Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of the most unusual figures in American political history, made it official today, announcing he would not run for a fifth term in 2012. Most observers noted accurately that he did not have any feasible path to victory, with both Democrats and Republicans lining up to challenge him (his independent win in 2006 was heavily attributable to a virtually non-existent Republican candidacy).
It was an appropriate if bitter end to Lieberman’s electoral career. I’ll have more to say about this at a later date, but Lieberman’s trajectory since his appearance on the Democratic ticket in 2000 has been in the steady direction of representing traditions he’s misinterpreted, and constituencies that no longer exist. It was fitting that when he crossed every line of political propriety and endorsed the Republican ticket in 2008, he embraced his friend John McCain precisely when McCain was reinventing his own political identity at the behest of the conservative movement, which in turn vetoed Lieberman as a possible running-mate.
My personal interaction with Lieberman was well back in the day, when he was an exceptionally sunny personality who was perhaps the Senate’s most reliable advocate of the Clintonian tendency in Democratic politics. I never saw up-close the reportedly bitter man who never got over his failed presidential campaign in 2004 and his lost primary challenge in 2006, blaming Democrats for turning their backs on him and on the “JFK tradition” in the party (which he cited once again in his retirement announcement). He never seemed to reflect much on the fact that others had legitimate claims to represent that tradition, making his own isolation largely self-imposed.
In any event, those Democrats who remember his earlier days in politics are rightly pleased that he managed one fine moment before announcing his retirement. In championing repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he did stand for the vindication of both justice and the popular will against the depredations of partisan politics. That, along with his mistakes, will be part of his complicated legacy.

The ever-estimable John Judis has written a must-read piece for The New Republic that casts a great deal of light on the antecedants of the contemporary Republican Party, showing its roots in the anti-New Deal “conservative coalition” of the 1930s. Here’s a key nugget:

If the conservative coalition’s aims and tactics sound awfully familiar to us now, that’s because the conservative coalition of the 1930s was the Republican Party of today. Like the contemporary GOP, it described the threat from liberalism in alien terms–as the product of communism or fascism that had been imported from Europe; it was obsessed with strict fealty to an anachronistic reading of the Constitution; it wielded Congress’s investigatory power in order to frustrate the administration; it simultaneously advocated balanced budgets and tax cuts (then, as now, a maddeningly illogical position); and it used an economic downturn to argue against government spending, even though that downturn was caused by Roosevelt’s decision to cut spending, not his New Deal programs.
But there was one crucial difference between the conservative coalition and contemporary Republicans: The former was not a political party, and this imposed limits on what it could do.

It’s now part of the CW that the two parties became vastly more ideological from the 1960s on, and that the GOP is the more ideological of the two parties. But what becomes apparent from Judis’ piece is how literally the conservative GOP is aping the policies and attitudes of the bipartisan conservatives of a bygone era–with the added dynamic of the ability to use party discipline to impose ideological conformity and block progressive legislation.
Democrats have often accused Republicans of wanting to repeal the New Deal. In many cases, this has represented little more than partisan hyperbole. Not any more. The most powerful voices in the conservative movement today are taking up the battle against FDR that their forebears fought and ultimately lost–at least for three-quarters of a century. And thanks to party unity, their media tribunes, and enhanced tools of obstruction, they are stronger than ever.

