After months and months of obsessive MSM and blogger attention to arguments within the Democratic Party about every detail of an Iraq withdrawal strategy, it’s refreshing this week to see some ink about Republican divisions as well.
You can make the argument, of course, that these divisons have no practical import: an assortment of Republican senators, especially those up for re-election next year, are itching to get their names attached to some sort of resolution that demands a change of strategy in Iraq, without doing anything real to force it.
But on another level, there’s a growing gap in Republican rhetoric on Iraq between those who are unhappy with Bush for failing to escalate our military involvement even more, and those who are at least willing to concede it’s time to prepare for withdrawal. Moreover, the GOP’s Iraq “hawks,” from Bush on down, are beginning to say things in defense of their position that are, well, a bit crazy.
According to the Washington Post’s account of a Republican Senate Caucus meeting yesterday on Iraq, featuring none other than Dick Cheney, Ted Stevens of Alaska offered this fine bit of geopolitical analysis: “If we leave prematurely, it would be absolute anarchy. We’d be turning over to al-Qaeda one of the largest oil-producing states in the world.”
Aside from confusing the Sunni insurgency with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, and conflating al-Qaeda-in-Iraq with the perpetrators of 9/11, Stevens seems to assume that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would lead inevitably to a Sunni reconquest of the country. Since the more likely outcome would be a ferocious Shi’a extermination campaign against the insurgency, this argument is truly bizarre. It’s even less credible than the standard “the terrorists would follow us home” extension of the “flypaper” theory that by sacrificing U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, we’re at least “pinning down” al-Qaeda in Iraq, because our enemies can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
Meanwhile, Sen. John McCain, presumably trying to step on news reports about his floundering campaign’s latest shakeup, came back from a trip to Iraq and immediately launched an attack on–I swear I’m not making this up–Mike Gravel.
Now it’s never been a secret that some Republican Iraq War Hawks have long promoted the decidedly minority view that we would have won in Vietnam if we handn’t cravenly drawn the line at nine years, 58,000 combat deaths, and troop levels exceeding a half-million. Some even think we should have deployed tactical nuclear weapons. But McCain’s now retailing an even more lurid revisionist tale: that the decision to cut off assistance–led by Gravel among othrs–to the crumbling regime of Lon Nol after the ill-advised U.S. widening of the war into Cambodia created Pol Pot and the Killing Fields. “I’ve seen this movie before from the liberal left in America, who share no responsibility for what happened in Cambodia when we said no,” quoth McCain. (This gambit was too much for Joe Biden, who rejoined: “Give me a break! Quoting Gravel as the voice of the left? This is a man who, God love him, nominated himself for vice president. I mean, come on!”).
Meanwhile, adding to the Republican disarray, the president himself, on the eve of an official interim report on Iraq, made a speech in which he said, after expressing an openness to different options: “Yes, we can accomplish this fight and win in Iraq. And secondly, I want to tell you, we must.” Since every viable option for a changed strategy in Iraq involves an admission that a “win” in Iraq is simply delusional, Bush is clearly rejecting, in advance, and for the umpteenth time, any hortatory advice from Congress.
So there you have it: GOP opinion on Iraq runs the gamut from self-consciously toothless efforts to distance vulnerable Republicans from Bush’s policies, to lunatic arguments that we’re about to hand Baghdad over to Osama bin Laden, to fatuous Vietnam-era analogies.
Democrats would be wise to take a few days off from debating their own relatively minor differences of opinion on Iraq and let the American people hear, loud and clear, the GOP’s “wisdom” on the subject. Democrats might also begin to hammer home the obvious point that Bush and his allies are paving the way for a major al-Qaeda propaganda victory by screaming from the rooftops that the inevitable U.S. withdrawal will be the worst U.S. setback since the British burned Washington during the War of 1812.
Month: July 2007
Robin Abcarian has an L.A. Times article about a book that is getting big buzz in political strategy circles, “The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation” by Drew Westen, a psychologist and brain researcher. Abcarian does an excellent job of mining the book’s main ideas and how it is being received.
