Eric Levitz wrote at the time:
Republicans’ strength in rural areas — combined with heavily gerrymandered district maps — allowed the GOP to retain comfortable state legislative majorities in the midterms, despite receiving fewer votes in statewide races. In response to this outcome, the GOP’s legislative majorities in both states aren’t resting on their laurels, or resigning themselves to their newly limited authority. Rather, they’re using their lame-duck sessions to usurp a wide variety of powers from their states’ incoming Democratic governors and attorneys general.
Needless to say, among Republicans’ top priorities was supercharging their existing strategy to restrict voting rights, which has now been taken up by red states all over the country, even states like Iowa which voted for Trump in 2020 by double digits.
The 2012 GOP autopsy diagnosed the problem correctly but the party decided to destroy democracy rather than change their toxic message. Donald Trump was just the guy who got the grassroots fully engaged in getting the job done.
As for the Democrats, their 2020 autopsy doesn’t go into what messaging should be used going forward but so far it appears that the party is planning to run with a “Morning in America” campaign, betting on the improved economy and the end of the pandemic to allow them to beat the usual predicted mid-term losses. If President Biden can stay fairly popular and the Republicans keep cannibalizing themselves it might work. But if that’s all they have in the hopper, I think they are ignoring their own data. There are tens of millions of hardcore Trump worshipers out there. And according to this latest survey by the Democratic polling outfit Democracy Corps, they are ready to rumble:
We were also surprised by how much Donald Trump’s loyalist party is totally consolidated at this early point in its 2022 voting and how engaged it is. Yes, they have pulled back from historic presidential year levels: the percent scoring 10, the highest level of interest in the election, has fallen from 84 to 68 percent. But Democrats’ engagement fell from 85 percent to 57 per-cent. Republicans are following their political theater much more closely than are Democrats — producing an 11-point gap.
And what are the Republicans excited about? Government spending? Dr. Seuss? Liz Cheney? Nope. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, they are obsessed with The Big Lie:
The grassroots effort to punish Gov. Brian Kemp largely fizzled at key Republican meetings across the state this weekend even as record crowds of activists continued a relentless focus on former President Donald Trump’s lies about Georgia’s election results.
It’s not just in Georgia or Arizona, both of which have Democratic senators who won special elections in 2020 and will have to secure their seats in 2022. The Washington Post reports:
The ramifications of Trump’s ceaseless attacks on the 2020 election are increasingly visible throughout the country: In emails, phone calls and public meetings, his supporters are questioning how their elections are administered and pressing public officials to revisit the vote count — wrongly insisting that Trump won the presidential race.
A Georgia judge just ruled that local voters can inspect ballots from the 2020 election.
The Big Lie is now the main Republican grassroots organizing and mobilization tool. Sure they’re pretending to be up in arms about Mr. Potato Head, but this is what is getting them off of their La-Z-Boys to go down to their local GOP meetings and volunteer. Their Dear Leader said that he “wouldn’t be surprised if they found thousands and thousands and thousands of votes” in Arizona and he predicted they’re going to Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and New Hampshire with similar audits. It’s unlikely that will happen but it doesn’t really matter. Trump is going to start up his rallies again next month and his followers will be fed a steady diet of the Big Lie — which is perversely reinforced if the “proof” cannot be obtained.
And in case you were wondering if the heroine of the republic is ready to step in and lead her small faction away from this hideous mutilation of the electoral process, think again:
And all this hysterical enthusiasm is supposed to be matched in 2022 by euphoric Democratic voters rushing to the polls to register their gratitude to the party for bringing back the economy and getting the vaccines distributed? I have my doubts. Let’s hope they realize sooner rather than later that it’s going to be metaphorical hand-to-hand combat for the foreseeable future and plan accordingly.
Democratic lawmakers heading back home to their districts are concerned over their safety in light of the January 6 Capitol riot and continuing threats, The Washington Post reported.