President Obama’s memorial speech in Tucson has established a solid foundation for the creation of new social norms to reduce the role of violent extremist political rhetoric in American public life. But our politics will quickly revert to its previous state if political commentators and politicians cannot define a clear and reasonably unambiguous “line in the sand” between what should be considered acceptable in political discourse and what should be viewed as unacceptable.
One social norm that is already emerging is that specific threats of violence are simply no longer acceptable. It is unlikely that we will hear overtly threatening remarks again anytime soon about “meeting census surveyors at the door with shotguns”, or “watering the tree of liberty with blood” in mainstream political discourse. Nor are we likely to see men appearing at political rallies with assault weapons strapped to their backs without there being serious and strenuous outcry. Among elected officials there will for some time probably even be a self-imposed ban on “humorous” remarks about “my close friends Smith and Wesson” or coy references to “second amendment remedies” that imply the threat of using guns and violence to achieve political goals.
This in itself will certainly be healthy, but it will not prevent the gradual (or not so gradual) return of the kind of rhetoric that portrays politics as a desperate, life or death struggle between literally evil and subversive, “un-American opponents of freedom and liberty” on the one hand and “heroic patriots” standing against them on the other (in the comparable left-wing rhetorical framework the dichotomy is between embattled “defenders of traditional democratic values” and “racist, right-wing crypto-fascists”). Simply creating a norm against clear threats of violence will not by itself reverse the broader “climate of hate” or “lack of civility” in politics.
Yet neither a “climate of hate” nor a “lack of civility” are sufficiently precise to create a clear new social norm. In fact, because of this imprecision, they are already being subject to criticism and even ridicule on the grounds that “politics is necessarily passionate” and “metaphors don’t kill people, people kill people.” A number of conservative commentators have dismissed the notions as typical nanny-state political correctness run amok.
As a result, we need a standard that reasonable people can consistently apply and insist upon — one that distinguishes what is acceptable from what is not acceptable.
Politics as Warfare, Political Opponents as “Enemies”
For some time TDS has been arguing that there are two key concepts that lie at the root of both political extremism and the climate of violence: The notions of politics as warfare and political opponents as enemies. This is how a TDS Strategy Memo put it last year:

For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans) extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
As a result, there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies are two central ideas – the vision of “politics as warfare” and “political opponents as enemies.” While these notions are widely used as metaphors, political extremists mean them in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

Read more…

When I heard in the wake of the Tucson shootings that Jim Clyburn had said something about bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine” (the long-lapsed FCC regulation requiring that broadcasters offer “equal time” to controversial political content), I literally groaned aloud. “Oh God,” I thought, “that’s all it will take to keep that conspiracy theory alive for another year or two.”
Sure enough, Rush Limbaugh and company were off to the races, as reported by Politico‘s Keach Hagey:

When some liberals called for reining in harsh political rhetoric after the Arizona shootings, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) took it one step further. He called for bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, in what was widely considered an attempt to clamp down on talk radio.
A week later, those calls have abated, and no one is seriously pursuing the idea of returning to the long-defunct policy, which required media on the public airwaves to present both sides of controversial political issues. Not Clyburn, not another Democrat who echoed his call for regulatory remedies, Rep. Louise Slaughter (N.Y.), and not the Federal Communications Commission, whose chairman opposes reinstating the policy.
But you wouldn’t know it from listening to conservative talk radio.
Conservative talkers like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity are rallying their listeners with a very old — and very successful — battle cry, accusing the left of trying to curb their free speech.
“So believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised, folks, if somebody in the Obama regime or some FCC bureaucrat or some Democrat congressperson has already written up legislation to stifle and eliminate conservative speech, and that legislation is sitting in a desk drawer someplace just waiting for the right event to clamp down because that’s what all this is,” Limbaugh said Monday, in his first show since the shooting. “And every time an event like this happens, they get into a trial run in hopes that this is the one that they can succeed in shutting us all down.”
This theme remained a constant on talk radio, conservative blogs and Fox News throughout the week….

