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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Thursday, November 13, 2008

How Rocky The Long Road Back May Be 

...it was only just one presidential election cycle ago that those who passed for Democratic leaders were a dispirited, desperate bunch who more resembled shipwreck survivors on some strange, brutal desert island than an organized Major American Party. There was no star-power, no sense of direction, and no answers to the compelling question of "How The Hell Do We Become Relevant Again". Time - and the special magic of George W. Bush and his worthless little band of fixers, thugs, and bagmen - turned out to be a providential gift, and now an entire generation is coming of age with the clear understanding that it is better to admit to being a used car salesman or collection agency case manager than to admit to being a Republican office-seeker in most parts of the country...

The Republican Governors' Conference thinks that it may be able to serve as the compass that the party can rely on to find its way back onto the path to electoral success, but this brave little group has a problem that the Democrats of 2004 didn't have to deal with. The Republicans of 2008 have governors who could be stars in the party, people who are likely to be stars in the party, and one person in particular who is already a star to the tattered remnants of the Republican base, even though that Governor was a direct party to the biggest Republican presidential loss since Barry Goldwater in 1964. They may have all sorts of great ideas, as a group, about how Republicans can get back to that mythical set of core values that not so many years ago had them striding across the globe like giants, but - as this Politico piece by Jonathan Martin suggests - that road back is going to be a rocky one indeed...

There are people at this meeting who, it is safe to say, have as-yet unfulfilled ambition. They may not quite yet be to the point of practicing convention acceptance speeches in front of the bathroom mirror (turning the head left and right to study camera angles), but that thought isn't far from a number of minds. Therein resides the problem, because there is a first among equals in this group, which is a bit surprising on the backside of an electoral shellacking, and desperate times like these don't necessarily feed any human desire to play nice with others when the personal stakes are high...

Martin's article is a rich vein of promising ore for anyone seeking a hint of personal hubris or ambition - or even an opportunity for the sort of Three Stooges slapstick from a collection of movers and shakers who are being overshadowed by a person that they may not necessarily consider to be a fully vested peer...

First, this:
Two events were added to the annual Republican Governors Association meeting especially for the Alaska governor and former vice presidential nominee, but her objectives were unclear and her message, mixed. For somebody who is now seen as a prominent leader in the GOP and perhaps the party’s instant-front-runner for the 2012 presidential race, it was a less than auspicious return to the Lower 48.

And then there's this:
The Thursday press conference featuring Palin drew 23 cameras into a ballroom — more than the total number of reporters who met two other governors and two potential gubernatorial candidates in a small meeting room on Wednesday.

And even though she was joined by many of her other GOP governors, the four questions that were allowed during Thursday’s sub-10 minute press conference were all aimed at Palin — leaving her colleagues to awkwardly and silently stand behind her as though they were there present to lend her their endorsement.

It gets better:
Meeting with reporters later that day, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, and Meg Whitman and Rob Portman, who, respectively, are eyeing 2010 gubernatorial runs in California and Ohio, went from speaking passionately and authoritatively about the GOP’s challenges to an awkward near-silence, turning to each other and initially saying nothing when the dreaded Palin questions came about.

After the others had grudgingly taken a turn, Pawlenty, a finalist on McCain’s veep list, spoke up.

“You wanted me to respond?” he said with minimal enthusiasm. “Look at the time,” he joked before saying the requisite nice things.

And then, the fascinating backstory:
While the governors were publicly polite, their aides, advisers and other Republicans here at this tropical networking and strategy session looked on at the Palin spectacle with a mix of bemusement, curiosity and annoyance.

“She’s our Britney Spears,” one veteran Republican, who is close to a prospective future presidential rival of Palin, observed after hearing her speak. “It’s just this cult of personality.”

The Republican party is in a tough enough bind as it is, trying to preach a return to its "core principles" of tax cuts for the wealthy, jingoistic militarism abroad, and the creation of "smaller" government that will restrict or eliminate programs that benefit the women, Hispanics, and African Americans that Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty claims they need to attract in order to have electoral success. Governor Pawlenty and other deep thinkers trying to plot that new course for the party fail to understand that, for all the talk of 'getting off course' and 'behaving like Democrats', they have been relatively successful at playing "small ball" when it comes to those very constituencies, which is why they are already doing poorly with these blocks of voters. They've stacked the courts to repudiate a woman's right to seek equal pay for equal work; they've fought hard against any semblance of even appearing to work to eradicate the still-powerful vestiges of hiring and housing discrimination; they've aligned themselves with the craziest sorts of wingnuts to the point where even native-born American citizens of Hispanic descent need to dread walking nighttime Eurocentric streets at the risk of being swept by the anti-immigrant hatred that these true-blue conservatives stoked...