Several Democrats have privately expressed concerns to leadership over their safety, while others have publicly spoken about the difficulty of balancing the need for public in-person events with the need for security, the Post reported.
“Obviously we’re going to return to more outward-facing live, in-person things and I’m thrilled about that. I want to do that,” Rep. Susan Wild told the Post. “I think we’re going to have to be very cautious. I think there’s going to have to be some ramped-up security. Hopefully it’s going to be low key, I don’t want people to feel like they’re walking into an armed event, but I imagine doing a lot of events in parks, in the daytime, staffers and local police are around.”
Earlier this month, the Capitol Police reported that threats against lawmakers increased by 107% in the first five months of 2021 compared to 2020.
“Provided the unique threat environment we currently live in, the Department is confident the number of cases will continue to increase,” the Capitol Police wrote earlier this month in response to an inspector general report.
Nothing to see here folks. Just normal politics as usual.
“This is as close to a coup attempt as this country has ever seen,” former D.C. police chief Charles Ramsey told CNN as the Jan. 6 insurrection by a Trump mob unfolded. [Video here.] Ramsey had perhaps forgotten the murders and coup d’état perpetrated by white mobs in Wilmington, N.C. in 1898, or the massacre of Blacks in Tulsa, Okla. in 1921. Or perhaps he never heard of them.
Silence is just the way perpetrators like it.
Call it critical race television. “60 Minutes” Sunday night ran a segment on Tulsa’s 1921 Greenwood massacre. Between 150 and 300 Black children, women and men perished in a white riot against “Black Wall Street” that began with an attempted lynching. The white mob used small arms, machine guns, and fire bombs dropped from airplanes to level about 36 city blocks and displace 10,000 Black residents from what was at the time an oasis of Black prosperity.
In the aftermath, no one was arrested, charged or prosecuted. No insurance company would pay the claims of Black customers. The city paid one claim. The dead, it is suspected, disappeared into mass graves the city is just now trying to locate one hundred years later. A conspiracy of silence effectively and chillingly disappeared the history of what happened, too. In the aftermath, Tulsa became “a haven for the Ku Klux Klan.”
Scott Pelley spoke the congregation of Vernon AME Church:
Scott Pelley: this was not taught in the public schools?
Congregant: No.
Scott Pelley: You never heard about this in class?
Congregant: You never heard a word about it.
Damario Solomon-Simmons: When I went to OU in 1998, I was sitting in a class of African American history. And the professor was talking about this place where Black people had businesses and had money and had doctors and lawyers. And he said it was in Tulsa. And I raised my hand, I said, “No, I’m from Tulsa. That’s not accurate.” And he was talking about this massacre riot. I said, “Man, what are you talking about?” I said, “I went to school on Greenwood. I’ve never heard of this ever.”
Sometimes the victors don’t write the history. They bury it.
The Wilmington race riot of 1898 by a white mob in the predominantly Black city of Wilmington, North Carolina is better reported. Two decades before Tulsa, an editorial on the topic of lynchings in a Black-owned Wilmington newspaper suggested that “our experiences among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than the white men with the colored women.”
Armed rioters in front of destroyed press Daily Record building. Photo was reproduced in Collier’s Weekly. Via Library of Congress.
In response, “a mob numbering as many as 2,000 whites” burned the newspaper building to the ground, then organized a coup d’état to displace the Republican-Populist “Fusion” city government and replace it with all-white officials. “Citing ineffectual leadership, corrupt officials, and soaring crime, the men justified their actions as for the greater good of Wilmington society.” Researchers in 1997 found no support for those claims.
As many as 60 may have been murdered in the violence. All Black.
For all the violent moments in United States history, the mob’s gruesome attack was unique: It was the only coup d’état ever to take place on American soil.
