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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: September 2015

Cheney’s Reminder of Bush Legacy Should Make Jeb, GOP Blush


From WaPo columnist Dana Milbank’s “Dick Cheney tries to fool the public again,” commenting on his address to the American Enterprise Institute:

Cheney hyperbolized, hyperventilated and gave rein to hyperactive imagination — “desperation . . . cave . . . neutered” — and the audience at the normally sedate American Enterprise Institute was riled…Applauding Cheney from the front row were Paul D. Wolfowitz, a principal architect of the Iraq war, and Sen. Tom Cotton, (Ark.), author of the Senate Republicans’ letter to the ayatollahs attempting to kill the deal during negotiations. In the second row were former congresswoman Michele Bachmann and I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the Cheney aide whose tenure led to a prison sentence.
Surely, those who would like to see Congress undo the nuclear agreement can’t expect that rolling out Cheney is going to save the cause. When it comes to dire predictions based on scary intelligence, the former vice president wouldn’t seem to have the best track record.

Clearly the GOP’s neocons have learned nothing from the Bush administration’s catastrophe. More disturbing is that few of the current Republican presidential aspirants are willing to say so.


Bouie: How GOP Loyalty Pledge Could Backfire

In Jamelle Bouie’s Slate.com post “Why the RNC’s Loyalty Pledge Was a Huge Mistake,” he explains why Donald Trump’s signing the pledge sets the stage for an even worse disaster:

…A Trump nomination is so unlikely that it’s not the actual nightmare for the Republican Party. The nightmare is a third-party run, where Trump gets himself on the ballot in all 50 states, and siphons white voters from a GOP that needs white turnout to win national elections.
…On the surface, this is an important victory for Republican leaders. But look carefully, and it’s somewhere between a disaster and a catastrophe. Trump hasn’t just bound himself to the RNC, the RNC has bound itself to Trump and put pressure on other candidates to do the same. Let’s say Rubio wins the primary and becomes the Republican nominee. Thanks to the pledge, he’s linked to Trump, and Democrats can run wild with guilt-by-association. By the end of the campaign, Trump might be the face of the Rubio campaign, as much as the Florida senator himself.

I’m not sure any GOP nominees would be all that bound to Trump just because of the pledge. It’s more about Trump sliming the whole party and his misogynistic, Latino-bashing and general boorishness becoming the new face of the Republican Party — regardless of the pledge. He sucks up all of the media coverage to the point where the word “Republican” conjures up a caricature of Trump’s head. He’s a wet dream, not only for cartoonists and late-night comedians, but also lazy TV reporters and commentators. The other GOP presidential candidates can’t get arrested as long as he is around.
But I think Bouie is dead right about Trump’s fidelity to the pledge, or anything he says, for that matter. This is a man who thinks it is perfectly alright to contradict himself 180 degrees within a couple of days, if not hours. As Bouie explains:

That’s the disaster. The catastrophe is that there’s nothing to hold Trump to the pledge. As soon as it becomes inconvenient, he can break it. And because he’s untethered from the institutions of the Republican Party, Trump has nothing to lose from breaking the pledge. Indeed, anything he gains from signing–the imprimatur of the GOP and commitments from other candidates–is almost irrelevant to his appeal as the “outsider” who understands the world of the “insiders.” The only thing that ties Trump to his word, on this score, is the promise of official “respect.” For a man of Trump’s ego, that’s weak binding.

Bouie shares a reminder of Ross Perot’s waffling about his independent candidacy intentions in 1992, and Perot was a guy with some actual principles. Remember Perot prattling on about being drafted by “the volunteers”? Something similar is all the cover Trump would need to trash his pledge, argues Bouie quite convincingly.
“The people are calling, and I must answer the call,” has been leveraged by many a demagogue down through the ages, and it’s not hard to imagine Trump playing that card with gusto. Some will grumble if he breaks the pledge, but few of his potential supporters would hold him accountable. They got on the Trump bandwagon less because they admire his consistency and integrity, and more because they wanted to root for a rogue rhino smashing up the crystal.
What “the pledge” does for Trump is buy him a little breathing space. His GOP opponents can and will still attack him. But he has disarmed the “not a real Republican” argument to a degree, at least for the time being. It secures the possibility that he can win the GOP nomination, but does nothing much to insure that he won’t reneg on the pledge and run as an independent. As Bouie concludes,