Never mind that the “threat” is totally not-happening. Never mind that even if the Fairness Doctrine were brought back, it would involve “equal time,” not the suppression or elimination of conservative gabbing. Never mind that even in that remote contingency, it would only apply to the increasingly less-dominant broadcast media, not to “speech.” And never mind that when the Fairness Doctrine was in effect, there was plenty of conservative advocacy abroad in the land.
Rush’s lurid suggestion that the Obama administration was looking for “the right event to clamp down” and that Clyburn was cleverly and with vast secret backing conducting a “trial run” by bringing the subject up represented a bit more than the now-habitual effort to make purveyors of extremist rhetoric the victims of the Tucson tragedy. He was stopping just short of the analogy which you can see in comment threads all over the right-wing blogosphere: that “the Left” is looking for a “Reichstag Fire” with which to justify a totalitarian takeover of the country, just like you-know-who did back in 1933.
No informed and sane conservative believes this crap, even for a moment. But Rush and Glenn and Sean–not to mention the authors of countless viral emails shrieking about the Fairness Doctrine for at least two years now–play with fears of imminent totalitarianism regularly, and it’s about time folks on the Right called them on it. Aside from unnecessarily scaring the folks who hear and trust this stuff, it must be noted that such fearmongering has the collatoral effect of stimulating the sort of insurrectionary sentiments that genuine totalitarian threats might legitimately raise. And it’s an especially bad time to be doing that.

It’s noteworthy that the annual holiday set aside to commemorate the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King has come this year immediately after a horrific act of violence in Arizona, and at the end of a brief and not very edifying debate over the relationship between violent political rhetoric and actual violence.
Unfortunately, most conservative activists probably aren’t much in the habit of reflecting on the teachings of MLK. Some appear to think that “color-blindness” was his enduring legacy; others, that he is simply a historical figure who contributed to the dismantlement of Jim Crow, and is not terribly relevant today. I vividly recall seeing posters around Denver during the 2008 Democratic Convention (erroneously) claiming MLK as a Republican. Above all, many conservatives–along with millions of liberals, moderates, and non-political folk–probably think of MLK Day as simply an ethnic holiday for African-Americans.
You might imagine that some of MLK’s writings that were addressed to the conservatives of his day–say, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, or Paul’s Letter to American Christians, would be useful reading right now. But contemporary conservatives are not at all in the same psychological space as their forebears in the 1950s and 1960s, who were defensively protecting an unjust status quo on grounds that it represented a lesser of evils or a condition best left to fade away slowly. No, for the most part today’s American Right is in a counterrevolutionary mood, viewing the status quo as representing the intolerable consequences of liberal policies and political victories.
But for that very reason, ironically enough, King’s many injunctions to the progressives of his day to strictly eschew violence, stand for the universalist principles of America’s civic and religious traditions, and seek reconciliation rather than self-righteous vengence, seem more appropriate reading material for the Right than for the Left (though the latter need constant reminders as well).
Now it’s true that most conservatives have never embraced violence as a means to the changes they seek in public policies, and that many are careful to avoid demonization of opponents or appeals to “higher laws” that sometimes are used to justify violence or other extraordinary measures. While they may sincerely believe that lower taxes on “job-producers” or a scaling-back of the New Deal and Great Society safety net or war with Iran and North Korea are essential to America’s future, they don’t necessarily view those who disagree with them as un-American or illegitimate.
But there’s simply no denying that there has been a significant rise on the Right in just the last few years in the numbers of those who may not openly advocate domestic violence, but defend the recourse to violence as a trump card in the defense of what they view as immutable principles of governance, economics and national security; that’s the unavoidable meaning of talk about “second Amendment remedies” and secession, or of liberals as “a Terrorist Fifth Column” or as “looters.” And that’s in addition to those conservatives who believe legalized abortion is an ongoing “Holocaust” defended by the latter-day equivalents of the Nazis, or that separation of church and state represents persecution of Christians and an attack on civilization itself.
To those on the Right who are flirting with violence and hatred even if they cannot justly be accused of abetting hate crimes, a good immersion in King’s writings would be a very good idea. And a good place to start might be what King had to say on the power of nonviolence:

[T]he nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding.

Nonviolence doesn’t always “work” to achieve immediate social or political objectives. But it does always provide a safeguard against the blindness and bitterness that hatred sows when civic conflict becomes war and opponents become enemies.

On the very day when Republicans are in the process of dumping their African-American party chairman, word comes from South Carolina (via Jon Chait) that Newt Gingrich is stressing the need for a massive outreach to minority voters.

