The Republicans got spanked in 2008, and they’re going to keep getting spanked.
The explanation is simple:
The myth of Republican competence and fiscal responsibility is shattered. Trust in the GOP is at a historic low. Less than a quarter of the public trusts Republicans more than Democrats to handle the major issues of our time.1 Thousands of Americans are still homeless or living in trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi because of the towering blunders of the Bush administration during and following Hurricane Katrina. The invasion of Iraq was, as Martin van Creveld, one of the greatest military historians of our time, said, “the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them.”
It used to be that the Democrats were the urban machine stuffing the ballot boxes, and the Republicans were the suburban party with the reform element. That’s all history. By any fair assessment, the Republican Party isn’t just a little more corrupt than the Democratic Party; it’s a lot more corrupt.
The culture war is over because it didn’t exist to begin with. It was a Republican invention that worked for two cycles, in 2002 and 2004, and now they’ve taken it too far. They’ve ventured into the land of the absurd, into creationism and pretending that the ice caps aren’t melting and the oceans aren’t heating up degree by degree.
Early on, it looked like McCain might spare Americans another descent into the culture war in 2008, then he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Suddenly his waffling over evolution and creationism was small potatoes. That return to the culture wars of 2002 and 2004 was one of his biggest mistakes.
Americans in general, and the younger generations in particular, have rejected the culture war. This youngest generation of voters that turned out in record numbers in 2008 is historically diverse and quite possibly historically Democratic. They’re for gay marriage and against the Iraq War, and they think the government should do more for people. Strangely enough, they’re also pretty concerned about the environment.
When I ran the title of this chapter by my Republican friends—the most preeminent writers, strategists, and politicians I could find—none of them contradicted me. Republicans are ready to admit that the Republicans are in real trouble. America doesn’t want any more of what the Republicans have to offer, and the Republican Party is in full finger-pointing, backstabbing mode.
In campaigns, there are two slogans: stay the course, and time for a change. Change won in 2006, and it won again in 2008. The American people voted for real shifts in strategy and policy, away from the failed Bush policies and old Rove-style politics and toward a new brand of campaigns and politics. The operative word in the previous sentence, dear reader, is “toward.” In 2008, Americans didn’t just vote against Bush, they voted for Obama and for Democrats across the country.
Breakdown of the Essential Republican Covenant
It’s Carville story time again. This time let’s hear the one about how Republicans made a pact with the American public.
Once upon a time, the Republicans went to voters with a two-part promise. These guys said, “You may not like us, we may be economic royalists, and we may favor corporations and the wealthy too much, but we can offer you two things that the Democrats can’t.” People were listening.
“Voters,” they said, “we’re competent. We start meetings on time, and we’re efficient.” Then they continued, “And, listen, we’re culturally compatible. We own guns and trucks. The Democrats are a bunch of effete east coast elites.”
For a long time voters bought into that. But over the last eight years the Republicans have destroyed both pillars of their success. They’ve exposed themselves as not merely incompetent but completely and utterly deranged.
Breakdown of Competence
Iraq is the greatest and perhaps most immediately obvious proof of Republican incompetence. But there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to proving how badly the Republicans have hurt Americans in the past eight years.
IRAQ
The real point on Iraq is that, depending on how you calculate it, the war is estimated to cost between $1.5 and $3 trillion. That $3 trillion figure, by the way, comes from Professor Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University, who only won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Of course, the cost of the war the Republican Party championed becomes all the more unconscionable in light of the economic crisis they engineered. Lack of oversight, rampant tax cuts, burgeoning budget deficits, failure of regulation, and Republicans’ anything-goes attitude toward fiscal policy are at the core of our current economic problems.
What is absolutely stunning is that the Republicans, after committing the United States to a $3 trillion war, were unwilling to commit a trillion dollars toward a stimulus package to get out of what Alan Greenspan said would be the most wrenching economic crisis since World War II. It’s like the Republicans started a fire, then blocked the roads to keep firefighters from putting out the fire they started.
Americans will be dealing with the consequences of Republicans’ rampant irresponsibility for the foreseeable future, and the Republicans are going to have to pay for what they’ve done. In early 2009 the Republican party faces its ownership of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, totaling $12 billion a month, and the fallout over what is, without a doubt, a Republican-induced recession.