If anything, the loyalty pledge enhances his platform. He can run his campaign–touting Social Security and condemning illegal immigration–and when he loses the nomination, he’ll have the audience and support he needs to make an independent run. Whether Priebus knows it or not, he’s been played, and it’s going to hurt.

Priebus had to do something, and the pledge also gives him a little cover. But no one should bet that it will be honored. Trump may fool us all and gracefully bow out when the time comes, but at this point that’s not a bet for the smart money.
Dems have to run their best campaign, regardless of what Trump does. He may end up a king-maker, or worse, gulp, a king. Let the media continue to obsess about Trump’s distraction du jour, all the way to November of next year. For Dems, however, the challenge is to get focused on mobilizing their base and honing the message that there is only one party that represents adult America, and it is not the party Trump currently leads.


Political Strategy Notes – Labor Day Edition

Happy Labor Day — Really,” by WaPo/American Prospect columnist Harold Meyerson notes that, despite wage stagnation and shrinking union membership in recent years, there have been some recent gains American workers can celebrate, including: “Through actions in city halls and statehouses, through court decisions and labor board rulings, public officials, prompted by workers’ advocates, are finding ways to overcome many of the obstacles–outsourcing, franchising, stagnating minimum wages, union busting–that have created the new normal and with it, the shrinking of the middle class…Ordinances to raise the local minimum wage, which first popped up in liberal strongholds like San Francisco and Seattle, have in the past few weeks been enacted in St. Louis, Kansas City, and Birmingham, Alabama. A proposed ballot measure to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2021 in California–home to one out of every eight American workers–commanded 68 percent support in a Field Poll last week…Unions are polling better, too…”
Another possible sign of labor rising — a presidential candidate on a picket line.
From Benjamin Siegel’s “Obama to Give 300,000 Workers Paid Sick Leave With New Executive Order” at ABCNews.com: “President Obama will sign an executive order Monday giving hundreds of thousands of workers employed by federal contractors access to paid sick leave…The order will require federal contractors to give employees the ability to earn at least seven days (56 hours) of paid sick leave annually. It will give about 300,000 workers new access to paid sick leave, and an additional number of workers the ability to earn more sick leave than they had before.”
For a more expansive take on the president’s initiatives on behalf of American workers, read Noam Scheiber’s “As His Term Wanes, Obama Champions Workers’ Rights.”
So how’s the President doing on job-creation as we celebrate Labor Day 2015? Paul Krugman reports, “As of last month, the U.S. unemployment rate, which was 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office, had fallen to 5.1 percent. For the record, Mr. Romney promised during the campaign that he would get unemployment down to 6 percent by the end of 2016. Also for the record, the current unemployment rate is lower than it ever got under Ronald Reagan. And the main reason unemployment has fallen so much is job growth in the private sector, which has added more than seven million workers since the end of 2012.”
Former Reagan advisor Bruce Bartlett unveils a new tweak in the GOP’s strategy to divide American workers’ voting power by race.
Moyers & Company presents a panel discussion, “Is Labor a Lost Cause,” featuring a dialogue with labor reform leaders, Stephen Lerner and Bill Fletcher, Jr (transcript here)

E. J. Dionne, Jr. addresses the proper role of government with respect to the lives of American working people and notes, “Many of the choices are not between more or less government. They are about whether what government does provides greater benefit to workers or employers, management or unions, individual investors or investment firms…”Which side are you on?” This question from the old union song is the right question to ask about government.”
At Counterpunch Walter Brasch’s “The Boss Who Fought for the Working-Class” pays tribute to Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune was #1 in circulation world-wide, featured columnists like Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Karl Marx — and was read cover to cover by Greeley’s friend (and sometimes adversary) President Abraham Lincoln. “When his [Greeley’s] employees said they didn’t need a union because their boss paid them well and treated them fairly, he told them that only in a union could the workers continue to be treated decently, that they had no assurances that some day he might not be as decent and generous as he was that day. The union was for their benefit, the benefit of their families, and their profession, he told them.”