And now, on top of everything else, they have an improbable STAR in their midst for whom many of them apparently have no particular respect but whom they can't actually repudiate because of the powerful sexual and emotional thrall she has cast over that base that all of them need in order to travel that last little bit up the road to the top. It seems like this is what a rocky road might look like for Republicans...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:17 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Reservations For Special Places In Electoral Hell 

...I don't want to see Saxby Chambliss defeated in his effort to be reelected to the position of US Senator from Georgia because he's a Republican. I mean, that works, too, but it's not good enough in this particular case. In this particular case, we're talking about a person who demonstrated a remarkably clear lack of fitness for the honor of being a United States Senator back in his first Senate campaign in 2002...

The facts are simple and stark. Chambliss, who used a number of deferments (including a football knee injury) to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War, was running against Democratic incumbent Max Cleland, a combat veteran who had won both the Bronze and Silver Stars in Vietnam but ironically didn't earn a Purple Heart for the loss of both his legs and part of his right arm because those injuries were the result of the sort of stupid, tragic accident that can happen in places where people are equipped with grenades and assault rifles and any number of other inplements of death and where a moment's simple unfortunate carelessness can have far greater personal consequences than anything that could ever happen in the halls of the University of Tennessee College of Law...

Had Chambliss wanted to run a straight-up conventional negative campaign, loser whining by people like me would have been little more than the outcome of a toughly fought campaign. Chambliss decided to go a different way, though. He decided to use the entirely legitimate complaints by Democrats about the virtual elimination of long-standing civil service protections for career federal employees that were contained in the Homeland Security Act to portray a Real Man who actually served his country in a conflict that Chambliss no doubt supported in an abstract way - like many other tough, militaristic Republicans who somehow never could work through all those entangling deferments to get out there on 'the point' themselves - as a stone cold committed supporter of Osama bin Laden and whatever pure Hell OBL wanted to casually visit on our beleaguered, wounded nation...

We have to talk about John McCain one more time now; sorry for that, but political cookies only crumble so many ways. McCain was one of the few Republicans to object to the clearly reprehensible ads that Chambliss ran back in '02, yet now he is rushing back to Georgia to backstop ol' Saxby in his uncomfortable runoff election next month against Democrat Jim Martin. By stepping into this campaign, McCain has finally repudiating any sense of the honor that he has tried to cultivate over the last eight years for the decades of honorable and heroic service that he gave to this country. McCain and Chuck Hagel were the two most prominent Republicans to repudiate Chambliss's anti-Cleland ads six years ago; Hagel - who has ended up earning far more street cred as a Maverick than McCain - will not be found stumping for Chambliss in the upcoming runoff election...

Max Cleland and Chuck Hagel are Vietnam War combat veterans. John McCain is a former Vietnam War POW. Saxby Chambliss is a Vietnam War-era draft deferment baby. Those are three dramatically and distinctively different things, and ol' Sax has never has "got it", as they say. His ads back in '02 weren't just a problem that he has to address now (in a remarkably dishonest fashion, one must say; but he is, after all, a Republican who couldn't make it in military service). His ads back in the day call up the question that he could never hope to answer if his children ever found out the history of the Man he defeated to become a United States Senator: "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"...

If God is willing and just, there is a special place in some remote, cold electoral Hell reserved for those who have mischaracterized, misrepresented, or just flat-out lied about the courage and patriotism of those who are and have been far greater and more honorable people that these particular losers could ever have hoped to be. Hopefully, there is one more incumbent Republican Senator who has reservations to that special place...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:30 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

A Veterans' Day Tribute From The Inside 

...one of the blights on our nation's soul that may never be fully addressed or redressed is our treatment of troops returning from the Vietnam War. No amount of insistence on the part of any number of advocates for either side of the debate over the Iraq invasion that everybody "supports the troops" will ever make up for attitudes that troops returning from Southeast Asia confronted back in the day (and I'm not talking about the much-ballyhooed "spitting" or "animal blood" references; I'm referring to a larger casual indifference, one that could also be ascribed to the treatment of veterans of the Korean War)...