Abcarian describes Westen’s book as providing “a grand unified theory of How Democrats Can Stop Blowing It,” and nails the Dems “single worst tendency: intellectual dispassion.” Abcarian notes also:
Jonathan Cohn has just published a long piece for The New Republic on the influence of the late George Romney, governor of Michigan, member of the Nixon Cabinet, and occasional candidate for the presidency, on his son, Willard Mitt Romney, candidate for president in 2008.
It’s an excellent profile, of interest particularly to those with no personal memory of Romney pere, who, as Cohn emphasizes, was one of the leaders of moderate Republican resistance to the first, Goldwater phase of the conservative movement’s takeover of the GOP. (One tidbit not mentioned in the piece was Romney’s role in the next, aborted phase of that takeover: he was the object of an unsuccessful revolt against Spiro Angnew’s nomination as vice president at the 1968 Republican Convention, led by then-governor John Chafee, who was distrurbed by Spiggy’s inflammatory racial rhetoric. Lest we forget, Agnew briefly eclipsed Ronald Reagan as the darling of the Right in the early 1970s, before a bribery scandal drove him from office).
While Cohn carefully documents Mitt Romney’s very recent makeover as a paragon of Republican conservatism, he does not note the obvious parallels to another son of a prominent Republican politician: George W. Bush. Just like Mitt, W. had to overcome conservative mistrust of his old man in order to become the presidential nominee, a process that reached its apogee in the famous 1998 Robert Novak column which dubbed him the “ideological heir of Ronald Reagan” despite his biological link to G.H.W. Bush.
It’s true, of course, that George Romney’s legacy is not remotely as large a blessing or curse for Mitt as Bush 41 represented for Bush 43. Many Reagan- and post-Reagan Republicans have probably never heard of the man. And even relatively well-informed observers may only remember him for his disastrous remark on the 1968 presidential campaign trail that his earler support for the Vietnam War was the result of his “brainwashing” by military briefers (which led to the devastating quip by Gene McCarthy, playing on Romney’s reputation as intellectually unformidable, that “I’d think a light rinse would have sufficed”).
Still, you have to remember that most conservative activists and opinion-leaders are deeply, deeply invested in the idea that W.’s many problems are attributable to a lack of fidelity to The True Cause. In other words, they think they were “had” by Bush and his flacks in the runup to the 2000 elections. Given Mitt’s far more ideologically heterodox record in Massachusetts, and his very recent “conversion,” the Bush experience is certain to weigh on conservatives as they try to decide between Romney and, say, Fred Thompson. And profiles like Cohn’s, which stress Mitt’s moderate birthright and nonpartisan habits as governor, will help fan conservative fears that blood is thicker than ideology.
One of the long-standing cornerstones of GOP election strategy is the suppression of African American votes, accomplished in recent years through a host of techniques, including felon disenfranchisement laws, “caging” and voter i.d. requirements. But it turns out that one of the more effective tools used to reduce the votes of lower-income Black voters in the 21st century is the refusal of the Civil Rights Division of the Dept of Justice to enforce Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), which requires public assistance agencies to offer voter registration to clients,
According to a report by Demos, Project Vote, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, groups that have been working for better enforcement of the NVRA:
Yesterday’s Washington Post Outlook piece by National Review’s Byron York made it all but official: the GOP’s conservative base, including its opinion leaders, has largely given up on George W. Bush’s presidency.
York’s analysis identifies three specific reasons for this development: Bush’s advocacy of an approach to immigration reform that has deeply offended conservatives; his self-contradictory handling of the Scooter Libby saga; and perhaps most of all, his botching of Iraq. Of everything York says, this last point is the most interesting, indicating conservative acknowledgment that the “surge” is failing, and that the Right will no longer embrace it as a reflection of its own thinking on Iraq. Though York doesn’t go into this, we may be about to experience an especially ironic political moment this week, when John McCain returns from a trip to Iraq, and could conspicuously part company with the administration’s strategy there. Even though McCain’s own presidential campaign has become road-kill during the recent conservative rebellion against Bush, his original support for the “surge” was widely interpreted as validating a defiant conservative “tilt” by Bush on Iraq. If McCain bails on the “surge” now, many Republicans will follow him in reassuming a position to the right of the administration on Iraq.