September 4: A Plan for a Counter-Revolution at SCOTUS

Are you one of those Democrats who don’t think it ultimately matters that much who wins the 2016 presidential contest, especially if someone you consider a corporate lackey wins the Democratic nomination? You really, really need to pay attention to Republicans plans for the Supreme Court, which encompass vast economic as well and social and civil rights issues. I discussed one very prominent conservative blueprint for remaking America via SCOTUS at Washington Monthly today:

I really do appreciate the efforts of Constitutional Conservative legal beagles Randy Barnett of Georgetown and Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law in laying out in some detail–and not in a legal journal but in the Weekly Standard–rules for examining future Republican Supreme Court appointments. It’s not just a litmus test in the making–which presidential candidates in both parties typically say they do not want to administer–but a rationale for a litmus test. And their piece has the advantage of being very clear on the key points.
To Barnett and Blackman, who first discuss the notorious history of Republican SCOTUS appointments they view as betrayals, the big thing is that prospective Justices have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government–the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of “judicial restraint”–and stare decisis–the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent–in pursuit of the “original” meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders–or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders–and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned. No wonder they talk repeatedly about needing Justices–and presidents–with courage! And the dividing line between good and bad “conservative” Justices could not be made much clearer: Alito goooood! Roberts baaaaaad! Barnett and Blackman even suggest their rules should be made clear to and then demanded by presidential primary voters!
If that actually starts happening, it will be as or even more important to watch as any other discussions of any other issues. As Brian Beutler recently noted in an important piece at TNR, Barnett and Blackman are among other things leading advocates for a return to the Lochner era of jurisprudence, whereby most regulations of private economic activity by the executive or legislative branches would be declared unconstitutional as an abridgement of “natural law” concepts in the original Constitution and an exotic understanding of the due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments. These are dangerous people to let anywhere near a Supreme Court nomination. But they and many others like them, who now play a dominant role in the very powerful conservative legal fraternity the Federalist Society, are likely to be right there with their litmus test in hand.

Think about that before uttering any “not a dime’s worth of difference” assessments this year.


A Plan for a Counter-Revolution At SCOTUS

Are you one of those Democrats who don’t think it ultimately matters that much who wins the 2016 presidential contest, especially if someone you consider a corporate lackey wins the Democratic nomination? You really, really need to pay attention to Republicans plans for the Supreme Court, which encompass vast economic as well and social and civil rights issues. I discussed one very prominent conservative blueprint for remaking America via SCOTUS at Washington Monthly today:

I really do appreciate the efforts of Constitutional Conservative legal beagles Randy Barnett of Georgetown and Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law in laying out in some detail–and not in a legal journal but in the Weekly Standard–rules for examining future Republican Supreme Court appointments. It’s not just a litmus test in the making–which presidential candidates in both parties typically say they do not want to administer–but a rationale for a litmus test. And their piece has the advantage of being very clear on the key points.
To Barnett and Blackman, who first discuss the notorious history of Republican SCOTUS appointments they view as betrayals, the big thing is that prospective Justices have a clearly documented willingness to ignore both other branches of government–the principle behind the receding Republican doctrine of “judicial restraint”–and stare decisis–the principle against overturning well-settled Court precedent–in pursuit of the “original” meaning of the Constitution. That means treating SCOTUS as an all-powerful institution communing with eighteenth century Founders–or worse yet, Con Con mythologies about those Founders–and empowered to kill many decades of decisions by all three branches of government, precedent and democracy be damned. No wonder they talk repeatedly about needing Justices–and presidents–with courage! And the dividing line between good and bad “conservative” Justices could not be made much clearer: Alito goooood! Roberts baaaaaad! Barnett and Blackman even suggest their rules should be made clear to and then demanded by presidential primary voters!
If that actually starts happening, it will be as or even more important to watch as any other discussions of any other issues. As Brian Beutler recently noted in an important piece at TNR, Barnett and Blackman are among other things leading advocates for a return to the Lochner era of jurisprudence, whereby most regulations of private economic activity by the executive or legislative branches would be declared unconstitutional as an abridgement of “natural law” concepts in the original Constitution and an exotic understanding of the due process clauses in the 5th and 14th amendments. These are dangerous people to let anywhere near a Supreme Court nomination. But they and many others like them, who now play a dominant role in the very powerful conservative legal fraternity the Federalist Society, are likely to be right there with their litmus test in hand.

