Category: Republicans

Failure to Launch: Newt & Saul

Last Friday, Newt Gingrich rolled out a big anti-Employee Free Choice petition drive, at CPAC. His group, called AmericanSolutions.com, brought on former Michigan GOP chair and RNC chair finalist Saul Anuzis to manage the new media campaign. Key to their launch at CPAC was a bribe for joining up – they were giving away a free Nintendo Wii for getting people signed up against Employee Free Choice. After all, how can rights and a stronger economy measure against a free video game system?

Oddly the petition drive didn’t get off to a great start. By around midday on Friday, there were less than 40 signatories. I tweeted, somewhat ironically:

Anti-American Worker FAIL: @newtgingrich‘s anti-free choice petition tells how many have signed. Why do these 39 ppl hate the secret ballot?

The bigger point was that one of the GOP’s biggest figures was unveiling a petition drive at the biggest conservative conference, brought on a finalist for the RNC chair, and in the opening hours with major press attention had only garnered 39 signups (at least a few of whom were union organizers and progressive bloggers who want to know what Newt’s people are saying). It was a miserable turnout and one that was fairly funny in its meager scale.

Fast forward to Monday afternoon. Jefferson Morley of the Washington Independent has an article up on Gingrich and Anuzis’ efforts online against the Employee Free Choice Act. Morley writes:

So far, the Anuzis card check campaign on AmericanSolutions.com is based on one such question (When given the statement, “Every worker should continue to have the right to a federally supervised secret ballot election when deciding whether to organize a union,” 77 percent agreed.), with a video that clocks in at 49 seconds, and an online petition that, as of Monday afternoon, had  been signed by 555 people.

As I write this, the Anuzis/Gingrich petition is at 598 people. CPAC and its thousands of participants had gone on for two days in the interim, there was major blog and news coverage of the Anuzis/Gingrich new media effort against Free Choice, and yet this massive new media campaign can’t scrape together 600 dead enders to stand with Newt and Saul against America’s workers.

Maybe Newt and Saul need to up the ante and pony up for an XBox 360 or throw in a year’s supply of Cheetos and Mountain Dew Code Red?

Disclosure: I’m proud to work for the Service Employees International Union. This post was neither approved by nor written with the knowledge of SEIU. It represents my views alone.

The Modern GOP

Paul Krugman, on Bobby Jindal’s idiotic critique of keeping Americans safe from disasters, and what it says about the contemporary Republican Party:

Basically, the political philosophy of the GOP right now seems to consist of snickering at stuff that they think sounds funny. The party of ideas has become the party of Beavis and Butthead.

Given the DC press loves to snicker at the same sort of stuff, this might still get a fair bit of media play for them.  But of course, the American people don’t by this bunk. They want Republicans to be bipartisan and work with Obama to achieve his agenda. And they want Obam to stand by his campaign promises.

So I’d say to the Republicans, by all means consider snickering. Just don’t spend much time evaluating how it’s received by the voting public, especially after consecutive sea-change elections that brought huge Democratic majorities to both chambers of Congress and a Democrat to the White House.

Yep, That’s Bound To Work

I really do hope Republicans pursue a strategy of “universal exorcism and bloodletting” of more moderate leaders with national profiles like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Charlie Crist and creating a unified plan in which Republicans say no to everything the incredibly popular President Obama says. This is a cunning plan and I am frightened for Democratic electoral prospects in the mid-terms if Republicans carry it out.

Also, please continue to push Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal as your parties leaders. These charismatic voices are really in touch with what the majority of American voters who approve of Obama’s agenda want from an opposition party.

The GOP Minority’s Honeymoon with the Press

It’s starting to look like what it always looked like during the Clinton years – no matter what Obama does, he can’t win with the Beltway press. Peter Baker’s wank-tacular piece of “news analysis” in the New York Times today shows exactly what Obama is up against. Namely, the press corps refuses to recognize that Republican obstructionism has a direct relationship to President Obama’s diction regarding the economic recovery package.

Baker’s piece is titled “Taking On Critics, Obama Puts Aside Talk of Unity.” Well, yes, this is what Obama has done. But nowhere in Baker’s article does he document the causal relationship between how Republicans have obstinantly opposed Obama’s overtures and the inevitable shift towards a harder line by the Obama administration. The actions of Republicans in response to Obama’s efforts at unity and bipartisanship simply do not play into Baker’s piece, making it nigh impossible for a reader to know that President Obama isn’t taking a stand on the economic recovery out of narcissism or partisanship or because he had the urge to take pot-shots at the Bush administration.

President Obama has done exactly what the Washington press corps and the Conventional Wisdom set have asked of Democrats for decades. He put aside ideology and reached across the aisle to accomplish legislation for the good of the country at a time when we are in crisis. The Republican response to his outreach, his overtures, his invitations, and his cocktail parties has been to reject him outright. That three Republicans in the Senate have supported a watered down version of the recovery package in itself is a tremendous accomplishment in the name of bipartisanship.  Despite acting exactly as he promised to act during the campaign and putting forward a post-partisan effort to pass this legislation, Baker hits Obama at the moment when he’s pushing for the best bipartisan legislation he could possibly get from the current group of Republicans in Congress.

It might be easy for Baker to write this article. After all, false claims of equivalence have long been a hallmark of the Washington press corps’ hostility towards Democrats. In the end, that’s exactly the sort of article this is, a “gotcha!” attack on a popular president. Baker’s article could be summed up as: “Obama promised to be post-partisan, but it turns out he’s a Democrat!”

