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Category Archives: Politics

Party Like It’s 1949

For South, A Waning Hold on National Politics in today’s NY Times, and the excellent accompanying interactive graphic, provide more data on the marginalization of the Republican party.  Obama’s victory without support of the deep south marks the end of 36 years of the Southern Strategy pioneered in Nixon’s 1972 re-election campaign.  A Democrat victory without monolithic southern support diminishes the importance of the red-state south in national politics “for some time to come.”  The parts of the south that “have experienced an influx of better educated and more prosperous voters in recent years” went for Obama.  The article goes on to say:

Southern counties that voted more heavily Republican this year than in 2004 tended to be poorer, less educated and whiter . . . Mr. Obama won in only 44 counties in the Appalachian belt, a stretch of 410 counties that runs from New York to Mississippi. Many of those counties, rural and isolated, have been less exposed to the diversity, educational achievement and economic progress experienced by more prosperous areas.

Continued Republican focus on these voters has the effect of “alienating voters elsewhere.”

The article goes on to look at Alabama and the impact of race on its white voters. It quotes an historian from the University of Alabama, who says “Alabama, unfortunately, continues to remain shackled to the bonds of yesterday.”  Lest there be any doubt the article visits Vernon, Alabama, “the small, struggling seat of Lamar County on the Mississippi border.”  They turned out in greater numbers for McCain than for Bush in 2004 because “any time you have someone elected president of the United States with a Muslim name, whether they are white or black, there are some very unsettling things.”  A city employee stated that anyone who is not upset that Obama was elected “needs to be at the altar” because his election is offensive to “Christian folks.”  One white resident is concerned about a black man “over me” in the White House.  Another said ““I think there are going to be outbreaks from blacks . . . From where I’m from, this is going to give them the right to be more aggressive.”

Vernon, Alabama:  The Land that Time Forgot.  This is the future of the Republican Party?

Party of the Past

Not so long ago the Republican Party was ascendant.  More new voters registered Republican than Democrat and Republican clubs sprouted on college campuses.  Karl Rove spoke of a “permanent Republican majority,” the institutionalization of us-versus-them exclusivity at all stages of electoral politics.

No more.  The media is filled with stories of the inroads Obama made in supposedly impregnable Republican camps–yesterday’s NY Times reported on Obama’s courtship of young white evangelicals.  He didn’t capture a majority of their vote, but did make sizable gains over recent Democratic presidential candidates.  The results are the logical outcome of years of divisiveness:  continue to pit “Real Americans” against those you deem less worth and wind up in a half-empty hall with deflated victory balloons and a puzzled expression on your face.  Frank Rich’s Op-Ed captures it:

The post-Bush-Rove Republican Party is in the minority because it has driven away women, the young, suburbanites, black Americans, Latino-Americans, Asian-Americans, educated Americans, gay Americans and, increasingly, working-class Americans. Who’s left? The only states where the G.O.P. increased its percentage of the presidential vote relative to the Democrats were West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Arkansas. Even the North Carolina county where Palin expressed her delight at being in the “real America” went for Obama by more than 18 percentage points.

I also recommend Nicholas Kristof’s Op-Ed, Obama and the War on Brains.  Kristof sees Obama’s election as a reversal of the Republican worship of anti-intellectualism.  While electing intelligent leaders is no automatic cure–Jimmy Carter was smart–we are living in the wreckage wrought by eight years of proud ignorance.

Finally!

It has been many years* since I cast a vote for the President-elect.  I have watched my candidates concede, accepted that I was out of step with the electoral vote, and taken four more years of the other guy.

Not tonight.  I am amazed and pleasantly stunned.  Barack Obama is President-elect.

Incredible.

——————–

*I voted for Clinton in ‘92 and ‘96 but was not elated to do so.  The last eight years have been so bad that 1996 feels like it was many lifetimes ago.

Vote

I anticipated a long wait but waited only twelve minutes to vote this morning. The poll was crowded but the lines moved briskly and efficiently.  People chatted with neighbors and caught up on their family news while we checked in and checked out.  I went with a friend and we made the smart decision to park a few minutes away on a side street.  Had we tried to park closer it would have taken as long to find a space as it did to vote.

Now comes the long wait.  I’m hoping this is over before midnight.