What happened that day was nearly lost to history. For decades, the perpetrators were cast as heroes in American history textbooks. The black victims were wrongly described as instigators. It took nearly a century for the truth of what had really happened to begin to creep back into public awareness. Today, the old site of The Daily Record is a nondescript church parking lot—an ordinary-looking square of matted grass on a tree-lined street in historic Wilmington. The Wilmington Journal, a successor of sorts to the old Daily Record, stands in a white clapboard house across the street. But there’s no evidence of what happened there in 1898.
The year 1898 marked a turning point in violent race relations across the country. At the same time Wilmington was dealing with its violence, Phoenix, South Carolina underwent a violent episode in which at least 13 men, including one white man, were killed by white mobs. After Wilmington’s riot, followed closely in the press throughout the country, other states experienced similar unrest within a short span of time. Within 25 years of Wilmington’s riot, at least six other major race riots occurred throughout the country in which blacks lost their lives, property, and experienced ever tightening controls on their rights. In all cases, the numbers of black dead were never fully tallied with estimates ranging from as few as seven dead in the Springfield, Illinois riot to as many as 500 injured in Chicago. Massive property damage and a mass exodus of blacks also followed.
The Atlanta Riot of 1906 closely resembled the building tensions and outbreak of violence in Wilmington. Atlanta had struggled to recover from the Civil War and re-invent itself as a “New South” city. Attempts to revitalize the city faltered until the turn of the twentieth century and the violence in 1906 reflected growing tension between whites and blacks regarding segregated public spaces. The white rioters focused their attention on destruction of the upwardly mobile, successful black businessmen of the city. Additional impetus for the violence was linked to reports of black-on-white sexual assault.
This is the same strategy they're using for 1/6: run out the clock, target low-level operators instead of criminal elites, sell Americans savior syndrome fairy tales while refusing to investigate serious attack.
Only it's not just GOP doing it; it's GOP and complicit Dems.
Even now, supporters of Donald J. Trump are attempting to bury the history of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and prevent a full congressional investigation. Americans cannot allow that to happen. Not again.
“The American people need to be prepared for the fairly likely possibility that the former president will be prosecuted,” Jonathan Chait wrote last week after New York’s Office of the Attorney General announced that the Trump Organization is now under criminal investigation.
In essence, get ahead of what’s coming so you aren’t playing catch-up after the fact. Trump and company are already playing offense.
While polling on the matter is scant, I’ve found that even among news-savvy liberals I speak with, few people grasp the severity of Trump’s legal exposure. Trump fans “know” he is a brilliant businessman based on the character he portrayed in a reality show, and Trump haters have heard about his financial difficulties.
His likely criminal record has been discussed much less frequently, and often in fairly long, dense reported investigative stories. The best of these was a 2018 New York Timesreport describing Trump’s practice of creating fake shell companies to bury profits. The Times described this as “outright fraud” — fraud being a defined crime, not just an aggressive use of tax shelters or operating in legal gray areas. And while most of that fraud took place decades ago, other reporting has built a very strong case that Trump has engaged in tax fraud much more recently.
Donald Trump is no more legally bulletproof than he is 6′-3″ and 243 pounds. Especially should his accountant Allen Weisselberg cooperate with authorities to save his own skin. The public should be prepared for the sun to set on the Trump Organization. The more prepared they are, the less propensity for violence in the streets. (Let’s be blunt.)
The more surprised the public is to learn of charges against Trump (should they be filed), the easier it will be for Trump to depict them as political. Trump’s criminal defense will be the legal equivalent of his familiar political message: corroding confidence in public institutions and spreading his belief that corruption is the norm.
As much as it has been a relief not to watch nonstop coverage of the Trump Show, it is a mistake to ignore what he and his followers are up to. Better to force him to react to a nonstop stream of negative news about himself.
Get the meme rolling. Not only that, but toss in some accelerant. The Trump brand must be further devalued along with that of his party. Whatever disagreements one might have with James Carville, this comment from his recent Vox interview seems like sound advice:
… Democrats can’t fuck it up. They have to make the Republicans own that insurrection every day. They have to pound it. They have to call bookers on cable news shows. They have to get people to write op-eds. There will be all kinds of investigations and stories dripping out for god knows how long, and the Democrats should spend every day tying all of it to the Republican Party. They can’t sit back and wait for it to happen.