The midterm win wasn’t enough and Republicans need to aim for winning 40 more House seats and 12 or 13 more Senate seats in the next election, Gingrich said to a crowd at the Marina Inn at Grande Dunes.
“If you’re going to govern in 2013, you’re going to need a really large margin,” he said.
To do that, Republicans need to spend at least 30 percent of their time campaigning to black, Hispanic and other minority communities and emphasize lowering taxes instead of social programs such as welfare.

Quite appropriately, Chait found it hilarious that Gingrich thought Republicans weren’t spending enough time talking about tax cuts.
But it’s a sign of Newt’s myopia that he doesn’t seem to think there’s anything about the GOP’s messaging that might represent a bar to a better performance among minority voters.
Totally aside from Newt’s trumped-up “lowering taxes instead of welfare” choice, minority voters just don’t agree with the fundamental premise of GOP rhetoric that too much government is threatening the country, as noted recently by Ron Brownstein in a column on exit poll findings:

Minorities were almost exactly twice as likely as whites to say that life would be better for the next generation than for their own; whites were considerably more likely to say that it would be more difficult. And on a question measuring bedrock beliefs about the role of government, the two racial groups again registered almost mirror-image preferences. Sixty percent of minorities said that government should be doing more to solve problems; 63 percent of whites said that government is doing too many things that would be better left to businesses and individuals.
The irony in these results is that minorities expressed more faith in both the future and the government than whites did, even though the recession has hit minority communities harder.

And beyond this very different set of perspectives, minority voters aren’t likely to get friendlier with a party that is in the habit of (a) blaming the housing and financial meltdowns on shiftless poor and minority families who took out mortgages they couldn’t afford; (b) screaming about non-existent “voter fraud” any time there’s an effort to help minorites exercise their right to vote; and (c) treating the first African-American president as a dangerous extremist who is consciously betraying the U.S. Constitution.
I’ve never quite shared the assessment of Newt as some sort of strategic genius, but maybe that’s because I’ve been watching him since he was a flaky history professor running to the left of a Democratic congressman in two straight elections back in the 70s.
Still, if Newt and other Republicans are serious about increasing their share of the minority vote, they need to understand that spending more time saying offensive things to minority voters ain’t going to get the job done.

So the Republican National Committee is holding its regularly-scheduled chairmanship election today, and controversial incumbent Michael Steele is almost certain to lose. The question for Republicans is how embarrassing the whole scenario will turn out to be. After all, Steele is a symbol of alleged GOP diversity, and after all, the party did rather well under his leadership.
But it’s also a bit difficult for Republicans to pose as champions of fiscal probity when their national commitee seems to be constantly struggling with money issues fed by questionable spending practices, and without question, some GOPers fear Steele’s camera-friendly visibility, particularly since he’s prone to gaffes.
The front-runner to replace Steele (after a complicated series of ballots) has become Wisconsin Republican chairman Reince Priebus, but he’s been hit with a last-minute rumor campaign suggesting he’s a “plant” by potential presidential candidate Haley Barbour, himself a former RNC chief. This development underlines the sort of internal problems Republicans are going to face in a wide-open presidential cycle where everyone at every moment is suspected of carrying the water for a would-be Chief Executive.
If you are interested in following the RNC decision, I’d recommend you keep an eye on Dave Weigel’s blog at Slate; he’ll be covering it all in detail.

Back in early December, when all the talk was about progressive unhappiness with the president’s decision to cut a deal with John Boehner on the extension of Bush tax cuts, Gallup seemed to offer some empirical evidence that Obama was paying a price with self-identified liberals’ support:

Liberal Democrats remain strong supporters of President Obama, but their approval of the job he is doing has fallen noticeably since the midterm elections. For the first time, it dropped below 80% in the week after the announcement of the tax deal he brokered with congressional Republicans.