Barack Obama has been against the war in Iraq from the start—as have I, by the way—and begins from this eminently sensible and responsible position. Americans can trust the Obama administration to follow through on pushing the Iraqi government to invest in reconstruction rather than leaving that to the United States and its allies, and on withdrawing American troops from Iraq.2
KATRINA
For most of the flooding in New Orleans, to say it was the result of a natural disaster is one of these convenient Washington lies. It was no such thing. It was a man-made disaster. The city was supposed to be protected by levees built by the federal government to withstand a category three hurricane. The hurricane that hit the city of New Orleans was at most a low two and could have been just a category one. As a result of shoddy construction the levees broke and most of a great American city was lost.
In any court of law any jury would have found the federal government negligent and it would be forced to indemnify the people who suffered as a result of its negligence. But that’s another one of these inconvenient topics that shouldn’t be brought up in polite company. It’s more fashionable to mumble something about corrupt local politicians or the culture of incompetence and corruption in Louisiana or whatever other inane crap that flies because New Orleans is a thousand miles away.
If anyone has any doubt of just how bad President Bush was, all they have to do is watch footage of that incurious dolt receiving the briefing that a major American city was about to be lost and not asking a single question. Then, after he was told what was going to happen happened, he actually flew over New Orleans and didn’t land.3
It may be more polite to mumble something about Louisiana’s lack of self-sufficiency or corruption and how we need to look forward and not back. But the truth is, Katrina was a massive failure of the federal government. There’s not a single parliamentary system in this world in which a government that negligent would have survived twenty-four hours without calling an election.
U.S. COAST GUARD
If there were an agency you think Republicans could run, it would be the U.S. Coast Guard. They’re all about security, and the Coast Guard is supposed to be our first line of defense. In December 2006, we found out they not only couldn’t run the Coast Guard, they might have done a better job sinking its ships than any military opposition has so far.
From 2003 to 2006, a $17 billion shipbuilding contract with LockheedMartin and NorthropGrumman ballooned to $24 billion. Plans to update current patrol boats failed spectacularly. The boats these contractors tried to convert actually ended up in worse shape. As if that weren’t enough, the design for a series of new boats proved an utter failure. They didn’t even remember to waterproof the radios they installed. Our Coast Guard cutters were running around with a bunch of radios shorting out constantly until someone figured out that these two private contractors hadn’t thought to install waterproof radios on boats.
Appropriately enough, this whole plan was called “Deepwater.”4
More like deep, well, you know. The Bush administration managed to decimate the Coast Guard. My favorite quote on the whole debacle was the New York Times’ editorial: “In Iraq, lax government oversight and incompetence or profiteering by contractors have disabled reconstruction efforts. Now the same disease is undermining our coastal defenses.”5
What do Iraq and the Coast Guard have in common? I’ll give you a hint: Bush.
Corruption and Cronyism
Obviously you’ll have Democrats involved on occasion. I’m not denying that Bill Jefferson and Rod Blagojevich had their problems. But corruption is an institution with these Republicans. It’s systemic. They’re out of control.
Think about the Republicans’ major efforts to ding Democrats on corruption. They spent $25.1 million investigating Democrat Mike Espy over Super Bowl tickets, and it ended in his acquittal.6
Anyone want to take a guess at how many Reagan administration officials were convicted, indicted, or investigated? I’ll tell you, because unless you’re a history nut, there’s no way you’d ever come up with the number: it’s 138.7
The Republican Party is a parade of the corrupt, from Duke Cunningham to Governor Jim Gibbons with his briefcase full of cash and poker chips8 to Senator Ted Stevens,9 now a convicted felon whose November 2008 “Checkers” speech left all eyes dry. Lest they feel neglected, let’s not forget Tom DeLay, charged with money-laundering and conspiracy, or Jack Abramoff, whose deeds are so notorious he no longer needs an explanation to follow his name. (And when you mention Abramoff, it’s only polite to acknowledge Representative Bob Ney, whose involvement and subsequent investigation as a result of Abramoff’s outing was spectacular.)