Think about that before uttering any “not a dime’s worth of difference” assessments this year.


How the GOP Demonizes BLM for Political Ends

The New York Times editorial board explains the politics behind Republican posturing about the Black Lives Matter movement, and calls out several of their presidential candidates in particular for trying to stir up white resentment:

The Republican Party and its acolytes in the news media are trying to demonize the protest movement that has sprung up in response to the all-too-common police killings of unarmed African-Americans across the country. The intent of the campaign — evident in comments by politicians like Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky — is to cast the phrase “Black Lives Matter” as an inflammatory or even hateful anti-white expression that has no legitimate place in a civil rights campaign.
Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas crystallized this view when he said the other week that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were he alive today, would be “appalled” by the movement’s focus on the skin color of the unarmed people who are disproportionately killed in encounters with the police. This argument betrays a disturbing indifference to or at best a profound ignorance of history in general and of the civil rights movement in particular. From the very beginning, the movement focused unapologetically on bringing an end to state-sanctioned violence against African-Americans and to acts of racial terror very much like the one that took nine lives at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in June.
The civil rights movement was intended to make Congress and Americans confront the fact that African-Americans were being killed with impunity for offenses like trying to vote, and had the right to life and to equal protection under the law. The movement sought a cross-racial appeal, but at every step of the way used expressly racial terms to describe the death and destruction that was visited upon black people because they were black.

It’s a shameful legacy for a political party which once included leaders who actively supported civil rights reforms. Republicans like Sens. Jacob Javitz, Lowell Weicker, and Everett Dirksen, Governor Nelson Rockefeller and others all had impressive records of supporting racial justice and equality, even though they were conservative on most economic issues. Today GOP leaders are all active and tacit supporters of suppressing of African American votes. Huckabee has even advocated illegal measures to suppress voting on several occasions.
In reality Dr. King and the Movement were deeply concerned about violence targeting Black Americans and spoke out about it many times. As the Times editorial notes, in his eulogy for the four little girls who were killed in the Birmingham church bombing in 1963, Dr. King “did not shy away from the fact that the dead had been killed because they were black, by monstrous men whose leaders fed them “the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism.” He said that the dead “have something to say” to a complacent federal government that cut back-room deals with Southern Dixiecrats, as well as to “every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice…”
The Times editorial also emphasizes the clear connection between voter suppression and the racial violence that occurred during the Movement:

During this same period, freedom riders and voting rights activists led by the young John Lewis offered themselves up to be beaten nearly to death, week after week, day after day, in the South so that the country would witness Jim Crow brutality and meaningfully respond to it. This grisly method succeeded in Selma, Ala., in 1965 when scenes of troopers bludgeoning voting rights demonstrators compelled a previously hesitant Congress to acknowledge that black people deserved full citizenship, too, and to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Along the way, there was never a doubt as to what the struggle was about: securing citizenship rights for black people who had long been denied them.