In terms of the impact on Bush of a bailing base, York offers this comment:
So now the president has 18 months left in office, and they won’t be quiet ones. Absent the committed backing of his party, he will be forced to exercise power based not on his political clout but rather on the authority the Constitution gives the office of the president: He is commander in chief. He can veto bills. He can issue pardons. And that’s about it.
Well, some of us have thought “that’s about it” in terms of Bush’s power ever since the autumn of 2005, when the Katrina fiasco and growing signs of futility in Iraq decisively turned independent voters against Bush, while permanently destroying, across the board, the Bush-Rove reputation for political wizardry, built up by the 2004 re-election campaign. And we’ve learned since then that Bush’s constitutional prerogatives are indeed formidable in terms of enabling him to stubbornly pursue wildly unpopular policies. Sure, “base” support for the “surge” temporarily lifted Bush’s approval ratings into the tepid 40s range after the 2006 elections, but it’s pretty clear the White House has declared final independence from accountability to public opinion of any sort.
The real impact of the conservative defection from support for Bush is that it will further enable 2008 GOP presidential candidates to distance themselves from the incumbent’s record, as part of a desperate effort to make the election something, anything, other than a referendum on the previous eight years. It’s more essential than ever for Democrats to lash the GOP to the mast of Bush’s record, and to make it clear that the “change” GOP candidates offer from the status quo is if possible even more irresponsible and extremist than the disastrous path blazed by W.
Louis Menand has a review article in The New Yorker entitled “Fractured Franchise: Are the Wrong People Voting?,” a freebie for net users. Menand discusses “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Chose Bad Politics” by George Mason University Economist Bryan Caplan.
Menand’s review is really a spingboard for mulling over some theories of why people vote the way they do. Along the way, he provides this disturbing rant on political illiteracy:
The political knowledge of the average voter has been tested repeatedly, and the scores are impressively low. In polls taken since 1945, a majority of Americans have been unable to name a single branch of government, define the terms “liberal” and “conservative,” and explain what the Bill of Rights is. More than two-thirds have reported that they do not know the substance of Roe v. Wade and what the Food and Drug Administration does. Nearly half do not know that states have two senators and three-quarters do not know the length of a Senate term. More than fifty per cent of Americans cannot name their congressman; forty per cent cannot name either of their senators. Voters’ notions of government spending are wildly distorted: the public believes that foreign aid consumes twenty-four per cent of the federal budget, for example, though it actually consumes about one per cent.
It goes on. Not a pretty picture, nor a compelling argument for increasing voter turnout in general. Similar scary litanies about “low-information voters” have dogged U.S. democracy for a while now. The preferred assumption is that the political illiterati are voting mostly for the other party, or alternatively that most of them are not voting at all.
Menand sees an elitist strain in Caplan’s thesis:
The average voter is not held in much esteem by economists and political scientists, and Caplan rehearses some of the reasons for this. The argument of his book, though, is that economists and political scientists have misunderstood the problem. They think that most voters are ignorant about political issues; Caplan thinks that most voters are wrong about the issues, which is a different matter, and that their wrong ideas lead to policies that make society as a whole worse off….Caplan thinks that the best cure is less democracy. He doesn’t quite say that the world ought to be run by economists, but he comes pretty close.
According to Menand, Caplan also advocates dubious reforms, such as an “economic literacy” test for voters, and giving extra votes to people with “greater economic literacy.”