Which is what Republicans are counting on.
The veritable future depends on turning the insurrection into the GOP’s albatross. Carville added, “So whatever you think Republicans would do to us [had the insurrectionsists been lefties], that’s exactly what the hell we need to do them.” Sans threats and violence.
For their part, Republicans such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and the soon-to-be indicted Rep. Matt Gaetz are actively trying to disappear the insurrection down the memory hole by yanking the media spotlight onto phony election audits.
Trump adviser Roger Stone told a crowd in Tallahassee, “Politics isn’t bean bag.” Veterans of Bloody Sunday have the scars to prove it. If we hope not to suffer more of them, Republicans and Dear Leader need to be consigned to playing defense.
CNN’s John Harwood pays tribute to a couple of people who saw it coming:
The essay described congressional extremists, their rejection of truth, a party turning into authoritarians or “an apocalyptic cult.” It bore a striking headline:” Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.”
Published in 2012, that Washington Post piece demonstrates more than the foresight of its political scientist authors, Tom Mann of the center-left Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein of the center-right American Enterprise Institute. It shows the disease within the Republican Party had spread long before Trump metastasized it.
Their conclusions — that the GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” — did not gain wide acceptance then. Many journalists joined leading Republicans in dismissing them.
“Ultra, ultra liberals” whose views “carry no weight with me,” sneered Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.”I thought they overstated things,” Republican Charlie Dent, then serving his fourth term in the House from Pennsylvania, recalls now.
“People like me were thinking, ‘Yeah, there are some kooky people around, but c’mon,'” says William Kristol, who was then editing the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. With John Boehner as House speaker and Mitt Romney winning the GOP presidential nomination, Kristol saw the Republican mainstream still in command.
All have since gotten slugged by reality. What ailed the party in 2012 has worsened.Kristol’s magazine, having diverged from Trump-era orthodoxy, no longer exists. Of his earlier sources of reassurance: Boehner fled Congress to author a book decrying his colleagues’ dysfunction; Romney has become a pariah as the only Republican senator who twice voted to convict Trump on impeachment charges.
Dent, now a CNN political commentator, quit the House after moderates like him became further marginalized. McConnell was shaken by violence inside the US Capitol for which he declared the defeated Republican President “practically and morally responsible.””I don’t get much satisfaction out of being right,” says Mann, now retired in California. “A country, and a system, like ours has to have two strong governing parties. The fact is, we only have one.”
“It’s a grim picture for the foreseeable future,” adds Ornstein. “We have a serious risk of losing our democracy.”
Yeah. Some of us knew what was happening and endorsed the Ornstein-Mann thesis at the time. The following
As thrilling as it was to see Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann declare that it’s all the Republicans’ fault, I have to confess that I don’t believe it’s quite the Village earthquake everyone seems to think it is. After all, it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve made this observation. Here’s Ornstein in November of 2003:
[F]aced with a series of tough votes and close margins, Republicans have ignored their own standards and adopted a practice that has in fact become frequent during the Bush presidency, of stretching out the vote when they were losing until they could twist enough arms to prevail. On at least a dozen occasions, they have gone well over the 15 minutes, sometimes up to an hour.
The Medicare prescription drug vote–three hours instead of 15 minutes, hours after a clear majority of the House had signaled its will–was the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated the longstanding tradition of the House floor’s being off limits to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor during the vote to twist arms–another shameful first.
The speaker of the House is the first government official mentioned in the Constitution. The speaker is selected by a vote of the whole House and represents the whole House. Hastert is a good and decent man who loves the House. But when the choice has been put to him, he has too often opted to abandon that role for partisan gain.
Democracy is a fragile web of laws, rules and norms. The norms are just as important to the legitimacy of the system as the rules. Blatant violations of them on a regular basis corrode the system. The ugliness of this one will linger.