During the Civil Rights Movement most southern Democratic elected officials were a huge part of the problem of racial injustice and they worked together with right-wing Republicans to relentlessly suppress the votes and civil rights of African Americans. It was a coalition of progressive Democrats and Republicans who opposed and finally overcame them to secure passage of the great Civil Rights reforms of the sixties.
But the Democratic Party has matured to the point where no Democratic political leaders advocate voter suppression or rolling back the clock on civil rights. Conversely, with very rare exceptions, no Republican leaders oppose voter suppression and most of them actively support it.
The Times editorial goes on to underscore the fact that Black Lives Matter “focuses on the fact that black citizens have long been far more likely than whites to die at the hands of the police, and is of a piece with this history.”
They are not saying that white lives don’t matter; they are calling needed attention to the outrage of racially-motivated violence, committed by police and others, and they are demanding corrective action, in keeping with the best traditions of the American Civil Rights Movement. And despite media focus on riots and civil disturbances in the wake of police violence, the overwhelming majority of Black Lives Matter protesters have remained exclusively nonviolent.
Republicans are trying to suggest otherwise. But this lie won’t stand the test of honest scrutiny.
The modern Republican Party now sees its hope for survival being based on energizing white resentment toward people of color, particularly those who dare to protest for their basic civil rights. As the editorial concludes, “politicians who know better and seek to strip this issue of its racial content and context are acting in bad faith. They are trying to cover up an unpleasant truth and asking the country to collude with them.”
The Republicans have deployed this strategy for decades with mixed results. But it is especially shameful when directed at a group of citizens whose central concern is their right to be free from racially-motivated violence.


Political Strategy Notes

The Obama Administration and the cause of Democratic unity chalk up a huge victory with Sen. Barbara Mikulski’s decision to support the Iran nuclear deal, which should provide the margin needed to secure approval of the agreement. “Opponents of the agreement said they could not remember another recent policy battle where the White House and Ms. Pelosi were so driven. In tandem, they made the Iran vote a strong test of party loyalty.,” report Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn at The New York Times. “Our ability to build coalitions, to lead, to have credibility when we enter into a negotiation was really on the line,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat who organized the Iran deal strategy with Ms. Pelosi, with whom she consulted almost daily while lawmakers were scattered in their districts around the country. “To walk away now would diminish our ability to lead on future issues.”
Greg Sargent comments on several recent polls showing substantial support for draconian immigration policies, like Trump’s call for mass deportations. Sargent boils it down to a disturbing conclusion “…perhaps the better way to understand what’s happening here is that Trump’s supporters like the story he is telling them, which is largely that immigrants are to blame for the suffering of American workers.”
The GOP front-runner continues to rack up endorsements from hate-mongers and their groups, but Dean Obeidallah argues at the Daily Beast that “Behind Trump, the GOP Really Is Becoming the Racist Party.
Will Trump Cave? He meets with GOP chair Priebus today, and they will no doubt discuss whether he will sign the “loyalty” pledge to support the the Republican presidential nominee (and publicly reject an independent campaign). Dana Bash and Tom LoBianco of CNN Politics write that it’s likely he will sign it. But it’s hard to see all that much upside for Trump in caving so early, other than short term good-will from his competition.
The most populous state may be on the verge of securing automatic voter registration for residents who have drivers licenses, reports Alice Ollstein at ThinkProgress.
NYT’s conservative columnist Ross Douthat ponders “The End of the Republican Party?,” and strains to be “a little less pessimistic” about the prospect. But it’s not a good sign for the GOP that he and others quoted in his column are talking about it.
Campaign for America’s Future Dave Johnson offers some insight into “What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won,” including “…Fixing our country’s problems is not just about electing a president. Billionaire money has taken over many statehouses – where they gerrymander the districts to keep themselves in power. Sanders likes to say that there are two primary sources of power, “organized people and organized money,” and that when people across lines of race, gender, class, nationality, and sexual orientation reject right-wing wedge politics and come together, “there is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cannot accomplish.” In addition to proving a presidential candidate can still run a formidable campaign without fat-cat contributions, Sanders has shown how Democratic Socialist ideas can get a hearing, even with all of Trump’s theatrics distracting the media.
Democracy Is Top Economic Growth Strategy, Says Study,” explains Terry Jones at The Investors Business Daily. Jones quotes study authors MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and University of Chicago economist James A. Robinson: “Our central estimates suggest that a country that switches from autocracy to democracy achieves about 20% higher GDP per capita over roughly 30 years.” Might it follow that eliminating voter suppression in the U.S. would help improve the economy?
Granted, the presidential campaign season is too damn long. But I doubt that scheduling a few more Democratic presidential debates would hurt the party nominee’s chances, and it’s quite possible that doing so could actually help Democrats to unify and toughen up for the general election. A little extra battle-testing can be a good thing.