So, on the waning edge of Veterans Day, read this. This is what those of us who were just a year or two too young to go into the military and our parents missed when our loved ones and slightly older high school friends came back from Vietnam, and it's what people missed when friends and loved ones came back from the Korean peninsula in the early 1950's. Shame on us if we stand still for this being missed ever again...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:32 PM 0 comments

Sunday, November 09, 2008

It's Always Good To Have A Plan 

...there is a war of words going on these days in the shadow of Barack Obama's electoral landslide on Tuesday. Actually, there are several wars, or at least a couple of wars being waged on several fronts. On the one hand, all sorts of people who, in a court of law, would be considered to be without standing are offering unsolicited (and likely unheard) advice to the coming Obama administration about how it should take bold measures or move slowly or "rule from the center" or not over-reach (although that last bit of advice is really a not so well-disguised plea to please, please over-reach). The religious Right is waging a spirited debate with actual Christians who are somewhat socially conservative over the proper way to approach this disturbing new reality that they are facing for the first time in a long time, given that they were beaten straight up in the Republican primaries by a man that most of them swore they would never vote for, and got drubbed straight up in a general election where they didn't have a Ralph Nader to lean on or a Ross Perot to blame...

And then, of course, there is the Republican party itself. In two short years it has gone from having its hands firmly grasping all the gears and levers of the federal government to desperately clinging to the barely floating scattered wreckage of its once proud ship of state. The party that couldn't stop itself from chattering excitedly just four years ago about "a permanent Republican Majority" and was making final arrangements for Grover Norquist's ceremonial bathtub murder of the federal government has been reduced to only being able to have a useless say in veto override votes that will never come and maybe - just barely maybe - sustaining filibusters in the US Senate. The once 'Grand Old Party' is having its own battle over 'whither the party to get back on top'...

Just today in my own local conservative birdcage liner, I saw this Washington Post special column by Jeff Flake, Representative of Arizona's 6th Congressional district, written in the shocked, numbing hours after the results of election day had rolled in. In it he maps out his view of "the way back" for a beleaguered party that doesn't have a single player in the game who looks like a leader and which can only rely on the usual crew of hate-spewing pundits to try to gather its scattered threads together. His plan for climbing back to the pinnacles of power?

-- Recommitting to the Principle Of Smaller Government.

-- Eliminating Earmarks.

-- Unshackling the Power Of The Free Market by dramatically limiting government control.

-- Reaffirming the Awesome Power of Social Conservatism regarding abortion and gay rights and an unfettered support of a fully-automatic assault rifle loaded with a clip full of cop-killer bullets in every pot.


In the dead, cold, pure vacuum of political outer space, this is a pretty good list. Down here on earth, however, it demonstrates pretty clearly how out of step truly right-wing neo-libertarian Republicans are with the citizens of the country. The one great tragedy is that Rep. Flake's agenda wasn't more prominently employed by his party mates; had they done so, we might be looking at a Democratic majority that would persist for a generation or more. It is understandable that Rep. Flake would hold these beliefs; he is a very conservative Republicana very conservative district . Unfortunately he doesn't have much of a finger on the pulse of the country...

"Smaller Government" is a mantra for good times; most of the painful things that plague ail Americans these days are a result of Republican governmental malfeasance rather than the overbearing influence of 'Big Government'. More to the point, most of the things that Americans think need fixing need to be fixed by the sort of 'Big Government' that Flake so abhors. The "free market" that he so loves won't fix these problems, unless his idea of fixing the problems includes standing by while core elements of the American and global economies collapse into a smoking pile of wreckage. The "free market", as understood by a neo-lib like Flake (Lord, please help me resist the obvious jab. Amen.), is in fact the root of many of the problems we are facing right now, from the from free-market movement of family wage jobs to cheaper overseas labor pools and the free-market encouragement of unqualified mortgage applicants in an overheated and over-priced real estate market to the free-market investment in reckless bundled purchase of those unqualified applicants' mortgages by all sorts of financial managers who hold the basic life security of millions of otherwise unsuspecting American citizens in their hands...

The American people want reform of the disaster that our health care system has become and which is directly a product of "free market" influences that have proven beyond doubt that the free market isn't the place where life and death decisions should be made. The American people feel like they are on the ropes - rightfully so, because they are - and the politics of 'social issues' like abortion or gay marriage or gun rights has little meaning in the face of the prospect of discussing these issues around a sputtering trash fire in some hobo camp rather than around the warm crackling fireplace in the homes they used to own. Voters in America by and large voted for the things that matter to them and - in those votes - repudiated both the Republican party we have come to know and love and the Republican party of a few true-blue Right Thinkers that never has has any sort of meaningful role in federal governance over the last half century in any case...

Jeff Flake is a True Believer, and is probably more of a Maverick than John McCain could ever hope to be on his best day, since Flake has stuck true to most principles except that niggling little "term limits" thing. He has a plan to get the Republican party back to power - or at least to a place where it matters again - and in some respects that's an excellent thing. It's always good to have a plan, even if there isn't a shred of evidence from the last several decades suggesting that any aspect of the plan will work...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:41 PM 0 comments

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