That was nine years ago. The Republicans weren’t duly chastised then and won’t be now.
But what would happen if they were? By that I mean, suppose they all read Mann and Ornstein’s bill of indictment and decided that they had gone far enough and it was time to start working with the Democrats again. Can we all see the problem with that? They’ve moved the so far to the right that they can easily declare a truce tomorrow secure in the knowledge that they’ve already won.
Here’s how Ornstein and Mann characterize today’s Democratic Party:
Democrats are hardly blameless, and they have their own extreme wing and their own predilection for hardball politics. But these tendencies do not routinely veer outside the normal bounds of robust politics. If anything, under the presidencies of Clinton and Obama, the Democrats have become more of a status-quo party. They are centrist protectors of government, reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures.
So, even as the Republicans have moved hard to the right, the Democrats protect the status quo. Which, with each passing year, has moved farther right. Basically, Republicans enact their agenda and it becomes the status quo. Then the Democrats come along and protect what they’ve done. That becomes the center. At which point the Republicans call the Democrats communists and move even farther right. The Dems are “hardly blameless” alright.
I’ll give you a good example of this working in real time:
At the end of March, a version of the Simpson-Bowles plan was given a vote on the House floor. It was annihilated, 382-38, with Pelosi and most Democrats voting against it.
But Pelosi, the day after the vote, said that she could still support the plan if it stuck more closely to the original version put out by Simpson and Bowles. “I felt fully ready to vote for that myself, thought it was not even a controversial thing … When we had our briefing with our caucus members, people felt pretty ready to vote for it. Until we saw it in print,” she said. “It was more a caricature of Simpson Bowles, and that’s why it didn’t pass. If it were actually Simpson-Bowles, I would have voted for it.”
Yet when the Simpson-Bowles plan had been originally unveiled, Pelosi called it “simply unacceptable.”
Within the course of just a few months the Democratic minority leader has moved from saying that Simpson-Bowles was beyond the pale to saying that she would have voted for it. It’s now the new center.
I’m sure it makes the DC Democrats proud as punch to be the “grown-ups” in the room and be able to look down their noses at the rambunctious Tea Partiers. But the fact is that the Tea Partiers are all that’s keeping the government from codifying a “consensus” that up until about five minutes ago existed only as Grover Norquist’s wet dream. As far as I’m concerned they have done us a big favor.
I don’t know about you, but I think the “status quo” sucks. I take no pride in being a member of a Party that is “reluctantly willing to revamp programs and trim retirement and health benefits to maintain its central commitments in the face of fiscal pressures” when the entire premise is bullshit. There’s enough money. The government simply insists upon allowing millionaires and corporations to escape their responsibilities and we are a global military empire which, as they always do, is sucking the lifeblood out of our polity.
Worried about deficits? Here you go:
When we have adequately addressed our irresponsible tax policies, our obscene military spending and our insane health care system, then I’ll be happy to “defend the status quo.” Right now the status quo is what’s killing us.
The Republican Party has just gotten worse since then. And the Democratic Party is improving. I think it took Donald Trump and a strong progressive movement to change the dynamic but there has been monumental movement on the right for a long time and plenty of us saw it coming.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Joe Biden is a sort of Democratic mainstream avatar. He always has been. Going back to his early days in the Senate, he was a a very predictable Senator from Delaware, straddling the various strands of liberalism and conservatism that co-existed in the party in those days. Today he is straddling the left and the center in the new Democratic Party.
At home and abroad, President Biden is confronting what it means to lead a changing Democratic Party.
The center of gravity in the party still seems closer to Biden’s center-left than to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s democratic-socialist left, as Biden’s victory in the 2020 nomination battle confirmed. In primary campaigns in competitive districts, voters have often supported a more moderate candidate over a more liberal one.
Yet everyone agrees that Democrats have moved left since Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice president. The liberal wing’s influence has grown, and what power it has is amplified through social media and cable TV. As president, Biden feels the changes constantly.