September 2: Behind the Friendly Face of Dr. Ben Carson

It’s time to take a really good look at Dr. Ben Carson, as I noted today at Washington Monthly:

Now that Ben Carson is all the rage in the GOP presidential nominating contest, sharing the spotlight with Donald Trump without a trace of the negative vibes The Donald brings to the table, I figure my little hobby of trying to understand what the man means with his incessant references to “political correctness” is becoming a public utility…
One of my exhibits for describing Carson as a “wingnut with a calm bedside manner” was his reference in the Fox News GOP presidential debate to Hillary Clinton as a denizen of the “progressive movement” who was following “the Alinsky Model” for destroying the country. Even as they declared him the winner or one of the winners of the debate, MSM observers slid right over the ravings about Alinsky as though they couldn’t hear The Crazy or, more likely, didn’t understand what he was talking about. That sure as hell was not the case with right-wing media, who heard the dog-whistle loud and clear. Indeed, at National Review, John Fund even called it that:

The award so far in this Republican debate for dog-whistle rhetoric goes to Ben Carson. He answered a a question about Hillary Clinton by referring to her belief in “the Alinsky model,” a topic of great interest in the conservative blogosphere.
Named after Saul Alinksy, the late community organizer who inspired both Hillary and Barack Obama, the model calls for destabilizing the existing system from the inside and paving the way for radical social change.
Despite his mild manner and soft voice, it may be that Ben Carson is the candidate on tonight’s stage who is privately the most deeply ideological.

According to people like Carson, a big part of the Alinsky Model is “political correctness:” disarming opponents by deriding their utterances as small-minded and offensive…. [H]ere’s a fine description of the core idea in a Tea Party take on Carson’s well-received 2014 CPAC speech:

Dr. Carson says that the good news is that the majority of people in this country have common sense, but the problem is that they’ve been “beaten into submission by the PC (political-correctness) policemen,” which has kept people from speaking up about what they believe.
To thunderous applause, Dr. Carson revealed one of Saul Alinsky’s (author of leftist bible, Rules for Radicals) more deceptive tactics that he taught to his progressive, Marxist followers:
“One of the principles of Saul Alinsky, he said you make the majority believe that what they think is outdated and nobody thinks that way, and that the way they think is the only way intelligent people think. And if you can co-opt the media in the process, you’re far ahead of the game. That’s exactly what’s happened, and it’s time for people to stand up and proclaim what they believe and stop being bullied!

So every time Carson denounces “political correctness,” which he does in just about every other sentence, that’s what he’s talking about: a conspiracy by “progressives” to suppress common-sense (i.e., hard-core conservative) “solutions” by pitting people against each other through talk about race, gender, income inequality, etc. etc. In Carson’s heavily Glenn-Beckish worldview, all his talk about “unity” and “civility” means the kind of country we can have once the snakes (i.e., you and me and HRC) have been thrown out of Eden.

It would be nice if political reporters would play closer attention.


Behind the Friendly Face of Dr. Ben Carson

It’s time to take a really good look at Dr. Ben Carson, as I noted today at Washington Monthly:

Now that Ben Carson is all the rage in the GOP presidential nominating contest, sharing the spotlight with Donald Trump without a trace of the negative vibes The Donald brings to the table, I figure my little hobby of trying to understand what the man means with his incessant references to “political correctness” is becoming a public utility…
One of my exhibits for describing Carson as a “wingnut with a calm bedside manner” was his reference in the Fox News GOP presidential debate to Hillary Clinton as a denizen of the “progressive movement” who was following “the Alinsky Model” for destroying the country. Even as they declared him the winner or one of the winners of the debate, MSM observers slid right over the ravings about Alinsky as though they couldn’t hear The Crazy or, more likely, didn’t understand what he was talking about. That sure as hell was not the case with right-wing media, who heard the dog-whistle loud and clear. Indeed, at National Review, John Fund even called it that:

