I never get tired of reading Republicans-in-disarray articles, and today Stu Rothenberg feeds my monkey. He spends most of his time arguing that Karl Rove made a mistake announcing his anti-Tea Party crusade in the Northeast Establishment New York Times and that he’d be better off co-opting the wingnuts than confronting them. His conclusion, however, is that not much can be done about the problem because there is no easy solution to a political base that is infused with so much hatred and paranoia.
Ultimately, the Republican Party’s problems go back to its base voters, who participate in primaries and nominating conventions. Many of them are so blinded by their anger toward President Barack Obama, the national news media and their own party leaders that they are willing to nominate the most conservative candidate in a primary, no matter how limited his or her appeal in a general election.
And for party strategists, there is no easy solution to that problem.
I have an idea. I don’t think it is very hard to implement. How about Establishment Republicans stop feeding the Crazy to the Stupid?
How could that be done? Well, the management at Fox News could make some decisions about what kind of information they want the Republican base to have. Do they want them more angry and paranoid, or less? Is the network about making money or giving power to the right? For a while, those two objectives were not in conflict. They seem to be in conflict today, however. As for politicians, they shouldn’t feed anger and paranoia to the base if they don’t want them to behave like wingnuts. That means that they should stop appearing on some hate radio shows and that they should disavow some of them.
There is a certain sense in which the Republican Party relies on anger and paranoia, but we can all see that it has gone way too far in the Obama Era.
“their anger toward…Obama”
And what exactly is that “anger” (actually blind hatred, but whatever) based on, again? A (Repub) scheme to regulate health insurance by mandating (subsidized) insurance coverage under a “personal responsibility” theory. A one-time run-of-the-mill Keynesian increase in gub’mint spending to offset the (Repub-caused) largest recession since the Great Depression. What else?
Some fairly weak tea Wall Street regulation? That’s not a class of folks our rightwing Southern Brethren have been too keen on in the past. Benghazi? That came a little late in the Obama Hatred Game. Doing little or nothing on the thousand and one crises that “conservatives” deny are even crises, like climate change? Please. Doing nothing is not a cause for “conservative” hatred. Accepting gays in the military? Is that it?
The reality is that there is very little actual political basis for the (overwhelmingly white) “conservative” hatred of Obama, unlike say, contempt for admitted criminals and professional incompetents like Cheney and Bush junyah.
And to the extent that any teaturd could articulate a policy reason (such as, say, “increased spending for negro…er, wastrels!!”), one quickly sees it is based on lies and disinformation that the corporate/plutocrat establishment ginned via the corporate press and Fox Propaganda network.
So while I agree that the intentional lies and absurd anti-Obama spin that a dimwit like McFool blathers 24/7 have their effect, I have to wonder what the REAL basis for the “conservative” hatred is, because the actual Obama policies pursued and adopted are usually fairly insipid from a real demonic lib’rul standpoint (if not actually opposed to liberalism, such as Obama’s escalation of imperial wars and his embrace of dubious Bushco militarist policies, such as our heroic Drone War on Islamic Weddings and Family Reunions.)
There’s something fishy about all this bloviating rightwing “anger”….
subtract the racism personally directed at the president and you still get Whitewater and Paula Jones and Vince Foster and impeachment.
I don’t know, I read today in Ross Douthat that Obama cynically inflamed animosity on the part of. Catholics something something to activate us, his base, by something, something contraception vs. Roman Catholicism. (mistake to read Ross Douthat)
Exactly right. The republican base voter has been conditioned to believe that NO democrat should ever be in the White House and, if they are, their election was illegitimate. The past four years would have been full of rage and paranoia if Hillary had won – it just would have been focused a bit differently and maybe less absolute rage at the black guy – because there wouldn’t have been one.
I still think racism is a factor in Clinton hatred too. It wasn’t for nothing Clinton was called our first black president, by supporters, and some including me like to think of Obama as our first Jewish president in just the same sense. Indeed Clinton hatred is expressed in that kind of racist terms, focusing on the idea of his excessive animal appetites, and Obama hatred on his supposed cold calculation and leadership of an international socialist conspiracy.
Guns. There are coming for your guns. And if one plays parlor psychologist, that means they are coming for your penis. Hmmm! That might not be so far off. They hate gays. That might mean they are not so secure in their heterosexuality. They worships long hard things (guns), the more powerful the better. Compensation? They fear Communist dictatorship. Projection?
No matter how much they fracture they will never lose sight of who the enemy is. Which would be pretty much everybody in America that does look or sound like them.
This phenomenon concerns me.
They can’t stop though.
The vast majority of the people voting for the GOP are not voting for the reasons the establishment wants. Most GOP voters don’t give a rats ass about lowering Romney’s tax rate, corporate tax cuts for outsourcing, and deregulating Wall Street. Those issues don’t drive most GOP voters to the polls and a good portion of their base doesn’t even like NYC bankers and East Coast fat cats.