They were evident throughout the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Biden and his advisers had to weigh traditional U.S. support for Israel’s right to defend itself against Hamas-launched rocket attacks with rising concerns — particularly but not exclusively among those on the Democratic left — over the number of casualties as well as the widespread destruction in Gaza by the Israeli military.
Biden’s support for Israel over many years has been unwavering. He reiterated that position Friday. “There is no shift in my commitment to the security of Israel. Period. No shift, not at all,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what there is a shift in: We need a two-state solution. It is the only answer.”
Through mostly quiet diplomacy, along with one unusually public demand to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to de-escalate, the Biden administration helped to bring about an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire, fragile as it may be. That public shove to de-escalate was indicative of the new political environment, and it appeared to help bring about results.
In remarks Thursday evening, after the cease-fire was announced, Biden had reiterated U.S. support for Israel, promising to replenish Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. He also pledged to work through the United Nations to provide humanitarian assistance and reconstruction funding for the people of Gaza. He said the United States would work with the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, in these efforts “in a manner that does not permit Hamas to simply restock its military authority.”
Two days earlier, Biden had praised Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a Palestinian American who has been scorching in her criticism of Israel. Biden and Tlaib had a vigorous conversation on an airport tarmac when he arrived in Michigan. Shortly after, he said publicly how much he admired Tlaib’s intellect, passion and concern for others, adding, “And God, thank you for being a fighter.”
That was acknowledgment that, if Biden has not shifted, the backdrop against which this conflict took place was different than in the past, especially among Democrats. “There’s still strong support for Israel in the Democratic Party,” said a former Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer candid analysis. “But the dynamics have become more complicated.”
Why has this happened? Well, maybe because we have just had a glimpse of our own Netanyahu and a fresh look at our own apartheid past? Also, this:
Netanyahu’s choices to align himself with former president Donald Trump and the Republican Party, and Trump’s policies, which did not offer even the pretense of evenhandedness, contributed to turning what had been strong bipartisan support in the United States for Israel into a more combustible partisan environment. Which in turn has led more Democrats to become sympathetic to the Palestinian people and less supportive of Israel.
Netanyahu threw all his support to Trump, dissed the Democrats and sucked up to the Republicans without any regard to how that was going to change the calculation in the US. That was short-sighted. He didn’t need to go as far as he did but then his actions at home have been just as reckless.
That’s just one area in which Biden is being influenced by the left in ways that we might not have predicted. The progressive faction is now not just considered “the professional left” as it was in Obama’s term. It clearly has a seat at the table and can no longer be dismissed or used as a foil (hippie punching.)
This complicates the Democrats’ agenda because there is more friction within the party. But that’s the inevitable result of having a big tent. It creates a lot of conflict, compromise and trade-offs. But it also creates a more progressive party overall.
Daniel Dale points out nine ways the Big Lie is influencing politics. It’s not pretty:
Fuel for restrictive voting laws
Perhaps the most consequential result of Trump’s lies about what happened in 2020 is the slew of 2021 efforts by Republican state legislators to make it more difficult to vote.Enter your email to sign up for CNN’s “What Matters” Newsletter.“close dialog”
Among other things, Republican proposals would reduce the availability of ballot drop boxes, shorten early voting periods and absentee voting periods, make it harder for voters to obtain mail-in ballots, increase voter identification requirements, prohibit 24-hour voting and drive-through voting, eliminate Election Day voter registration, limit who is allowed to return someone else’s absentee ballot and more aggressively purge voter rolls.
In many cases, it’s not clear whether Republican legislators actually believe the 2020 election was fraudulent or whether they are cynically using voters’ own misapprehensions about the election as political cover. The distinction is irrelevant in practice, since the lies are turning into suppressive bills no matter what the real reason is.
A career problem for Republicanswho stood for truth
Another Georgia Republican who stood up for facts about what happened in 2020, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, announced this week that he would not seek reelection. Like Raffensperger, Duncan has made Republican enemies by declining to humor Trump’s nonsense.