The award so far in this Republican debate for dog-whistle rhetoric goes to Ben Carson. He answered a a question about Hillary Clinton by referring to her belief in “the Alinsky model,” a topic of great interest in the conservative blogosphere.
Named after Saul Alinksy, the late community organizer who inspired both Hillary and Barack Obama, the model calls for destabilizing the existing system from the inside and paving the way for radical social change.
Despite his mild manner and soft voice, it may be that Ben Carson is the candidate on tonight’s stage who is privately the most deeply ideological.

According to people like Carson, a big part of the Alinsky Model is “political correctness:” disarming opponents by deriding their utterances as small-minded and offensive…. [H]ere’s a fine description of the core idea in a Tea Party take on Carson’s well-received 2014 CPAC speech:

Dr. Carson says that the good news is that the majority of people in this country have common sense, but the problem is that they’ve been “beaten into submission by the PC (political-correctness) policemen,” which has kept people from speaking up about what they believe.
To thunderous applause, Dr. Carson revealed one of Saul Alinsky’s (author of leftist bible, Rules for Radicals) more deceptive tactics that he taught to his progressive, Marxist followers:
“One of the principles of Saul Alinsky, he said you make the majority believe that what they think is outdated and nobody thinks that way, and that the way they think is the only way intelligent people think. And if you can co-opt the media in the process, you’re far ahead of the game. That’s exactly what’s happened, and it’s time for people to stand up and proclaim what they believe and stop being bullied!

So every time Carson denounces “political correctness,” which he does in just about every other sentence, that’s what he’s talking about: a conspiracy by “progressives” to suppress common-sense (i.e., hard-core conservative) “solutions” by pitting people against each other through talk about race, gender, income inequality, etc. etc. In Carson’s heavily Glenn-Beckish worldview, all his talk about “unity” and “civility” means the kind of country we can have once the snakes (i.e., you and me and HRC) have been thrown out of Eden.

It would be nice if political reporters would play closer attention.


Further Evidence That Low-Information/Paranoid Voters Rule GOP

A nugget from Steve Benen’s Maddowblog post, “GOP base: Obama wasn’t born in US, but Cruz was“:

While top-line results are usually the most important takeaway from polls like these, that’s only part of what’s amazing about these new results. Consider this excerpt from the latest PPP report:
…51% [of Republican voters] overall want to eliminate birthright citizenship. 54% think President Obama is a Muslim. And only 29% grant that President Obama was born in the United States. That’s less than the 40% who think Canadian born Ted Cruz was born in the United States.
Let that one roll around in your head for a moment. Nearly seven years into the Obama presidency, less a third of Republican voters believe the president was born in the United States. A significantly higher percentage believe Ted Cruz was born in the U.S – and he wasn’t.

Piling on, Benen adds that 54 percent of GOP respondents in the poll believe that President Obama is not a Christian and “32 percent aren’t sure,” beliefs echoed by Scott Walker and other GOP presidential candidates, despite numerous reports of the Obama family attending churches across the nation. Further, 66 percent of Trump supporters believe the President is a Muslim.
Take your pick of these stats, parse them any way you can. But but you won’t be able to avoid concluding that an awfully large percentage of self identified Republican rank and filers are dummies or paranoid. Republican leaders are, to some extent, merely reflecting the irrational suspicions and ignorance, willful and otherwise, of their “base.”
But real leadership is not about pandering to the worst instincts of constituents. It’s about educating them and bringing out the best in people, challenging them to a higher level of awareness and common concern for their fellow citizens. Measured by that standard, 21st century Republican leaders have failed miserably. The interesting question is, when do more enlightened conservatives in the rank and file become too embarrassed to call themselves Republicans?