The conservative bait has always been giving a sheen of respectability to social and regligious conservatism in all it’s hatred and bigotry. It’s selling point is legitimizing that crap as morally superior and deeply American. Remove that from the Republican platform and all they have are a bunch of economic goals and policies that don’t work for most people and even most of their own voters like about as much as rectal bleeding and the ebola virus.
If the establishment quits offering up crazy and social issues as the main course there is no reason for most of their voters to show up and eat. They don’t want or like the other dishes on the menu, but they’ll go along with it as long as they can gorge themselves on bigotry and hatred while being told they aren’t racists but instead devout patriots compared to the Democrats.
There is no way out of the this for the establishment and they know it. Which is why the current panic is going on. They have a limited time to get back into office and enact their sweeping economic reforms and destroy the safety net and any public services. They have to do it before they are demographiced into oblivion.
Their time is not so limited as long as there are Democrats like Erskine Bowles, Max Baucus, Rahm Emanuel and a cast of thousands.
American TalibanGOP: “Absolutely no shtupping unless we say so!”I think this is about right. The New Deal was wildly popular until the social upheaval of the ’60’s created a wedge of resentment politics based almost entirely on race, and protests against the Vietnam war gave the establishment the opening it needed to split “no-nothings” (America love it or leave it) and the racists away from the Democratic coalition. It started with Nixon’s “silent majority” and morphed into the “moral majority” during the Reagan administration, finally topped off by Gingrich’s demagoguery against Government as a morally corrupt enterprise.
the result of this is that there just aren’t any establishment elected leaders left. No one left to appeal to the center. Nothing to do but go all in, and hope you can suppress, depress the vote enough to get the desired results.
I don’t agree with Mr. Rothenberg’s conclusion there. There exists a faction within the Republican Party that would love to nominate the most extreme candidate. But that’s not what happened in 2012, is it? They nominated the candidate with the most money to spend in the primary who was willing to play an extremist on TV. In my neck of the woods the extremists went for Santorum, but the caucus results went handily to Willard. The Party made certain of it. It was something how they treated the Ron Paul supporters. They are not afraid to wield their power on their own people to get the desired result.
No way the most radical candidate gets nominated in ’16.
I don’t see it that way. How many primarys did Romney “win” with around 40%? He “won” because there was one Romney and a horde of anti-Romneys each with their own regional base.
Tech geeks have known for years what happens with the type of behavior routinely practiced by the GOP.
Well since Mississippi has just two weeks ago gotten around to ratifying the 13th Amendment, I’m thinking that if that is any indication of what it takes to turn RED around, that Fox News could partner up with Media Matters today and we wouldn’t see a change in 3 lifetimes.
Better 3 lifetimes for a change than eternity. Today FOX, today!
If they did that, I mean really did that, they’d begin to badly lose elections until the brand detoxified. Until they fear their base more than they fear liberalism it’s not going to happen. Which means it’s never going to happen because liberalism goes after their ill-gotten gains.
Well, the management at Fox News could make some decisions about what kind of information they want the Republican base to have. Do they want them more angry and paranoid, or less? Is the network about making money or giving power to the right?
Is Roger Ailes’ brief from Murdoch to win elections, or make money off the highest possible ratings? Why should Ailes be trusted to have the Republican Party’s best interests at heart any more than Karl Rove does? This is high-level power grift at work, my friends.
Okay, Ailes cuts loose Dick Morris, Carville & Matalin and Calamity Wasilla.. but then picks up Erick (Son of Erick) Erickson, Dennis Kucinich and Herman Freaking Cain. Same. Old. Sh-t.
Well, well, well. First lightning strikes the Vatican.
And now Mississippi finally formally ratifies the 13th Amendment. It’s unanimous. Slavery is unacceptable.
And in the cornfields of Nebraska, I understand that there are some pigs with wings revving their engines.
From 2012 Primaries:
Newt Gingrich is a STUPID person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like!
Today, Joe Conason feeds my monkey.
That’s pretty funny. I received a spam mail this morning that references the Draper piece and reads in part:
“Good morning ,
I have attached the cover story from the New York Times magazine that may interest you.
As the CEO of Aristotle, I can tell you this is a great time to be in the middle of a revolution in the way technology influences decisions at the ballot box. I would welcome your feedback.
Can the Republicans Be Saved From Obsolescence?”
You probably know this guy – Princeton ’78.
“…[Rove would] be better off co-opting the wingnuts than confronting them.”
But the wingnuts are increasingly resistant to co-opting — by Rove and the establishment, anyway. They’ve been co-opted by the wingnut billionaires, and the latter have an investment to protect.