It isn’t just Georgia officials on the hot seat for speaking truth. Nevada’s Republican Party Central Committee voted in April to censure Republican Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske for refusing to investigate (baseless allegations of) election fraud and being too “dismissive” of (baseless) concerns about “election integrity.”
A rationale for a crackdown on elections officials
Republicans have not only targeted particular state elections chiefs. Lies about how particular counties conducted the 2020 election have provided a rationale for a broad Republican effort to restrict local elections officials.A new Georgia law gives a state board the power to appoint someone to temporarily take over local elections boards. A new Florida law says a county elections chief can be penalized up to $25,000 if any drop box is made available in a way that violates the law’s requirements. An Iowa law signed in March allows local elections officials to be fined up to $10,000 for a “technical infraction” and charged with a felony for failing to implement guidance from the Iowa secretary of state.
And Republicans around the country have or are trying to forbid local officials, among others, from sending out absentee ballot applications to voters who have not specifically requested them.
An impetus for a change in House Republican leadership
Last week, Republicans removed Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the third-ranking spot in the party’s House leadership because of her vocal criticism of election lies — and replaced her with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has repeatedlypromoted those lies and who tried to get the election overturned.
A factor in open primary races
Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer who is now running in the Republican primary for the US Senate seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Rob Portman, has turned the Big Lie into an applause line in his speeches — proclaiming that he, unlike his “establishment” rivals, is willing to flatly declare that the election was stolen from Trump.
In Virginia, the just-concluded Republican gubernatorial primary featured a candidate, state Sen. Amanda Chase, who also emphasized her baseless position that the election was stolen.Chase finished third in a seven-candidate field. But she wasn’t really alone: the winner, businessman Glenn Youngkin, made “election integrity” one of his campaign issues and declined for weeks to say that Biden had been legitimately elected, changing his tune only after he secured the Republican nomination last week.
The basis for an Arizona “audit” — and pushes for other audits
The Big Lie underpinned the decision of Arizona’s Republican-controlled state Senate to commission a so-called “audit” of the 2020 election in the state’s most populous county, Maricopa, after the county had already conducted an audit that found no problems.The state Senate hired an obscure, inexperienced firm that is run by someone who has promoted election lies; the firm’s Maricopa processes have been widely criticized by actual elections experts. But Republicans in other states, from Georgia to Michigan and California, are now pushing for similar “audits.”
Another fight in Congress
The Big Lie led to the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Now, instead of working together on any number of other issues, Congress is spending time fighting over whether to create an independent commission to investigate what happened.
Of course, the two sides aren’t equivalent here: It is Republicans in particular who have turned what could be a moment of quick and easy bipartisan unity into yet another partisan scrap.
Ammunition for conspiracy theorists
As CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan has reported, the Arizona “audit” that is based on the Big Lie has become a fixation in QAnon conspiracy circles — a basis, albeit a ludicrous basis, to continue to believe that a series of states will somehow overturn President Joe Biden’s already-certified victories and that Trump will soon be returned to office.Granted, QAnon adherents always manage to find some nonsensical reason or another to justify their nonsensical beliefs. But there’s no doubt that the continued prevalence of election lies has given the movement some ammunition.
An (unknown) effect on the public
Polling evidence suggests that there is a widespread perception among Republican voters that Biden was not legitimately elected. For example, a CNN poll in late April found that 70% of Republican respondents said they did not think Biden legitimately won enough votes to be president.It’s impossible to say with certainty how this false belief is affecting these voters’ broader perceptions of Biden’s presidency. But it seems highly likely that it contributes to the polarization of the public, limiting the President’s capacity for earning the support of people who voted for Trump — and even limiting average Americans’ ability to have productive political conversations with each other.