Here, courtesy of The Washington Post, are some of the highlights of 2007 and 2008 in corruption for the Republican Party:
August 2007: Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) was arrested during a sex sting in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.*
September 2007: Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL) announces he won’t run for reelection, just days after the Chicago Tribune raised questions about the lawmaker’s Nicaraguan land deals.
January 2008: Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) announces he will not run for reelection amid an ongoing federal probe into his and his wife’s connections to the Jack Abramoff scandal.
February 2008: Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) is indicted by a federal grand jury on thirty-five counts, mostly related to federal land exchanges. He had already said he would run for reelection this year, and is now awaiting trial.
April 2008: Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), who has already announced that he would retire at the end of the year, is admonished by the Senate Ethics Committee for having called the U.S. attorney in New Mexico to ask about the status of a pending corruption investigation.
July 2008: Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is indicted for allegedly making false statements on his financial disclosure reports regarding gifts he got from oil services firm Veco Corp. and its CEO. Stevens vows to fight the charges and says he will still run for reelection.10 Of course, in October 2008, Stevens was convicted on all seven corruption-related counts and in November he was defeated in his run for re-election by Democrat Mark Begich.
FLORIDA
I talked a bit in the Introduction about Florida and what happened in 2000. I don’t know how many times I have to say it, but Al Gore won Florida. Period. I’m including this section against the request of my publisher because, well, as I’ve said on numerous occasions, I’ll never get over it.11 It’s small consolation to bask in the vindication of the 3-point victory Obama won last year in Florida.
Here’s a number that tells you everything you need to know about what the Republicans got away with in Florida eight years ago: in Palm Beach, Pat Buchanan received 3,704 votes, although he received only 561 in Miami-Dade and 789 in Broward. Also submitted for your consideration: the fact that 29,000 ballots in Palm Beach were discarded as “undervotes”—no chad was punched—or “overvotes”—multiple chads were punched.12
You can’t tell me 3,700 residents of Palm Beach voted for Pat Buchanan. No one believes that. If you believe it, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. The ballots missed in Palm Beach and Duval County probably cost Gore about 113,000 votes.13 Bush also threw in improperly submitted military ballots and overseas ballots and managed to stop the Miami-Dade recount, which was showing a clear victory for Gore.14
A friend named Beth Hellman tells me that her mother-in-law is still recovering from the disillusionment and outrage of 2004. Many of the residents of her Florida community are Holocaust survivors. As important as voting is to them, she says, they’d rather abstain than vote for Pat Buchanan. But if you look at the figures, that’s just what the Republicans claim happened in communities all over Florida.
Of course, the Republicans had been hard at work disenfranchising Democrats in Florida for a while. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission concluded that in the lead-up to the 2000 presidential election, charming Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris and her cohort of Republican cronies had improperly scrubbed voting rolls of “felons,” 180,000 of whom were legally able to vote. Not to belabor the obvious, but Harris’s run on the rolls was obvious, blatant, and offensive disenfranchisement—of those excluded, 54 percent were African-Americans.15
In 2008, Republicans got up to the same old tricks—this time with little success. Over summer and fall, the Republican National Committee and the McCain campaign flooded Florida mailboxes with lies about Obama’s voting record and his economic plan,16 attempts to tie Obama to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,17 and, of course, mailers giving voters incorrect information about voting sites.18
While we’re in the midst of the history lesson, let’s review one more notable fact about the 2000 election: every reputable post-election analysis found that Gore won Florida. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago was hired by a consortium of media outlets to conduct the definitive study on who won the disputed Florida election. Unsurprising, NORC concluded that, “under a full accounting, Gore most likely would be president.”19
Want more proof? Here’s what the New York Times reported: “A six-month investigation by The New York Times of this chapter in the closest presidential election in modern American history shows that the Republican effort had a decided impact. Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state laws.”20 For more on this, keep reading to the Res Judicata chapter.
As the years pass, the evidence keeps piling up. Americans now have overwhelming, incontrovertible proof that Florida was stolen, and it’s just one part of the body of evidence that proves Republicans are corrupt.