Well, whatever was going on then seems to have been an outlier or just a momentary blip. In the last Gallup presidential job approval tracking poll (January 3-9), liberal Democratic job approval ratings for Obama were back up to 87%. And in case you think that poll picked up some sort of backlash to the Tucson tragedy, Obama’s job approval rating among liberal Democrats was even higher, at 91%, the week of December 20-26. Among self-identified liberals in general, the relevant support is at 76%, as compared to 69% in December 6-12. How about African-Americans? 93% now, as compared to 84% in December 6-12.
If there was ever some sort of trend indicating that disgruntlement with Obama was spreading from progressive elites to the rank-and-file “base,” it’s gone away, which should cool the jets of those folk who so recently were calling for a left-bent primary challenge to the president in 2012.

In discussing the 2012 presidential campaign, I’ve been a bit disrespectful of the odds for Republican dark horses who may be big time players in Washington or in the eyes of pundits, but do not exactly walk tall in the places that actually determine presidential nominations.
Now comes Dave Weigel with a timely reminder of just how slowly this presidential cycle is getting underway compared to the situation four years ago:

Here’s a list of all the candidates who had at least announced exploratory committees by this day, four years ago, in the last cycle. I’ve put the details for candidates who did something else — announcing a bid without an exploratory committee, or confirming they’d run — in parentheses.
April 17, 2006: Mike Gravel (announcing a full-on campaign at the National Press Club)
October 30, 2006: Duncan Hunter (announcing he’d retire from Congress and run for president)
November 9, 2006: Tom Vilsack (announcing a full campaign)
November 13, 2006: Rudy Giuliani
November 15, 2006: John McCain
December 4, 2006: Sam Brownback
December 7, 2006: Bill Richardson (telling Fox News “I am running”)
December 15, 2006: Tommy Thompson
December 19, 2006: Jim Gilmore
December 26, 2006: John Edwards
January 3, 2007: Mitt Romney
January 7, 2007: Joe Biden (announcing his intention to create a committee, on Meet the Press)
January 11, 2007: Chris Dodd (announcing a full-on run on Don Imus’s show), Ron Paul

You can soon add another name to that list: Barack Obama announced his exploratory committee four years ago this Sunday.
When Weigel published his post earlier this week, the number of 2012 Republican candidates who had set up exploratory committees was a nice round zero. Yesterday Georgia-based conservative talk show host Herman Cain became the first to set one up.
Now it’s true the number of candidates in the 2008 cycle was inflated by the open presidency, but still, there were 6 Democrats and 8 Republicans in the field by this time in 2007. (For those who think 2008 was atypical, consider 2004; at this point eight years ago, Howard Dean and Joe Lieberman were already announced candidates, while John Kerry, Dick Gephardt and John Edwards had set up exploratory committees).
It’s not as though the nominating process has become more langorous since then. Yes, we had unusually early contests in 2008 thanks to threats to Iowa and New Hampshire’s duopoly, but those weren’t apparent yet when all those candidates started running, and nothing fundamental about the process has been changed since then. The 2008 Democratic nominee won Iowa and the Republican nominee won New Hampshire. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, we had the latest in a long list of failures of prominent candidacies that adopted the strategy of ignoring the early states and mopping up on Super Tuesday (Rudy Giuliani).
In other words, time’s a-wastin’ for 2012, and the only candidates who can afford to lie in the weeds are well-known retreads or national celebrities, such as Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and Sarah Palin (you could probably add Ron Paul to the list if he runs once again). Tim Pawlenty and Rick Santorum are already heavily involved in quasi-candidate activity in Iowa, but that’s about it.
At some point soon, then, it will be time for the chattering classes to stop fantasizing about dark horses like John Thune, Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Mike Pence or Chris Christie, unless they get a move on and start making themselves much better known in the early states. That may be impossible for some of them. Some of my progressive buddies are convinced Christie’s going to be a formidable candidate, but I can’t quite see how a first-term governor will find the time to spend a year living in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina without his constituents getting a mite upset.
Moreover, each tick of the clock makes the task of all the dark horses that much harder.
Truth is, a lot of Republicans are less than excited about their potential 2012 field, and are talking up dark horses to make themselves feel better.
But soon enough, all the talk must end, and what you see is what you’ll get.