Menand also touches on the phenomenon of “shortcut” voters — those who don’t follow issues closely, but rely on the judgement of friends, relatives or political parties in deciding who to vote for. The latter may be more common in western Europe’s democracies, where turnount is much higher and where political parties and party-line voting traditions are stronger. Building Party cohesiveness is easier in Parliamentary systems, but that doesn’t mean Democrats can’t do more to encourage straight ticket voting in the 17 states where it is permitted. Such ‘shortcut voters’ may well provide the margin of victory in any number of close races.
I didn’t write much this last week about the second-quarter fundraising reports for presidential candidates, figuring the story was being obsessively covered elsewhere. The news that John McCain now has less cash-on-hand than Ron Paul did put an exclamation point on the terminal diagnosis of his candidacy which has been apparent for some time. And like just about everyone, I agree that the overall Democratic advantage in fundraising is significant, if not dispositive.
But there’s an interesting buzz on the Democratic side about the possibility that the huge Clinton/Obama money advantage over the rest of the field may spell doom for their rivals, most specifically John Edwards, whose status as one of the Big Three of Democratic candidates is increasingly being questioned, partly because of the money problem, and partly because his poll standings are lagging everywhere but in Iowa.
Over at The New Republic Online, John Judis made the case that Edwards, even if he wins Iowa, may not be able to duplicate the Iowa-driven Kerry miracle of 2004 because of the compressed primary schedule, which would not give him time to raise enough cash to compete in the vast array of big-state contests on February 5. At The Plank, Jason Zengerle, a notably Edwards-friendly writer, wondered if the whole Iowa-centric strategy of that campaign was a mistake.
To deal with the last point first, I can’t imagine why John Edwards would not want to focus on Iowa. He entered the 2008 cycle leading almost every poll in Iowa, with a strong and well-nourished organization already in place. Doing anything other than trying to build on that advantage would have been nuts, particularly since Iowa represents a landscape in which his rivals’ money would not necessarily translate into Caucus attendance.
Judis’ argument about the differences in the 2004 and 2008 calendars is clearly right, but let’s remember a couple of peculiarities of the 2004 dynamics. The meltdown of the Dean campaign post-Iowa was attributable to the catastrophic outcome in Iowa, and to the huge media exaggeration of The Scream–but also to the revelation that Dean’s significant money advantage had vanished thanks to promiscuous spending on organization and media in states well down the road. As it turned out, Kerry’s Iowa bounce, which produced a decisive NH bounce, not only enabled JK to raise money, but also wiped out the impact of earlier Dean spending in a variety of states. It’s not clear to me that a compressed primary schedule in 2004 would have changed the ultimate outcome at all. If anything, the “pause” after NH gave two other rivals, Edwards and Clark, a slim but definite chance to overcome the Iowa-NH bounce for Kerry.
The real and unanswerable question for 2008, particularly if Edwards or even someone further down in the field wins or places early, is the size of the impact of Iowa and New Hampshire on the immediate landscape of later states. And we’ve not even begun to assess whether HRC and Obama are wisely investing their vast hauls over the primary calendar.
To mention just one strategic dilemma: how does HRC approach Iowa? She clearly needs to beat Obama there. And given her overall investment in an “inevitability” campaign, she might be tempted to throw everything into an effort to win outright, thereby croaking Edwards. But that would run the risk of making Obama the clear and unified anti-HRC candidate in later caucuses and primaries.
In the end, John Edwards has no choice but to go for Iowa, and try to create a domino effect that neutralizes his rivals’ poll and money advantages, with the additional hope that they focus on each other and spend too much early money on states where the Iowa-New Hampshire bounce might overwhelm every other factor. It’s the other candidates, I suspect, who really need to make some perilous decisions about the intersectiom of money and strategy in this campaign.
Those who thought 30 percent approval was probably as low as President Bush could go need to think again. According to a just published Newsweek poll, Bush’s job approval rating has tumbled to 26 percent, which, as Kos‘s McJoan points out, approaches Nixonian levels of public support.