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT
Two dispositive words for you on the topic of Republican corruption, dear reader: Justice Department. To my great joy, one of the first post-election headlines questioned whether Obama would be investigating Alberto Gonzales and the Justice Department. If you’ll recall, Obama voted against Gonzales’s nomination, and he called for Gonzales to be replaced in the midst of the Justice Department controversies.21 That bodes well. Although it is no doubt unnecessary, allow me to formally and clearly express my support for a thorough and unrelenting investigation of Alberto Gonzales and the Bush Justice Department.
Let’s review the last few years in the Justice Department. They seem to have had some trouble with understanding the parameters of hiring. Or rather, Attorney General Gonzales demonstrated the same creativity and flexibility when it comes to the truth and the Constitution as the rest of the Bush administration.
There was Monica Goodling. Ms. Goodling graduated from televangelist Pat Robertson’s law school at Regent University in 1999. (It’s worth noting here that since 2001, the Bush administration has hired no fewer than 150 graduates of Regent University, which graduates only 150 students each year.)22 Despite her youth and inexperience, or perhaps because of it, given it’s the Bush administration we’re talking about here, Goodling rose quickly to become senior counselor to Attorney General Gonzales and White House liaison for the Justice Department.
At Gonzales’s side, Goodling helped lead the effort to pack the Justice Department with Bush conservatives. Goodling admitted to the House Judiciary Committee that she’d “crossed the line,” hiring based on ideological rather than professional or academic credentials.
I’m well acquainted with line-crossing. But, you know, to me, crossing the line is making an off-color joke in mixed company or maybe sticking your foot in your mouth on television. (I do both with some frequency.) Subverting the Justice Department and the U.S. Constitution is less “crossing” the line than trampling it.
Goodling even checked on applicants’ political donations during her deliberations.23 When questioned about the discussion she had with Gonzales about the hiring (and firing) at the Justice Department right before her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Goodling just said that he’d made her a bit “uncomfortable.”24
That’s something you’d only hear in the Bush administration.
Goodling’s resignation was just the beginning. The more layers you peeled away, the clearer it was how deeply rooted corruption and cronyism were in the DOJ under Bush. Back in 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the guy who lost an election to a dead man in Missouri, changed the hiring process for internships and honors programs so that political appointees would be able to influence the screening process.25 Now, in 2008, we find that, unsurprising, officials have done their best to pack the DOJ with Bush ideologues.
In June 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility released a report stating that the department had been throwing out left-leaning applicants for internships and the honors programs. Applicants with connections to Planned Parenthood and the American Constitutional Society got nixed. Top law students from Ivy League schools were kicked to the curb for using “leftist commentary and buzzwords” like “environmental justice” and “social justice.”26 God forbid someone be interested in justice at the Justice Department.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that “the Bush administration was engaged in a deliberate effort to inject partisan politics into the administration of justice.” Whitehouse didn’t mince words. In his words, these internships and programs “were made into a recruitment firm for conservatives, rewarding ideology with career advancement.”27
It is suspected that this particular wave of bad judgment and obvious, egregious bias originated with the efforts of a notorious previously mentioned Gonzales protégée. I don’t want to be too direct here, but I’ll give you a hint: her initials are Monica Goodling. At least four officials at the Justice Department were named as either being directly in violation of the law or having “exercised poor judgment.” When Justice folks were interviewed, quite a few of them pointed a finger at Ms. Goodling.28
It was Goodling who recommended a Ms. Esther Slater McDonald to be hired as counsel to acting Associate Attorney General William Mercer in June 2006. (Ms. McDonald, by the way, graduated from law school in 2003.) Goodling’s charge then rose to becoming one third of a three-person committee that decided which applicants would be interviewed for internships and honors positions. She followed in Goodling’s, and Gonzales’s, footsteps, duly weeding out the applicants who didn’t appear to be strictly Bushian.
McDonald was found out after a few other folks at Justice noticed their candidates weren’t faring so well in the hiring process. In what has become a time-honored tradition in the Bush Justice Department, she made a hasty exit in October 2008, a day before she was scheduled to be interviewed by investigators.29
Obama Attorney General Eric Holder faces an uphill climb as he sorts through the wreckage of the Bush Justice Department. Fortunately, you couldn’t find a man whose record and experience contrasts more with Gonzales. Attorney General Holder has long been a vocal proponent for the rule of law, a concept foreign to the Bush administration.