I was watching something on cable news about this the other night and suddenly realized that this is never going to right itself. Most Republicans — tens of millions of people —- are not going to wake up one days and realize they have been dupes for an orange conman. They are simply not the kind of people to ever admit they were wrong. This lie is going to be with us forever which is probably why the establishment hacks in Washington are just jumping on the bandwagon. They see the benefits and they are going for it, damn the consequences.
A Third Of California Restaurants Close Permanently Due To Lockdowns
But if you read the news story that’s the basis for the Daily Wire post, you’ll see that this high rate of closures isn’t ascribed to lockdowns specifically.
The Wire post begins:
A little more than a year after Governor Gavin Newsom instituted the lockdowns, nearly a third of California restaurants have closed permanently.
According to The Associated Press, California’s lockdowns have left the food industry battered and bruised in the Golden State….
Nearly a third of California’s restaurants permanently closed and two-thirds of workers at least temporarily lost their jobs as the pandemic set in more than a year ago and Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed the nation’s first statewide lockdown, a legislative committee reported Tuesday.
Were the business failures all the result of lockdowns? AP, citing the legislative report, implicitly blames the lockdowns and the pandemic itself. Even in the absence of lockdowns, many Californians would have chosen not to go to restaurants and linger over leisurely meals and drinks. We know this it true because it happened all over the country — even in South Dakota, where the governor, Kristi Noem, famously boasted in March that her government “never ordered a single business or church to close, we never instituted a shelter-in-place order, we never mandated that people wear masks.” In spite of that, South Dakota’s Argus Leaderreported in August,
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit South Dakota restaurants harder than just about any other industry in the state.
Six months into the pandemic, with the state economy mostly open for business, restaurants across the state are still struggling to make ends meet and keep their doors open as patrons and employees worry about spreading the potentially deadly coronavirus.
Since the pandemic began, nearly half of South Dakota’s restaurants experienced at least a temporary closure — often for as long as six weeks — and more than two-thirds laid off employees. Due to COVID-19, South Dakota restaurants have missed out on as much as $90 million in revenue, according to the National Restaurant Association, forcing some to close for good.
There were local restaurant shutdowns, but they were brief by California standards, and half of South Dakota’s restaurants weren’t shut down at all — yet two-thirds laid off staff.
Even before the pandemic, the restaurant business in parts of California was often a victim of the state’s economic success (and ever-increasing property values). San Francisco, with approximately 4,400 restaurants, lost 411 of them in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
And then there’s the failure rate of all restaurants under normal conditions: 27% fail in their first year, 50% in their first three years.
So to blame lockdowns for all the restaurant closures in California last year is absurd. And what’s the Wire’s alternative? No pandemic restrictions whatsoever, even for restaurants and other businesses in densely packed cities? That was unthinkable — except, I’m sure , to the sorts of people who read the Daily Wire.
This is the propaganda going out to people who are looking for reasons to support the recall of California Governor Gavin Newsom. And it includes people who may not have voted for Donald Trump but are sympathetic to the small businesses that could make it work during the pandemic, which includes a lot of restaurants. As he points out, it’s a very risky business in any case and assuming that Newsom’s policies were extraordinary and unnecessary is simply not falsifiable. Moreover, people were dying by the thousands! The idea that everyone would have just continued living as they did before if only those mean gummint officials hadn’t closed down non-essential gatherings is ridiculous.
Yes, there are a bunch of dumbasses who continued to gather and many of them got lucky and escaped the hospital and the morgue, but who knows how much they spread the disease at the time with their irresponsible behavior? But most people stayed sane and safe and stayed home and they would have done so even if the restaurants had all stayed open so those businesses wouldn’t have made it anyway.
The government loans and unemployment boosts were meant to help them all get over the hump. And they helped many of them stay afloat and they are coming back now, especially with the new government money flowing under the American Rescue Plan. But the idea that all businesses should have stayed open while the pandemic was raging is just sick. Everyone did the best they could and through the miracle of science we’re able to come out the other side in just a little bit over a year.
They need to STFU. Their Dear Leader is responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths as it is.