Nate Silver has an insightful post, “Did Democrats Give Up in the Gun Control Debate?” up at The New York Times. SIlver explores public attitudes toward gun control measures in light of the history of gun control in America and violent crime rates. Silver doesn’t reach any firm conclusions about future prospects for gun control, other than saying ambivalence among Democrats has given the NRA free reign. But his analysis of public opinion is a good read, especially for gun control advocates in their search for a workable strategy. As Silver expalins,

…According to the General Social Survey, conducted intermittently since 1972, the percentage of Americans who think permits should be required before a gun can be obtained has gradually risen (to 79 percent in 2008 from 72 percent in 1972). Background checks for gun owners are overwhelmingly popular, attracting the support of as many as 90 percent of Americans. And while most Americans say they do not want gun control regulations to become stricter, even fewer — about 10 percent — think they should be made more lax.
Still, the overall pattern is reasonably clear. According to Gallup surveys, for instance, the number of Americans favoring a ban on handguns has been on a long-term decline and is now about 30 percent, down almost 10 percentage points from a decade earlier…

Silver then looks at attitudes in light of gun ownership:

…This has occurred despite gun ownership becoming less common. When the General Social Survey was first conducted in 1973, about half (49 percent) of Americans reported having a firearm in their households. But the fraction was down to 36 percent by 2008

And crime rates:

…it is hard to track any sort of one-to-one relationship between crime rates and public opinion on guns. The rate of violent crime increased steadily in the United States for most of the past half-century, peaking in 1991, before embarking upon a relatively steep decline. But support for gun rights generally increased both as the crime rate was rising and then after it began to fall.

Silver discusses the evolution of the gun control policies of the political parties, noting the hardening of GOP opposition to any form of gun control and the weakening of Democratic support, until the election of President Clinton, when the bold language of the Democratic Party Platform of 1996 put it this way:

Bob Dole, Newt Gingrich, and George Bush were able to hold the Brady Bill hostage for the gun lobby until Bill Clinton became President. With his leadership, we made the Brady Bill the law of the land. And because we did, more than 60,000 felons, fugitives, and stalkers have been stopped from buying guns. President Clinton led the fight to ban 19 deadly assault weapons, designed for one purpose only — to kill human beings. We oppose efforts to restrict weapons used for legitimate sporting purposes, and we are proud that not one hunter or sportsman was forced to change guns because of the assault weapons ban. But we know that the military-style guns we banned have no place on America’s streets, and we are proud of the courageous Democrats who defied the gun lobby and sacrificed their seats in Congress to make America safer.

After this high water mark of Democratic support for gun control, the Democratic platforms of ’04 and ’08 barely mentioned the issue. “Democrats concluded that the issue was a political loser for them and they stopped fighting back,” as SIlver puts it.
After Tucson, Democrats are at a crossroads where they must decide whether or not it is OK to ignore the fact that high capacity ammo clips serve no other purpose, other than killing lots of people. Silver presents no poll data about attitudes toward banning the sale of high capacity ammo clips, which has been proposed in legislation by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy. It’s highly unlikely that Speaker Boehner and the Republicans will allow the life-saving legislation to move forward in the House.
Progressives and activists should not give up on McCarthy’s bill. As America prepares to celebrate the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, I remember how the holiday legislation languished in congress for more than a decade before it got any traction. Then, sparked by a well-organized citizens lobby launched in 1979, the bill rolled through congress like a well-oiled juggernaut, compelling even a reluctant Ronald Reagan to sign it in 1983. The two relevant points here are that attitudes can be changed, and worthwhile reforms sometimes take a few years. Activists should refuse to be demoralized by defeats in the short run, while mobilizing for victory in the long run. That’s how meaningful gun control to save lives will come to America.