Culture War
Republicans were just supposed to talk a pretty good game about the culture war, but then they actually stepped out and started to fight the thing and now people hate them for it. What Bush started in 2000 was a two-election trick that had met its natural and timely death by 2008. Its utility was long exhausted. (Exhibit A in the sizable bank of evidence testifying to the demise of the culture war is the failure of John McCain’s Hail Mary pick of one Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.)
A favorite institution of mine, Media Matters, undertook a major report on Americans’ political ideology. They used American National Election Studies from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and threw in data from Pew and Gallup, non-partisan public opinion research resources, for good measure. The conclusion? Media Matters’s “The Progressive Majority” report reads: “As all the data presented in this report make clear, whatever Americans choose to call themselves, on issue after issue—economic, social, security, and more—majorities of the public find themselves on the progressive side. And on many of the most contentious ‘culture war’ issues, the public has been growing more progressive year after year. The news media may not have noticed, but the facts are too clear to ignore.”30
Professor Larry Bartels of Princeton, whose wisdom and work I lean on heavily in my chapter on the economy, wrote the following: “Do working class ‘moral values’ trump economics? No. Social issues (including abortion) are less strongly related to party identification and presidential votes than economic issues are, and that is even more true for whites in the bottom third of the income distribution than for more affluent whites.”31
In the case that you may be uncomfortable with the Ivy League’s pronouncements on working-class voters, which would be eminently reasonable, I’ll turn to the west coast, to Professor Morrison Fiorina of Stanford: “In sum, observers of contemporary American politics have apparently reached a new consensus around the proposition that old disagreements about economics now pale in comparison to new divisions based on sexuality, morality, and religion…. Yet research indicates otherwise…. There is no culture war in the United States; no battle for the soul of America rages, at least none that most Americans are aware of.”32
The Republicans committed too deeply to a strategy of playing off a supposed culture war. I’ll give them this: in 2004, the culture war won them the election. They framed Kerry carefully, and they made sure to get their voters out. John Kerry was an effete, northeastern liberal, and they put the gay rights amendment on every state ballot and deployed every megachurch member they could reach. But that’s over and done, and it’s not going to work again. It’s cashed out. As I’ve said before, and my friends Larry Bartels and Morrison Fiorina now say somewhat more elegantly, it’s the economy, stupid.
The consequence of the Republicans’ lingering preoccupation with the culture war is that it has led them to become a party of ridiculous positions. I don’t want to say that I think Republicans are ridiculous people. I don’t think that John McCain is a ridiculous man per se. But I think that intelligent design and creationism are ridiculous theories. And I use the word “theories” loosely. These positions are silly, and goofy, and, by the way, they don’t make any sense. Yet the Republican Party has backed itself into a corner, and it is stuck saying Americans should learn these things in school. That shows how ridiculous the party has become.
With a recession and two wars, the Republicans had to be crazy to think that whatever minority of the country still agreed with them on the cultural issues was going to get them elected. Republicans would have to be certifiable to ever attempt a culture war strategy again. (Of course, that’s not to say I hope they won’t. I certainly hope to see the Republicans dedicate themselves enthusiastically to this strategy for another few election cycles.)
I go through the electoral limitations of relying on the Christian far right as a voting bloc in another chapter, but here’s a quick summary analogy. Let’s say you wanted to buy into a company. You went in and commissioned a study to see who was buying that company’s product and would they fit into the prospects of long-term growth for that company. That’s a cold, hard decision that people have to make every day if they want to be a part of something. Now look at the Republicans. Their prime consumers of their product are white people over sixty-five. Let’s take whites over sixty-five as a percentage of the electorate. It was 90 percent when Carter ran, and it was 74 percent this year. Their basic base is a rapidly shrinking market share; the Christian right is shrinking. Not only that, the Republicans, McCain specifically, just aren’t gassing up the Christian right like Bush did.
If politics were football, it’d be like the Republicans ran a post-pattern and are waiting in the end zone, but their quarterback got sacked a long time ago.