Hockey Mom with Fendi Bag

This goes up there with John Edwards’ $400 haircut:  the highest-paid consultant to the McCain campaign during the first two weeks of October was Sarah Palin’s make-up artist, who earned $22,800.

Twenty-two thousand eight hundred dollars.  In addition to the $150,000 the Republican National Committee spent to outfit Palin and the rest of her brood.

It’s expensive, being Mrs. Joe Sixpack.

The Palin Backlash

It is fascinating how Sarah Palin’s nomination has turned conservative columnists and commentators against John McCain.  They echo what many others (like me) were saying immediately after McCain announced her selection: she is too inexperienced, she knows nothing of substance about the most important domestic and foreign policy issues, and her selection was a cynical move that calls McCain’s judgment into question.  This avalanche of apostasy includes Peggy Noonan’s recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed piece.  (Subscription required)  Noonan’s conservative credentials are impeccable.  Among other things she served as advisor to President Reagan and speechwriter for Bush senior.  Here is some of what she has to say about Palin:

[W]e have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for? For seven weeks I’ve listened to her, trying to understand if she is Bushian or Reaganite . . . But it’s unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn’t think aloud. She just . . . says things.

. . .

This is not a leader, this is a follower, and she follows what she imagines is the base, which is in fact a vast and broken-hearted thing whose pain she cannot, actually, imagine. She could reinspire and reinspirit; she chooses merely to excite. She doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.

Sarah Palin represents all that is mean-spirited, coarse, and reactionary about our political process.  That she could be one breath away from the presidency should keep everone awake at night from worry.

Brooks Editorial

After yesterday’s post I vowed I would not mention Sarah Palin again soon, but David Brooks’ editorial in today’s Times made me break my vow.  I disagree with Brooks far more often than I agree with him, the point being that Brooks is not preaching to the Times’ choir.  Today’s editorial, titled “Why Experience Matters“, takes issue with Palin’s nomination as VP candidate and with trumpeting of instinct over experience it represents.  He describes the Bush administration as “the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice” and states this attitude “made Bush inept at governance” because governance “is hard . . . requires acquired skills . . . [and] [m]ost of all, it requires prudence . . . How is prudence acquired? Through experience.”  He concludes that Palin “has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.”  All reasons why McCain showed terrible judgment in selecting her. 

McCain’s Judgment II

A post two weeks ago about the selection of Sarah Palin asked whether McCain was serious.  The pundits view the selection as a success because it invigorated the McCain campaign.   “Ordinary Americans” like Palin because she is “just like us.”  That’s the problem.  I don’t want a President and Vice President who are just like us.  I want elected leaders who are more knowledgeable, more thoughtful, better-read, and more in tune with the world’s complexities than us.  We’ve had eight years of one of the worst administrations in history led by someone “ordinary Americans” can relate to.  Having a New York Times editorial echo these thoughts is small comfort since the “ordinary Americans” who’ve embraced McCain and Palin don’t take their cues from the Times.  Others, though–the “extraordinary Americans”–see that the emperor has no clothes.  I called Palin’s selection “a cynical, craven capitulation to the far right [that} underscores the  deep flaws in McCain’s judgment."  The Times said it "raises profound questions about his judgment." I said "[t]his decision is bold only in the context of politics as a game.”  The Times said “[i]f the choice was, as we suspect, a tactical move, then it was shockingly irresponsible.”  Palin’s scripted, non-substantive, shallow–how can anyone take seriously someone who claims insight into Russia because it’s visible across the Bering Strait?–make her shortcomings painfully obvious.  If McCain were CEO of a public company and he promoted to second in command a person so obviously lacking in knowledge about the business the shareholders would have his head, the second’s physical resemblance to Tina Fey notwithstanding.  (Fey nailed Palin’s appeal in Saturday’s opening sketch on Saturday Night Live.)   I’d laugh at McCain’s buffoonery if the stakes were not so high.

PS:  Bob Herbert’s Op-Ed 9/12 Times Op-Ed piece

Time for Some Campaignin’

JibJab, which has produced wonderful political satires over the years, has released its 2008 campaign video.  JibJab is an equal-opportunity satirist, skewering Democrats and Republicans alike.  If you enjoy Time for Some Campaignin’ check out the other JibJab originals, starting with This Land.