The larger problem with Baker’s piece, outside its gotcha style, is that it completely ignores the existence of Republicans from the course of events surrounding the economic recovery package. As far as I can tell from Baker’s piece, Republicans are merely passive flowers that are the subject of harsh words from Democrats. Had Obama spent more time sprinkling them with sugar water while promising to pour vinegar on nasty Democrats who want to vote for the recovery package Obama supports, perhaps then he would have lived up to whatever twisted expectations Baker has for his behavior in The Village.

It’s hard to process the extent to which Republicans are getting a pass for their absolutist obstructionism in the early days of the Obama administration. Baker’s article today is a perfect microcosm for the honeymoon Republicans are getting with the press. I’ve already seen quotes to suggest that the Obama honeymoon is over, less than a month into his administration. But something tells me that the Republican minority’s honeymoon with the press will continue for a long, long time to come…and at the expense of the Obama administration’s ability to get things done for the good of the country.

Epic FAIL

Surely this is a preview of what the Michael Steele-run GOP will look and act like. A month ago Steele said:

Not in the history of mankind has the government ever created a job.

Evan Robinson of the Group News Blog points out how wrong Steele is:

While we might wish that George W. Bush had not had a job for the previous eight years, this statement that our soldiers, sailors, and airmen, whether overseas or here at home; the cops and firefighters who keep our streets safe; the teachers who determine “is our children learning”; and all the doctors, nurses, and nurses aides who work in public hospitals aren’t jobs is just stunning.

Having a job means working for a living, right? So that means that, according to the Republican party, all these people don’t work for a living. You can’t say that about our armed forces, or our teachers, or our police and firefighters. You just don’t. It’s appalling.

This quote should be put over pictures of the rescue workers at Ground Zero, planes taking off from aircraft carriers, soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and cops on the beat. It’s unbelievable.

Of course Evan forgets that Steele and the GOP will get away with this crap because they’re big into flag lapel pins. Or something.

WATBs Are…Whining

One aspect of the bipartisanship fetishization that I haven’t really fleshed out yet is the extent to which Republicans will always pitch a fit if Democrats aren’t sufficiently accommodating to Republican legislative goals. Over at his new home, The Plum Line, Greg Sargent writes about Rep. Eric Cantor’s pearl-clutching complaints against Democratic interest groups’ ads attack Republicans. Sargent quotes Cantor saying:

“President Obama should immediately disavow plans by some political groups who announced they will run attack ads against Republicans,” Cantor says. “Let us be clear: attack ads will not create jobs or help struggling families but will only serve to undermine our nation’s desire for bipartisanship. Instead of thinking about winning at any cost, we should all be thinking about creating the jobs Americans need.”

You know, I’m not even sure that Cantor is right when he says “attack ads will not create jobs” — as they do in fact provide jobs to actors, editors, media buyers, writers, etc. That’s really neither here nor there, though.

Cantor is creating a red herring. The ads aren’t the problem, as they didn’t stop Republicans from voting for the stimulus, which while smaller than needed is still expected to create 2-3 million jobs. Republicans are the problem , through their  obstructionism, opposition for the sake of opposition, and whining to the media that Obama is using his mandate to pass things the American public gave him mandate to pass.

I don’t doubt that there are many Americans that genuinely want to see bipartisanship (in this context used by its definition, not as Cantor or Mark Halperin define it). But more than abstract ideas about comity, Americans want government that works. Not all ideas, policies, and programs are created equally. Some are right, some are wrong, some are good, some are bad.

I don’t recall a single point in the stimulus debate where Obama and his administration made the substantive items a question of winning or losing on them. There was no “win” orientation when they pulled funding for birth control. There was no care of “winning at any cost” when they pulled bankruptcy reform from the stimulus.

Cantor is simply making things up.  But the effect of Cantor’s lies is to add inertia to their “Obama wasn’t bipartisan enough” meme. Expect this to continue to gain traction as the whine reaches an increasingly high pitch.

Update:

Here’s the ad in question. Good lord Cantor is whining. This is about as soft an attack ad I’ve ever seen. Hell, it’s not even an attack!

Disclosure: I’m proud to work for the Service Employees International Union. This post was neither approved by nor with the knowledge of SEIU. It represents my views alone.

Responding to Partisanship

This is simply remarkable, but entirely unsurprising. Republicans are likely not going to vote at all for the stimulus in the House, according to Rep. Castle.

Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., said there could be as many as 10 to 15 Republicans supporting the package, but added, “If I had to bet, I would bet zero.

It’s remarkable that the Republicans are being candid and equally remarkable that Democrats in DC did not expect this outcome.

Tim F. of Balloon Juice is spot on when he writes:

If Republicans plan to deliver exactly zero votes for Obama’s stimulus bill, then why does the bill still have compromises in it? Screw them. Put the family planning stuff back in, take the tax cuts out. If we know for sure that passing a crappy bill still won’t win any votes then just pass a better bill. They won’t scream any louder. The political cost won’t be any greater. Also, and pay attention because this is the important part, a better bill is more likely to succeed.

That any other course of action than what Tim suggests would be possible at this point from the Democratic side is only testament to our party’s tactical ineffectiveness. What goes unsaid from Tim’s post is this – step back while I put on my bipartisan fetishist hat: A hard step to the left in response to Republican obstinance could force moderate Republicans back into the realm of voting for the bill. That is, if it really is more important for the administration and Democrats on the Hill to pass a bill that has bipartisan support than having a bill that works, then responding to Republican partisanship with Democratic partisanship could open the door to that too!

Moreover, if Democrats respond to this by pulling the current compromise-ladden crap fest off the table and putting a good bill built on progressive principles (including birth control funding, supertrains, health care, etc) and the GOP doesn’t respond by begging their way back to the table, then as Tim says – we get a good bill that’s more likely to succeed and help the economy.

I swear to God, watching Democrats function in DC is like watching a group of sky divers who are constantly surprised by the laws of gravity.