She also cites a new ARG poll, which indicates that 45 percent of adults want the House of Reps to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush (46 percent opposed). And things could get gnarly sooner for the puppetmaster. According to the ARG poll, 54 percent want the House to begin impeachment proceedings against Vice President Cheney. There is already a fair amount of heated discussion in the blogs about the wisdom of impeachment in the context of Democratic ’08 strategy, and If this trend persists or grows, it will get even hotter.
How much of the Bush/Cheney free fall can be attributed to rising gas prices? A good question, and Professor Pollkatz’s Pool of Polls has a graphic that indicates a pretty clear relationship over time.
Last week Mark Ambinder of The Atlantic did a post reporting some of the findings from a big survey of Republicans done by Tony Fabrizio, including some comparisons to a similar survey ten years ago. And last night, Tom Edsell, at HuffingtonPost, supplied a link to the Fabrizio-McLaughlin power point presentation on the survey.
You can read it yourself, and try to absorb Fabrizio’s segmentation of rank-and-file Republicans into seven categories (Free Marketers, Dennis Miller Republicans, Heartland Republicans, Government Knows Best Republicans, Moralists, Fortress America, and Bush Hawks). More interesting IMHO are the survey’s conclusions about divisions in the GOP ranks, particularly given the clear 1997-2007 trend it shows towards a self-consciously conservative party (71 percent of those in the survey self-indentify as conservatives–up from 55 percent ten years ago).
The divisions cut across a broad swath of economic and social policies. While big majorities of Republicans claim to favor both balanced budgets and additional tax cuts, they’re split 52 % (tax cuts) to 44% (budget balancing) on the highest fiscal priority. Perhaps more significantly, GOPers support the proposition that “universal health coverage should be a guaranteed right for every American” by a 51%-43% margin, with interesting splits among the seven segments. 44% of Republicans appear to dislike private accounts for Social Security. They’re all over the place on global warming and federal involvement in education.
On cultural issues, the two things that stand out are: (a) while 61% of Republicans call themselves “pro-life,” and 80% appear to support significant restrictions on abortion, 53% also agree with the proposition that “the Republican Party has spent too much time focusing on moral issues like abortion and gay marriage”; and (b) a startling 49% (with 42% opposed) favor allowing gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military.
The issues where Republicans are united are interesting, too. 74% of GOPers still think the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do; a host of surveys show large majorities of independents, and overall majorities of Americans, feel differently. And on immigration, 76% agree that enforcing the laws against illegal immigrants, even if that means deporting them, should be the main goal of national policy. Aside from illustrating why John McCain’s campaigning is tanking, this finding could mean trouble down the road for presidential candidates whose opposition to the “grand bargain” approach to immigration reform (i.e., Rudy Giuliani) is technical rather than fundamental. It could also mean trouble for the GOP generally if the immigration debate begins to focus not on “amnesty” but on “deportation.”
The survey also includes presidential candidate questions, but since the data’s about a month old, it’s interesting mainly in terms of the preferences of different segments. Giuliani runs first in all seven categories, but is (unsurprisingly) weakest among “Moralists.” Fred Thompson’s nascent bid also appears to have reasonably broad support; his weakest segment is one (‘Heartland Republicans”) that is basically a midwestern regional grouping.
All in all, Fabrizio displays a Republican Party that’s more of a coalition than is generally assumed; whose points of unity could be problematic in a general election; and where relative support for Bush’s Iraq/terrorism policies has complicated the old economic/cultural fault lines among GOPers.
In connectiion with the growing buzz about “Sicko,” Michael Moore’s new documentary about America’s health care system, Robin Toner has an update on the health care proposals of ’08 presidential candidates of both parties in today’s New York Times. She touches on the candidates positions on public and private sector plans, inclusiveness of coverage, financial and cost containment ideas, tax incentives and other aspects.
Toner provides capsule policy summaries for each candidate here. (See also our post here for more insight into the candidates’ policies and here for an overview of how the different states are doing ).
